Jonah Havensby (25 page)

Jonah was in a daze he was trying to process all of this as fast as she was saying it, and found that he couldn’t. He wasn’t really human? He wasn’t really fourteen? He was from another planet? He spun and threw up on the tree again. Athena rose once more, and offered him another tissue from her purse.

“In another week, you looked like you were four years old. The week after that, you were eight. Your father broke protocol and went into the emergency containment room that had become your home. He did reflexology tests and tests to see if you could understand simple instruction. You couldn’t talk, or didn’t, but somehow you understood the language.”

“When he took a blood sample, you passed out for an hour and a half. The blood sample confirmed what we had thought, from the bite you had taken out of him, you incorporated his DNA into your own. So, as I said, he was pretty much your father. You weren’t strictly a clone, because there were other unidentifiable components in your blood, and in the DNA. When the military discovered your father had provided that initial contact, and had provided you with a basis to grow into whatever you were becoming, they decided to terminate the entire project. Do you understand what that means?”

Jonah understood what she meant. He was wiping at his mouth with his coat sleeve and he nodded.

“Your father was adamant that you were not a threat. He argued that you might be the most important biological discovery of all time. He tried to tell them that as time went by, your very anatomy was becoming more human than alien. But the government was convinced by the military reports that they needed more invasive procedures. They wanted to find out what made you tick, so to speak. That meant you wouldn’t survive their procedures.”

“The following day after the order came down was a Saturday. On Monday morning, when I returned to work, you and your father were gone. That’s when I was forced to retire and I moved down here to be near my family. I hadn’t heard from your father since. He must have moved to Kensville because he knew I was close, or, at least, close enough if he needed something. But he never contacted me. The military has been searching for the both of you since that day. They even wiretap my phone a few months every year. And I see the government vehicles drive by my home every so often. They’re keeping tabs. Your father must have known, or at least suspected.”

“So you’re saying that it was the government that killed my father? Those men who came after him and blew up my house? You’re saying they did that?” It was the first thing Jonah had said in a while, and he was hoarse from getting sick.

“Let me be clear about this,” Athena said, standing up. “As far as I can see, I’m not sure who in the government may or may not still know about the project, Jonah. It’s been five years since the project closed. And only those who needed to be told were involved. What I do think is that some portion of the military, probably very covert, will try and locate you till the end of time. They see you as a threat, Jonah. They want you back and under their control. I’m sorry to be blunt, but you need to understand the situation.”

“I understand,” Jonah said. “I’m an alien. I’m a threat to the human race. And the only reason my dad is my dad is because my alien body has his DNA.” He said it so calmly he actually believed he might have gotten past all of it, until he threw up again.

He was an alien. How could he be an alien? A little ball of wet sand? Couldn’t he remember anything from his childhood? Why couldn’t he remember the smallest, simplest thing? Was it all true? How could it be?

He was panicking. He felt it deep in the empty pit of his stomach. His breath was coming in hitches. 

Just then, the green gem began to glow.

Jonah was bent over with his hands on his knees, the gem hung just below his face. It lit up the ground. He looked up and saw Athena Stapleton gasp. She backed up until her legs hit the bench of the picnic table.

She saw him stand. He was sheet white and had a thin layer of sweat dripping from his forehead. He was bathed in the pale green light. It looked like he was going to say something. Just then, the branches of the tree behind him exploded into flames.

Athena clutched her purse to her chest, skirted the picnic table, and jogged in the direction of the parking structure. She was probably moving as fast as her aged body would move her. When she came off the wet grass and hit the pavement, she moved faster, although, at her age, it was definitely not a sprint.

The gem went dark. Jonah was surrounded now only by the light of the flames in the tree in the darkening evening. He turned and looked at it. The whole tree hadn’t gone up, just the branches, but if something wasn’t done about it, the tree would burn to the ground, and he wasn’t quite sure the cold, frosty grass would stop it.

He turned back and watched her hurry away past the parking structure.

“Wait!” He yelled. “Please, wait!”

He felt like he might burst into tears. He ran after her. It was easy to catch up to her and block her way.

“Jonah, I have done everything I can for you. I told you everything I know out of my respect for your father. But I cannot be involved with you. I cannot put my family in danger.” She looked back at the tree that was on fire.  Somewhere in the distance an alarm sounded at the fire station. She turned back to him. “Either from you or from the people who are after you.”

That struck him hard. Was he a danger? Were the ‘dangerous men’ just men and he was the dangerous one after all? Tears ran down his face.

Athena put a hand under his chin. “I believe your father was right in taking you.” She said. “I don’t believe you’re a great threat to this world. He should have had more time with you. He should have told you. I think he could have helped you more by telling you.” She slid the back of her finger tips up his jaw line one more time. “He probably began to think of you as just a boy. Such a boy.” She finished with the same astonishment as when she first sat down at the picnic table. She was looking deep in his eyes.

She took money out of her purse and pushed it into his hand. He didn’t look down at it. His eyes stayed on her face.

“I can’t help you anymore.” She said. “Do not come back here, Jonah Havensby. Never come back here and disturb me again. It won’t be safe for either of us.”

He tried to say something but he just began to blubber through a stream of tears.

“You run now, Jonah Havensby,” she said. “You run and you do not stop running. You survive. Like your father wanted you to. You do not share your secret with anyone. You trust no one. You run now.”

Jonah stood there, huffing for breath and wiping his tears on his coat sleeve.

“Run!” She said.

And he was off. He did not look back. What started off as a jog, quickly became faster, and then faster still. Soon he was into a full-out run. He ran faster and faster. As he did, his tears dried. The only thing he concentrated on was the run. He didn’t know what his destination was. He just ran. He ran until he blacked out.

XVI

When he woke, Jonah was on his stomach. He felt sunlight on his face. It was daytime. He rolled over and felt a dull throb in his left eye and decided to keep his eyes closed. But this was different. This was what it felt like when the pain subsided. It was as if the pain had started a half-hour ago and was winding down now.

He also was dimly aware that he had been sleeping on his stomach before he rolled over. He never slept on his stomach in the nest. It was too uncomfortable. He was aware that he was under the electric blanket, but something else was different. He wasn’t on the ground. He couldn’t feel the wood underneath him.

He sat up and opened his eyes. What he saw when he opened them terrified him so much that he tried to back against the wall, but he wasn’t on the floor. As he backed up, he fell out of the camping hammock, which tipped over with him, blanket and all. That didn’t stop him though. He scooted himself right into the back corner and looked around.

He was in what looked like a wooden cabin. There was a slanted wood roof, walls with several windows and a light wood floor. All of it seemed to have been treated with some kind of finish that made the wood gleam in the daylight.

He looked to his left and there was a red metal box next to him that hummed. It had cords running this way and that out of it. When he scooted near it, he could tell that it was an electric generator. Both sides of it held electric outlets, only two of which were not in use. He looked to see where the power cords went, but each of them seemed to go under the floor. One of the power cords went from an outlet and then back into the generator, but there was no telling where it reattached. It seemed to Jonah that this power cord was self-recharging the generator. The readout on the machine was all the way into the green, which said it was fully charged, and an orange light above that told him that the generator was plugged in and charging.

When he looked past the generator, he could see that the room curved around and went into another room.

He stood up on wobbly legs. He still had no idea where he could be. He wasn’t sure that someone hadn’t finally captured him and put him here. He wasn’t sure if he should explore.

When he began to look around the room he was in, the first thing he noticed was the overturned camping hammock. It was exactly like the one he had slept in at the cave. There were two more set up right next to that one. Were these those hammocks?

He passed by the three hammocks. He didn’t bother righting the one he had knocked over. There was a shelf here, built right into the wall. One had five books on it. Things his father used to read, he knew. He had seen one of these books in the footlocker in the cave.

Next to that were two sets of silverware and his hunting knife that he kept in his backpack. Next to that was a small microwave oven. He looked at it suspiciously. He looked at the back of it and followed the power cord down to the floor. It was plugged into an extension cord that disappeared into the floor. He came back up and tentatively pushed the door button. When it opened, the light inside it turned on. He shut the door again.

Jonah looked up past the shelves. He saw where the wall met the slanted roof, although it didn’t look like the wall connected all the way into the roof. He followed the roof line around, when his eye was caught by something else. There was a twinkling of light. He went over to it and looked at it. It was a white Christmas light. As he followed it up through the slanted roof, he saw that each beam that held the roof in place was wrapped in white Christmas lights. If he had woken up in the night, it would have been the first thing he would have noticed. He couldn’t see where they plugged in, but he was sure it was one of the cords on the generator.

His foot kicked something under the shelves. When he looked, he saw that it was one of the footlockers. All three of the footlockers were open there along the wall, and well organized. One held clothes, the other held what appeared to be about a month’s worth of canned food. The other held various tools and other objects. He could see various batteries and two flashlights as well. He bent to look at the first, the one with the clothes, and discovered the red sweater he had traded out at the second cave. At the end of the row, he found his pack, neatly placed against the wall.

Someone had brought everything he owned in the world back to this one place that was obviously filled with things that were stolen from various locations over the last two months. He was sure he was in a cabin built of stolen lumber. Had the military men who were after him ‘acquired’ all of these stolen items and built a cabin somewhere in a remote location? Somewhere far away where they could torture and kill him?

He looked up again. When he followed one of the beams in the roof to where it should have met the others, he found that the central wall of this cabin was a large tree trunk. A very large tree trunk. That’s why the room was curved. He went to it and touched it with his hand. It seemed like this tree was still alive. It had bark on it. He peeled some away and crunched it in his hand and dropped it on the floor.

He looked to the right, to where the room curved into another room. He wondered if it would be guarded. He leaned his back against the tree trunk and slid his way around it, step by step. He stopped when he got to what appeared to be two shower curtains hanging from a metal bar. The curtains separated this room from the other room. They were light blue and had some kind of Hawaiian Aloha pattern to them – a pattern of brightly colored flowers. If he hadn’t been so scared, he would have admitted to thinking they were pretty cool.

He slid his foot right up next to the shower curtain and slid his hand to the edge of it. He opened the curtain by the tree trunk just an inch, just enough to see to the other side. After he looked, he grabbed the curtain and slid it all the way to the far wall.

Here he found a room with a mirror and a shelf on one wall, a window on the other wall, and the stolen claw-foot tub in the center.

Jonah went to the wall with the window. Just under the window, a piece of metal pipe came in through the wall, sealed off by a metal lever. Under this contraption was a large metal pot that reached up to his knees. When he lifted the pot, he could see that it rested on an electric hotplate, but it also had a tube at the bottom of it which led into the claw-foot tub. He replaced the big pot, back up onto the hotplate and examined the metal lever.

He pushed the lever up and water surged through the pipe. He wasn’t prepared for the water pressure that came through and, since he was so on edge anyway, it scared him enough that he dropped backwards and banged his head against the tub.

He got back up on his knees and went back to the pipe. It was filling the pot quite quickly. He cupped his hand under the stream of water and brought it to his mouth. The water tasted cold and fresh. Not like out of a tap, but good nonetheless. He bent up to the pipe and drank directly from the stream of water. When he moved the lever back down, which took more pressure than lifting it up, it cut the water off. He looked into the pot and saw that the water had filled the bottom of it, but he noticed the water wasn’t staying put.