by Annie Berdel
Jeremiah winked at his wife as he turned and walked out the door with Ridley following.
Ridley continued trailing the large expanse of a man into the barn, lost in her own thoughts.
Jeremiah stopped to fast and Ridley ran right into the back of his solid form. “Sorry” she said as he reached out and pulled the cord on the light fixture in the middle of the room. “Some habits are hard to break” he said, realizing he needed a flashlight instead.
“Don’t worry about it” he said as he turned to face her “But you can tell me what you said to my wife”
“What are you talking about” Ridley asked
“When I left to go get that table you wanted, she was a mess. When I came back, well, it was the first bit of hope I’ve seen in her eyes since this all started”
“Oh! I understand. We were talking about healing energy and the studies I have been doing. She agreed to be my subject matter after the surgery” Ridley replied
“Healing energy?”
“Ya! I told her it was kinda like the experience you get when you lay hands on someone for healing. We, as doctors, treat the physical but we neglect the emotional impact that a trauma such as what your wife has gone through. These emotions, a lot of the time, get stored within the body causing more damage down the road, even years after an incident.”
“Fascinating”
“It truly is. Our bodies are remarkable once you start diving into all the intricacies of how they function. Given the right circumstances, diet, exercise etc., they heal themselves much more efficiently than most people can even imagine. We, as a society, have become so dependent on modern medicine that it’s ridiculous. Do you know how much money these pharmaceutical companies make off of keeping us sick?” Realizing what she was doing, Ridley paused for a moment.
“Listen, sorry for that. I’ve a pretty big soapbox sometimes” she said sheepishly
“Don’t apologize. You need to speak out more. This is another reason I brought my family out here and why we live the way we do. I understand exactly what you are talking about. We raise our own nourishment, whether it come from animal or plant. We know what we put into our bodies. Most people can’t say that. “
“Exactly!”
“Ask Shelby about her issue with pop later after she recovers”
“Pop?”
“Soda. Pop. Whatever you call it. When she was much younger, she drank a lot of it. I’m talking several cans for breakfast. Easily going through a 12 pack in one day herself. She tried multiple times to stop but it would last for a while and she was right back at it. Horrible back and forth.”
“What got her to stop?”
“Moving here. Not having access to it. It really was an eye opener for us, the amount of control that it had over her. Almost like an addiction” Jeremiah stated
“You realize, it is technically is a real addiction. It controls you. It leads to a person needing a fix and just a viscous cycle. The bad part is, other things set it off without you realizing it. It’s more an addiction to sugar then to the actual beverage. When we consume something sweet, the taste will trigger our brains to release chemicals called opioids, which make us crave more of what we found pleasure in. You want to read something that scares you, study what man-made opioids are! Vicodin for one! “Ridley exclaimed
“It really is all about the money, isn’t it?”
“No. There’s some good out there… just got to find it. Right now though we need to get what I need and get back to the house and set up. Tomorrow morning, I want to get started. After that we will have plenty of time to talk. That being said, I want to know what I am going to need to improvise with.” Pulling a sheet of paper out of her pocket, Ridley handed her list to Jeremiah. “In a perfect world, this is what I need.”
Jeremiah grabbed the list and scanned over it. Taking a deep breath, he looked at Ridley as he flailed the paper. “I don’t think we have half this stuff!” he cried out
“Hey, I didn’t think so but Improvise, adapt and overcome is part of my motto! The other half is drink more beer and have more fun, but that’s a whole other story!” she quickly retorted
The look on his face made her giggle. “Jeremiah” she said laying her small dainty hand on his holding the list “its ok. I got this. This list is made from the other world we knew but there are alternatives to most everything. I will need your wisdom here as I am not as skilled as you are on naturopathy. Most of my life has been spent in allopathy and it wasn’t until not so long ago that I woke up from drinking their Kool-Aid.”
Giving her a sideways glance, he felt his pulse start to decline back to a normal state.
“Let’s get started then” He said turning his back on her and walking to the cabinet that held jars of dried herbs.
Ridley looked around the room. This was her future in medicine. Not the stark white room she began her career in where everything was sterile and in its perfect position. No, here she would have the sky above her and a dirt floor below. Her equipment would not be shiny silver pieces of metal but rudimentary tools that would have to feel the flames of fire.
Slamming her fists into the pockets of her pants, she took a deep breath. Feeling her heart beat faster in her chest, she knew what she was up against. It was going to be a challenge but one she would not, could not back down from. Besides, if it was easy, they wouldn’t need her.
29
He was cold again, his body shivering. Why couldn’t he stay warm?
He strained to open his eyes but they fought back and denied him. He felt his world spinning out of control as the fog enveloped his thinking. Why couldn’t he fight his way out of this dream?
Something was on his nose, tickling. He tried to reach his hand up and scare it away. Was his arm even moving? His brain said yes, but his nose was still being harassed by something. Scrunching his nose, he was startled when he felt the breath of her voice on his skin.
“Tommy?”
Emma leaned in closer and whispered again in his ear. “Tommy, I’m here”
She had leaned over to kiss his cheek, not realizing her eye lashes were playing havoc on his nose. But, it was enough to give her a sign of him waking up. He had been in and out of conciseness since the doctor had attempted to patch him up.
The doctor, what a joke, she thought. She had half a nerve to chew her brother out for dragging that man out to her farm.
“Tom, please wake up” she said with a hint of desperation in her voice
Tom stirred. He felt like he was riding a never ending roller-coaster up hill, waiting for the climax at the top, his stomach being left behind trying to catch up. Shaking his head to try and clear the thick haze, Tom moaned loudly as his brain erupted into lasers of brightly colored flashed on the inside of his eyelids.
Damn! That hurt!
“Tomas”
He could hear her voice barely over the noise of pain going off in his head.
“Leave me alone!” He tried to scream
Emma watched as her husband was becoming restless. “Why can’t I comfort him?” she silently cried out to God
Being careful, she slid into bed beside him. His lung and ribs still bruised, she didn’t want to risk more damage but she needed to somehow help him. He had always found solace in her body before, would he now? Spooning against his side, she snuggled her face into the side of his neck. His arm filling the hollow formed against her stomach and chest and her legs slid up against the side of his. He felt so cold, so hard, and so different she thought. Breathing in, his scent no longer carried the faint aroma of his aftershave. Gently laying her hand on his chest, she felt his heartbeat. “God please” she silently begged, tears beginning to spill down from the corners of her eyes.
He could feel her against him, like a nymph trying to seduce him and steal his soul. The miasma of perfume burned his nostrils making him want to retch. He needed to escape but couldn’t get his body to respond. He was succumbing to her taunting. How did this form have so much control
over his own body? Betrayed by his own bag of bones, he could feel a warming in his groin. A bead of perspiration broke out across his forehead, the internal battle taking external form. He had to control this, somehow. Trying to stretch out his legs was useless as he could barely feel his thighs, let alone anything lower. He tried shifting his trunk, his mind trapped within his carcass. Taking a deep breath, he gave up and rifted into a dreamless sleep.
Emma lifted her face to kiss his cheek and felt the cold pallor of his skin beneath her lips. His fever had broken!
Thank you ~ the words leaving her lips in a whisper.
Quickly backing out of bed, she re-tucked the blanket around him. Grabbing the wash basin, she refilled it with cool water and a little bit of apple cider vinegar, bringing it back to the table beside his bed. Dipping a washcloth into the tepid mixture, she rang the excess liquid out and gently wiped the man’s sweaty face. His breathing had leveled out and he wasn’t laboring so hard to take a breath. She knew the drugs she had given him would take the edge off the pain, but he had to still be in an enormous amount of discomfort. Wiping his closed eye, she became fixated on his lashes. Their youngest son had those same long, gorgeous lashes. Their son needed his father as he was growing up, to teach him and instruct him. He was in his most volatile years for influence and having a father alongside him would be crucial is his development into adulthood. Emma couldn't imagine Connor without his dad by his side. They were so close, best of friends. Emma envied their camaraderie but knew the love between herself and her son was also unique.
Ringing out the washcloth again, Emma folded it over onto itself and laid it gently on his forehead. She would leave it for a bit to help keep him cool. Drying her hands on the towel, she looked at her husband laying helpless before her.
His beard was coming in as he hadn’t shaved in a while now, she would look at maybe taking care of that tomorrow depending on how he was reacting to the medications. Last thing she wanted to do was irritate him even further but she also knew how he would complain about how his beard itched when he tried to let it grow out. A goatee was one thing, but a full on beard just irritated him.
His hair was also getting a little long as it was starting to curl just below his earlobe. She wasn’t going to touch that as she preferred his hair a little longer versus the flattop that he usually wore. He could cut that himself when he was better. Taking a deep breath, she fought the thoughts trying to swarm into her present. He would get better. He had to. She would not allow herself to think otherwise. She wasn’t about to go into the apocalypse without her love by her side. They had fought so hard for so long to get where they were in life with a better home, a better relationship that she wasn’t about to give that up now.
Satan be damned, she muttered
If there was anything about Emma, she was a fighter and a survivor. All of her life had been a struggle. She used to envy those who had the cushy life of no problems until she realized how weak they were. Challenges were now faced with her chin held high and a grin on her face. This was just a bump in the road. Her God was bigger than this and she felt secure in the fact that He had everything under control, even if sometimes she didn’t agree with how He went about it.
30
He was there in Tunguska on the hundred-year anniversary of the so called White Night event. His expertise was in geology and with the high content of iridium deposited in the bogs after the catastrophe, the government thought it best he investigate, completely off the books, of course. Today they romanticize the term and call it Black Ops, but back then it was just called incognito. He had seen the devastation that brought over eighty million trees to the ground, the land still struggling to recover from the devastation even a century later. Two hundred square kilometers felt the impact of what some scientists speculate was an airburst from a meteor while others thought it was the second coming of Christ himself. Theory has it that if the blast had happened four hours and forty-seven minutes later, due to the rotation of the earth, the blast would have completely taken out Saint Petersburg, Russia, once the capital of Imperial Russia. The blast bigger then even Hiroshima had a death toll of zero. Not one human died in an area that completely flattened all other structures. The last time such elevated levels of iridium were discovered was during excavation of the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary, when the earth revealed her only extinction level event.
Now he was looking at the same data levels. The isotopic signatures of stable carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen isotopes at the layers near Memphis were damn near the same as in Russia, along with the high amount of iridium.
Damn, he muttered under his breath.
Opening another file, he took a deep breath. While the nitrogen was probably deposited as aid rain during the fall out from the explosion, his eyes kept coming back to the levels of iridium.
Had they succeeded, he wondered.
Standing and stretching his back, Sean closed his eyes and rolled his head back and forth until he heard the joints in his neck pop. Bending back over his desk, Sean clicked on a photograph on his computer monitor, zooming in to see if he could detect a blast pattern.
Bingo, he said as he sat back down in his chair and punched “Operation Blowdown” into the search bar. Scanning the article, he jotted notes down as he read.
“The trees directly below the explosion are stripped as the blast wave moves vertically downward, while trees farther away are knocked over because the blast wave is travelling closer to horizontal when it reaches them.”
Glancing back at the picture on his screen, he had to admit, while it looked a lot like the pictures of Tunguska, it had its differences. Not nearly the size of the Russian explosion, Memphis still had the tell-tale indications of something being detonated from aloft. It still didn’t explain the other cities that were hit, Los Angeles and San Diego in California, Memphis and St. Louis were together along the Mississippi so there could be something he was overlooking there but it still didn’t explain how Houston, Colorado Springs, Atlanta and D.C. fit in. Running his fingers back through his hair in frustration, he was missing something glaringly obvious and he knew it.
31
He heard the kids, their melodic melody of laughter causing his headache to intensify. Turning his head away from the noise, he felt the light against his face. Opening his eyes he was perplexed. The lace of the curtain outlined the window that was allowing the light into the room. His brow furrowed as he wondered why someone hadn’t shut the curtain and allowed him to sleep. But then again, what was with all the ruckus outside his room? Kids were supposed to be quiet! A man needed his rest!
He tried to pick his arm up to slide out of bed and silence the commotion outside but it weighed a ton. Flicking the blanket back, he tried to swing his leg out from under the rest of it and try and sit up. The pain in his chest from the movement released a scream from his throat that quieted the noise from the children outside his room. His door swung open and multiple people rushed into the room.
“Tom!” a young man shouted “Stop!”
Tom turned his head and looked at the man in puzzlement.
A black woman behind him was already yelling behind her for someone to “Go get Emma!”
Both of these characters surrounded him and gently shoved him back into his bed.
“Dude, you shouldn’t get up yet. You’ve been through an ordeal if you haven’t noticed.” The man said as he helped Tom swing his leg back onto the bed.
“Yes, take it slow.” The woman said as she plumped up his pillow “Emma is on her way”
Emma … the man mouthed the words
The energy of the two people kept Tom distracted as they resituated him comfortably back into the bed. Tom licked his lips trying to talk but the dryness of his tongue made it impossible to speak. Pointing to his mouth and gesturing like he was drinking, both people looked from one to another like he was speaking a foreign language.
“Wait Tom. You need to wait until Emma gets here. We don’t want to do any
thing to cause any further damage and I’m not sure if you can handle anything to drink right now.” The man said
Tom laid his head back against the pillow and shut his eyes. “Who the hell did these people think they were? And why were they in my room? And…. And… what the hell happened?” The thoughts swirled around in his head making his stomach want to hurl.
“Tommy?” He heard her voice but kept his eyes closed. That voice. The one that had been haunting his nightmares. Was she real? So much anger escalated beneath his skin. He tried to concentrate on his breathing. In through your nose, out through your mouth. He could feel his heart beating against his chest, pushing against his ribs, trying to escape. The pulse from the rhythm of his blood crashing against his senses like a wild ocean storm sending waves against the unprotected shoreline.
“Tom.” Her voice interrupted his thoughts again, this time causing him to open his eyes. There before him stood a frightened but hauntingly gorgeous woman. He knew her, somehow. Her eyes drinking in his very essence as they stared at each other.
“Tom” she said so gently that he had to shift his eyes to her mouth to see if there was any trace of words left on her lips. Blinking, he looked back into her striking grey eyes seemingly mesmerized.
“Tommy?” She said again with more clarity
That voice! His head screamed. The voice from his dreams.
Back and forth his heart wavered between drinking in the quintessential beauty of her eyes against the detestation of emotions that her voice caused. Who was this person?
Leaving the side of his bed, Emma walked into the bathroom and poured a glass of water. Walking back to Tom’s bed, she lifted the glass to his lips. Again their eyes locked above the rim of the glass. Parting his lips slightly, Emma laid the edge against his mouth and tilted the glass slightly. The cool liquid felt like molten lava as it slid down his throat. Coughing wildly, Tom grasped at his chest as Emma wiped his mouth with a cool washcloth. “Easy” she said
“You have several broken ribs. You were hurt pretty bad and it’s going to take some time for you to heal, but you are alive. And you’re home and safe.” Emma explained with a forced smile.
