The Freezer (Genesis Endeavor Book 1) (3 page)

“Thanks Phil, I appreciate it. I’ll let you know as soon as
I
know something.” Jack was about to hang up, but he sensed Phil was going to say
something more.

“Uh, Jack...” There was a long pause. “Uh... never mind, we
can talk about that later. Call me if you need anything.”

Jack hung up, curious what that last exchange was about. He
worked in an odd business, and a lot of what went on was not supposed to be
talked about. The latest job was, like most of their projects, for the
military. Technically it was for some big corporation, but no corporation in
the U.S. had a need for a multi-billion dollar underground bunker. Jack had a
high security clearance within the army the last few years before retirement
which was sort of a prerequisite for building secret bunkers and it played into
the importance of his role with the firm. Still, they never knew exactly what
they were building, or at least Jack wasn’t privy to it. The current project
started the weekend his wife and daughter died, and the progress in the last
twenty months had been good. Whatever the purpose of the project, it required a
lot of room underground. For all he knew though, they were just making another
big bomb shelter. With the nuclear threat from the Communists, bomb shelters
and underground bunkers were good business these days. For many, it was just a
matter of time before the “cold war” turned into a real war.

After getting the guest room ready for Mae, he spent some
time thinking about all the projects he had either worked on personally,
consulted on, or knew about during his time both in the military and working
for Phil. He was confident that if the missiles ever did fly, humanity would
survive, but God help us if it ever happens. It was a morbid thought, but
anything was better than thinking about the cancer.

The memory was as vivid this time as the last, down to what
he had felt and what he had been thinking deep in his mind at the time. There
was still a sense of disconnection there, but it was no longer quite as strong.
He still didn’t feel much, and that extended to emotions. The constant light
source betrayed nothing. He was beginning to think he was indeed dead, and this
was the afterlife. There was still a vague sense of time, but deprived of all
senses, it had little meaning. With nothing else to do and a lot of emptiness
still left to fill, he focused on the memory once again.

* * *

Wednesday morning, Mae drove Jack to the hospital. The
surgery was going to require he be put under for about an hour, and because of
the anesthesia, it needed to be performed in the hospital as opposed to Bill
Callun’s office. They drove Mae’s car instead of the mustang. She thought the
mustang was too fancy to drive, and too loud. “If I wanted to drive a race car
I would go to the race track,” she said. Jack really didn’t care either way. His
mind was focused on the next few hours.

“Mae listen, I know this is just a formality and all, but
here is a power of attorney for my belongings, just in case...” He handed her
an envelope.

“In case of what? They’re gonna knock you out, go inside
you, cut off a piece of your liver, stomach, and kidneys, and put it in a
bottle, then wake you up... You aren’t going to the gallows or nothing like
that Jack.”

He smiled and said, “I know, Mae, but you never can tell
with these things. I’ve seen my share of surgery gone wrong. I’m sure everything
will be okay, but like I said,
‘Just In Case’
.”

Mae shook her head and took the envelope and muttered
something about “always prepared”. Jack just smiled and sat back. She really
was a good woman, and obviously she cared about him. Jenny and Jack were married
for over six years before the accident, and during that time, Mae was the
closest thing Jack had to a mother. “Mabel, I feel bad that I haven’t stayed in
touch. I guess I thought that seeing you would be too hard, but I was wrong. Thanks
for being here for me.” She just nodded and started looking for a parking spot.

* * *

“Okay Jack, I’m going to put you under now, and when you
wake up you might have a headache and feel groggy. That’ll be normal. It might
also take you a little while to remember where you are. Once you are coherent
again, we will tell you how things went. You will probably be able to go home
after a few hours, but you will need to take it easy for a couple days. Just
relax and don’t worry, this will be over quickly. See you in a couple hours.” Jack
nodded to Bill as the anesthesiologist injected him with the anesthetic.

“I thought you used ether to knock him out?” Mae asked the
doctor.

“Not these days, now you have all sorts of intravenous
anesthetics available. Ether was too volatile. It blew up too many patients, so
they developed better stuff.” Bill said it with a smile.

“Wow, the technology these days, it’s amazing isn’t it?” Mae
shook her head in wonder.

“Indeed it is, Mae, indeed it is.” It was the last thing
Jack heard as he drifted off.

* * *

The memory faded out one last time. It no longer felt
distant and disconnected. It actually felt like he was beginning to wake from a
dream. He blinked and the world flashed dark. This was new. He closed his eyes,
and darkness settled in. Perhaps he wasn’t dead. For the first time since
awareness came to him, he began to
feel
. The realization that he was
still in a body was a relief, and he settled back into sleep.

* * *

“Can you hear me?”

“He’s starting to come around, Doc. You really performed a
miracle this time.”

“Only time will tell.”

* * *

The veil of unconsciousness slowly lifted and Jack opened
his eyes. He blinked a few times in an attempt to clear away the foggy haze
that not only covered his mind, but also seemed to surround everything in his
line of sight. As his mind cleared, the confusion built. He became aware of
somebody next to his bed. “Jenny, is that you?”

“Just relax; your vision will take time to start working
right. How do you feel?” A man’s voice.
Why did I think it was Jenny?
He
tried to will himself to think clearly. The sharp memory of Jenny’s death came
back to him and faded just as quickly.

“Where am I? Who... where am I?” The disorientation would
not go away any more than the blurry vision. Even his own voice didn’t sound
right to his ears, and not just because he was slurring his words, it just
felt… off. “What the hell is going on?” Memories threaded their way into his
consciousness, and he tried to grab hold of one that would explain where he
was. The cancer, the biopsy, the surgery...
Surgery!
“Bill?? I can’t see
shit here.” He tried to sit up but his arms didn’t seem to respond to his
commands.

“It will take some time for your eyes to work properly. Your
muscles too. Just relax and try to get some sleep.” A hand patted his shoulder.

He started to relax and sink back into slumber but something
plucked at his brain and he tensed up again. “Wait... what do you mean, my eyes
– what are you talking about? Bill, you said I might be groggy and disoriented,
not that I wouldn’t be able to move or see!”

“He thinks he’s just had surgery. Do you think the freezer
burn was too great?” A woman’s voice.

The figure next to him moved away and in a fading whisper, “No,
I think we are safe. Now let’s let ...” The voices were gone.

What the hell is going on?
“Wait, come back!” But the
voices didn’t return. He tried to focus, to use his senses to gain an
understanding of where he was and why he was here, but nothing seemed to work
quite right. He couldn’t move, couldn’t see, and the air tasted horrible, musty
and old. Something nagged at him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He felt
like he had just been dreaming about being dead but like all dreams, he had
already lost most of the memory of it. He looking around again but it felt like
gauze was covering his eyes.

He focused on feeling, as if that was something new to him. He
could feel the weight of gravity holding him down, and even felt a little
chilly. But something wasn’t right. Primarily, there was a distinct absence of
pain.
Am I paralyzed?
he asked himself.
No, I feel cold in my feet,
and the weight of the blanket on me, and the tubes attached to my arms. I even
feel a little hungry, but no pain, no nausea.

It was unexplainable and incredibly different from how his
mind was telling him he should feel. It’s the anesthesia, it has to be. I am
still loopy from the stuff they gave me. Just go to sleep, it will all be clear
when the drugs are out of my system. With that, he finally relaxed and sank
into a deep slumber.

Consciousness came slowly. Jack looked around and blinked a
few times. Everything around him had a haze like he was looking through a foggy
glass window. He tried to wipe at his eyes but his arm just flopped up and
smacked him in the forehead. “Ouch.” Closing his eyes and focusing his thoughts,
he tried to will his memories to the surface.
Hospital. Cancer. Biopsy. Okay,
I’m in a hospital, after a surgery.
He remembered waking up and being
confused; something about a doctor saying vague things about his eyes,
something about some really weird dreams. “Man those must have been some crazy
drugs they gave me.” He was talking out loud but he didn’t realize it.

He went through sort of a mental checklist of his body
parts.
Toes? Check. Fingers? Check. Legs? Check. Arms? Check. Body? Check.
He wiggled his toes, or at least he thought he did... it felt right. He wiggled
his fingers and felt something on his forehead. His hand was still there from
when he tried to rub his eyes, and his fingers were wiggling. “Okay, that’s a
little odd.” He said it to himself, out loud again. He tried to move his arm,
and it flopped off his head back to his side, feeling numb as if he had been
laying on it all night, but without the pins and needles. He could control individual
joints like his fingers or his elbow but when he tried to coordinate more than
one thing he felt... disconnected.

What is the problem here? Did something go wrong with the
surgery and put me in a coma for a while?
He had read an article in Life
magazine about a lady coming out of a coma after ten years and not being able
to move. Something about muscle atrophy. That would explain a lot.

But then he noticed how...
good
he felt. There was no
other word to describe it. He felt good. There was no pain, no upset stomach. It
wasn’t until that moment that he realized how much pain he had suffered the
last few months. The sore back, the indigestion, the sudden spasms of pain
during normal tasks – all were symptoms of the cancer eating away at him, but
they had come on so gradually that he hadn’t even noticed when the symptoms
started. Only in the absence of the pain did he realize how much he had been
suffering.
Why was the pain gone?

“Well, I see you are awake.” The voice startled him. His
eyes were closed and he had been concentrating so hard on what was going on
with the inside of his body that he hadn’t even heard the man walk in. The
voice sounded familiar, perhaps it was the same one he had heard the first time
he woke up.

He opened his eyes again and tried to focus on the speaker. It
was indeed a person, and the size and shape of the body confirmed that it was a
man, if the voice hadn’t already given that away. He could tell the man had
dark hair, but his face was still a blur. He blinked a few more times
ineffectively.

“Do not be concerned about your vision, it will come in
time.”
Who was this guy?
He talked... different.

“Where am I? Who are you? Why can’t I move?” The questions
just fell out of his mouth before he even realized he was talking, and without
effort, he was already getting frustrated. He wanted to know where he was and
what had happened to get him here.

“Relax, I will answer all your questions in time, but for
now I would like to ask you a few things. Let’s start with your name. Do you
remember your name?”

Jack was now convinced that he had been in a coma. Something
had gone wrong during the biopsy, or maybe he was in an accident later and had
some amnesia. “Of course I remember my name, the question is, why don’t you
know it? Where am I?”

“Please, I am trying to... judge your mental condition.”

“Hell, I’m starting to question my mental condition myself. My
name is Jack. Now can you
please
tell me where I am?” The frustration
was turning to anger.

“If I told you where you are you would only be more
confused. My name is Teague. Do you have a surname?”

Surname? Oh, last name.
“Uh, yeah, Taggart, Jack Taggart.
What do you mean I’ll only be more confused? Am I still at Deaconess Hospital,
or was I moved?”

“Jack, there is much to explain and some of it will be...
difficult to grasp. If you can let me get my questions out of the way, I can
maybe start to shed some light on the, um, situation.”

Jack thought about this for a moment. What was the harm in
answering a few questions, maybe then they will tell me where the hell I am and
how I got here. “Okay, ask away, but at least tell me if the surgery went bad
or something.”

“Surgery... right. Tell me, Jack, What is the last thing you
remember, besides waking up here?” During his twenty years in the military,
Jack had met many different doctors, from field medics and surgeons that fixed
people’s bodies to the psychologists and psychiatrists that worked on their
minds. This guy felt more like a head shrink than a medical doctor. Jack didn’t
care much for the head doctors, and the fact that he was ignoring Jack’s
questions did not help.

“Uh, well, I remember my doctor telling me that I would feel
disoriented when I woke up, and that I might have a headache. Then I woke up
here and you told me I would be confused if you answered my questions, and you
must be right because by not telling me anything, you cleared everything up
just perfectly, Doc.” Jack tended to get a little sarcastic when he got
frustrated. “Tell me, Teague,
are
you a doctor?”

If Teague heard the sarcasm, he either didn’t recognize it,
or he ignored it. “Yes, Jack, I
am
what a Doctor of sorts. My specialty
is more along the lines of working on people’s brains though.”
Bingo! “
Can
you go back a little further and tell me more about what you remember? I don’t
need details, just generalities.”

Jack suddenly got the feeling this was an interrogation. The
whole situation was so alien, all of his internal alarms were worthless –
everything
was ringing alarms in his mind.
Well, if this is an interrogation, I’m
fucked anyway, I don’t know shit.
He sighed. “I was going in for a biopsy. My
mother-in-law drove me to the hospital, and they put me in bed and then gave me
the anesthesia. Now please answer my question, did something go wrong with the
surgery?”

Teague appeared to be writing in a notebook, as far as Jack
could see. And without looking up, he said, “The first biopsy? No, you lived
through that surgery.”

“That surgery? Doc, you aren’t making any sense, does that
mean I’ve been through more than one? Did something happen that gave me
amnesia? I feel like some time passed since then, because the last thing I
remember...” Confusion, frustration, and adrenaline caused him to try to sit
up, which was not entirely successful. Actually, all he managed to do was flop
his arms around a little.

“Jack, take it easy!” Teague placed a palm on his chest and
held him down, although it was not really necessary. “You are in no condition
to try to get up!”

Jack took a deep breath to calm down. He was angry again and
he knew that anger would not help him to get the answers he wanted. He needed
to have his wits about him. After a few more deep breaths he said, “Okay doc, I
won’t try that again, but you have to start being honest with me. What in HELL
is going on?”

“Jack, I need to tell you some things that will be difficult
to hear, and your first reaction will be disbelief, but bear with me please. Once
I have told you these things, hopefully I will be able to answer some of the
questions you have. In the meantime, I want you to spend some time trying to
move your fingers and toes. You need to teach your brain how to move again. Now
before I get started, are you hungry?”