RESTORATION (a science fiction novel) (RESTORATION (the science fiction trilogy)) (20 page)

He was still plagued by the thoughts of how Ron Simpson died and then Ron’s Doctor and even Ron’s parents, why were they not restored?  He figured maybe the parents couldn’t be restored because they drowned very far out at sea when their yacht capsized.  It was probably many hours before it would have been discovered and with the one hour limit long surpassed Restoration would have been impossible. 

But what about Ron and his childhood Doctor, why had they not been restored?  They had been in accidents that were surrounded by witnesses and authorities immediately.  Emergency personnel highly trained to make sure people get to the hospital within the hour.  Everyone knew that the Medic-Star storage service could insure their lifefile would always be secure and available.   

He and John would have to look into this next to see just how elaborate these murders were. How did the killers make the permanent death situation look believable?  Maybe they blamed it on some system failure. 

No one would suspect anything unless they had connected all the deaths together like he and John had, only then does it look so suspicious.  As single incidents nobody would be the wiser.  Their deaths had occurred in different areas of the country and enough time in between that the authorities simply would not make the connection. 

Dodge arrived home and walked into the kitchen from the garage entrance to see his family gathering around the table for dinner. 
The fantastic aroma of fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, and homemade Cole slaw. 

Linsey and the kids went all out for Grandpa’s last dinner as a dying man. 
         “Before we eat I want to do something that we haven’t done enough of around our family in recent years,” said Allan.  Dodge already knew exactly what his Dad was going to do.     

“Let’s all join hands and say grace.”  They all closed their eyes and bowed their heads as Alan Kerrington asked God to bless the bounty they were about to receive, bless all the hands that prepared it, and thanked him for the new life that he was about to receive and for Bobby’s Restoration.  It was a very touching moment and it nearly brought tears to all their eyes.  As soon as he finished, he smiled and said, “Please pass the rolls!”  The mood changed from serious to happy and light hearted in less than a second. 

They all stuffed themselves soundly before Linsey surprised Alan with a blackberry pie that she had picked up at the bakery.  It wasn’t homemade, but it was fresh baked and very good.   They spent the rest of the evening around the table talking about old times and Grandpa was very entertaining for Bobby and Sarah with many colorful stories.  He spoke of the old days when kids went to school dances, smoked cigarettes, got in too many fist fights, and drag raced fast noisy cars like their dad’s.  He told them about working on his Grandpas farm and how they would have to do so many things by hand like driving the tractors and combines to plant and harvest because they didn’t have the robots like the farmers had now.

The kids got tired and Grandpa was running out of steam so they all retired to bed in preparation for the big day.  At around 2:00 a.m. Dodge heard something downstairs but he couldn’t make out what it was.  He normally would have slept through it but his mind was running on heightened alert due to the whole hacker mess and blue car guy.  Paranoid was an understatement but he was masking it well. 

As he made his way downstairs very slowly while listening he realized the sound was coming from the kitchen and it sounded like his father coughing.  He entered the kitchen to find Alan sitting at the kitchen table with a roll of paper towels on the table in front of him and a couple of them in his hand.  In front of him on the table lay three different kinds of inhalers.
         “Dad you okay?”  Alan would have liked to answer his son but he was too busy just trying to breathe.  Dodge realized this and sat down at the table with his Father.  Alan coughed and hacked for the next half hour unable to speak except for saying “coffee” to Dodge.  Dodge made himself busy preparing a fresh pot and getting out two cups, sugar, and cream and set it all out on the table between them.  After several hits from the inhalers and more hacking that bloodied several paper towels, his Father finally got enough breath to speak. 

“This is what I do at night,” he forced out between gasps.  Dodge reached over and patted his Father on the hand and slid the hot cup of coffee across the table to him.  After a few minutes he was able to talk a bit better.
         “This is what I’ve been going through now for months.  I lie down at night and get an hour or two of sleep then I just can’t breathe.  Not even the oxygen helps much because I have these coughing fits.  If I had only known that those damn cigarettes would do this to me I would have never smoked that first one.”

“Well, Dad, you only have to make it through tonight and then it’s over, you get another chance with a brand-new body in just a few hours from now.”
         “I think I’ll just stay up, if I go back to bed, I’m just gonna start coughing again and I hate it.”
         “Okay, I’ll stay up with you, how about we go sit in the TV room?  We’ll put on an old movie and have some fun.”

“Sounds good let’s go,” said Allan. 

They got up and headed for the TV room.
         “Let’s watch one of those classic James Bond Agent 007 flicks, I love those old movies!”  Dodge agreed as he chuckled to himself. 
“If he only knew!”
 

At some point during the movie Dodge dosed off.  He awoke to the end credits rolling up the screen to one of those famous 007 sound tracks.  He looked over at his Father and saw that he had dosed off too.  He was relaxed it the recliner with his feet propped up on the footstool.  He appeared to be sleeping peacefully but he looked so tired.  The cancer had taken a toll on his body and spirit.  There was no doubt in Dodge’s mind that his father was very near to dying.  Thank God in just a few short hours he would be young and healthy again. 

Dodge got up quietly and went into the guestroom and retrieved Alan’s Lifecorder unit off the bed side table.  He brought it to where his Father was sleeping and placed it there beside him to make sure it got updated while he slept.  He wanted his father to remember what a nice evening they had together.

  He sat back down in the chair next to him, turned off the TV and went back to sleep.  At about 5:45 a.m. Dodge heard the coffee pot time beep and smelled a fresh pot beginning to brew.  He had set the timer for morning so that it would be ready when
Linsey came down.  He looked over at his Father who was just beginning to wake up and they both sat up in their chairs.  Alan immediately began using his inhalers as he did every morning before attempting to get up and move around.  Two of them were for helping him with his breathing and the other was a fairly new drug for relieving pain.  It was specially developed for people that were in excruciating pain due to terminal illness.  It was designed to make them as comfortable as possible until their time came to go.

             
Just as Dodge left the room he heard the sound of Alan choking, so he ran back into the TV room to make sure he was okay.  His Father had his head over a small trash can that Dodge kept by his recliner.

             
“Dad, you okay?”        

             
“Yeah, sometimes this happens in the morning.  I’ll be okay, just go on about your business.” 

It was only then that Dodge fully understood why his Father wanted to stay at his own place but by the same token no one should have to go through that alone.  Dodge went into the kitchen and poured some coffee for both he and his father and by the time he got everything put on the table Alan was up and making his way to the kitchen. 

Dodge carried their coffee out to the patio with his Father following.  The sun was just peaking up over the horizon and so they just sat there together silently and watched it rise.  

“Dad, I need to tell you something and it might just be the craziest thing you’ve ever heard.”
         “Okay, Son, go ahead, whatever it is I can handle it.” 

“You can’t tell a soul, not even Linsey knows this and it has to stay that way for a few more days.  Even when she does know I don’t want anyone talking about it unless we have to.  I want to tell you now just in case, God forbid, something should go wrong with your restoration.  I would never forgive myself if you passed and found
yourself looking down from heaven at me thinking, “Why didn’t my son tell me he was in such a mess?”

“You can tell me Son, what is it?”

  “My team and I at ESS are actually secretly working for LifeTech. We developed the very system that is about to save your life and it has taken us more than ten years.  During that time apparently one of our team members went rouge and installed a back door in the software and a wireless receiver in the unused space on the chip.  Long story short, he’s dead, his parents are dead, and his doctor is dead.  I’m being followed daily and I believe the family could be in danger.  Alan was just staring at his son with a blank look on his face that could only mean he was in shock. 

“Man when you say you need to get something off your chest, you
aint jokin kid!  How long have you been walking around with this on your shoulders?” 

Dodge was almost embarrassed at the answer.

“Oh about two months I guess.  But that’s because at first we didn’t really know how deep it went and we thought we might just be paranoid.”
         “Who’s we Son?”
         “Oh, well that would be . . . , Just then he realized he shouldn’t be speaking outdoors about all this and he decided not to use John’s name.     

“Just a friend, I shouldn’t really say.”
“You don’t trust your own Father?  Who would I tell?”       “Dad, please, you should keep your voice down, you know, ears everywhere.”
“Oh, sorry.” 

“Look, Dad, I really didn’t want to tell you this now because you’re about to go to your procedure today and I didn’t want you to worry.  On top of that, I’ll have to get right back to working on
who’s behind this thing and I wanted you to know that I might not be at the hospital as much as I’d like to be during your recovery.” 

Alan reached over and slapped his son on the back hard.  The man still had moments of strength even with being old and sickly. 
         “No worry’s Son,” he said.  “I’ll recover quickly, and I’ll help you in any way I can.  No one messes with my family while I’m still kicking!  Right now I’m sure glad that I decided to go through with this.  You may just need the younger version of me around to watch your back.  Hey when’s the last time I showed you the gun collection? You know I added a lot to it during the pandemic. I thought if the criminals came for us looting and killing, they’d  have one heck of a shoot out on their hands before they got us.” 

Alan was always the “Be prepared like a Boy Scout, shoot them all and let God sort them out,” kind of a guy.  He was in the military when he was a young man and was deployed twice to
Iraq just after Sadam Hussein was toppled from power.  He saw a good bit of action and was very pro gun.  He saw firsthand how people lived in countries that didn’t have freedom and he was more than willing to die to protect it. 

When the pandemic hit and the world began to go out of control things got very scary right there in Noblesville.  The stock market crashed and had to shut down completely for months.  A state of martial law ensued and the president of the united states made a decree that all prices on everything would be frozen and regular currency would be used and accepted in a normal means.  In spite of the ruling people simply bartered instead, it was like jumping back two hundred years in time to trade a chicken for a quart of fuel oil. 

The United States, Canada, and Mexico had pretty much become cut off from the rest of the world both for reasons of quarantine and the collapse of the world economy.  In the early stages looting, riots, and criminals completely out of control were moving across the country in waves.  People had lost their minds and taken up the “every man for himself” attitude. 

When the National Guard and standard military battalions finally got control of the population again, tens of thousands had been killed and entire communities in some cases were looted out and burned to the ground.  His Father and several other men from their neighborhood moved six families into the largest house in the neighborhood. 

This house was on the highest ground in the area and was older brick construction.  They barricaded themselves in the home with all their resources of food, water and weapons.  They boarded up the windows on the lower floor and most of the windows on the second floor.  They did all of this in the two weeks prior to the riotous gangs moving through the town.  The men took turns at watch and sounded off if anyone suspicious came near their make shift fortress. 

Only a few smaller gangs moved through the area.  Anyone that came within two hundred yards received a verbal warning and then they were fired at.  Needless to say every single one of them went packing off in a hurry.  They only had to stay in the house for two weeks before the Calvary arrived. 

Once the military presence was strong, everyone emerged.  They hadn’t lost anyone in their group but there were people reported murdered as little as a mile from their location.  They were very lucky that the men in the community were smart and resourceful in a tough situation.

  Alan kept his guns all these years and was continuously adding to his collection.  He tried not to think about his days in Iraq and didn’t really talk about it very much.  Dodge assumed that the memories were mostly bad and that his Dad simply didn’t want to be reminded.  Dodge thought about his Father’s offer to help him.