Sleeper Protocol

by Kevin Ikenberry

  “Then get to it,” she said, and the swing stopped. I helped her stand, and she shuffled to the dented storm door and opened it. She looked at me for a long moment I wanted to frame like a picture. There was nothing but love in her face. “Time is wasting, Kieran. But if you want something, there is always time.”

  When I opened my eyes, night had fallen, and the soft light of a full moon cast shadows from the bare trees across the roof of the hexhab. I missed Berkeley for a heartbeat before telling myself that I hardly knew her. Giving her my heart had been foolish, and though the ache would fade, given time, it was real and constant. The scent of her no longer lay upon my pillow, but I imagined it with every breath. Try as I might, my body longed to feel her next to me. I wanted to tell her I was sorry, but I had no idea what to be sorry for, if anything.

  <>

  Sorry I woke you, Mally.

  <>

  Just thinking.

  <> There was a subtle hostility in her voice. <>

  You’re worried about me.

  <>

  Knowing that Mally depended on me for her life sobered me. At least someone—and Mally was clearly a someone—depended on me. I wondered what my shred of existence would be as I drifted back to sleep, the full Tennessee moon shining down through the hexhab’s canopy with cold, indifferent light.

  “Mally, does this place have a name?” I whispered aloud, and the softness of my voice startled me.

  <>

  “Moonshine.” I studied the moon and imagined the face smiling back at me. Like a voice whispering the story into my ear, the memory came. The story had been handed down to me. My grandmother had been a teacher, educating children for more than fifty years. Fresh from the teaching college, called the “normal school” long before it became a university, she found work teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in the Dry Creek area. The poor community took great pride in its schoolhouse, to which she delighted. Tucked into the sharp draws of Cherokee Mountain, Dry Creek sat under several ridges that blocked all but the most direct noonday sun.

  One day, a few of her male students asked to take her hiking up the ridges. Being the same age as them but already a certified teacher at seventeen, she went and learned “rocking.” The boys would heft and heave large rocks to the edge of the ridgeline and set them rolling down the hills with shouts and laughter. She had a great time until she came home to her host family.

  She’d taken a room with Jim Scanlon and his wife Emma. When my grandmother came home, Mister Scanlon, as he preferred to be called, was sitting in a handmade rocking chair spitting “terbaccy” accurately into a spittoon five feet away.

  “Missy, did you have a good time this afternoon?” His voice was soft and kind but his face stony. He called her “Missy” instead of her given name the way some men used “darling” or “sweetheart.”

  Beaming, she told him about the grand time she’d had on the ridges. He watched her and didn’t smile or make a move until she was finished.

  “Missy, don’t you ever go doing that again. You and them boys ruined three families’ way of life this afternoon.”

  She and her students had destroyed the moonshine stills of three different families, jeopardizing their income for the coming winter. Bursting into tears, she apologized over and over again. Mister Scanlon patted her arm and told her that it would be okay, that the community would help the families, but that if she ever wanted to have that kind of fun again, she should do it someplace else. She avoided doing it again, as much from embarrassment as from newfound maturity.

  Not long after that, she met up with a great-uncle who owned ranch land in New Mexico. She moved west and fell in love with a widower raising six children on his own, and they had one more child: my mother. My whole family came from there except for me. They’d moved to Tennessee because of family and work, and I was born here. I’d come full circle—that much I knew.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  This time, I recognized it as a dream. Berkeley was there, and the weather was warm in the high country. Eleven Mile Reservoir was a blanket of shimmering diamonds in the early-morning sunshine. I sat on the rocks, a lame excuse for a fishing pole in my hands, and the warm sunshine hammered down on me, and my eyes closed. The pink-and-purple splotches behind my eyelids exploded in random fireworks that made me smile. Her hand was on my back, gentle and warm at the base of my neck.

  The breeze down from the slopes of Pikes Peak was cool. Midsummer perfection. It was the kind of day best spent in a hammock or lying in the cool grass under fragrant trees—the kind of day where time stood still.

  “What are you going to do, Kieran?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “But you are going back, right? You’re going to go back to Sydney for integration, aren’t you?”

  There were tears on her cheeks. Her blue eyes were wide and frightened, lower lip trembling slightly as I touched her face with my fingertips. “Why are you crying?”

  “If you go back, you’re going to war. A war we’re probably not going to win. You’ll be dead before a year is up.”

  “That’s a risk I have to take.”

  “Why?” She sniffled. “You’re not even from this world. Why would you care enough to fight for it?”

  Looking out across the millions of diamond-like reflections from the lake, I answered, “Because they need me—those soldiers out there. We have to protect each other and watch out for each other because no one else will.”

  “What about me?” Her eyes narrowed. “What about fighting for me? Am I not good enough for you?”

  “Why would you care, Berkeley?” I said, though she was already fading. “Why would you care about me? I’m just—”

  “Nobody.” I sat up, completely naked, inside the hexhab. The sun was high in the sky. Surely I slept more than an hour?

  <>

  I touched the soft panels for some breakfast and hot tea. A shower invigorated me and left me ready for the day. My clothes were dry, and I slipped them into my pack. New clothes brought a smile to my face. I felt clean for the first time in a while. “Mally, I’m very close to integration, aren’t I?”

  <>

  “I know that. But I’m reasonably sure that something is very close. Within a few miles at best.”

  <>

  I almost said something sarcastic but held back because Mally would have been offended again. I needed her too much to let her be mad at me for being sophomoric. After I collapsed the hexhab, I started walking north and slightly to the east. The wide, lush valley was a palette of early-winter browns and tans as I moved easily through the light forests and wilting grasses with no dwellings or fences anywhere in sight.

  There really weren’t many places as beautiful as this. Without a trace of humanity, the wilderness felt more vibrant and alive. I made reasonably good progress around ponds and streams that fed into the N
olichucky. I broke from a tree line and looked up a long, shallow hill. In the distance, a stand of five enormous trees in a straight line meant a road had been nearby. I started walking toward it. My heart began to pound. I remembered that landscape better than anything I’d seen since waking in Sydney.

  The closer I got to the trees, the more familiar the small knoll became. To the west of it, the ground sloped away drastically and then shot right back up another hill with a tree line almost a quarter-mile long. The hillside had once been pasture, but now trees had begun to grow on it. Eventually, the whole area would be deciduous forest again. On the knoll, I walked under an ageless black walnut tree and stumbled upon the stacked-rock foundation of what had been a springhouse. How did I know that?

  I slung my pack to the ground and took a heaving, deep breath with my hands on my knees so I did not collapse. The dizziness passed, and I turned back to the east. The tall grasses held the remnants of a foundation. A house had once stood here—not mine but a significant place in my life. We called it the farm—my grandmother’s childhood home. The home from my dream. The western hill once had a tree with my initials carved in it. I had memories of running around on hot summer days with my cousins, hands sticky from picking grapes and apples. I recalled the taste of cold spring water washing away the sawdust when my father and I cut firewood in the forest. Tears streamed down my face, and I let them fall. This was the closest I would come to my family, the one constant in our lives. This place was home. I felt empty, aware that while this was my home, or as close as I could get to it, there was nothing here for me.

  From my dream, I remembered the tin-roofed house with the wide veranda and the gentle rhythm of the porch swing.

  “It’s not there anymore, mate.” I heard Allan’s voice in my head and chuckled in the soft breeze.

  You cannot go home again.

  <>

  No, Mally. Burying my face in my hands, I sat and cried.

  The breeze grew cold after an hour. I sat on the rocks and twirled long grass in my fingers, peeling the layers to expose the sweet white pulp inside, the taste firing more memories as I sucked on a blade and watched the day pass. I could hear the voices of my cousins as we played in the grass, threw black walnuts at metal lawn chairs, and pulled apples from the trees. I sat and wept. Everything manmade had been picked clean from the landscape, but the memory was there and untouchable. Down the hill, tobacco grew in wild clumps. Things had changed, but to the trained eye, things were really the same.

  The hum of a subatmospheric transport caught my attention as it descended toward the northeast, reminding me that I was far from any semblance of my old life. All that I remembered was gone, but I carried the memory alive and fresh in my mind. That alone could take me anywhere I wanted to go. It was time to go, maybe all the way back to Esperance. I did not know anymore. I hoisted the pack to my shoulders and got to my feet slowly, my legs aching from sitting for too long.

  “Mally, how close is that support terminal?”

  <>

  I started walking toward a notch at the edge of the forest where a road once lay. “I’ll find a place to camp tonight, then.”

  Mally chimed, <>

  Looking back at the remains of the farm, I wiped my eyes a final time. “And you can book a seat for me back to Esperance?”

  <>

  “Six minutes?” A memory surfaced like a lightning strike.

  I’d gone to Jump School, the Army’s Basic Parachutist Course. That wouldn’t have been so bad except that it was south Georgia in the middle of summer, where the temperature was ninety-something with an equal amount of relative humidity. Basically, the only time I wasn’t soaked with sweat was on the nights we went to the air-conditioned movie theater. “Misery” was a good way to describe the weather in the South on most days except when the door to the C-130 Hercules was open, and the rushing wind off its wings filled the open cabin.

  “Six minutes!” the jumpmaster screamed above the wind.

  “Six minutes!” we jumpers screamed back.

  In sleeker parachutes than our heavy bags, the jumpmasters all wore combat fatigues and smooth, clear goggles. They eschewed the protective helmets the rest of the jumpers wore. Being a jumpmaster must have been the best of both worlds. Across the tight aisle sat a Naval Academy midshipman with eyes as wide as dinner plates behind his thick glasses. His terror made me calm. I could do it just to lead him out the door, although I knew I wouldn’t have much choice anyway. I was going to be the first man out of the aircraft. If I didn’t jump, they’d throw me out.

  The jumpmaster stepped forward to where we were sitting and began the litany, every syllable enunciated against the screaming winds from the open doors and the roaring of the propellers. “Outboard personnel! Stand up!”

  The jumpers with their backs to the exterior of the aircraft stood up.

  “Inboard Personnel! Stand up!” I stood up and took my place at the front of the line.

  With his index finger crooked like a crude hook, the jumpmaster yelled, “Hook up!”

  I reached up and snapped the hook that connected my static line to a thick metal cable running the length of the fuselage. The hooked line attached to me would pull the parachute out. Hopefully. I pushed a metal pin through the hook to protect it from coming off the cable. I tugged on the line, and the hook didn’t move. I looked at the jumpmaster.

  “Check static line!”

  The jumpers behind me quickly checked their static lines. From the hook, the line draped over my right shoulder and then wove back and forth across the exterior of my parachute pack. I couldn’t see it much less check it—the job was up to the jumper behind me. Every jumper checked the person in front of them to make sure that the line was not covered by anything green. The parachute pack and its straps were green. Green over yellow meant the static line would not deploy and then pull the parachute out of the pack. A jumper could hang off the static line behind the aircraft. Not exactly the way anyone would want to do it, and the static-line check put each jumper’s life literally in the hands of the person behind him. I never doubted the guys behind me. From the back of the line, the last jumper would slap the ass of the next person in line and say, “Okay!”

  It seemed like an eternity passed before the chain reached me, but the slap came, and I screamed, “All okay, jumpmaster!”

  The jumpmaster gave me a thumbs-up and stomped over to the open door of the aircraft. Holding onto the side of the hatch, he stuck his head outside into the breeze. I really wanted a pair of goggles like the ones he wore.

  He looked at the line of jumpers. “One minute!”

  “One minute!” we screamed back in unison. All of the fear of jumping from a perfectly good airplane had been trained out of me. I wanted nothing more than to get out that door.

  “Thirty seconds!” the jumpmaster screamed at us.

  “Thirty seconds!”

  The jumpmaster stepped away from the door and motioned me forward. “Stand in the door!”

  Passing him my static line, I did a left face and grasped the sides of the aircraft’s troop door. Knees bent, with one foot behind and one foot on the exit platform—the toe of my combat boot in the breeze—I felt the wind hammer against my fingers, and I relaxed. I was ready to go. The massive wing of the airplane bounced in the thick, humid air as fields and forests slid by below. At 1,250 feet off the ground, the big aircraft probably doing a little over 150 knots, the bouncing wing struck me as odd and distracted me from looking down or allowing fear a port of entry.

  The glaring red light to my left
switched to green. The jumpmaster slapped my ass and screamed, “Go!”

  I jumped, pulling my hands onto my reserve parachute. The wind knocked me sideways. The horizontal stabilizer of the transport aircraft shot past. I counted in great screaming gasps, making it to “three” before my parachute jerked open. There were no problems when I checked the unfurled canopy. I looked down between my feet and howled like a madman. I’d gone because I loved it, and I loved being in the Army. Risks were minimized, all possible outcomes trained for. I’d thought that everything in the Army would be the same. I’d been wrong about all of it—except for the friends I would make and the ones I would bury.

  “Mally, delay that transport to Esperance by another day. There is one more place I need to see.”

  <>

  “Just a minute. I grew up near here, and the house where I lived—that place is obviously gone now. I get that. But there’s something else.” I paused for a moment and tried for the millionth time to imagine the world I’d left behind. “Is there anything manmade still standing in this area other than the support terminal?”

  Mally didn’t respond immediately. <>

  I blinked. My knees quaked, and I leaned against a sycamore tree. I remembered one of the memorials, a cemetery that once had a baseball field located right next to it—not close enough for a foul ball to find its way into hallowed ground, but I remembered seeing the gravestones while I played center field. I didn’t learn what it was for several more years. When I did, the effect was profound. The name came in a flood of memory. “What happened to Mountain Home? When the Franklin Preserve was created, was it removed?”