Stephen W. Sumner

SEEKING FOREVER

Jan 29, 2247?

The journal was covered and bound in black leather. A small strap sewn to the binding and a brass buckle held the cover shut against the elements. Even a casual observer would notice the pages were worn now from near daily reading. Multiple pages had been ripped out from the back of the book; paper was a scarce commodity now. The last available page had been filled in at least three years prior. The author had begun writing it as a gift for her husband, he with a mind more scientific than her practical one. Now she read portions from it as a daily ritual providing a tie to her previous life. She longed for a day when it would serve its original purpose. There was more that the journal could have contained, events locked in Jennifer’s mind that she could only wish to have consigned to the purgatory of written pages.

A stray lock of auburn hair dropped into her peripheral vision and she tucked it back behind her ear. In the waning light of a late winter day, she lit a candle for reading. Her fingers eased open the buckle. This evening Jennifer looked to the beginning.

Personal log — Jennifer O’Malley — Aug 29, 2012

We, my husband Ian and I, had our personal hide hole finished and filled with two weeks to spare. The hole was stocked with all the necessities to set us up nicely as a highly competitive livestock ranch, assuming of course that there would be livestock. Who knew what we’d wake up to, especially if it turned out to be a post-apocalyptic world. The toughest part was only being able to work on its construction during the weekends. That was all the time we had with my being away at training camp twenty-fours a day during the week. As far as Planning and Zoning was concerned we had just built a self-sufficient hunting lodge up on the mountain. A trust fund was set up to take care of the property taxes so suspicion might be avoided over the years. We could only hope that nobody would notice the lack of occasional occupancy.

I thanked God Ian was working right there with me though. The very last weekend the three of us spent alone, right there at our hunting lodge. Ian and I made love whenever Darren was asleep, all three of us hugging and playing otherwise. I think I was more tired after that weekend than the previous eight. My team members and I were given Monday off that final weekend to say our last good-byes. Tuesday, August 15th may be the hardest day I have ever had to endure so far. Ian and I both had to calm Darren down for the Cryogenic prep. I kissed my precious baby’s face as he went to sleep. As I watched my tears glistening on his face, I prayed that I would see him again when all was taken care of. When Ian went through prep, I was by his side until they sealed him in the chamber. It was as hard to say good night to my husband as it was to Darren. The next two weeks were probably the loneliest I have felt in a long time. At least my employers kept me fairly busy until the day before my team’s Cryogenic insertion.

I sincerely hope that the “old man” is wrong and that we wake up and find out that all we’ve missed has been 15 years of bad reruns on television. Did I make the right decision to join Camelot Enterprises? As much as I am missing my family, I almost believe it would have been better to take our chances with Apocalypse. At least I would know where my husband and child are.

Personal log — Jennifer O’Malley — Day 1 — April 2, 2239?

I heard somebody crying. I tried mumbling at them to make it stop. I realized that I was the one crying, and it subsided into sobbing. Eventually, it became apparent to me that I was waking up from Cryogen. How utterly embarrassing that was. Oh, how I miss Ian and Darren! Hopefully, the rest of my team will not leave me somewhere figuring they can do without the crybaby. I hope they did not hear me.

I didn’t expect the dreams during Cryogen. At least, I think they were dreams. How is it possible to dream when the brain is frozen to a state of inactivity? I think I read somewhere that microburst microwaves or something like that were used to keep ice crystals from destroying our cells. Could it be that which caused the synapses to fire, or to simulate firing? I don’t know enough science to understand it fully.

Maybe my soul left my body and went to Purgatory. That might explain why I relived my life — from birth to freezing — over again, only from the outside looking in. It started out when I woke up in a field of grass and flowers. It was daylight, but I couldn’t see the Sun. Occasionally, a breeze would blow and I thought I could hear voices in it. Whenever I thought I heard Ian or Darren or somebody else I was close to, I would go through the birth to freezing thing again. When that wasn’t happening, I would see planes, trains, and an odd ship go by. I once wondered if a train would stop should I get on the tracks in front of it. They went by so irregularly; I could never plan on when to do so. They never seemed to go by when I was near the tracks either. Perhaps somebody else was trying the same thing further up the tracks. Every now and then I would be close enough to the tracks to see people in the windows. During my wanderings, I would sometimes lie on the grass and gaze at the clouds. I think I would sleep during those periods because everything would fade to black. It was eerie, no light, no stars, no breeze, and I could not even feel the grass beneath me. The darkness also contained a voice that spoke to me in a language that I didn’t know. I kept saying that I couldn’t understand it, and it would start back up again after waiting for me to finish. After a couple of dozen more episodes like that, I gave up and talked to the voice about things I wouldn’t normally say. Many years seemed to pass before the last time I lay down for one of these naps as I came to call them. When the darkness faded, Camelot Enterprises was pulling me out of storage because the Apocalypse threat was over.

That’s what I thought, and I remember feeling so sure that it was all so real. I watched my Darren grow and go to school. I did all the things a normal parent does, until the government types in their ill-fitting suits showed up at the door. These guys invited themselves in and started asking all sort of questions about Camelot Enterprises. They weren’t too happy with my pat answer about being a small cog in the larger machine. They suggested that I accompany them downtown for a polygraph. I politely declined. The head honcho started making noises about Darren winding up with Child Protective Services and a ward of the state, and that’s when Ian made a move at one of them. God, I love that man dearly, but he’s never been much of a fighter like me. The goons had slapped him down and cuffed him in no time flat. I thought briefly that I could take them on and then set Ian free, but these guys are like a box of cigars. If you take one out, there are dozens more just like him. I relented when I tried to picture a life on the run from the Feds. They let him go and I told him I’d be back soon.

They took me to a nondescript office building and drove into the underground parking. The room they took me into was bare of anything but the polygraph and chairs. One chair was designed for strapping somebody down, and that’s the chair I had to sit in. When I questioned why I needed to be strapped in, they made excuses toward reducing testing error. The test was administered and I couldn’t tell if they liked the results or not, but then the little black case with the syringe came out. I didn’t waste any time trying to squirm out of the restraints. I was about half way done too, when two big thugs grabbed my arm and stretched it out like a half deflated balloon. I thought they had about ripped my forearm off when another one put a tourney on and sunk that needle into the vein. The blackness returned. So did that voice. And then I was a meat Popsicle thawing out in the Camelot bunker. I started crying. I crawled out of the chamber to find myself with the team I had been with in what seemed so many years ago.

Is it real? Is it a dream? How can I be sure? I’ve written down here what I experienced, just in case it was real. Maybe Ian will be able to verify whether or not I was dreaming. It’s beginning to look like I won’t have time for this existential psychobabble. The bunker portal was frozen when we woke up, and somebody opened up an emergency hatch. It wouldn’t have been so bad but the passage was flooded and started filling the bunker. All my team survived, but events went downhill from there. If I die before I can join my husband, I hope that somebody in my team will be able to find Ian and give this journal to him.

Jan 29, 2247?

Darkness had arrived, and this was the wrong time of year to be taking chances with the overnight weather in what was once western Nebraska. There had not been any major snow storms up to this point in the season, but she could only hope a blizzard did not sneak in on them overnight. Without satellite imagery that had been readily available in her youth she wasn’t any better at predicting weather than the pioneering farmers. She closed the cover of the journal, then buckled and wrapped it up. Jennifer stepped out of her tent to make one last survey of the camp and to verify that the sentry watch had been set up. The first watch looked highly alert, skittish even as she went around checking them. They believed they hid their fear from her. She could still sense it though. This was fear born not of man, nor wild animal, but of something else.

The town that was formerly known as Lincoln, Nebraska was far behind Jennifer and the rest of her rag tag group of volunteers. Doom had followed them since just outside of Lincoln. It came in the night, and stole the lives and sometimes the bodies of her band of wanderers. Mornings had become frightful events. The sentries usually saw and heard nothing. The very first morning had found her second in command missing, and two dead; high volumes of blood splattered about in all three cases. It was unnerving then, but when it happened a second and then a third night in a row it was deadly to group morale. Not Jennifer’s, of course, her morale was already at rock bottom and had been for some time. The only thing that kept them all together was the fear that alone they would be easier targets. Onward Jennifer and her group strove; destination within only another couple of days. If the secret Camelot base was found it would be culmination of almost seven and a half years journey for the one time owner of a real estate development company, one time leader of a Camelot Enterprises Recon team.

Jan 30, 2247?

The terrain had been getting rougher as the day stumbled on. Progress was slower than back on the plains. The group was particularly tired after today’s hike. They were all sweaty despite the cool temperature as there had been little wind. It was earlier than she would have liked, but Jennifer gave the order to set up camp. Going through the motions would help keep her mind from all that she had done to get to this point. It did not help completely though. It did not distract her from counting the number of times she had sold her sex for ammunition to stay alive. She thought it would not take long living in this new world for Ian to understand her actions. Delivering that news would be anything but pleasant though. The dread of it skulked in the dark recesses of her mind.

Base Camelot Alpha had been a derelict by the time what remained of her original recon team had arrived. It was hard to decipher from all the debris how many other teams had gone through it hoping to find a trace of their loved ones, leaving enraged. Vandals and those who hated Camelot Enterprises, and all it stood for, may also have been to blame for the shambles as well. It was her knowledge of sewer construction that had provided a break in finding an unmolested section of the base. There had been precious little information of any usefulness left there anyway. Yet it had provided enough clues to get them started on finding the family bunker, or Base Camelot Forever as it was called in files and documents they found.

At that point, her Camelot Recon team had decided it would not be possible to continue without gathering or recruiting more personnel. Out of the original ten team members, Rose, Harley, Raven, and Jeremy were all that survived until then.

Garick was a scruffy but well-disciplined twenty-something fellow and the first to be recruited. That was four years prior. He became her Second Officer two years afterward when there was nobody left to connect Jennifer to her past life. Through sheer force of will she had kept herself going through it all. Garick had tried to convince her that finding Base Camelot Forever was not going to bring back the past or her family. During their fourth argument, she had vented her full frustration and anger at him for it. It still surprised her that he stayed, but he had remained steadfast from then on without ever again expressing his opinion about searching for the base. Marta now tried to fill his shoes. She was tough and capable, but it was not like having somebody who had been a bosom buddy next to her in a time of crisis. Something unspeakable made her wonder how many lives had been lost at her expense. Would those men and women live still, if not for her? The world had changed for the worse becoming an untamed and deadly beast. Yet all the team members had seemed to want to press on.

The chill in the air numbed her to her soul. The automatic motions of setting up camp finally pulled her mind from its torturous reverie. Nobody else mentioned it, but she could tell everybody was afraid. Thankfully they also believed that locating Base Camelot Forever would grant them shelter from the death that hunted them now. Tomorrow they would be in the general area, and the search would begin in earnest. If the slaughter kept up much longer or increased in ferocity, she didn’t think they would last the week. Would tonight be the night terror and death wandered her way? If it were not for her hope and yearning to find Ian and Darren again, that death would have seemed a release.

Darkness descended along with the temperature, and froze the cheerful banter of Jennifer’s party. After the sparse meal, and her watch, at first she fell into a fitful dreamless sleep, clasping her Browning pistol in its holster. Jennifer eventually dreamed of ghosts and ghostly whispers. Those voices sounded hauntingly familiar from her past, another world and time. They told her where to find Base Camelot Forever, and also told her it would be empty. So she cursed the ghosts and their voices not wanting to hear that Ian and Darren were no longer there.

Morning broke to a cheerless sky, snow drifting lightly down, and the number of survivors down to twenty-three from forty-five just four mornings ago with news of 6 more vanished or vanquished. The air took on a note of desperation as those who remained glanced at each other wondering what the next night might bring. It was also getting to be as time consuming burying the dead as it would be traveling, or searching for the Camelot facilities.

Feb 1, 2247?

The campsite was empty when she woke up this morning. Desertion is normally hard on those left behind, but in some measure for Jennifer there was also relief. At least the nightly horror had not taken any. There were no pools of blood or lifeless bodies strewn about. The half remembered dream voices had been strident during the night. An hour later she located the small stand of trees mentioned by those disembodied voices. With growing concern she operated the portal to enter the facility. Ducking through the opening she descended the sloping corridor to Camelot Forever. If the ghostly voices were right about the location, could they also be right about what she might find? She tried her best not to think that thought while getting nearer to the underground entrance. Unsteadily she slid her pass key card through the read mechanism.

Everywhere Jennifer explored, empty cryogen tubes, dead computers, empty rooms, empty corridors, until the ache in her heart swelled and swelled into a hard knot that choked her breathing into a sob. She sank to her knees and shook as the anguish mixed with frustration. She had no reason any more to doubt the ghostly voices in her dream of a night ago. She had seen where her husband and child had been stored. There was no one left connected to her previous life. There was no one left connected to her current life. She clutched her belly and wept, rocking back and forth for a long few minutes. She tried to envision her future and all she saw was a graveyard with headstones for all those she knew plus empty graves for all those she would come to know.

She withdrew her pistol from the holster and cocked the hammer, a round already in the breach. Slowly, moving the tip of the barrel to her head, she prepared to fire. A shadow fell across the floor behind her and was followed by a plaintive, “Don’t… please don’t?”

Without looking back Jennifer queried, “Garick, is that you? Have you come back from the dead to haunt me for my mistakes?” With bitterness born of self-torturing anguish she added, “You’re too late for that.”

“Will you let me explain?” asked Garick.

The gun fell to her thighs as she sighed. A few more moments of self-hatred and recrimination might be just what she needed, thought Jennifer. “Explain what?”

“I’ve loved you from the moment I met you. I was so lonely before you came along.”

“You’re a young man Garick, you’ll find somebody else. I would still be looking for ghosts from my past.”

“I’m older than I appear, older than you. I’ve been alive for seventy years, almost twice your age. The symbiont has kept me young as well as alive. I don’t know if the symbiont has had a chance to take effect in you yet.”

“You’ve infected me?” Fresh tears dropped from her eyes as she contemplated more than her share of the rest of a life having lost her loved ones, and having caused more death than anyone has a right to. Her pistol came up to her head again and fired as she heard Garick scream.

“Wait!”

Feb 7, 2247?

Jennifer opened her eyes slowly as they had difficulty adjusting to being open for the first time in 6 days. She wondered where she was, until Garick wandered in, and then she started wondering why she had to be still alive. He noticed her watching him and moved to her side and sat next to her on the bed, left foot still on the floor.

“I thought I’d lost you. I haven’t seen that type of reaction before, of symbiont activation that is. Are you feeling okay?”

Jennifer’s voice croaked, but she managed to ask the question, “When did you do this to me?”

Garick looked at her tenderly, and responded, “The night we made love before arriving at Lincoln. The others, at least the survivors, I implanted just before you. You were the last, because I was afraid of losing you from a bad reaction to the symbiont.” He touched her arm when she turned away from him remembering her moment of weakness to which he referred, “Jen? Jennifer?”

“How did you know about Camelot Forever? You’ve been here before?”

“Ironically enough, I was implanted here by Camelot Enterprises members, your husband and son actually, though they both died from symbiont reactions later. They spent 30 years trying to develop it, trying to make sure they would be meeting you when your team resurfaced. It was chance that brought you to me. Nobody would have greeted you here otherwise.”

“The others, you told them about the symbiont?”

“Yes, I did, they all knew the risks. The ones that did not want to risk it were encouraged to leave. The survivors have all departed. They will probably wander much as I did at first until they remember how to pass it along.”

“You might have killed me with it!” accused Jennifer.

“You were set to kill yourself, though, weren’t you? Look, I didn’t tell you because I feared you would reject the opportunity. You constantly drive yourself to the brink, and I feared what you would do when you did find this place. I did not want to lose you!”

The accusing look died in her eyes with the acknowledgement that he was correct, so she willed her eyes to close and spoke no more. He stared at her for a long while unable to determine how she was accepting the development. He finally turned and set his other foot on the floor.

“I don’t remember how to live anymore.”

“We can learn together, Jen. Will you let me be with you? Will you share your life with me?”

“I will have to think about it for a long while.”

Garick sighed. “I understand,” he said, “I’ll wait for your answer.” He edged to stand up when he felt her fingertips wrap around inside the crook of his arm, holding him down. He turned to look back at her.

“Until then,” Jennifer began, “please hold me? Like you did that night we were together?”

###

Copyright and License Notes

Copyright 2013 Stephen W. Sumner

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Content

Stephen W. Sumner
SEEKING FOREVER

Copyright and License Notes