Soldiers of Fame and Fortune Full Series Omnibus: Nobody’s Fool, Nobody Lives Forever, Nobody Drinks That Much, Nobody Remembers But Us, Ghost Walking, 12 Book series...

by Michael Todd

  The guys stood around and laughed wildly at her. The large man smirked, gritted his teeth suddenly, and slammed his arm down. The motion yanked the woman off her chair and across the table. She let go and slid to land with her face in his lap and her ass in the air. After a moment, she put her hands on the guy’s thighs and raised her head before she rolled onto the floor.

  She was more than pissed at this point, and the humiliation of the scene began to sink in. “Fuck you guys. This was total bullshit. He acted drunk and obviously, he isn’t as drunk as he said.”

  Paula snickered as the man stood and swayed back and forth. He tried to put his feet in front of him, but instead, he fell and face-planted after breaking a chair on the way down. The woman shut her mouth with a snap, spun on her heel, and walked away.

  Holly laughed and shook her head as she walked around the bar and down the hall. She looked over her shoulder to see Paula peek around the corner, a concerned look on her face as she dried a glass. She frowned with a sense of disquiet and turned away from the bartender and into the doorway of JB’s office. He wasn’t behind his desk, so she walked in farther, turned, and froze in complete and utter shock.

  Chapter Eight

  Holly stepped all the way into the office and shut the door behind her. She approached JB, her head tilted in bemusement. He stood still, an uncomfortable smile on his face. She narrowed her eyes and stared at the lack of wrinkles and laugh lines in his face. It was smooth, youthful, and even beneath the stubble of his five o’clock shadow, she could see how much younger his face looked. Of course, he’d shaved his beard, which was new, but all the stubble on his face was dark brown.

  Her gaze shifted to his hair, which didn’t match his facial hair in the least. It actually seemed grayer than the last time she had seen him—much grayer. She stepped back and put her hand to her chin and shook her head. “Did you do something to your face?”

  JB shook his head and simply waited as she stepped forward yet again. She reached her hand up and flipped a piece of his hair, then ran her finger down his cheek. The dichotomy between his hair and his youthful skin and glow completely threw her off guard. It didn’t gel together at all. Then suddenly, she realized what had happened. Her shoulders sagged and her mouth opened, but no words emerged. She gripped his shoulders and turned him to look at the solid tone of gray in his hair.

  “It’s not natural,” she mumbled to herself as she turned him again.

  He chuckled dryly. “You’ll have to be more specific than that because I’m telling you right now, there are a whole lot of things in my life that aren’t natural at the moment.”

  Holly shook her head, her gaze still glued to his face and hair. “You dyed your hair, but you didn’t do it to hide the gray—you dyed it gray.”

  JB put his finger to the side of his nose and tapped it. “Bingo. I did it this morning.”

  He walked to his desk and took a seat. Holly followed and sat slowly in the chair opposite him. “I don’t understand. I swear, the last time I saw you, it looked darker. I thought it was the lighting or that maybe it was wet ʼcause you just got out of a shower.”

  “No. It was darker, and by the time I woke up this morning, there wasn’t a hint of gray anywhere. Everything was dark-brown.”

  JB leaned forward, his hands pressed together. “Holly, I think I have a problem. I think we have a problem.”

  Holly leaned back hard in her chair, her eyes wide, and realized exactly what that problem was. “You are getting younger. Or, at least, your body is getting younger. Your hair, your skin…”

  He leaned back and patted his chest with his fist. “My whole body is like the one I had twenty years ago, minus the leg. But even that has begun to hurt, and I fear that I won’t need a fake one after too long.”

  She blinked. “You’re talking about re-growing limbs here. That’s not possible.”

  “Neither is anti-aging, not to this extent.” He shrugged. “You fed me the fountain of youth. But that’s not really the problem here—not yet, at least.”

  Holly nodded, still slightly in shock. “I don’t know what could have done this. I thought I identified all the compounds.”

  JB smiled. “But did you really know what they would actually do?”

  She shook her head. “No, I guess not. But they have definitely surprised the fuck out of me, that’s for sure. My grandmother would have hoarded this stuff.”

  He took her hand across the desk and the touch pulled her from her haze. “The biggest problem right now, though, is the fact that people will start to ask questions. You can see that even dyeing my hair won’t work.”

  Holly pushed abruptly from the chair and paced the room, her head clutched in her hands. “This is unbelievable. It’s one of the biggest discoveries in human history. This is something no one could have thought would ever actually be achieved.”

  She whirled around and looked at him. “I mean, look at you. The one thing humans have fought and lost against for our entire existence is time. Aging. The fact that our cells are programmed to break down from our mid-twenties. They grow and multiply and then, when you reach your peak, they begin to die. You are regenerating cells and you are doing it at a rate that is bizarrely inconceivable. Babies take longer to replicate cells and their one job is to grow.”

  JB stood, walked over to her, and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Take a deep breath. I swear, between you and Paula, I’ll have to keep paper bags in my office. Holly, you created the Elixir of Life. The water at the base of the Tree of Eternity. The Holy Grail. I don’t know what to expect from it. I don’t know if it will stop at my peak, if it will last, or if I will start to die all over again, but this is wild. You didn’t have any idea that this could be what was in that serum.”

  Holly exhaled a ragged breath and looked into his youthful eyes. “Yeah. I think that somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew it. And somewhere in the front of my mind, I questioned it. But I struggled with the thought. I struggled with the idea of believing that something like this could be created. And if it did, I struggled with what to do with it. I never thought, though, that it would actually happen. But here you are, young and vibrant and strong. Have you had any side effects?”

  JB chuckled, turned, and walked back to his desk. “Increased energy. Increased strength. Increased libido. Nothing that I can point to that would be considered a negative thing. I can’t complain that my leg wants to grow back—or, at least, that’s what I think might happen. It’s my leg. I’ve fucking missed it.”

  She chuckled but her voice cracked. An immense pressure had settled quickly on her shoulders. It was exactly what she and Salinger had discussed, but in even more depth. Her creation had not only healed JB’s leg, but it healed him of old age as if it were a disease in itself. “I guess if you really stop to think about it, we’ve realized that the Zoo heals its beasts—or most of them—when they die. This shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise. At the same time, though, this stuff pumps through their veins. It does not do that in our bodies. We are human, made of blood and flesh. Goop doesn’t belong in us. That is one of the problems I have.”

  He shook his head. “While you may be right, think about humans. There are tons of things in this world that aren’t made to be in us, but we put them there anyway and our bodies adapt.”

  Holly shook her head. “That is a whole different level. That’s evolution. An evolution by our bodies to adapt takes thousands, even millions of years. Not a couple of weeks. But how could I hold this secret from the world? No more death, no more aging, no more pain. It truly is like playing God.”

  She slumped in the chair again and held her hand to her head. JB frowned when he saw how severely this had affected her. “Holly. This is not necessarily a bad thing. You saved me and you possibly gave me a whole new lifetime.”

  “Right, but at what cost? This is something the world needs but I don’t know how to deliver it to them in a fair and unbiased way. That is the whole reason I decided to stay
here in the Zoo. To hide here. To have time to work on my research and create something that could really make a difference.”

  JB chuckled. “I think you accomplished that one right off the bat. Who else has taken this besides me?”

  Holly looked up. “Uh, Billie. I injected her with it when she faked her death in the Zoo. And she took a vial, but I don’t know who she gave it to. So, there are three of you. But I haven’t seen her since the day I gave you the serum. I don’t know how everything turned out for her.”

  He took a deep breath. “She’ll be back eventually, and we can talk to her about it. Until then, though, you have to really weigh these things carefully. You have to put some serious thought into them. Being here in the Zoo is not a bad thing. It’s probably safer than being out in the world with this discovery.”

  Her voice cracked when she spoke. “But how do I decide what to do with it? I thought I knew what the future would bring, but with this, I now have no idea. I can’t see it at all.”

  JB gave her a kind smile. “You are resilient, and you were born for greatness. The answer is that you need to find a goal that is bigger than you, Holly. You need to open that ʼscape and let the fears fall away, even if it’s only for a moment, so that you are able to really look into the future and see where you belong and where this belongs. It’s heavy and I’m not saying it won’t be an uphill climb, but you are the key and your decision will shape the world.”

  She snorted. “That’s not an enormous amount of pressure or anything.”

  He laughed and pushed the pen around on the desk. Holly lifted her head and blinked. “Oh yeah, you brought me here because you said you needed a favor. What’s the favor? More hair dye? Lots of carbs to soften you up?”

  JB shook his head and leaned forward again. “Holly, there is a huge secret here. I am a threat to this secret. I need to die.”

  Holly slammed her hands down on the chair. “I know you are a martyr and everything but that is fucking ridiculous. We found this because I went into the Zoo to make a cure for the disease that was killing you. Now you want to die? And what? Give your body to science? I don’t think I can perform tests on your dead body. It’s too soon.”

  He shook his head and his hands. “No. No, I need to die like Billie. I need to die out in the Zoo, and it has to be a real death. Then I need you to bring me back again. Just like you did with her. Pump me full of this stuff and heal me all over again. I know that means we need more serum, but this is the only way that people won’t look at me and wonder where I’ve hidden the fountain of youth. That, or I have to leave, but even then, my ID says old man and my body says yeah right.”

  She fell back in the chair, covered her face with her hands, and screamed into her palms. After a moment, she dropped them to her side and groaned. “Great, when did I have ‘Save the World’ tattooed across my fucking forehead?”

  When he made no effort to respond, she sat there and her face went soft as her eyes stared off into space. He could tell she was deep in thought about that statement, and he let her run with it. She didn’t have ‘Save the World’ tattooed on her forehead, but she had created a way to save lives. She’d created a way to reverse the one enemy that humans could never combat—aging. More than that, she’d created a way to restore the body to its perfect form.

  Holly sat there for several minutes, totally silent, and allowed all the realizations to push through her head. Finally, her gaze shifted to him and a smile, with a twinge of sadness behind it, crossed her lips. “Shit, I will have to save the world.”

  JB smiled. “And I couldn’t think of a better person to do it.”

  She chuckled, shook her head, and stood. Her wheels were moving again and all kinds of ideas circulated. He thought she’d leave but she stopped and pointed at him. “When the aliens get back—and I have only now realized that they will and that the goop was their way to prepare for it—they will probably kill most of the remaining humans, if not all of us. I imagine we might need some super miracle drugs, and I put myself in front of that race. I already know one, if not the most important one, to combat that. To use their weapons against them.”

  He nodded, an expression of sudden clarity on his face as he absorbed what she had said. “That would be annoying to them, to say the least. To find out that we are actually using what they meant to use to kill us to make us better.”

  Holly laughed wildly. “It’s genius. I’ve always wanted to fight fire with fire and now, with this, that is exactly what we would do. Turn their tricks right back on them and watch them blow up in their faces.”

  JB slapped his hands down and stood quickly. She looked at him with amusement, but when he began to untuck his shirt, her face fell and she put her hands up and turned her head. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is exciting for me too but not that kind of exciting.”

  He leaned his head back and laughed as he lifted the front of his shirt to expose his chiseled six-pack abs. “What did you think I wanted to show you?”

  She did a double take and her cheeks went red. “Oh…I…whoa. You have some big-ass muscles for an old bartender.”

  JB nodded with a smirk. “That they are. Apparently, according to Paula, they are as sexy as fuck. I think I was able to take that compliment a little better when I was in my twenties and thirties than now, but nonetheless, the serum made me strong.”

  Holly stared for another moment before she averted her eyes, her cheeks burning. He chuckled as he tucked his shirt back into his pants and sat down. His eyes twinkled like a young teenager when he leaned back in his chair and smirked at her. “You know…you’re kinda cute when you blush. It’s definitely a new look for you.”

  She put her hand to her cheek and glared at him with narrowed eyes. “Look who has all kinds of confidence and ego now. If the serum did that, I’ll destroy it. I’d rather let the aliens take me than hand more cockiness over to the male species.”

  Chapter Nine

  She had taken a couple of days to really let all of it sink in. Now, Holly paced back and forth in JB’s apartment, her hands pressed together against her lips. He had stayed in the background and not come out for anything. She looked at him as he stared at his hair in the mirror. The gray he had put in it had all come out, and he would have to do it again if he intended to show his face.

  Holly pursed her lips. “So, we need a way to kill you and make it look good—believable—without actually having an animal eat you. I don’t think you would come back if you were tiny bits shuffled around in some dino shit.”

  He looked up. “Do these animals shit?”

  She paused and her expression shifted to curiosity. “Huh. You know what? I have no idea. I’ve never seen any scat, but then again, I really wasn’t out there looking for dino pies or locust excrement. I’m sure they have some way to expel their waste.” She shook her head and her hands. “Anyway, back to what I was saying. I’ve thought about this and I think it needs to be seriously fleshed out, but there is a way. First, you make an announcement that you will go into the Zoo and make it clear you want to go alone. You die and we bring you back to life. But we still need a way for you to be able to return. You are too well-known to roll in young and have someone not connect the dots.”

  JB nodded enthusiastically. “Okay, okay. So…what if before I got to the Zoo, I show myself? We can use makeup—really good theater makeup to make me look old and not doing so well at the same time.”

  Holly pressed her lips together. “I think that would work if you don’t get too close to anyone.”

  He thought about it for a second. “Right. Once I’m dead, someone can introduce my way younger nephew, who is in his twenties. That’s my cue to come back. He is my family, so he will look like me and no one will question it.”

  She pointed down. “What about your leg?”

  JB blinked. “It’s growing back, but if it doesn’t, I’ll wear long pants all the time. No one will even know that it’s fake.”

  Holly shook her hand back and forth aga
in, nervous energy driving the instinctive motion. “That’s shaky but it could work. This is big, though. I think we need another couple of people involved in this. Stay here and I’ll go grab them.”

  He watched her leave, his anxiety rampant, but released it after a moment’s thought. Rather than worry, he sat there and considered his death for several moments before she returned with Dan and Paula. Dan was confused and walked in carefully but froze when he saw JB. He narrowed his eyes and walked forward. “JB? What in the… You look like you did when I first met you decades ago.”

  Holly realized Dan was completely in the dark. She pulled a chair out and he sat at her gesture. “Okay, I’ll tell you a story but it has to stay with only us. Can you promise that?”

  He looked at the others. “Of course.”

  She related the entire story, from JB’s illness to her trips into the Zoo and the serum she’d created. Then she told them about the plan. Both Paula and Dan were silent for a long while as they absorbed the magnitude of what she had explained.

  Paula pursed her lips. “And you will be able to save JB if he dies?”

  Holly nodded her head. “Remember Hickok?”

  Dan turned quickly toward her. “Wild Bill?”

  She sighed. “Right. To answer your question, yes, we can. We did it for Hickok and it worked perfectly. Dan, go sit with JB. He will tell you all about Billie.”

  Paula looked at JB, then at her. “I’m in and I think Dan is. What will you do now?”

  Holly pulled her laptop from her bag. “I will contact Hickok. She needs to be part of this. She can’t come back here as herself, which is why she changed her identity to Jean, so I think she would be perfect for this.”

  She sent a message to the last email address that her friend had messaged her from and revealed the whole plan, but in code. Once she’d sent it, she sat nervously while Dan was filled in on everything that had happened with Billie. She knew she should have kept him in the loop, but she’d wanted as few people involved as possible. A couple of minutes later, she received another coded message.