“After I get some rest I want to go out and get materials to reinforce the fences again. Maybe hit the Walmart now that we’re cloaked.”
“Can I give you a list?”
“Sure.”
“There’s pancakes left if you’re hungry, but they’re cold.”
“Nah, I’ll get up in time for lunch. I just need a couple hours.” I headed toward the stairs that led to my room. “Hey, Beck? Any chance you can get a meeting together for later on?”
“Sure, what’s up?”
“Just things I want to discuss. Security, the fences, maybe looking for a new home. I’m concerned about the Sleepers and those assholes who got away.”
“Absolutely. I’ll organize it.”
“Thanks.” I walked to the stairs. “Beck, it’s good to have you back.”
“It’s good to be back. Wait…”
I stopped.
“I didn’t die again, did I?” Beck asked.
“No.” I laughed. “I just missed you.”
“I missed you too and I’m proud of you. Thank you for being on top of things.”
“You’re welcome,” I said sincerely.
It felt good to be told thank you. I seem to irritate people and the things I do slip from their minds. I was exhausted and my bed was calling to me. I went inside, shut my door, snatched up my bottle, and had a morning nightcap. I needed it. I was hungry, but more tired than anything else.
After taking off my boots, I rested back on the bunk and before I could even wonder why the Tom Selleck poster was back on the wall, I fell fast asleep.
5. Alex
I cursed Sonny under my breath. What the hell was he thinking giving Mera that bottle of bourbon? She just was sliced wide open, had major surgery, and had a baby, and he gives her booze? Like a ‘Welcome off the Wagon’ party right there in the medical room. Mera wouldn’t give it up either. It was tucked next to her in the bed under the covers like she was hiding an obscene teddy bear or something. I only knew about it because Noah said they moved the baby not only for observation, but because they knew Mera had been drinking.
She was out like a light when I returned. Maybe it was the booze, or just the fact that she was able to breathe a sigh of relief. Hope had made the first hurdle.
Despite having taken a short nap I was still tired and conked out in the chair next to Mera. I was in a deep sleep, dreaming too, until her voice invaded my dreams.
“What’s that smell?”
I shook my head, trying to remain asleep.
“Alex, what is that smell?”
After waking, it took a minute before I locked in on the odor. It smelled rancid and rotten, then I looked to my feet. I had stepped in remains and hadn’t even thought about cleaning off my shoes.
Sure enough, a chuck of innards was right on the tip of my boot.
“Goddamn Sonny.”
“How is it Sonny’s fault?” Mera asked.
“Because he was cleaning the yard.”
“You can’t complain. You wanna complain, clean it yourself.”
She was right. Our attackers were slaughtered right in our yard and I was the only one who hadn’t helped out. As much as I wanted to stay in the room with Mera, I had to clean off my boot and see what was going on in our little community. Find out how people were doing, and see what was next.
Mera didn’t seem to mind me leaving. Of course, she wouldn’t, she had a million people going in and out of that room. Plus, Javier told her he was going to be bringing in Beck and his soldiers so they could get the cloaking serum. I was positive Beck was going to make the best out of his two day stay there.
To my surprise, when I walked out of the medical building, I spotted Danny with Ed. They were working out. Not doing pushups or anything like that, more their sword swinging “slice em’ and dice em” routine. Despite that Ed is the older Phoenix and came from the future, there was an unmistakable bond between them. It was obvious they were brothers.
They trained like it was a ballet, both moving with grace, and I felt like a proud papa standing there watching them. I actually watched for a while, putting off what I needed to do. Which wasn’t much until Sonny woke up.
Beck had called a meeting for late afternoon and asked if I would get Danny and head out with Sonny to get fence repair materials. I didn’t have a problem with that. Maybe getting out was what I needed. I wouldn’t have wanted to go if Hope wasn’t out of the woods, but with each passing hour, Javier grew more confident about her survival. Much like I was when Phoenix was born.
I swore that baby was going to die.
He had a traumatic birth, his mother had been dead, infected with the Sleeper virus, he inched his own way out and squirmed, airways blocked until we got to him.
He was little. I mean small enough to fit in the palm of Beck’s hand. Okay, maybe not that small, but he didn’t stand a chance.
Yet he’d survived.
There he was, a grown ass man before me. In my time, he was still a toddler taking a leak wherever he pleased.
When Danny noticed me standing off to the side watching, they finished and headed my way.
“You taking a break from my mom?” Danny asked.
“Yeah, she kicked me out.”
He snickered. “Is she still drunk?”
I frowned. “Fucking Sonny.”
Ed laughed. “Wait. This is nothing. They end up…” he paused and cleared his throat.
I peered at him. “Spoiler alert?”
“Something like that,” Ed replied.
“How long you staying?” I asked him as they walked with me.
“Until I know where you guys are going.”
I nodded. “What are you guys doing now?”
“Clean up,” Danny answered. “There’s still body parts here and there. Why?”
“Sonny wanted to take a trip to the home store, get stuff for the fence, probably will hit the Walmart. You know how he gets. Beck said to take you,” I said to Danny.
“Can I come?” asked Ed.
“I’d love for you to come, but,” I tilted my head, “I would feel much better with you here while the fences are vulnerable.”
“Not a problem then.” Ed nodded curtly. “I understand.”
“Although we do have that cloaking serum.”
“Um, yeah, about that,” Ed said.
I stopped walking. “What?”
“Well, we have it in the future, it’s just short lived. Don’t rely on it.”
“Aw, I will be pissed off if we dosed our people, gave them a bad flu, and this cloaking thing doesn’t last long.”
“Sleepers overcome and adapt to a lot.” Ed shrugged. “Just exercise caution.”
I began walking again. “Well, at least we have you. I mean, nice to get some sort of intel from the future. Say…curious. You came back here. You ever get a visitor from the future?”
Ed looked right at Danny.
“Why are you looking at him?” I asked.
“Um…”
“What do you know?” I asked Danny.
“Dude, I know nothing.”
”“It’s a big brother thing,” said Ed. “I guess asking for permission. Sorry. Yeah, we have. Once that I know of.”
“Figured as much. No one can leave that damn time travel crap alone. Was it someone you know?” I asked. “Or is that spoiler territory?”
He looked at me as if he didn’t know how to answer it. “No. Because he came from far in the future. Randy’s time, give or take fifty years.”
“What did he want?”
“Honestly? To visit.”
“Not change anything, make anything worse or better?”
“No,” Ed answered and sounded honest about it. “Best I could recall was he just wanted to visit.”
I stared at him. “Maybe you believe that. But I don’t. No one goes through time to visit. There’s always a reason. Did you ask him?”
“No,’ Ed replied.
“Why not?”
“He said he was visiting.” He gave another shrug. “No one else seemed to notice or care. I don’t remember much.”
“That’s just strange. Were you drunk when he told you he was from the future?”
“I heard him tell someone else. And I wasn’t drunk.”
“Was it me?” Danny asked. “Cause you looked at me.”
“No, it wasn’t you.”
I held up my hand. “Let me get this straight, you overheard him say he was from the future, visiting mind you, and you didn’t ask anything else?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I was afraid I would get in trouble.”
“What the hell for?”
“For listening when I shouldn’t.”
I cocked back. “That’s odd.”
“I was just a kid, so…”
“What?” I threw out my hands. “Oh, great. Do you know who he told?”
“It was either Sonny or Mom.”
Danny laughed. Why that was funny, I don’t know.
“Oh, swell. Sometime in the future, someone comes from the future for a visit and just lets your mom or Sonny know.”
“I can tell you what he was like. I remember that,” Ed said.
“Nope.” We approached the main building. “Don’t want to know. On this one, I am so over the time shit that I’m taking the padre route.”
“What is that?” Danny asked.
“No man should know too much about their destiny.” I opened the door.
“And this is coming from the self-proclaimed Spoiler Alert King,” Danny mumbled.
“I heard that!” I shouted and kept going.
Although I was curious, I didn’t want to know. I wanted to put it out of my mind. For all I knew and hoped, Ed’s presence would change the need for a visitor from the future to come and visit. At least I hoped.
6. Mera
There were a lot of things that went through my mind as I lay in the hospital bed, no one around, completely by myself under doctor’s orders to rest. My newborn daughter was doing spectacularly and I needed to heal.
I did feel it, though not as much as I thought I would. Not the tiredness, but the need to heal. I also was told to take it easy on the booze.
I missed it. I couldn’t help it. For as long as I could remember I had been a drinker. I loved alcohol. After the event I drank more, and often. I consumed so much I don’t think it did anything to me. The only time alcohol gave me a good feeling was when my mood allowed it. Otherwise, it only calmed me, and I never got drunk. Though sometimes I wished it did. I hated when I’d be hungover, feeling like crap, and never had the ‘high’ from drinking.
Sonny gave me a bottle of bourbon and I barely touched it, yet Noah whisked it away saying he’d give me more later.
We had three doctors in our community. We were fortunate. They loved their work so much that often I believed they kept people in the makeshift hospital just to have something to do, or compete with each other on who took care of the more interesting patient.
Two of our scientific community members were transported to us from the future in what was known as the “Savior Project.” The last of mankind traveled back to live here. They were dying in the future, nearly extinct, so they left.
To this day we still don’t believe they understood the world in which they arrived, one besieged by an event that rendered most people dead, or turned them into Sleepers. To the time travelers it was a beautiful, open world.
While there were still many people from Project Savior unaccounted for, we would find them eventually, hopefully.
The quiet but spunky one was Noah, a man whose last name we never knew. I don’t think he even knew it. When we first met him two years earlier, Noah didn’t speak a word of English. He understood it, but didn’t speak it. A brilliant geneticist, we were told he was always thinking of ways to keep mankind alive and thriving. He was young by our standards, but he looked older. He did stop aging since we met him. A man small in stature, but big in heart, he looked sixty but was only forty. He worked the least with patients and often retreated to his own work. Noah was smart and could figure out anything.
There was also Levi Minx. Same age as Noah, but like him, Levi looked older. He had a stocky build, one we were told by Ed would get larger. He too was a brilliant scientist and doctor. He and Sonny were constantly fighting. It amused me.
Once I asked Levi, “If you guys are nearly extinct, and are picked over by future Sleepers, how are there scientists?”
He replied, “We weren’t on a farm like how you kept your animals. We had cities, technology. We kept striving for more, for better. We are educated by our elders, each of us learning a bit more. The virus increased brain activity, and those of us in the future have a bit of the enhancement without the bad. Just because the Sleepers come and get us doesn’t mean we are dumb.”
I kind of wanted to say, “Well yeah you are if you can’t figure out a way to not be picked off.”
They did. They left that time.
Levi was probably, in my opinion, the number one hands on people doctor.
The virus, which was originally intended to increase brain activity and bring back those mentally lost to traumatic brain injury, was designed, invented, and created by none other than Alberto Javier.
He invented it to help his son; it mutated and became a virus.
Javier is my favorite. A kind and gentle, distinguished looking man who probably could have been the GQ cover model for virologists before the world slipped from us.
He and Levi saved me and my child.
They will save the future if they can stop bickering long enough to do so.
Each of them came in to check on me and my daughter frequently. I knew that Beck and his soldiers would be coming in for the cloaking serum treatment.
Earlier, Javier came in to ask if I minded, since the medical facility was set up as wards and they were short on space, would I mind if Beck had his serum recovery in the same room as me.
Of course I didn’t mind. Why would I?
When Javier returned again, I knew something was wrong. I thought for sure the baby had taken a turn for the worse.
I was ready, I believed I could handle it.
“No. Not at all,” Javier said. “Her breathing is wonderful, her heart is strong. However, there is something I need to discuss with you.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“When you were injured, you and the baby were cut by a non-sterile object. It wasn’t clean.”
“So we have an infection.”
“I’m watching it,” Javier assured me. “Something bizarre is happening. See, the sword was used to kill a Sleeper as it went into you and
the baby.”
“But I am immune to the Sleeper virus. I was scratched by one.”
“A scratch is different than a bite, and both of them are different than a sword covered in Sleeper blood going into you and the baby. There is a level of the virus, small, that seems to be growing. I want to start a treatment to fight it similar to what I had done to Alex. It’s early, the infection is small, and it’s slow. It also looks different than what I have seen.”
“How so?”
“Instead of the bloodstream, it looks like it’s going after the DNA.”
“Is it creating a sickness or a genetic mutation?”
“That,” he wagged his finger, “is a smart question, and one I don’t have an answer to. I’m looking. Testing can take days.”
“What does this mean?”
“I don’t know. At this phase it is new to me.”
“Thank you for your honesty.” I nodded. “Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Can you not tell Alex, Beck, or anyone about this? Let’s just say the treatment is for a potential infection.”
“Absolutely, I can do that.”
“So, I didn’t ask. Is it me or Hope?”
“Both.”
Again, I nodded. “I see.”
“I wish I had answers. Unfortunately, at this point, I can’t predict the course of this.”
“Maybe we can. In the future, Phoenix says you were around. Maybe this is an important thing we missed and now that you are alive, we’ll
get it.”
“Maybe.”
Javier was a man of science. He saw what was in front of him and wanted to work on that. Me, I thought of Ed. I needed answers, and even though his future was probably different than the path we currently were taking, I believed he would give some insight.
Javier spoke cautiously, even presenting that perhaps this wasn’t a big deal. Somewhere inside I believed the DNA thing was huge and a piece of the future puzzle that in a world without Javier, was probably missed.
7. Sonny
The one thing that surprised me was how warm it was. A few days shy of March and it was already sixty degrees. I was glad, I didn’t feel like working on the fence in the bitter cold. Also, knowing Ohio, it could snow in the blink of an eye.
Four of us needed to go out. Two trucks.; one to carry the fence supplies from the home store, the other for things we’d pick up at the old Walmart.
We had been to the Walmart before, but it was overrun with Sleepers. This trip would be a true test of the cloaking inoculation. We still didn’t know how long it would last.
I debated on who I wanted to take. Danny for sure, Alex would come whether I wanted him to or not, so it came down to Randy or Michael.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want Randy to come. He was a Sleeper master in his own right, but I thought Michael needed to be with us. We all had it in the back of our head that he would turn into the Sleeper Super Shredder and control the Sleepers should we run into problems. I needed him to know we were going to do our best to make sure that didn’t happen.
Sleepers (Book 7): Sleepers 7 Page 3
