by Dan Glover
"I can help you. I delivered four babies over the last three years. Karen taught me a lot. I'm not a doctor like she is, but I'm pretty good. I know what to do. She says I'll make a fine midwife."
"Thank you, my beautiful Amanda. I'd like that. Sometimes I wake up and realize I'm going to have a baby and it scares me. Not the pain so much but the responsibility. I expected Alpin would be there for us. But apparently he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me or the baby."
"Were you two in love?"
"We were expected to be in love, I think. My mother and father wanted lots of children but after giving birth to Alpin they found out they couldn’t have any others. Dr. Karen helped them to conceive me. They raised us as brother and sister. Alpin used to tease me when we were little. He'd say mean things like: you're not my real sister. But then he'd cry that he was sorry and not to say anything to mother and father about it.
"They told me all about it when I turned sixteen. They said they love me like a daughter and the fact I am not even related to them means nothing. I feel like I was adopted. I knew I was different but I never knew how different. Alpin seemed to use my sense of loss against me. I'm not sure why. When we got older he was always telling me how pretty I was.
"One day we swam to a beach in old France. I never wear clothes when I'm swimming. They weigh me down. When we walked out of the ocean Alpin was looking at me so strangely. Maybe I led him on, I don’t know. All of a sudden we were doing it right there on the beach. It was my first time. And when he was done he got up and ran back into the ocean just leaving me there by myself.
"I knew I was pregnant right away. It felt very natural. And I love being pregnant. But it bothers me the way Alpin is acting. Ever since that day he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. When I try to talk to him he walks away like he doesn’t hear me. I think I was in love with him but now I'm not so sure. Maybe I was just in love with the thought of being in love. Does that make sense, Amanda?"
"It makes perfect sense. I thought I was in love with him too, Ena. Forgive me?"
"There is nothing to forgive. Oh... when I asked my father if you can come along he wondered if we could share a cabin. Is that all right with you?"
Chapter 46—Waking in the Dark
There was a weird smell in the air and he had a headache.
He woke on the floor in the dark. He wasn’t sure where he was at first and then he remembered going to get Nate. Karen sent him downstairs after they stumbled across some sort of anomaly. Kirk could not remember what happened after leaving Karen. Sitting up, he discovered he was back on the first floor. There were four other figures lying close by.
One of them was Delilah.
His heart skipped a beat. The room spun around threatening to throw him back down as he rose to his feet to go to his wife. Holding onto a metal chair for support he rubbed the back of his head discovering a fist-sized lump forming there. When the dizziness didn’t subside he went to his knees to crawl over to Delilah. Taking her hand in his he felt warmth. After kissing her on the lips he whispered in her ear.
"Wake up, sweetie."
Though her eyes didn’t open he noticed one of the other figures stirring. Nate was coming to.
"Where are we, Kirk?"
"I think we're on the first floor, Mr. Nate."
"How did we get here?"
"I don’t know. The last thing I remember is being upstairs with Karen. We saw something strange so she told me to go find you, and then I woke up here."
"What are Delilah and the others doing here, Kirk? Is she okay? I wonder why they came ashore."
"She seems all right. She is just now waking up."
Kirk whispered into Delilah's ear and then kissed her again. Her eyelids fluttered open.
"Oh! I am so happy to see you, my darling Kirk! What happened?"
"We're still trying to figure that out, sweetie. Are you okay?"
"I think so. Where is everyone else?"
"I see everyone except Karen. I don’t understand what you're doing here. Why did you leave the ship?"
"You didn’t come back. It was getting late; we thought you might have gotten trapped somewhere and needed help."
"But we were only gone an hour or so, darling Delilah."
"You were gone all day long, Kirk. The tide was starting to come in. You didn’t tie off the skiff and we were afraid it would float off. So we came ashore in the rubber dingy to secure the skiff and to find you."
"Are Lily and Natalia okay, Mr. Nate?"
"Yes, I think so... please open the door, Kirk. Let's get some fresh air in here."
Kirk walked to the door half expecting it to be locked but it opened easily. It was full night as a cacophony of clatter erupted into the room: the hoots of owls, the screams of big cats, and the screech of a billion insects.
"We must have been asleep all day, Mr. Nate."
"Yes it looks that way. Lily and Natalia are waking up."
"I remember now, Kirk... we smelled something strange in the hallway. We walked into this room and saw the two of you lying on the floor. As soon as I took a breath I blacked out. Someone must have gassed us."
"Did you see anyone else, Delilah?"
"No, Kirk... but we heard sounds coming from the next room."
"It feels like someone hit me on the head... how about you, Mr. Nate?"
"I remember watching Karen talking to that stranger. I turned around and you were gone, Kirk."
"So you are saying there is someone else here, darling Nate?"
"Yes, sweet Lily. How are you feeling?"
"Like I've been asleep for days and I can't wake up. I'm so groggy. Is Natalia okay, lovely Nate?"
"She's coming around now, sweet Lily. We are all accounted for except for Karen. She must be around here somewhere."
"I'm starting to remember everything now, Mr. Nate. We saw something in that room upstairs... it looked like a volcano in the floor. Karen told me to run and get you. When we got back, there was someone in the room with Karen. Remember? You were watching through a window over the door. The next thing I know, I woke up here."
"I think we were gassed, Kirk."
"Maybe we should get back to the Nautilus, sweet Nate."
"What about Karen? We can't just leave her here, lovely Lily."
"We can return in the morning, darling Natalia. We all need to get some rest. My clothes stink too. It must be some kind of chemical agent that was used on us. We need to clean up, make a plan, and return better prepared."
"Well... whoever did this to us left us our rifles. There is a note here too."
"What's the note say, sweet Nate?"
"It's from Karen. It says she's decided to stay here for the time being. We are free to go. We can take anything we wish from this floor but we are not to attempt to go to the upper levels."
"We cannot leave her, my son... you know that. She will fall prey to Lake Syndrome within hours. She understands that too. She is being held against her will. I'm certain of it."
"We won't abandon her here, mother. We'll be within a safe distance. But I think we had better go now while we are allowed to leave. That could change. I have a feeling we are all in danger."
"He's right, darling Natalia."
Lily walked beside her and caressed Natalia as if healing her hurts as they gathered up the rifles and what they can carry. Both Nate and Kirk hoisted three servers each on in makeshift packs their backs while Lily, Natalia, and Delilah took one apiece.
Kirk didn’t want to leave the relative safety of the building and yet if he failed to get some fresh air soon he felt he would pass out again. Without a word he led the way trusting the others would follow. The night was full of eyes, shadows piled on top of the black horizon. Even with a rifle in his hands he didn’t rest easy until they were back aboard the Nautilus.
The swaying of the ship under his feet no longer caused him to feel sick. Instead, he felt safer here. Still, something in the water splashed about the ship for t
he rest of the night making it impossible to sleep. He was tempted to shine a spotlight into the ocean to see what was making such a commotion but he was afraid of what he might find.
The rest of the crew had seemingly settled into their slumbers but he thought it best to stand guard, at least until the break of dawn. There was something out there and though the shotgun in his arms lent him a provisional sense of comfort he wondered if it would do any good against the terrors of the night that were surely stalking them all.
Chapter 47—Micah
"Have you been here all this time, Micah?"
"After I received my PhD I was offered a professorship here at Cornell. I was fifteen years old. None of my students took me seriously. After a year of trying to engage them, I decided I would rather concentrate entirely on research.
"By that time, I already had over a dozen patents pending on medical devices. They were bringing in a million dollars a year in licensing fees with ten times that much—probably a hundred times—on the horizon so the school generously allowed me to set up my research laboratory right here. They gave me use of the entire sixth floor. It wasn’t used for much more than storage anyhow.
"They left me alone to my work. I appreciated that. Soon after I set up my laboratory I was forced by my deteriorating heath to surreptitiously impregnate myself with the Try-Rights. There were the unexpected consequences, of course. I always anticipate the unexpected, however. I managed to alleviate the most onerous side effect of my disease—death—but I had fallen victim to a variety of ailments heretofore unknown to medical science.
"The first thing I noticed was abnormal bone growths on my skull. I'm sure you've noticed that too, Karen. I erroneously assumed it was a means of increasing space for my enlarging brain. Unfortunately, I wasn’t becoming any more intelligent: quite the opposite. Luckily I diagnosed my malady as my body's reaction to a foreign substance... the Try-Rights.
"I determined that in an effort to save my life I had accidentally opened a door to an acute autoimmune encephalomyelitis which could only be arrested, not reversed. From what I have surmised the bone growth is permanent yet I prevented any further advancement by reprogramming the Try-Rights. But the damage was done.
"As my appearance changed I became even more of a recluse. I no longer felt wholesome enough to leave the premises even at night. I set up a cot and a kitchen, ordered any food I needed, and began staying here permanently. Luckily, my patent work for the University persisted in garnering a large influx of revenue each year so they continued to leave me to my own recourses."
"Don't you ever get lonely, Micah?"
"Not at first... as you might know, I have very little in common with most people. I don’t mean to sound ostentatious but my intellect is quite a bit more advanced than an average person's, or even a genius in the traditional sense. You, Karen, are an exception, of course. I very much enjoyed our short time together.
"I rather liked being alone. I tend to live in my own head, as grotesque as that might sound. I had my books and my research and thanks to the Internet I had access to the nearly infinite databases of this University as well as all the others in the world. I was happy.
"But then the apocalypse descended upon the world. I thought I could save the lives of those who I deemed worth saving. Just think how much better the world could be if everyone alive were geniuses instead of the plethora of idiots that abounded before. It didn’t work out the way I envisioned, however.
"The people I inoculated with my Try-Rights developed more alarming symptoms than I did. They soon lost all sense of reason. They were reduced to living automatons. By the time I realized my mistake, I was unable to reverse the biological changes that accrued."
"What do you want from me, Micah? Why are you keeping me here? What can I do for you?"
"You can be my friend, Karen. Would you consider staying here with me?"
"I can't do that. I'll die if I stay here. I need to be close to..."
Wondering at the mystery of Karen's clandestine fountain of youth, Micah ascertained that her longevity and the apocalypse were somehow interrelated. From the little he gleaned about the epidemic ravaging the world, he learned it was rumored to start in the British Isles. Knowing Karen was from England didn’t necessarily implicate her but he did more digging. With his access to all the educational archives on earth it wasn’t difficult to track her down.
Karen Poole was a top researcher for the British Centers for Disease Control. She was recruited right out of the University, a rarity even for students at the top of their class. She promptly disappeared. Micah surmised that someone was taking credit for her work... probably her direct superior, a man named Dr. Hector Ramirez who published numerous papers during Karen's tenure, without her name, of course.
During the last year before the apocalypse a little known paper was published in an obscure Journal of Medicine under an obvious pseudonym. This paper made remarkable claims concerning an unknown parasitic infection originating in the Lake Baikal region of Siberia. Apparently, there was a growing body of evidence pertaining to a never before known symbiotic relationship between the agent of infection and the infected.
The paper was brilliant. After reading it, Micah scoured every medical archive he could access for related biological action at a distance but could find nothing. But then he was tired late one night and quite accidentally ran a general search; something interesting popped up.
The Centers for Disease Control in London issued a quarantine mandate in regard to a hospital in Nottingham where three doctors, a nurse, and six patients succumbed to a rapidly evolving parasitic infection. The CDC swept in to secure the building and spirited away the corpses before the local authorities had time to act. What caught Micah's eye was the name of the doctor issuing the order: one Dr. Marilyn Compton, acting on behalf of Dr. Karen Poole and Dr. Hector Ramirez.
Of course there was no way for Karen to know what he discovered. And now she showed up here looking even younger than he remembered her appearing over a hundred years ago, and far more beautiful. He suspected she must have stumbled upon a biological agent in contradistinction to his inorganic solution. Hers seemed preferable. He decided to bluff and thereby learn her secret.
"Ah... so that's your secret."
"What are you talking about?"
"Come on, Karen... you're smarter than that. You know exactly what I mean."
"I have no idea what you're saying, Micah. Fill me in, please."
"First, I'd like you to write a note to your friends. It is in their best interest not to be exposed to my Try-Rights any longer than they've already been. Let them go back to their ship. They can wait for you there."
"I thought you said there is no danger of infection."
"That's correct, Karen. But if they decide to make any trouble, that could change very quickly. Please... write the note."
Chapter 48—Worries
Ginger had experienced a monumental let-down every other time in her life that she'd been happy, almost as if she was sabotaging her own bliss so she couldn't help but wonder if this time would be the same.
Watching Kāne work filled her with a deep sense of contentment. His actions were completely and utterly natural. He moved with an ease that belied the thought she knew he put into every nuance of whatever sculpture he happened to be working on. She watched as he labored through the night only coming to bed when the birds began their morning songs of love and joy.
She didn’t mind how they rarely saw anyone else—she had never been one for socializing—though Kāne seemed to think that it bothered her to be alone so often. He came to her like a recalcitrant child ready for a scolding.
"I'm so sorry, my beautiful Ginger. I should be more attentive to your needs. Time gets away from me so easily when I work. It is as if I lose all sense of myself and what is going on around me."
"I don't mind, my loveliest Kāne. All I need is right here."
She draped her arms around his massive shoulders loving
how his muscles rippled beneath her caresses. He laid a gentle hand upon her rapidly expanding stomach as if divining for any tender movement within.
"He's restless today. When you put your hand on my belly he calms down. He must know his father is close by. Your touch is soothing both to me and to our baby."
"I promised mother we would come by for breakfast this morning. Would you like to sleep for a bit first, precious Ginger? I know you've been up all night watching me."
"I'd rather go now, darling Kāne, and later we can dawdle the day away in bed."
The Liberty sailed three weeks ago this very day in search of the lost Nautilus. Ginger knew Lady Lauren was agonizing over both missing vessels. She often saw her early in the morning standing on the top turret of Orchardton Hall gazing out at the ocean for a sign of sails which had yet to appear.
Ginger kept up a hope for the best yet she feared the worst.
Wild animals concerned her little. Storms could be difficult to deal with especially on the open sea but both schooners were built with double hulls and were virtually impossible to sink. Even if they were to capsize those types of vessels normally righted themselves, unless they sustained damage.
Time had a way of worrying the wooden vessels to pieces, just like the old homes that once graced all the towns and villages they traveled through on their way to the Lake every seven years. Even if they appeared sound on the outside, the rot from the inside would work its insidious terror upon the molecules binding the surfaces together and eventually rendering the wood soft and prone to giving way easily.
What concerned her most were other human beings. She kept having dreams where she was taken prisoner by men who never spoke. They were like robots, existing only to serve some higher power which always seemed just outside of her gaze.
When she discovered Amanda had sailed with the Liberty, Ginger was bereft. She knew Lady Lauren was an adept so far as midwifery went but she was counting on Amanda's expertise in child birth. She didn’t even say goodbye.