by Alex Myers
“We be needin’ all the help you can throw our way,” Hercules said.
“Then I’ll see you all when I get back from my honeymoon?”
“We would not miss it for the world, Mr. Riggs.”
Jack watched the family drive off down the road, waving as they rode.
Two gunshots then cracked the still of the night. The noise of the band stopped abruptly.
He turned to hear more gunfire from inside the hall.
CHAPTER 35
Saturday, August 15, 1857
Jack reached the door of the hall and heard shouting voices and screams. He cracked the door and slid silently inside. Everyone was standing and facing the wedding table set-up in the middle rear of the hall. Two half semicircles of men stood facing each other, guns drawn. He couldn’t make out the faces of the men on the far side but recognized the backs of Kazmer, Samuel, Andrew and Frank Sanger, and several men from the Complex. Jack could see several guns.
Allan Pinkerton pressed a gun into Jack’s hand. “You’ll probably need this.”
Jack didn’t slow down to thank him as he continued his movement through the crowd.
“Where is he?” The voice of Abner Adkins was blasting and hateful. “Tell me where he is or I’ll shoot his new wife.” To accent his words he fired a shot into the ceiling. He and six of his men were backing toward the rear entrance.
As Jack moved closer, he could see Abner with an arm around Frances’s neck, holding her from behind. He held a pistol to her temple with his other hand.
“Here I am! Let her go!”
Everyone turned in Jack’s direction except Scott O’Leary, Jack’s head of security at the complex. O’Leary rapidly fired three shots. The first two shots dropped the two men on Abner’s left, the third tore into Abner’s right shoulder. An explosion of crimson blood, shattered bone and shredded clothing covered the two men to Abner’s right. Abner reflexively dropped his grip around Frances and grasped his bleeding shoulder. Frances, dazed and covered with blood herself, spun from his grip and fell to the floor in the middle of the circle. Abner’s remaining men turned and ran for the back door. Frances, on the floor and her white dress covered with gore, struggled to get to her feet.
“I hate you, Riggs, you ruined everything!” Abner said through gritted teeth. “This didn’t have to end this way, you could have done your duty for the South.”
Jack ran next to Scott O’Leary, and he and Scott each held pistols in their hands.
Abner, swaying as he stood, took aim at Frances.
Jack yelled, “Adkins, I’m here. I’m the one you want.”
“Keep talking to him,” Scott said quietly. “I’m going to move around for a clear shot.”
Frances got to her feet and stood directly between Jack and Adkins, blocking any kind of shot.
Abner aimed at Frances then reached around her and aimed at Jack. “I just don’t know which one of you to kill first. Screw you, Riggs, we gave you a chance. You turned your back on your own people. You nigger lovin’ son of a bitch! But then you took my wife, my Frances.”
“You bastard!” A woman’s voice echoed from the back entrance. Everyone in the hall turned to see the hideously disfigured Mattie Turner advancing on the crowd with a gun.
“I gave up everything I had for you—my farm, my son, my face. All I wanted was you, and all you could do was obsess about them. Him, because you were jealous, and her, because you never got over her. ” Her clothes were dirty, her hair was matted and one half of her face was a giant scar.
Abner, still shaky on his feet, never once looked in her direction, but took over-exaggerated aim at Frances and thumbed back the pistol’s hammer.
“At least have the guts to look at me when I kill you,” Mattie said.
“Mama!” Little Robbie screamed as he appeared running through the crowd.
“Stay away from me, you little bloodsucking maggot.” Mattie thumbed back the hammer of her gun and aimed at the small boy.
Jack had to move. He shouted, “Stop!” And with a burst of speed, he dove for Frances like a linebacker tackling a running back. He was flying through the air with one hand extended to grab a hold of Frances and another aiming the pistol at Abner’s mid-section. “Now, Scott, shoot now!”
Scott O’Leary changed his aim from Abner to Mattie, who was pulling the trigger to shoot the boy. As he fired a round at Mattie, one of Abner’s men appeared behind Scott and from three feet away his gun exploded into Scott’s back.
Time stood still and movement stopped as Jack saw this all sailing through the air moving toward Frances.
Another explosion as Allan Pinkerton stepped toward Abner’s man that shot Scott and shot him in the chest.
Abner, unfazed by any of this, steadied his swaying and took aim at Frances. He could see Abner’s finger pull on the trigger. Jack pulled his trigger and then crashed into Frances. Simultaneously two shots echoed in the hall.
Jack collided with Frances, wrapped her in his arm, and knocked her off her feet. Jack heard her moan as he knocked the breath out of her. Then he felt red-hot, fire sear the top of his skull. He heard a woman’s scream as he landed in a heap on his new pregnant wife.
CHAPTER 36
Saturday, August 15, 1857
Jack and Frances lay face to face on the floor, the gun still in Jack’s hand, wrapped over her top shoulder. There was so much noise—women screaming, men yelling, tables and dinnerware crashing and bouncing—that any individual sound was not detectable. Jack stared into Frances’s face from mere inches away.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes, I think so,” she answered in a pained exhalation of air.
Jack lifted his head above Frances and saw the chaos. People were running and shoving, but a crowd of men were surrounding the fallen Scott O’Leary. Jack tried to get his bearings. Where the hell was Abner?
Jack tried harder to sit up and felt something inside him let go like a marionette being untied. He fell back into Frances.
“What, Jack? Jack, you’re bleeding!” Frances said.
“Abner, I can’t find him. Where is he?” Jack felt weaker by the second.
Frances rolled in Jack’s arm and looked behind her.
She was face-to-face with Abner Adkins. “No!” she screamed.
Jack summoned all his strength, lifted himself, and saw Abner still moving in a growing pool of blood, pointing his gun at Frances and smiling a maniacal smile.
“I can’t stand the thought of you winning, Jack. If I can’t have her, you shan’t either.” He extended the gun and the muscles in his arms and hand tightened.
There was an explosion. Frances winced.
The bullet hit Abner right between the eyes.
Jack dropped the still smoking gun on the ground next to them. The last thing Jack saw before falling into Frances was Abner’s still staring dead eyes and the evil grin upon his face.
He felt like he was falling down a dark tunnel.
“Jack, Jack, come back to me.” The sound of Frances’s voice stopped Jack’s downward spiral. He fought hard; he first saw dark images… then his eyes focused and he could see Frances, then the standing figures of Kazmer, Samuel, and Frank Sanger.
“He’s back,” Kazmer said.
Frances gave him as look as if to say, don’t jinx it.
“Hey,” Jack managed to say.
Frances held a piece of ripped table linen to the wound on his forehead.
“Jack, it’s the same spot on your head as before, it’s as if you keep reinjuring the same spot. Does it feel like it did before, you know, when you left me?”
“When I time traveled back to the future? Yes.”
Kazmer and Frank Sanger looked at each other wild-eyed, then looked to Samuel, who just shrugged his shoulders.
Light was starting to fade again from his still open eyes. He fought to stay with them.
“What if you die, what happens then, do you just stay in the future?” Frances asked.
“Frances, don’t talk like that,” Frank Sanger said, and then to Kazmer and Samuel, “She must be in trauma.”
“I don’t know, maybe I’ll just die,” Jack said.
Allan Pinkerton rushed up and said, “It looks like Scott O’Leary is going to be fine.”
“And what about that misanthrope?” Samuel asked, pointing at Abner Adkins.
“I don’t think he could be any more dead. How’s Jack?” Pinkerton said.
Frank Sanger almost imperceptively shook his head no.
“Mattie is gone,” Kazmer said, with Robbie sobbing at his side.
“Frances, I need you to get the money from the fort.” He spoke in soft, breathy, whispers.
“Jack, I’m fine… you’re going to be fine.”
“I don’t think so, I think this is bad… I think I’m leaving you one way or another. But I need you to get the money we stashed away in that altar.”
Her green eyes started to well up with water, her breath became hitched. “I have money. Just let it go. You’re not going anywhere.”
What little light he could see was like a spectacular carousel of colors, ranging from pastels to bright neon, emanating like an aura of his friends gathered around him. The only person he could see clearly was Frances. He was feeling lightheaded, like he was being pulled away by an irresistible force.
“Yes, I am, Frances,” he said softly.
Big tears rolled from Frances’s face and slashed on Jack’s cheeks.
“You’re crying. You must love me.” Jack smiled. “Things are going to be okay. Get the money from the Chapel. Things we’ve started, research, got to continue. War has to be stopped.”
“Forget about the war, this is about us.”
“It’s what we worked for… for our baby.”
“Don’t leave us,” Frances cried. “Don’t leave me!”
Jack was retreating, falling away fast, and not all the willpower in the world could keep him anchored to the earthly plane. Frances’s face became a mist of sparkling hues. Its beauty was hypnotic, and whenever he focused on the colors, he relaxed. Jack watched the colors blend and merge, surging and pulsing the way a jellyfish swims in the ocean. He heard Frances scream his name, but the voice was muffled and distant. Sounds faded and became unimportant—just the light, the calming, soothing light. He lost all feeling and the pain disappeared as the light surrounded him. He was swimming in the light, becoming one with its radiance.
CHAPTER 37
Wednesday, August 15, 2013
A sound appeared, softly at first, then louder with a grating intensity. The rhythmic beat had weight, substance. It came in regular intervals and attached itself like a hook to the thing people think of as a soul; to Jack, it felt like his very essence. As the pulsing became louder, with it came pain. At first, sparkling pinpricks in his hands and feet, then spreading like a cancer to his arms and legs. As the pain moved to his torso and head, he could feel he was lying in a prone position, yet he felt no pressure points where his body made contact. His heart raced as the beat grew even louder, and then he noticed they somehow synced. The sound was electronic.
Jack opened his eyes.
He was levitating three feet off a black, felt-covered bed.
Turning his head to the left, he found the source of the electronic beats. He was confused by what he saw. Instead of a normal ECG heart monitor, he saw a large video display in the wall that emitted a barely perceptible beam of light toward his chest. The display alternated between the numerical reading of his heart rate, a series of jagged spikes that displayed his heart activity as a graph and what looked like an MRI rendering of his actual heart pumping.
“What is it?” Jack croaked out loud.
“That’s a Russian Cardio Varia TF12,” a female voice to his right said.
Thinking he had been alone, Jack almost violently swung his head in her direction.
“Easy, Mr. Riggs. Easy,” said the woman in a white lab coat.
Jack’s throat was parched and his mouth tasted like chalk. He tried to speak but couldn’t. It was as if his vocal cords would not respond. He stared up at her sparkling blue eyes. Her face looked to be about twenty, smooth, without lines and supple, but her hair was gray and tied tightly in a bun. Jack moved his arm. It felt like it was moving through a thick viscous fluid. Being suspended, he was surprised he could move at all. Raising a hand to his forehead, he thought her blue eyes held more wisdom and maturity than a person her age should possess. She showed him a small hand-held monitor; the display matched the one on the wall.
“The Cardio Varia TF12 is also an advanced integrated electroencephalogram. While you have been in a coma, we have been building maps of your mind.” Hitting a button on the small monitor, she changed the display of his heart to one of his brain. She walked around his bed and went to the larger wall display. He slowly followed her movements. The light emitting from the wall unit moved from his chest to his head. “We start by superimposing the anatomical image generated by the MRI scanner with a magneto-encephalograph, or MEG image. The MEG is capable of recording minute alterations in the electromagnetic field, generated by the electrical activity of neurons deep within the brain. This three-dimensional reconstruction of your head and brain show the alterations of electrical activity as a function of time, and this is where we start.”
The moving video picture displayed what looked like a moving topographical map. The smaller spikes of the beta waves on the lower part of the screen were shown in dark blues, occasionally spiking into greens. The alpha and theta spikes were much larger, and manifested as various shades of green interspersed with black. At the top of the screen, the gigantic peaks of the delta waves danced, changing from yellow to bright red.
“I realize that your therapy has not progressed to the point where you are yet able to comfortably speak, but we are still able to communicate through this unit. Your motor functions are now limited to frivolous arm and leg movements. We could set up a keyboard, but that is totally unnecessary. Watch this. Think of a cool mountain stream, a warm breeze is blowing on your face, and there’s nothing to think about but the soft gurgling of the water.”
Jack’s need to communicate was overwhelming, so he did as he was told. A blue beta wave rose and separated from the others, a targeting box highlighted the ping.
“That right there,” she said pointing out the spike, “is what you are thinking. Now try another. Think of rush hour traffic, horns blasting, you are late for work, and your car is running out of gas.”
Jack did as he was asked, and a targeted bright yellow spike tinged with red appeared at the top of the screen.
“See it?” she asked. “This technique was first perfected by Dr. Deeley using the super computers of the 1950s, but using our near absolute zero, hyper-cooled, multi processor arrayed computers of today, we are able to do this.”
She hit another series of buttons and the screen display changed ever so slightly.
“This is going to be tough at first, but you will get better at it with practice. I want you to think of a single word. You can do this by either thinking of the meaning of the word or actually spelling it out in your mind. It would be easier though, to just imagine the word as a whole. Now concentrate.”
Jack closed his eyes and concentrated. He opened his eyes and looked at the screen. A bright green, tinged with yellow spike appeared and was targeted. Next to the spike a word appeared: ‘DATE’.
“Very good!” she said, looking at the screen. “Date? Do you want to know the date?”
Jack blinked his eyes in response.
“It is August 15th.”
Jack closed his eyes and concentrated again.
Another spike appeared and next to it was the word ‘YEAR’.
“The year? You want to know the year?”
Jack blinked his eyes again.
“It’s the year 2013. You poor man, let me fill you in on some details. First of all, I’m Dr. Mizell, and I’m Chief of Neurology he
re at Norfolk Presbyterian.”
Chief of Neurology? Jack thought. You don’t look old enough to be a doctor!
“You have been here at Presby for roughly a year and a half. You were suspended in a stasis unit for the first eight months while the nano-tech microbes repaired you internally. The nanites rebuilt you from a molecular level. Since then, you have been in a coma-like state for the last ten months as we rebuilt and remapped your brain, employing intense light therapy, or ILT. This is cutting edge; no one has ever come close to repairing this much physical and mental damage. You are being suspended now in a form of our new stasis unit. It not only prevents bedsores, but also facilitates in your physical therapy, keeping your muscles loose, limber, and toned. Your recovery should progress quite rapidly from this point.”
Jack’s head was swimming with everything he heard and wanted to shut down, thinking of everything he had lost. He struggled to keep his eyes open, to put another word on the screen. His vision blurred, then doubled. He saw two Dr. Mizells smiling at him as he faded to sleep.
CHAPTER 38
Friday, August 17, 2013
Dr. Mizell was right, Jack’s progress did move ahead in leaps and bounds. By the second day, he was able to compose complete thoughts and sentences on the large wall monitor. While his body and mind fused, regenerating to become whole, he found the process exhausting and could only remain awake for an hour or two at a time. By the end of the second day, he was able to piece a sequence of words together.
“You might find this quite interesting.” Dr. Mizell said. “Instead of thinking of words, think of a picture.”
Frances’s face appeared on the screen. It was in color and in rich detail.
“And who is this?”
Jack thought the words: ‘MY WIFE’.
With a confused look on her face, Dr. Mizell examined his chart.
Jack thought the words: ‘SHE DIED A LONG TIME AGO’. Seeing the words on the screen made his heart ache. He couldn’t have imagined the whole thing. Jack stared into the green eyes staring back at him from the video display.
