Danny stood up quickly and turned to Taylor and Travis. They stood paralyzed with bewildered expressions.
“Everyone, get your shovels out and let’s clear this place!” he ordered. “I don’t need anybody getting bitten, especially now that the doctor has gone home.”
Twenty minutes later, the graveyard was clear. It could still use a good once-over by a weed eater, but at least we were certain it was free of any more snakes.
Taylor sat down in front of a small tombstone to rest when a moment later he jumped to his feet. “It’s here, they’re right here!” he said, pointing at the ground in front of the headstone. “I can feel the vibration!”
Chester Henry, born May 9, 1906, departed this life August 16, 1918.
As we stared at the small forgotten gravestone, reality shook us with a vengeance when we heard a voice calling from beneath.
“Help me! Please help me!”
Like a call to arms, we all started to dig at a separate corner of where a grave should be. It was slow going, hacking through a number of roots. After a lot of combined effort, we uncovered a coffin sized metallic box. This casket wasn’t made of just any metal, it was made of iron.
Danny and I dropped down in the hole and began to work feverishly with the blades of our shovels to pry the lid open. Lucky for us, the casket was in the ground for a century. The iron hinges were eaten through by rust, making them easy to crack. A few moments later, we popped the crumbling lid up and then fell back in horror at what we saw.
CHAPTER 17
CHESTER HENRY
“Buried alive here inside a nightmare, living a life where you’re gone. There is no light here, It will be light-years until my mind’s clear.”
~Jhene Aiko
I don’t know what we expected to find. In my mind, it was not this. Perhaps a person lost in a collapsed hillside cave. Maybe even something as farfetched as some kind of hidden electronic device. What I saw horrified and shocked me. Considering the circumstances in the world, I guess I should have expected anything.
An Impal lay in the corroded iron box. His panic and terror ridden face was from a nightmare. The worst was his appearance. His ghastly manifestation froze my soul. He was a young boy and, assuming this was indeed his gravestone, he was only twelve years old when he died. The boy wore typical clothing of his time, brown trousers, blue shirt and a nice pair of Nettleton shoes. As normal as his appearance seemed, what lay beneath the surface of his luminescent ‘skin’ was beyond frightening. The poor child’s skeleton was visible. It made him appear like a demonic apparition with four arms. Two bony hands rested over his breastbone and two luminescent hands lay frozen at his sides. His skull grinned from beneath his luminescent face. I reached down to help him out, but he recoiled from my extended arm as if it was a loaded gun.
Danny spoke in a soothing, fatherly tone, “It’s all right son. You’re safe now. Let us help you.”
The boy’s eyes darted to each of us. He behaved like a wild animal trying to determine who posed the greatest threat.
After several moments of long silence, the poor boy finally spoke.
“Help me,” he muttered in a pitiful whimper. His cry was even more disturbing now that hundreds of pounds of dirt and an iron lid did not muffle it.
“We will, son,” Danny said, sitting down on the edge of the grave. “We’ll all help you.”
Danny glanced up at the rest of us as if soliciting backup for his statement. We all obliged and took a less threatening posture by sitting at the edge of the grave.
“Can you sit up?” Danny asked in a soft voice.
The boy frowned. His face contorted as he considered if sitting was a possibility. After several moments, he managed enough determination to attempt it. As he slowly rose, the skeletal features dissipated until they were all gone, except from the waist down. The waist up remains were now visible, resting behind him, unmoved in the hundred years since laid to rest.
I stuck out my hand since I was sitting right in front of him. He reached out and took it with a little hesitation. I tried hard to seem reassuring even as I felt the frigid cold of his touch. As I started to pull him forward, his hand slipped through mine and he fell back into the casket. The boy gave me an untrusting frown as if I just played some cruel prank on him.
“It’s okay, son. Focus on grasping my hand. It’ll be all right. I’ll do the rest,” Danny said stretching his arm out to the boy.
The boy glanced at me, then turned to Danny, who seemed to have developed a real rapport with the kid. He stretched out his hand and grasped Danny’s arm. After a few moments of focusing on his grip, he began to pull himself up. He took a seat by Danny with his back turned to the open grave.
The boy’s eyes darted about with a wild vacancy. He seemed to be trying to take in as much of the scenery as possible. For a moment there, I was sure he was going to get up and run away. Soon, his demeanor began to calm.
“Is that me?” he asked, giving a quick glance back over his shoulder at the grave.
“This is you,” Danny said taking his hand and patting him on top of the head. “This is what matters.”
“Why …” he began, and then broke into sobs as silvery tears rained off his cheeks.
Danny leaned down and whispered gently to the boy “Is your name Chester?”
Chester nodded as he continued to cry.
“Well Chester, why don’t you come home with us and you can have a nice meal and meet some other kids your age. Aren’t you hungry?”
Chester continued to weep as he looked up at Danny with bewilderment expression. “Yes,” he said. He was hungry and he didn’t understand why. Nobody else understood it either. The Impal’s desire for food was an accepted way of life.
We all got to our feet without a sound. Chester followed by grasping Danny’s hand. He continued to stare at his feet while venting a century of frustrations and terror through his ethereal tears.
“Chester, will you wait right here for a minute? I need to step right over there and I will be right back,” Danny said.
Chester didn’t want to let go until Danny whispered a few comforting words to him. He released his grip with a great deal of reluctance. As the boy stood with his back turned to us and sobbing into the palms of his hands, Danny huddled with us on the far side of the grave.
“Jesus, what …” Taylor began before Danny held up his hand for silence. There would be time for questions later.
“Taylor and Travis, I need you to rebury this poor kid once we get him out of here. Cecil, you come with me … I need your help to assimilate this child into the group. God only knows what this has done to him.”
Danny then gave a quick jerk of his head to indicate it was time to move out. I followed him back to Chester. As I passed by the open grave, I couldn’t help taking a final peek inside. The iron casket was lined with some sort of red fabric, which was all gone now except for a few tattered shreds. There was nothing left of Chester outside of his skeleton and a couple of tufts of blonde hair on his head. His clothing was completely gone except for a few indiscernible pieces of fabric hanging from his rib cage. If he was buried in shoes, they were gone as well. Many times back in the day, they buried people without shoes because it was considered a terrible waste.
I immediately regretted my morbid curiosity as I turned my head away with a shudder. I knew the morbid image was going to be burned into my memory for the rest of my life. What made it worse was Chester existed there for almost a century. I could not imagine it. The poor kid was going to require a lot of attention.
We soon made it back to camp, thankful the return trip was downhill. We decided to approach from around the far side of the lake. It was a more direct route to the mine and avoided the mess hall along with most of the cabins. We didn’t need any questions or distractions until we got our new resident accustomed to his surroundings.
Upon reaching the entrance to the mine, Danny motioned for me to go on inside. I pulled back the first tarp to s
lip inside and Danny sniffed the air. “Mmmmm, smells like it is dinner time!” he proclaimed as he patted Chester on the head. “Cecil, why don’t you go on in and tell President Lincoln to prepare another seat at the table!”
Chester was dumbfounded. “President Lincoln?” he squeaked.
“Yep, and a whole lot of other folks I think you will like,” Danny said as he squatted down to be eye level with Chester.
Chester didn’t look happy yet, although he seemed like he might be willing to entertain the idea of being happy.
I disappeared into the tent and soon found Lincoln and a few other Impals. I explained the situation and they all agreed to help. In less than five minutes, the word spread to every Impal in the mine. They began to rearrange the interior furnishings. Several tables and crates were lined up to form a very long table. The cots were lined up alongside like bench seats.
A group of nineteenth-century women broke out the food and placed it on the table. Unfortunately, the Impals’ menu was not any better than ours. All they had was potted meat, crackers and a few loaves of bread. Lincoln prepared a seat of honor for Chester at the head of the table and everyone else took their seat on the cots. Seeing a group of Native Americans and Colonial people seated in such close proximity made me think of Thanksgiving. When I was satisfied that everything was complete, I went back out and brought Danny and Chester inside.
Chester’s face lit up with wide-eyed astonishment when Lincoln walked over and introduced himself.
“Good evening, Chester,” he said. “Would you care to accompany me to dinner?”
The boy’s mouth dropped open. It was as if a hundred years of torment and misery suddenly melted away. He almost floated to the table then took a seat with pride beside the former president.
He looked about with gleeful excitement as Mrs. Fiddler sat down on the other side of him. She gave me a knowing wink. I knew little Chester would be safe. Danny and I slipped back out through the tarp. I started to speak, but Danny cut me off. “Hold your questions for the meeting,” he said as we started out through the woods.
It was late afternoon and the canopy of trees made it seem as if it was almost dusk. I did think it was a bit odd for Danny to call a meeting right now. I guess our earlier one was interrupted. In addition, we now have something else to talk about, something both wondrous and disturbing. I was sure Chester was going to be our primary topic though.
Our dinner would not be served for another hour, so Danny said he would grab a private table in the mess hall if I would go and get Burt.
“Derek and Andrews should be patrolling near the road right now. I think Taylor and Travis will be back here any minute. Would you run over to Burt’s cabin and get him?”
I set off through the woods and returned with Burt five minutes later. I found Taylor and Travis sitting at a small table in the corner furthest from the stove. The cook was already there frying up something that smelled like garlic and Spam. The instant we sat down, Burt exploded with questions.
“Okay, Cecil wouldn’t tell me anything on the way over here … so where the hell did you guys go? What’s this crap about somebody buried alive?”
Danny told the whole story to Burt as I watched his expression shift from annoyance, to curiosity, then to excitement and finally utter horror.
“Oh, God … to think the poor kid … oh, Jesus,” was all Burt could manage.
“How the hell did it happen?” I asked.
“The flu,” Travis said as if he was a thousand miles away.
“The flu?” we repeated in unison.
“Yes, did you see the date on his headstone?” Travis said. “His date of death was right in the middle of the great flu pandemic between 1918 and 1920. It infected five-hundred-million people worldwide and killed about seventy-five-million of those. This outbreak wiped out about five percent of the world’s population.”
“You figured out his cause of death by his headstone?” Burt asked. “How the hell do you know all that anyway?”
We all turned to Travis, a man I had not met until today. He sounded trustworthy.
“I’m a history teacher,” he said. “One of my students won the National History Day competition in D.C. last year. They did an incredible paper on the social and economic effects the pandemic inflicted on the world and the United States.”
“That’s all well and good,” Burt said. “It still doesn’t explain how you know this boy’s cause of death … for all anyone knows he could have been kicked in the head by a horse.”
“It’s the casket, isn’t it?” I asked.
I read a little about the pandemic after the swine flu scare a few years back. I remembered something about iron caskets.
“Yes, they were expensive so only the wealthier families could afford them,” Travis said. “The caskets were believed to be the next-best thing to prevent spread of the disease from the dead. Cremation was the preferred method.”
“Maybe the Henrys were a wealthy family who lived nearby,” Taylor said. “After you guys left we found an old sign that read ‘Henry Cemetery’. We also found the rotten remains of a house a short distance away.”
“His last name was Henry, wasn’t it?” I asked, recalling the engraving on the headstone.
“Yep, Chester Henry,” Travis said. “Born May 9, 1906, departed this life August 16, 1918. He …” Danny suddenly cut him off.
“Does it matter how the boy died?” Danny snapped. “The question is how the hell was he trapped in there. We know the soul leaves the body immediately upon death, we have seen it a hundred times over the last several weeks. His soul should be long gone before he was stuck in that Godforsaken metal box and buried.”
“Well …” Travis began. “I think the first thing we must assume is that iron had the same effect on Impals before the storm as it does now. There is only one plausible explanation.”
My heart sank to the pit of my stomach as the realization sank in. Several pale faces surrounded me, stricken at the revelation.
“Oh Jesus …” Burt croaked. “The poor kid was buried alive.”
Travis wiped a tear from his eye. “Medical technology was not as advanced back then. It was not uncommon for someone to be pronounced dead when they were still alive, undetectable to the ear of the physician. It …” he shuddered as if he was going to be sick. Travis remained silent for the rest of our meeting.
We tried to focus on our upcoming mission; however, none of us was in a talkative mood. We agreed to reconvene the following evening at Danny’s cabin.
I left the meeting feeling numb, unable to process all the emotions swirling about inside me. I felt terrible for little Chester. The poor child had endured so much over the last century; I didn’t know how he would ever be all right again. One thing I heard about Impals was that, prior to the storm, the passage of time was different for them. A hundred years might have seemed like a couple of days from Chester’s perspective.
Still, I couldn’t imagine spending two days in those horrific conditions. I wondered how many other premature burials now lay trapped and screaming for help around the world. I reasoned this away by the justification that it would only be those in iron caskets, which were rare, and they had to be buried while still alive. Given that combination, the odds decreased dramatically. Yet I knew the Law of Averages suggested there has to be a few out there.
I was also excited and a little scared about our upcoming mission, hoping Murphy’s Law would decide to take the night off for once. What can go wrong will go wrong seemed to be the story of my life as of late. It was the story of all our lives.
I was also angry. The sudden arrival by Chester strengthened my resolve that we were doing the right thing. My father says Impals are demons here to deceive us. What would a demon be doing in a situation like that? Buried alive seemed more like a torment dealt by evil than one endured by it.
I didn’t think I could hate my father any worse than I did the day I found out he was using the Tesla Gates. He succeeded
at proving me wrong on almost a daily basis. This anger and hatred always led to an overwhelming feeling of sadness; I had lost my father. I pushed it deep down, in the darkest recesses of my soul. Even there, the sorrow still managed to reach out and pierce my heart. I was struck by the overwhelming desire to be with my family, so I headed for our cabin.
CHAPTER 18
WINDER’S REPORT
“Recovery begins from the darkest moment.”
~John Major
I decided I would not discuss little Chester Henry with my family, not even Barbara. The topic would be too upsetting to everyone and would serve no purpose. As far as they were concerned, Chester was just another Impal refugee in the mine. I didn’t keep much from Barbara, but this was something she simply didn’t need to know. I would live with the horrible images myself.
Barbara and Abbs sat on our cot playing a game of Gin Rummy. Steff sat on the other side of the room flipping through the pages of some teenage girl magazine. She at least glanced up and gave me a half smile; I felt that was more progress. Barbara and Abbs invited me over to join them in their game; I happily agreed.
After several rounds of getting my tail kicked, we went to the mess hall for dinner. Steff refused to eat her fried Spam and only ate a few crackers with peanut butter. I choked my Spam down. I hoped this would be over soon and we could start living again with some degree of normality. A real shower, air-conditioning and trips to Martian Burgers were luxuries I would never take for granted again. At present, it seemed like an empty hope, yet it was something to hold on to all the same.
When we returned to the cabin, I added another hope to my list, one of privacy. Barbara and I had not been alone in weeks and as we lay there petting each other in the dark, the hope burned like fire. We kissed and caressed in silence. Nevertheless, in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot room with our daughters a few feet away, it was all we dared. Besides, maneuvering on two cots pushed together was not an easy task.
“When is this happening?” Barbara whispered as I stroked her hair.
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