The Initiative: Book One of the Jannah Cycle

by D. Brumbley

  “Great. I’m really looking forward to this now.” Logan gave Sierra a slight glare, but then just balled his hand into a fist and gritted his teeth to wait for it. “Need to work on that bedside manner, Do…Ow!” He managed to stay still as she pushed the rest of the first plunger’s contents into his arm, but Anna could see that part of his arm already turning red, along with Logan’s face at the effort of keeping quiet. She hadn’t been kidding. It felt like she had held a torch to his arm and the fire was just spreading outward into the rest of his body from there. It didn’t help his comfort level that the plunger itself was opaque, so he couldn’t even see the color of what she was putting into him. “Fucking hell, what is in that shit?”

  “I just told you, I don’t know.” Sierra tried to fight a giggle, but his face was so contorted that she snorted just a little. “You know, you’re right, I really do need to work on my bedside manner.” Sierra snickered a little bit and then held out the second syringe in front of him. “Ready to lose feeling in your tongue for ten minutes? I would suggest being careful when you talk, I don’t want to have to stitch up your tongue cuz you bit through it.” She looked at the syringe before she uncapped the needle and then tapped the tube. “They did tell us that the first syringe is meant to target the virus, so it attacks the virus in the cells closest to the injection site, which is what causes the burning, I would assume. Of course, your cells replicate the virus since it is usually in your cellular structure since birth, so it does little good except to weaken the structure of the virus for when the treatment comes. This one,” she said as she jabbed Logan’s arm again, though she tried to do it with more finesse this time, but there was a little part of her that was wicked enough to enjoy bringing a big tough man to his knees, even temporarily. “This one is, I think, a neurological agent so that you don’t feel as much pain from the first one, but the side effect is just that it temporarily paralyzes your tongue, and the last one,” Sierra nodded toward it, “is, I believe, an immune booster, so the combination of it and the neuro-agent give your arm a cold sensation.”

  Logan started working his mouth a little as the numbing agent set in, but she was right, the burning that had been moving through his body didn’t feel quite as bad as it had a moment before. “God, I hate doctors. Well, going to the doctor, anyway. Nothing personal against you and your mom. It just never ends well.” He grunted as she took the syringe out of his arm and he stretched it a little, since his arm in particular was mostly numb. “Alright, hit me with the last bit and get it over with.” He mumbled as he looked over at Anna over Sierra’s shoulder with a glance down at her arm. “Buckle up, baby. This shit stings.”

  “You roar like a lion over those things.” Anna just shook her head as she pushed her sleeve up to prepare her arm. “Heaven help us all if men were left to do childbirth. We’d all be dead.” Anna watched as Sierra jabbed him with the last syringe and once he was free to do so, he shook out his arm as he hissed from the cold sensation. “Oh, stop.”

  “I should’ve made you go first. Now you’re just gonna sit there and show me up on principle.” He glared playfully over at her as he shivered at the feeling moving through him. It was unpleasant, to say the least, and he knew it was only the beginning of the tinkering the Consortium was going to be doing with him until he was pronounced CV-free.

  Anna didn’t let him get away, and in fact, she went and sat on his lap before he could move from the exam table. “You’re supposed to hold my hand, right? This is close.”

  “Your ass is close to your hand? I would’ve gotten slapped a whole lot more in my life, if that were the case.” He put his mostly-numbed arms around her waist to hold onto her as Sierra got her kit ready to retrieve some vials of Anna’s blood before injecting her with the pre-treatments. “Do you two know of anybody else who got accepted from around here? Anyone else who’s going?”

  “Nobody I knew of.” Gary interjected with a shrug, trying to keep his mouth shut about how much of a baby Logan had been about the shots. “We didn’t even know you guys were accepted until we saw you in St. Louis, and I didn’t hear from anybody else. Not around here, anyway. I’ve got a cousin who got accepted, but he’s on the east coast, and after his info meeting, he started getting really ridiculously sick, so they’re revoking his acceptance.”

  “Revoke? I didn’t know they could do that.” Anna hissed at the burning sensation as it tore through her arm, but she didn’t growl and yell like Logan did, though he was right, it was mostly just to show him up. By the time she was done with her pre-treatment, she was wondering if they should have been a little more curious about the Consortium and the Initiative. The injections felt like torture for someone’s sick, twisted amusement. She didn’t miss that Sierra enjoyed it a little bit herself, and so she looked at Gary as she waited for her arm to go back to normal after turning into an icicle with the last shot. “You have a little bit of a sadist on your hands, I hope you know.”

  “Oh, you have no idea.” Gary said out of instinct before apparently Sierra had a chance to glare at him, and he cleared his throat. “I mean, no. Not at all. She’s sweet.” He didn’t move from where he was standing against the wall, but they could all see a slight flush run behind the stubble on his cheeks.

  Logan just laughed, and gave Sierra a look of almost admiration, since he hadn’t known she had it in her. “You two have fun with that.”

  “I am sweet, thank you very much.” Sierra replied defensively as she scurried about, picking up after seeing to both Anna and Logan. She did look over at Gary again, though, with a pinched expression. “I’ve never gotten any complaints about being unpleasant.”

  “Nope. Never will.” Gary answered quickly, clearly back on-script after his earlier slip.

  Logan finally felt vaguely back to normal again, though he still felt a little off and his tongue was still mostly numb. “Anything else the Initiative needs from us for now before we head up?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Sierra finished cleaning up and finally convinced herself to look back at Anna and Logan again. “You should be all set now. The pre-treatments are pregnancy-safe, if you are expecting. I’ll miss seeing you both around, especially if you do have a baby joining you soon. I was hoping to get the chance to deliver one on my own here soon.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you. I would say maybe the kid could hurry up, but since we’re leaving in just a few days…I don’t think they pop quite that fast.” Logan shrugged and took Anna’s hand to head out of the clinic. “I’m sad you guys won’t be coming up with us. Did they give you the option of taking a second wave or something, or was it just a one-time-only kind of offer?”

  “They didn’t say anything about another offer.” Sierra looked over at Gary and he shook his head to support her. Neither of them looked like they regretted their decision. “You’ll have to keep in touch, though. Let us know what it’s like up there.”

  “Of course. Well, until we launch for Jannah, anyway. We’ll be a little out of range at that point, for at least a little while.” Logan shrugged, since it didn’t seem like that long to be gone, in the grand scheme of things. If they were going to have another fifty or sixty years to live, that was ages. Spending just one of those years on a spaceship headed across the galaxy didn’t seem like that big a price to pay. “Send us wedding pictures when you make it official. And say goodbye to your mother for us. I doubt we’ll be back here before we head up.” He took Sierra in a brief hug, and felt the first stab of pain at leaving that he knew was going to be repeated often in the days to follow. “Liam’s wives will handle sending you two a wedding present from us, I’m sure.” That was a different kind of pain, realizing that he was leaving the estate in the hands of Liam and his wives. He had to trust them. That was all he could do. He just had to keep telling himself that.

  Sierra gave him another brief hug before she looked up into Logan’s grey eyes. “Be careful, okay? I hate to sound like I don’t trust people up there, but I don’t.”
/>   “Neither do we, believe me.” He admitted quietly, since it still weighed on his mind, just not heavily enough to stop him from wanting to go.

  Anna looked over at Gary as Logan said goodbye to Sierra. Logan had known her longer than Anna had, since Logan lived closer to the Webers than she did. “You better take care of your kinky girlfriend. She’s gonna be taking care of people that matter to me too.”

  “I’ll do my best. She takes a lot of looking after.” He winked at Anna, and lowered his voice as Logan said his goodbyes to Sierra. “Honestly, I got the dream gig. Little bit sadist but also proficient in first aid. I get both sides in one.”

  Anna just raised an eyebrow. “And you’re okay with that? You like that? I mean, she is pretty, but…”

  “She is. And I am. I don’t mind it. I’ve put up with a whole lot worse for much worse reasons.” He shrugged off the question, still smiling, and clearly wasn’t about to offer any more of an explanation of what he meant by that. “Your boy’s got some of it to him too. I’ve played online with him enough times to know it when I see it. I don’t know if he’d ever go Sierra’s direction with it, but he’s got it in him.”

  Anna actually chuckled at that and shook her head as she looked back at Logan. “You’re crazy. He’s never once shown me any indication that he wants to turn all bossy on me. I’m not really into that sort of thing anyway. I doubt I could do what I was told all the time.”

  “Yeah, I know the type, and you don’t seem like it.” Gary just laughed to himself, and nodded up at the sky, where there were three different stations currently in view, in their perfect line of orbit across the sky, chasing the sun. “Be careful up there. On Jannah too. Plant a tree for us or something if you get there. The rest of us are gonna be a while.”

  “Not too much longer after we get there, I hope.” She glanced over at Logan and then nodded toward the doorway. “You ready, Mr. Bickford? We should probably head home.”

  “I am, Mrs. Bickford.” He took her hand in spite of the rolling eyes from both Gary and Sierra, and headed for his truck with a last look around the place. It was a clinic, so he didn’t exactly have fond memories of the place, especially since the last time he’d been there, he had carried Anna into it bleeding to death, but it was still a part of home. A part of Earth that he was no longer going to see, possibly ever again. “I can’t imagine what places like this must look like in orbit.” He thought out loud as they got back into the truck. “Just walk into a room, press a button and some machine scans your whole body and fixes whatever’s wrong with you before you can blink, I’d guess.”

  “Yeah, that’s weird just thinking about.” Once they were back in the truck and heading home, she went back to holding his hand. “We’re making the right choice, aren’t we?”

  He nodded, but there was a deeply thoughtful look in his eyes, as he watched the road ahead of them, empty as always, with not just home at the other end of it, but the rest of the universe that they were about to go explore. “I still think we are. I get their point, and I get it if anyone doesn’t want to go. It seems like every time we learn anything about that place, we’re learning more and more about all the risks that go along with going, and we already know all the benefits. I just…” he shook his head, and looked over at her with a sheepish, subdued smile on his face. “Every time I think about not going, my mom’s poetry starts playing on repeat in my brain. Some of the ones she wrote right before she died. She’s got a line in one of them that says she trusted God to build a better world, hoping He eventually would forgive humanity for whatever we did to deserve this one. If we do get to Jannah and make it livable for the rest of humanity, I doubt I’m gonna give God the credit for our hard work, but my mom isn’t the only one who’s ever believed in that kind of dream. If there’s a chance of making that happen, it’s a chance worth taking.”

  “I don’t want to die in fifteen to twenty years because I was born with something that is killing me from the inside. I don’t want any of my family to die for it either. That’s reason enough for me. And spending fifty years with you sounds good to me.”

  Logan’s smile broadened at her comment and he moved over to her side of the cab for a change, since the truck was set and the road was open and clear in every direction. He leaned in and placed a kiss on her collarbone, moving down over the slope of her breast as he pushed her back against the seat. “I like you selfish, have I mentioned that?”

  Anna moaned softly as soon as his kisses connected with her collarbone and skimmed her breast, since she liked him selfish too. She dug her hands into his hair and held him close, silently begging for more attention from his lips. “I still feel like I’m living in a dream.”

  That made him chuckle against her skin, but his kisses continued their slow torture. “I’ve actually tried to think about what we’d fight about. I mean, yeah, I’m sure the Initiative is gonna be crazy and things are gonna get stressful, but I don’t know. I guess nobody knows what they’re gonna fight with their wife about at the time they get married. I’m just having trouble picturing what that would look like.”

  “I’d rather not think about it, mostly because I think when we do fight, it will probably get ugly. We’re both pretty damn stubborn.” She continued to run her fingers through his hair as his voice tickled along her skin, but it was difficult to think about them ever fighting over anything. “You don’t really think that they’ll force you onto someone else for genetic reasons, do you? I mean, that sounds a bit extreme up front. I don’t see a purpose in that. Even if they do, it’s easy enough for you and I to go off somewhere, I’ll do some exotic dancing for you and they can take your swimmers in a cup. Right?”

  “I figured that’s how they would do it. They’re not even allowed to reproduce up there until they get some kind of license. I heard that from a friend online a couple of years ago. So I doubt they’re interested in anything as dirty or chancy as just spinning a genetic roulette wheel.” He laughed against her breast and worked his way back up to her neck with slow, attentive kisses. “Most of their people are also supposed to be genetically altered some kind of way. Can’t control your population that tightly if you just let people fuck the way God intended and let the chromosomes fall where they may.”

  “Too bad for them.” She squirmed underneath him as she shivered from all of his intense attention. He was teasing her in the worst way. “They’re missing out on all the fun. I can’t imagine living life so sterile. I mean, you and I fucked in a barn, for crying out loud. Talk about some repressed human beings.”

  “Hey, the barn’s been a fantasy of mine since I was about twelve. Gotta check these things off while our feet are still down here on the ground.” He loved her squirming, just because he loved to know the kind of effect he was capable of having on her at all times. He hoped it never went away, that they never lost the kind of easy intimacy they could share in the moments between other events in life. He knew better than to think it would always be easy to maintain, but that didn’t stop him from wanting it. “Only one left on my list for the time being is the old trail we used to use when we were kids, back behind the old Williams estate.”

  “Mmm.” She replied in agreement before she grabbed his face and hauled his lips to hers. “Once we get home, we’ll have to go make sure that’s checked off too. We only have a few more days and I don’t think it’ll hurt to give Liam and his ladies a little more space. He’s learning how to work it out. Though I am honestly surprised that he hasn’t already asked for a break. Sex with three women in the newlywed stage? Yikes.”

  “Yeah, well, without going too far into detail, he’s my twin brother.” He leaned back a little and looked down at already-erect cock meaningfully with a wicked grin and a shrug. “What do you expect?”

  Anna rolled her eyes at first, but then she reached down to tease him with slow sweeps of her hand over his pants. “Boy, you sure have a lot of confidence in your cock, Logan Bickford.”

  “No more than you have in�
��” he looked her over, clearly having some difficulty settling on just one part of her. “Well, everything.”

  “Here’s to confidence, babe.” She smirked before she silenced any further conversation with her lips against his, since she really enjoyed the fact that they could travel and enjoy each other all at the same time.

  18

  Rachel saw Logan’s truck in the driveway in front of the house, but she didn’t know when Logan and Anna had returned, all she knew was that the truck was back and they were not. Or they were elsewhere. It didn’t really matter, though. She was sitting at a desk in the room that she had claimed was hers, even though it was technically hers and Liam’s, though he wouldn’t always be sharing it with her. Strange to think about, but she didn’t find it to be a terrible thing. It would be more beneficial when they were really running things around the farm and when children showed up.

  She looked back when she heard the door open and smiled when Liam walked through. Tonight was her second night in the two day allotment that the women had agreed upon, since it would mean that they would only have to wait five days before they would be able to sleep next to Liam. Two days with each woman, one day to himself. He did have his own room, and Rachel figured he would want to use it after a while. None of the three of them wanted to break up the time by weeks, since it would mean that they would have to wait much, much longer to be with Liam, and since they were all trying to get pregnant, that wouldn’t really make much sense either. “Did you see Logan? His truck is out there.”

  “Yeah, him and Anna decided to go out and commune with nature for a while.” Liam shrugged it off as he shut the door. “I probably would too, if I wasn’t gonna be setting foot on this rock for possibly the rest of my life.” He took off a pair of gloves he was wearing and a shirt that had obviously seen better days. She could tell from just the sight of him that he had been off working on the harvesters, making some adjustments that he and Logan had decided on after reviewing their performance during the harvest itself. He wasn’t dirty, exactly, but he’d obviously been working hard, and there was a sheen of sweat that remained on him after he got his shirt off and tossed in the laundry basket. She heard water start running from the sink once he stepped into the bathroom to wash his hands and get the worst of it off his face. “Are you still going over accounts? What are you working on?”