We are birthed.
'Isn't he beautiful?' Georgie whispered, so as not to wake the baby. Josh stared at him from a distance. He didn't know what to do. 'Come say hello,' she added, smiling. She was still pale, but looked much better than before. IV lines ran to her hand from suspended bags, and Josh's stomach turned.
'Can I?' he said.
'He's your son; of course you can.' Josh approached, cautious. 'Here,' Georgie said, passing him over. 'Hold him like that, supporting his head. That's it, there you are.'
Josh held him. He hardly weighed anything, yet he was so warm. And the smell—it was intoxicating. His vision blurred. Georgie was smiling, warmth flushing back into her cheeks.
'What are we going to call him?' she asked.
'Joseph,' Josh said at once. Georgie looked surprised.
'That was fast,' she said. 'And I love it. Joseph. Joseph. Jo—seph.' She grinned. 'Joseph,' she said again.
'I guess I owe you a hundred dollars,' Josh said, breaking his gaze away from Joseph's sleeping face.
Georgie laughed weakly. 'Yes, you do. And I'm going to hold you to it. You can put it toward the hospital bill.'
'I want to get you something,' Josh said. 'Something to say thank you. You've done an amazing job.' He looked down at Joseph again and couldn't help but grin.
'And so have you,' Georgie insisted. 'You've done the best job anyone could have ever done.'
We are grateful.
Chapter 32
Are you here?
Yes, we are here.
Have you taken me?
We have taken you.
Will you bring me back?
We will bring you back.
Josh felt peace within him. A warmth, soft and soothing, enveloped him. Then, a coldness, a fading of vision, an onset of darkness.
I am dying.
Yes, you are dying.
You too have died.
We also have died.
But now you are whole again.
Now we are whole again.
It trickled from him, spreading thin and formless. He was powerless to stop the receding tide, could only watch as it drained into nothing.
You have made a sacrifice.
And so have you.
You sacrifice yourself to protect those you love.
And you have too. We thank you.
The image of Joseph, so young and so fragile, was still fresh in his mind. Georgie, cheeks pinking with joy, a fighter and a giver, gave him solace. She would be safe because of him. Their son would be safe because of him.
Where will you go now? Back to where you came from?
Yes, we will return.
Where did you come from? Another dimension?
Where we come from cannot be understood.
Why do you come to our world?
We must gestate our young in your world until they are strong enough to come to ours.
Is your form mortal in our world?
Yes, we can be destroyed in your world.
Is that what happened?
We were attacked, wounded.
What happened to your young?
It has been returned. You have returned it.
The seed was your young?
Yes, and we are grateful.
Chapter 33
All was quiet. All was empty. A flicker, nothing more. Josh's mortal form was slowly decaying, as life anew was drawn from him. He knew. He had known. The seed—it was not a portal. It was the child in its embryonic form. And it was he who returned it, carried it across into this dimension, to its home.
Light filled his vision.
Chapter 34
His mouth tasted like ash. The ground was hard beneath him. The quiet was loud in his ears. His bones ached with cold. Everything was black.
Rolling onto his side, Josh levered himself carefully onto his arm, then onto his knees. His joints grumbled. He let out an involuntary sigh as he fumbled in his pocket for his cell, praying that it still lived as he turned the screen on.
Relief came with the glow of light, but his battery was low. He needed to leave. Sitting up, he instinctively checked his side, feeling for blood, for pain. There was old blood, but nothing new. He lifted his shirt; the wound was healed. They had healed him. Their gratitude had been repaid.
The memory was that of a dream: broken, confused and indecipherable. There was clarity—or had been, once—but now there were only pieces. Perhaps they would form again, in time. The overwhelming sense of peace was all that was left of it.
To his feet he climbed, holding his weight carefully. His mortal being was unfamiliar, clumsy; he longed for the warmth of another world, one he could not go back to. He would hold on to that feeling as long as he might, but he knew that soon it would be nothing but dust.
Ascending the ramp, he moved from the room, turning back at the top to look into it. It was quiet, peaceful—empty. They had gone. Josh wondered if they would ever return; he guessed not. They would find a new place to grow their young, somewhere safe. Earth was no longer safe.
Ahead, the cell light caught the dull crystalline remains of the parent still frozen from death, jagged and broken. He moved on, into the darkness. The light picked out the drill, old and rusting. The air was thick with mildew. The tunnel burrowed into nothing.
He followed the decaying tracks as they went, his head feeling as empty as the room itself had become. A thought felt near, but he had neither the energy nor the effort to muster it. Instead he walked in quiet, inside and out, watching the rotten wooden ties slip by one by one.
Not far down he came across a wall. The tunnel had been blocked. It was manmade rather than any kind of collapse, presumably sealing the room away forever. Doubling back, he semi-consciously looked for the chamber in the wall he'd crawled from. It didn't take long to find it; the door was still open. With muscles aching and mind jelly, he climbed his way into it and headed back the way he had entered.
The crawl moved by as a blur. He remembered shuffling through, but not much else. The heat, the smell, the pain—he was too numb to feel it. He felt drained, thin, like his journey from this world to theirs had taken something from him, something he'd not get back for a long while, if ever.
In a blink he was looking at the inside of a manhole cover. He couldn’t hear any traffic, so he heaved it up and emerged into the night. In the east, purple stained the sky. It would be morning soon. Without really paying much attention to what he was doing, he stumbled out of the drain, put the cover back, and shuffled to the nearest doorway, where he collapsed and fell straight to sleep.
Not much later, he awoke with a start. The morning sky was a little brighter, and a shadow loomed over him. He blinked. The shadow belonged to a police officer, who was pointing a flashlight at him.
'Sir, get up, please.'
Groggily, shielding his eyes from the officer's flashlight, Josh did as he was told. The officer eyed his filthy, blood-stained clothes, and Josh looked down at them also.
'Sorry, officer,' he said.
'Are you okay?' the officer asked, keeping Josh stable.
Josh nodded, teetering a little.
'What happened to you? Been drinking?'
'No, I'm fine,' Josh said, trying his best to sound fine. 'This, my clothes,' he added, still looking down, 'I got into a fight. I'm sorry. It's over now. It's all okay.'
Uncertain, the officer considered Josh. 'Can you make it home okay, get yourself cleaned up?'
Josh nodded. Clarity was coming back. 'Yes, I'll be okay.'
It was decided. 'All right then.' He backed up to his car, its panels gleaming under the eastern glow. 'You take care of yourself and try not to get into any more fights.' He climbed in, and pausing as he shut the door, added, 'And don't let me catch you sleeping in doorways again, all right?'
Josh nodded again.
'All right.' The lights on the car flashed and it pulled away silently, only the roll of its wheels whistling on the tarmac. Josh blinked.
The
street, it looked normal enough. Trees hissed in the wind. A man walked his dog on the other side of the street. Another car whistled by, and then another. They looked sleek, compact under the pre-sunrise sky. Soon more people would be up, and the roads and sidewalks would start to fill. He needed to move on.
He found a twenty-four-hour mart and bought some more clothes, some food, a bottle of water, a toothbrush and some deodorant. There were no newspapers or magazines, but he found a news screen with the date on it: thirty-eight years had passed. Seeing it didn't feel real. It numbed his mind.
The clerk at the counter, backlit by an enormous screen advertising some kind of hair product, gave him a funny look. Josh paid and got out without saying a word.
He changed quickly in a back alley, and washed his face and brushed his teeth with some of the water. The label on the bottle was animated, fresh water tumbling from a depiction of whatever spring it had supposedly come from.
He ate and drank, and felt a lot better. He was clean and smelled fresh enough. He found a clock and waited until about eight-thirty, then headed to Georgie's apartment. The subway was surprisingly clean, but not all that much had changed. Mainly there was more advertising, long screens running the lengths of the walls, projecting color and sound at him as he walked to the platform. The adverts seemed to follow him, targeting him with stuff that seemed appropriate for his age and gender.
The trains themselves had been refreshed, once glossy white, now streaked with smears of dirt from years of parading these tunnels. Josh's train approached, and he boarded.
Emerging into Queens, he made the walk to 82nd. The tree-lined street looked almost unchanged, other than the cars parked along its length. He found the apartment building he was looking for, and with his heart in his mouth, he pressed the buzzer. Then he waited. His mind was still numb.
A friendly, automated voice greeted him. 'Hello. I'm afraid there's no one home right now. Would you care to leave a message, or speak to the landlord?'
Josh hesitated. 'Can I speak to the landlord, please?'
'One moment.' The line clicked, and then another voice followed, complete with a video feed on the panel above the buttons. It showed an older lady with big hair. 'Hello?'
Josh didn't recognize the person, but no matter. 'I'm looking for Georgina Reed, please.'
The face on the screen scrunched in thought. 'Georgina Reed? You mean Georgie?'
Josh's heart leaped. 'Yes, that's right.'
For a moment the lady was silent. She shuffled uncomfortably. 'I'm afraid she passed away, a few years ago now. Can I help?'
Josh turned from the screen, his numb mind numbing further. Walking back to the street, the lady's voice saying, 'Hello? Hello?' behind him, he stumbled away. He was walking, but he didn't really know it. Slabs were passing underfoot. He watched the cracks wander by one by one. Tinnitus screeched in his ears.
* * *
A week had passed since Josh had emerged from the tunnel. He'd found his savings still intact—clearly Georgie hadn’t drawn much from them through her years—and so he rented a small studio apartment out in the cheapest part of Brooklyn he could find. He was having a little trouble catching up with the way things worked; much was similar, but it was the little details that threw him. Cell phones consisted of a small earpiece and a contact lens, and there were no desktop computers as he was accustomed to, so doing research was tricky, but he got there in the end.
He found Georgie's obituary, finding that she'd died of heart failure in the summer three years prior. The insert was heartfelt and loving, and it made him smile. He was still having trouble letting himself think of her or feel anything about her; it would take a while longer before he allowed himself to inspect that wound properly.
Lionel had also passed on, an eighty-year-old man with scores of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Josh could imagine him bobbing the younger ones on his knee while the older ones listened to his tales. They'd all be nonsense, of course, but that was the charm of them. That was his legacy.
It was more trouble finding out about Joseph, but with a little digging he discovered that he had moved out of the city to a small town called Pine Bush. There he'd co-founded a design firm that seemed to be doing well.
Josh had avoided calling the business number. He didn't want to simply jump into Joseph's life like that; it didn't seem fair. He wanted to go and check things out first. So he did. He boarded the bus at ten in the morning and arrived at Pine Bush at thirty minutes past midday. It was a Sunday, and he checked into a nice hotel and restaurant, where he planned to stay for the while he was there.
He went for a walk to clear his head, then returned to his room to shower and change for an early dinner. Entering the restaurant, he seated himself at the bar and ordered himself a drink, considering the same things he'd been considering over and over since he'd planned the journey: what would he do when he met Joseph? Would Joseph even recognize him? What if Joseph didn't want to know him? He swallowed the drink down, tipping it and his thoughts to the back of his head.
A waiter directed Josh to his table, and as he wound through the dining area, a bout of 'Happy Birthday' rang out. Josh turned his attention to the table where the song was being sung, to see a birthday cake, awash with candles, being brought out to a girl who couldn't have been much older than seven. She grinned a toothy grin as the cake was laid out before her, her younger brother squealing with excitement next to her.
Her mother sang through smiling lips, clapping with the restaurant staff who sang too. Other tables around them joined the singing.
It was then Josh noticed the father. No—it couldn’t be . . .
Josh had seen a group image on his son's website of the young company together, and he was sure this man's face was one of them. He loaded up the company page and checked again. The man, the father, he was there, one of the company. Could he be Joseph? All of a sudden, emotion overwhelmed Josh, like color filling black and white. Georgie, how he missed her, her smile, her laugh. And yet here it resonated through the laughter of the birthday girl. His son, the girl's father, was a handsome man, clapping and singing, enjoying the happiness of his children.
Josh blinked a few times, had to look away. The questions flooded in; he had so many to ask. And he would ask them, all of them, in time.
For now, he turned back to the family and sang 'Happy Birthday' with them.
If you enjoyed reading New York Deep, leave a review and you'll receive a free copy of Andrew J. Morgan's sci-fi thriller Noah's Ark. Once you've left your review, get in touch at andrewjamesmorgan.com to receive your free copy of Noah's Ark. Thank you, and I hope you enjoyed New York Deep.
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