Immortals (5 page)

Chapter 5

Two is Company

Domus-Nova

Mouse-tail Galaxy

Domus-Nova Year 2548, Earth Year 7859 AD

Ludvig woke up in the white room.

He let out a sigh. A sigh was the most he could do here anyway.

He was trapped in here and hated being imprisoned in what he referred to as his ‘white interruptions’. The only thing he could do, strapped to a white cot in an impossibly white room, with his limbs totally paralysed, was to stare at the ceiling of the room, and all around there was only the white nothingness of the room. Sometimes he would have a little more control of his body and then all he would be able to do was to inch his neck around and fat lot of good it did him! It was just the same white all around.

The walls were not concrete. They were either metal or a kind of glazed fibreglass, reminding him almost of an exquisite brand of bone china.

Today was one of those occasions when he was a little more in command of his faculties and could turn his head by a bare fraction.

His eyes roamed around the room and this time the wall to his right was different.

He was surprised to see an open door in the wall, a neat rectangle cut into it. He was sure that he had never, in so many ‘interludes’ before, ever seen any opening in the room.

The rectangle in the wall led to an adjacent white room with a cot in it. And there was someone strapped on to the cot in the other room, just like he was in his own cot. He could not make out much of the person, but judging from the profile, he seemed to be a young lad in his twenties with a thin but well-built frame. What struck him as odd, however, was the face of his companion. It was tanned, incredibly so, almost bronzed a rusty golden brown. It could not just be the tan.

Much too tanned for Norway anyway. The same white colour continued on to the walls of the adjacent room also. The person on the cot was still and probably as paralysed as he was. How many more were there like him? Was it an assembly line of dead bodies in a purgatory, which he visited every time he died and somehow failed to make it to the next level? Why was he sent back to his life on Earth each time? Was this the house of God or did God have nothing to do with life and death anymore? Every time he returned, he felt a pang of disappointment. A part of him wanted to cross over and see what was on the other side. It was as frustrating as not being able to access the next, more difficult, level of a game. However, in this game of hyper-reality, there was nothing that his paralysed self could do to change the outcome. He died, woke up in this white room, spent varying amounts of time paralysed on this cot and then went back to his self on Earth, to the last time he woke up from sleep.

The hows and whys of it eluded him. He had asked these questions before and had had no answers. At least now he knew that he was not alone. There might be others who could not die, like him. Maybe he could have his answers if he tried. Before he could analyse the scene any further, a door in the rectangular opening slid down from the top, closing his view into his neighbour’s room. He let out a frustrated sigh and struggled hard against his bonds but could not muster even a flicker of a movement in his body, save his head threshing on the pillow.

As Ludvig was struggling against his restraints, yet another door slid up at the foot end of his bed and a man in a strange, white, bulky Hazmat-type suit walked into his room. He was holding a ten by ten inch rectangular frame in his hand and he steadily walked up to his bed. He reached over his torso and Ludvig cringed in terror. A haggard, old face looked back at him through the visor of the Hazmat suit. He had big eyes and an impossibly large head, hidden under the helmet. But there was no threat, just the look of compassion on his face.

Maybe even guilt.

But then maybe Ludvig was reading too much into a Hazmatted face.

The man lifted the rectangle and held up the frame to Ludvig’s face.

The frame was a mirror and it instantly reflected his face. It took him a while to focus and when he did, he was in for a shock.

It wasn’t his face.

Ludvig looked into the face of a handsome young man with a scar running down his right cheek. The skin was tinted a strange tanned bronze colour. He turned his face around to see if there was any coloured light reflecting off his face but that was not the case. The bronze hue was the natural colour of his face, reflected in the mirror. The face seemed battle-hardened and his high cheek bones seemed to have been cast to perfection in some fiery forge. The face was capped by a beautiful mat of blond hair that grew long and fell to the sides, on the head rest. The features reminded him of the pictures of Viking sailors, save for the strange colour of his skin.

Despite the shock, he fell in love with the face and it took a while to register that he was seeing his own face in the mirror. There was then the familiar whirring noise above his head and the image of the white room began to melt into the earthly world of Ludvig Hanssen.

***

Sogn og Fjordane

Fjord Territory, Northern Norway

8 May, 2012

Ludvig got up with a start.

Today’s ‘interruption’ had been different.

He had never ever seen another soul in the white room. It used to be his solitary confinement – a purgatory, from which he always came back.

But this time, he had seen other people in there; in fact, three new faces, if he counted his own in the mirror.

But he didn’t resemble himself in the mirror at all. He had never looked like that, even when he had been younger. The face in the mirror had a regal look. Square-set jaws, blue irises, prominent cheek bones, with a blond mane of hair and a freakish scar running across his face. To top it all, his face had an out-worldly strange bronzed hue. How much stranger could these ‘interruptions’ get?

Never had his face been like that – bronze?

Never ever in this life of his.

But that was exactly what the mirror had shown.

And who was that other soul, strapped to another cot? And why did the old man in the Hazmat suit show him his face? Who was that old man with a strange face, in a Hazmat suit? He had no answers to these questions.

Initially he had dismissed these interludes as very weird and vivid dreams.

But dreams they had not been.

Each time he had died, he had gotten up a morning before, armed with the foresight of the day ahead. He had the knowledge of the day that he had lived already and died in. He had always travelled backwards in time to wake from the last good sleep before his death. These occurrences had unnerved him initially but then he had learnt about the inevitability of them and slowly had started taking advantage of this freakish occurrence and had eventually learnt to use that foresight in securing himself his tremendous fortune.

He didn’t understand what was happening to him but he had not been able to bring himself to confide in anybody. He knew that no one could possibly have answers to his questions, and he had therefore never asked those questions aloud, at the risk of having his sanity questioned.

There could be any number of possible answers on the fringes of known science but he knew that he would never ever know for sure. It might even have nothing to do with science.

Maybe he was stuck at the gates of hell in a weird purgatory and was always turned back to live some more. That was the closest he came to in his search for plausibility and that too when he wasn’t the religious type at all. But religion had that knack of having answers to all questions, its answers not measurable in designed trials but only in the depths of someone’s faith. 

Ludvig had definitely benefitted from his ‘interruptions’. He had somehow gotten power over death and he had used that power to make a financial empire for himself.

There had been many natural deaths down the course and a few that had been engineered by him because of a need to ‘reset’ his life at that time.

He had been apprehensive about suicide the first time. He didn’t know if suicide was allowed by his ‘freak rule book’, but that time he had been in a very bad bind and was really ready to accept death in both the forms, reversible and irreversible.

And it had been a reset for him then.

It was yet another ‘reset’ for him now.

He couldn’t fathom why his body that had just endured the harshest of conditions on the Sogn for a week, had succumbed to a heart attack while just trying to fornicate with a pretty young thing!

‘Bloody hell!’

He had woken up from his ‘interruption’ back on the banks of the Sogn on the last day of his Sogn adventure, a day’s work away from the reception party at Fjaerland, a day away from the bountiful dinner party and the soft caresses of Dagny.

‘Oh crap! I can do the Sogn at seventy years but am not allowed to do Dagny. Give me a break!’ Ludvig mumbled aloud in frustration.

His sailboat lay anchored ten feet from the bank where he had set up camp the night before.

He gathered himself and started packing his gear to reach the base camp – again.

Chapter 6

Juliet’s Nursing Classes

Mumbai, India

8 May, 2012

Jai hailed a taxi and rushed to Byculla. Nasreen stayed in a tiny single-room flat to the south of the JJ Hospital and Grant’s Medical College, Mumbai. She paid an exorbitant rent for the flat and had not much left for anything else. But that was the story of much of Mumbai, anyway, and she was happy to have a job, three square meals, and a roof over her head.

Jai raced up the stairs to the third-floor flat of Nasreen. Everything looked very calm. There were two potted basil plants outside her apartment.
 

‘Medicinal,’ she had said when he had once enquired about them.

He rang the bell and waited. There wasn’t any sound coming from within; unusually quiet. He waited for a few seconds and rang the bell again.

Still no one got the door. He held the knob of the door and slowly twisted it. There was something sticky on his palms. He looked at his palms and his heart sank as he saw the drying, black blood on it.

The door squeaked open and the barrel of a Beretta handgun looked straight back at him.

That was a young boy, not much older than him, probably a shooter from another area who must have been left here as a lookout.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ the boy mouthed the words, almost whispering, while the Beretta was pointed squarely at Jai’s face.

‘Where is Juliet?’ Jai asked.

‘Why do you want to know?’ the boy mouthed back. Jai had by now entered the room and had sidestepped away from the door; the sunlight was now directly on the boy’s face and Jai was in a relatively dark nook by the side of the door.

Jai had no straight answer for the question. His body was pumping adrenaline furiously and his brain was whirring chemicals across its synapses. Anticipating a bullet in your face could do that to you, nine times out of ten.

‘Well, I have to know because–’ Jai lunged at the boy from where he was before finishing his line. Jai had jumped from the dark and had jumped in mid-sentence of his reply.

A counter-attack is least expected mid-sentence.

The boy sidestepped, trying to get his body out of the line of attack and fired a shot reflexively. The shot rang out loud inside the closed room and the echo provided enough distraction for Jai to complete his lunge. He had aimed for the boy’s hand holding the gun and was successful in deflecting the shot away from him, also succeeding in wrenching the gun out of the boy’s hand at the same time. An inexperienced shooter’s grip would loosen a bit when the shot recoiled in his hand and Jai had struck the hand at the same time and turned the gun 180 degrees, allowing it to slip out of the boy’s hand and into his own.

Jai immediately took aim at the boy

‘Where are the girls?’

The boy’s eyes flickered for an instant and Jai saw the movement a little bit late. There was another lookout, who had been hiding in the kitchen, and this second boy had by then, snuck up behind him. He pointed a gun cocked and ready at Jai.

Jai swivelled across towards him but he was too late. The second lookout fired and Jai felt the bullet shear into his chest, right about where the dagger had gone in, in his ‘dream’ a day before. The feeling of being shot, when you know you are being shot, is one of intense, searing pain. The ribs that break do not hurt much. The pain is much in the mind, exacerbated by the anticipation of the hurt. People who got shot out of the blue, did not usually feel a thing till a lot later, and often only when they saw the red or when others drew their attention to it.

For Jai, the hurt grew out from his mind as it slow-motioned everything around him and he saw the bullet travel from the muzzle of the gun to his chest, burning a painful track as it sank inside him.

The pain in this case, did not last very long as the bullet had managed to tear a hole through the chamber of his heart, and he felt faint and lost consciousness even before he hit the ground.

Chapter 7

A Different Time Zone

Domus-Nova

Mouse-tail Galaxy

Domus-Nova Year 2548, Earth Year 7859 AD

As darkness enveloped Jai’s eyes, he felt that he was falling into a bottomless abyss, and then moments later, he woke up on the white cot in the white room again. It reminded him of a popular gangland torture, where they immersed someone’s head in a tub of water. He felt as if he was immersed in the blackness of death and then delivered out into the room. The void lasted only a moment but it added to the panic when he awoke in the white room.

His eyes flew open and he squinted furiously to adjust to the brilliant white light of the room.

He was strapped to the same white cot as in his last ‘dream’ and he was in the same white room and still paralysed below his neck. In fact a little better since the last time, as he was able to move his neck a bit more.

He turned his head up to see a fluid-filled glass disk above his head from which a diffuse white light emanated to envelope his face and head. There was still the same clock on the wall at the foot end of his bed.

The door next to the clock slid up and a man in a white suit walked into the room. Jai did not remember seeing a door there.

The man shuffled up to his bedside and an old, haggard face was visible through a glass helmet over his face. He had seen the Bomb Disposal Squad of Mumbai don similar bulky but black costumes with a helmet on top.

Jai opened his mouth to ask where he was but no sound came from his mouth.

The man’s face was elderly but the wrinkles were few and his eyes had a very kind look in them.

He pulled up a frame along Jai’s legs drawing it slowly to his face and Jai saw a mirror reflecting his cot, his torso, and then his face.

And the reflection in the mirror hit him like a bomb.

The face he saw in the mirror did not belong to him.

It was sitting atop his torso and so belonged to him in a technical sense, but it was not the face he had known to be his, all these years. It was a foreign face, in fact a strangely different face altogether – rust-brown-coloured and with black hair, a much more adult face, someone in his late twenties to early thirties, much more mature looking, and with very deep and thoughtful eyes. The face had a natural, stately poise and there was a steely resolve in the eyes that he saw.

Jai was bewildered by what he saw and he screamed at the top of his voice. The lips moved but the room remained eerily silent. The man in the suit smiled compassionately and gently brushed Jai’s hair with his gloved hand.

The man quietly retreated and as he was going, he pointed to the clock on the wall.

The door slid down and the wall adjusted itself to absorb the door within itself. Jai’s eyes shifted to the clock. The time was six thirty on the clock.

But then again, was it?

It really was not six thirty.

Both the clock hands pointed straight down at the number eight. And the clock face had been numbered one to sixteen around. That made a count of sixteen hours for the half-day and thirty-two for the full!

‘What the hell?’

There was a soft whirring noise above Jai’s head and the white of the room started to slowly fade away from Jai’s eyes. Jai sighed in exasperation as darkness closed in on him.