The Freezer (Genesis Endeavor Book 1) Page 4
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?”
Chapter 6
After a meal of something that resembled sawdust mixed with Jello, washed down with water that tasted somewhat of dead fish and old motor oil, Jack started to feel human again. Despite the sensation of his body suspended in thick grease, he felt better than he had since, well, since before he could remember. His mind was incredibly clear, and his vision was clearing up every minute. Most things were still out of focus, but he felt like he was picking up details that he never would have noticed before.
“Well Jack, how are you feeling?” Teague walked into the room, holding what Jack had thought was a notepad but now was looking... well, not as much like a notepad. It appeared to be piece of mirrored glass a little less than a quarter inch thick.
“Better Doc. Say, what is that thing you are writing on? It doesn’t look like paper.”
Teague looked down at the object and after seeming to ponder the question for a moment, said “It’s just a fancy clipboard,” and sat down in a chair near the bed, crossed his legs, and placed the clipboard on his lap which obscured it from Jack’s vision. “Your vision seems to be improving, that is great.”
Jack just gave him a flat look and shrugged. He knew an evasive answer when he heard one, and obviously there were things this man was going to hide from him.
Teague continued, “Okay, I have done this more than a few times, but I suspect it will be more difficult with you. Let me start with what I know about you. You are Jack Taggart, born April 23rd 1928 in Bakersfield, California. Joined the military July, 1944. Married Jennifer Williams in July, 1958. Gave birth to a daughter, Allissa Taggart in 1959, Retired from the military July 1964. Diagnosed with Cancer August 1966. You are six feet, two inches tall, black hair, blue eyes, Caucasian. Is all that correct?”
“You left out ‘ruggedly handsome’.” He meant it sarcastically, he felt a dangerous mood coming on, and was ready to start being just as evasive in his answers. If he could have seen clearly, he would have caught the look of amusement on the doctor’s face. “Can you sit the bed up so I can see you better?”
Teague reached across and worked some unseen controls, moving the bed up to a sitting position. “Thank you. Now, tell me where the hell you got that information. Aside from my mother-in-law, there is nobody alive, other than me, who knows all that.” Most of that information would be pretty easy to find, but one small detail revealed something that even the military didn’t know about him. “Did you hire a private investigator to find all that information? Or do you work for the military?”
Teague smiled a little. “Jack, come on, I told you I would answer all your questions as we go. If it helps, then you could say that I am involved in the military in some capacity. That is where I got your records.”
That explained a lot, but he still didn’t feel like he could trust this guy, there was still something he was hiding. Jack filed it away for later. “Does all this have to do with the project I was working on for the military?”
Teague looked down at his ‘clipboard’ and appeared to be drawing circles on it. After a moment he looked up and said, “Jack you are a very perceptive person. That’s a good thing. Your mind is functioning very well, which tells me a lot. Once again, to answer your question in a way you can understand, I would say, yes, this does indeed have something to do with the project you were working on for the military, but it is not relevant to the current situation, nor is it relevant to the information I am about to give you. Shall I continue?”
His frustration was building, this man was being evasive and not completely honest, and Jack didn’t know why. But it was clear that he wasn’t going to be able to control the conversation, and so far nobody else had shown up with any answers. He sighed in resignation. Best to let the man just speak his piece. “Okay doc, let’s have it.”
Teague stood up nervously, looking as if he were struggling to find the words, which was another irritation as the man had been beating around the bush for so long already. He paced back and forth from one end of the bed to the other. “Okay, what I am about to tell you will be a shock, and might be hard to take.”
Jack’s chest bounced once as he laughed derisively, “Doc, two days ago I was told I have cancer, and it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to survive it for very long. My wife and kids are dead, I am dying, and I just woke up in a room that smells like a basement, I can’t move, I can barely see, and I haven’t seen anyone I know or trust yet. I can’t think of a situation that could be any worse than this, and you think that you can say something that will be hard for me to take?” He hadn’t intended to just explode like this but the frustration had peaked very quickly.
Teague took it all in and if anything, it seemed to bring him to a conclusion. “Okay, you want it straight, here it is. In 1967, you died as a result of the Cancer that spread through your body.”
Chapter 7
Time seemed to stand still for perhaps ten seconds. Then, like a blast from a shotgun, the irritation exploded into anger. “Oh Christ! What kind of bullshit are you talking about now! Dammit, you said you were going to give me answers, and all I am getting from you is evasive responses and now some kind of cockamamie joke!” He nearly fell out of the bed trying to reach out and grab the man and throttle some sense into him, which only served to frustrate him more. With a roar he shouted out, “Goddammit! Is someone out there who can tell me what the hell is going on!”
Teague stood at the end of the bed, passively watching Jack lose control. He didn’t react to the outburst, and even looked like he expected it. He resumed pacing. “Jack, please, I understand your frustration, and given your circumstances I can see that you are going to have an incredibly difficult time coming to grips with this.”
This fueled his anger even more. “Bullshit doc! Look, I wake up in a room I have never been in, surrounded by people I have never met, I can’t see, I can’t move, and now you’re trying to tell me I’m dead! Tell me that I was in an accident and I was in a coma, tell me something went wrong with my biopsy and I didn’t wake up for a few months, but don’t sit here and tell me that I’m dead... how can I even talk to you if I’m dead?!” He shouted out again, “Hey! I need some GODDAMN ANSWERS IN HERE!”
Teague sighed heavily, and stopped pacing for a moment. “Please Jack, calm down. If you don’t calm down I will have to sedate you and let you rest for a bit. I can explain this to you if you want to listen.”
From the doorway to the room, just out of Jack’s line of sight, a woman’s voice said “Doc, do you want me to bring a sedative?”
“No, that won’t be necessary, will it Jack?”
/> The voice was like ice water on his rage, cooling it instantly and allowing a chance to get himself under control. He sat there panting from the tirade, shaking from the adrenaline, and started counting slowly to ten in his head. By the time he reached ten, he had not only taken control of his emotions once again, but also started analyzing the situation. He really had little choice here. He was practically an invalid, and aside from the woman outside the room, there was only one person he could get answers from. But despite the anger cooling, he wasn’t ready to start believing this man. “Am I in a loony bin? Is that it? I went nuts and you are just another kook trying to mess with my mind?”
“Jack I can assure you that you are not crazy, even though it might very well seem that way. If you let me explain, it will start to make sense.” Teague was incredibly calm this entire time. Either he’s had a lot of practice laying this lame prank on other people or he thinks he’s telling the truth.
The adrenaline spent, he suddenly felt the weight of the situation on his shoulders. It pushed him down into the bed as if it was a physical weight. He realized he was acting like a hot-headed kid, and that thought sobered him up a little. He sternly said to himself, you’re a military officer, Taggart, start acting like one! This guy obviously wasn’t going to go away, so he might as well humor him. He took a few long slow breaths, and said in his ‘officer’ voice, “Okay, continue.”
“Tell me Jack, do you know what DNA is?”
Jack shrugged, thought for a moment, then said, “Yeah, I read an article in Life about it.” The outburst of anger had somehow relieved the pressure of the frustration and anxiety he had felt just minutes before, and with that gone he was starting to feel like he could put up with this guy’s BS long enough to maybe get some answers.
Teague’s brow wrinkled as he looked down at his clipboard, scribbled something, then said, “Ah... Life magazine, Okay. Well, DNA is the biological ‘blueprint’ that all life is based on. It contains all the information about how your body is built, from the way the cells form for your heart, to the color of your eyes. Are you following me so far?”
Jack rolled his eyes and said, “Yes, I follow. Like I said, I read an article on it. Scientists said that it will prove that Darwin was right and that all living things evolved.” Jack rolled his finger signaling for him to continue.
“Yes. Well, in the – um, let’s just say that at some point in time, scientists figured out that by using DNA, they could re-create an organism that was already alive. Make an exact duplicate. They called it ‘cloning’ and they had some success in proving that it worked. However, for many years, it was considered immoral to try to recreate God’s work –”
Jack blurted out, “They were right, scientists playing God are what brought about the nuclear bomb.” Jack was not a particularly religious man, but he believed in God, and had seen enough war to know that God was nowhere to be found when man started taking God’s work into his own hands. “I’ve seen first-hand the destruction something like that can cause doc, trust me, people were not meant to meddle with those kinds of power.” Jack watched the expression on Teague’s face change. It was the first time he had truly seen some emotion out of this man. Is that guilt? Fear? Both? Perhaps the man was just irritated at being interrupted, but Jack didn’t care about that; if he was going to have to listen to this quack’s spiel, he was doing it on his terms.
Jack was hardly a scientist, but he had an analytical side that always served him very well both in the field an when dealing with politics. “What you are talking about is only theory, though. Unless the military was dabbling in it...” This thought created a sudden flood of insight. “Wait a minute, is that what I am building out by the air…” He cut himself off. Teague had said he was involved in the military, but he had never shown any credentials, never proven anything. Sure, this whole situation screamed military – the evasiveness, the vague answers, the windowless room. But Jack had to tread carefully here, for all he knew someone had set this whole thing up to get information out of him, information that required some very top secret clearances to even discuss. But the train of thought was not stopping. Perhaps the underground facility he was building was some experimental lab that the military will use to conduct experiments with DNA and ‘cloning’. If it was possible, the military would go to any length to take the best soldiers and make an army of exact duplicates. It was a chilling thought. Jack had seen first-hand what some Nazi “scientists” had been doing when he was helping to liberate the death camps only reinforced that there wasn’t too many things governments would not attempt to do to gain the upper hand in military force.
Teague recovered from whatever had come over him and smiled. “I think I see where your line of thought is headed Jack. The military probably was working on cloning in secret, somewhere, but what I am talking about was very public, and a lot of people were not happy about it.”
“Doc, you’re talking like a quack again. I would have heard if these experiments were going on, and I never heard anything about it, except for maybe in a sci-fi book.” Annoyance was building again and he struggled to keep it in check. This guy is clearly deranged but something about this whole conversation rang true and until the real doctors showed up, he wanted to get as much as he could out of it.
“Jack, cloning experiments started hitting the mainstream in about the year 1980, and moved on until – well until about the year 2012.” Jack blinked a couple times. The statement took him by surprise, but he quickly recovered. Does it ever end with this guy?
He let out a short laugh, shook his head, and sat there for a few moments trying to figure out how to start getting some truth out of this conversation. “Look, I can’t help but think that what you are telling me is pure bullshit. You’re just messing with my head. Come on, you’re sitting here trying to convince me that I died and was remade in an experiment years later. Next thing you will try to tell me that it is the year 2020 and Martians took over the planet.”
Teague smiled. “No Jack, as far as we know, there are no Martians, or any other ‘alien’ life, although this world might seem very alien to you now.” Teague’s smile went away, and he said, “And it is not the year 2020, more like the year 2320, near as we can tell.”
Chapter 8
Jack leaned back and closed his eyes. He wanted to start laughing hysterically. “So what is this, some kind of time travel thing? I have read some science fiction in my time doc, and you sir, could author a bestseller. Now let’s go back to the beginning and you can tell me the real truth.” Jack opened his eyes and fixed him with a stare.
Teague’s shoulders dropped as if he was finally giving up trying to pull of this practical joke, and for the next minute he wouldn’t meet Jack’s eyes as he appeared to be lost in thought. Suddenly his eyes lit up and he said, “Do you want to see what I have been writing? Has your vision cleared to the point that you can see it clearly?”
Jack had been so preoccupied with this crazy conversation, he hadn’t noticed at what point his vision had cleared. Now, not only was he seeing things without the haze, he realized he could see much more clearly than ever before. He had always been a little near-sighted in his left eye, but every detail was sharp and clear now. As he looked around the room, testing his vision, he saw some things that only added to the confusion. There was a square sheet of glass on a stand next to his bed that had what looked like colored text and symbols written on it, but they were moving! Like a television screen only a quarter inch thick! Furthermore there were no wires going to it! On one side of the room there were some devices that looked to be machined from all sorts of different metals, but it kind of resembled a chemistry set with all sorts of tubes and pipes twisting around in a seeming random fashion. The room had a ‘medical’ feel to it, but the walls were raw concrete, and the lighting had a slight bluish tint to it. Jack looked back at Teague, completely befuddled by what he was seeing and nodded.
“Are you okay to hold something in your hand yet?” Teague said moti
oning to his hands. After having to be fed at dinner, or breakfast, or whatever meal it was, Jack had been wiggling his fingers and making fists. He lifted his hand to see how it was working. He could lift his arm fairly well, and could turn his hand around at the wrist, open and close his hand, pretty much at will.
“I think so, give me something to lift”. Teague set the ‘clipboard’ in his lap, and Jack immediately noticed it weighed a lot less than he expected, even though it appeared to be made of glass and should have weighed at least a couple pounds. He was able to lift it without much difficulty and he picked it up with both hands, examined it front and back. It did indeed look like square sheet of glass that was mirrored on one side, or maybe was shiny metal, reflective but the reflections were dull and blurry. On the other side however, it was like a two way mirror and he could see through it to the blanket beneath. That wasn’t the confusing part though, seeming to be printed directly on the surface of the glass was some typed text, laid out similar to a newspaper. He started to read.
Life Magazine - a publication that started as a humor and general interest magazine in 1883 and was purchased by another publication company in 1936, at which time it became a weekly magazine with a strong emphasis on photojournalism. In 1972 it became a special publication that was only occasionally released, and in 1978 it became a monthly publication until 2000. From 2000 on it was an occasional special publication that appeared in Time magazine and in some newspapers until 2012.
Teague tapped the glass, which then changed before his eyes to be a document containing all of Jack’s biological information, history, and even a color photo. The photo was from Jack’s retirement, and looked faded, like a very old photo that had been well preserved. That, like everything else, didn’t make sense because he had never seen an ‘old’ color photo. Teague then reached down with the pen and tapped again. This time, a detailed history of Jack’s cancer appeared, from August of 1966 to June of 1967, when according to the document, he passed away as a result of the cancer.