Geoffrey’s telepathy was so resonant in the lieutenant general’s brain that it literally affected his sight. It was like having a jet engine blast past so close that a person could not only hear but see the sound, except that this jet engine was mental and greater in intensity for that fact. His head felt like it was about to literally burst, and a thin line trickle of blood began to roll down the side of his neck from his ear. He was on his feet now, slamming his head with his hands and yelling to high heaven for relief. Lieutenant Dan had been on the battlefield many times, right in the very thick of things, with bullets flying past his head and explosions all around, but he had never experienced anything even remotely and horrifying as this. Seeing his reaction, Geoffrey immediately stopped his experiment, but it was too late. His powers had become so profound in the absence of use that just the echo—if it could even be called that—of his telepathic voice was enough to inspire madness, if not death. It was only because Lieutenant Dan was a war-seasoned veteran that he had not lost his mind altogether and hurt someone seriously. When his sight began to shake and fade with the sheer force of the power that was ripping his brain apart, the thread of his sanity finally broke.
Now, suddenly, he was back in a violent theater of war but the enemy was not on the battlefield, but in his head. Geoffrey was now standing near the doctor, both of them by the door, about twelve to twenty feet from where Lieutenant Dan was raving and beating his cranium. Something broke in the lieutenant general’s head and in an instant, he had spanned the entire distance separating him and Geoffrey and was literally on top of him. Geoffrey didn’t even know he was sprawled full length on the floor until he looked up and saw one of Lieutenant Dan’s huge fists coming down toward his face. Everything went white, whiter than the room already was, and when color returned, it was the color of his own blood on that fist, coming down for another hit. And another. And another. And another… Of course, Geoffrey didn’t realize it. He didn’t realize anything anymore. Everything, the screams, the haze of pain, the fist pounding his face to pulp; all of it was a single indecipherable blur like the dream in the beginning. The doctor had tried to pull the lieutenant general off the patient and was knocked completely off his feet and into the air. He landed some feet away, unconscious. Meanwhile, Delilah screamed and thrashed, but heavy as she was with child, she could do no more than panic fruitlessly.
Geoffrey soon lost all consciousness, but though his awareness of the world around him ceased, the brutal merciless beating didn’t. The lieutenant general’s enormous fist continued pounding into his horribly disfigured and broken face like a mallet ramming into a pulverized sand bag. The lieutenant general kept pounding until he locked those killer hands around Geoffrey’s limp throat and squeezed until bones cracked beneath the awesome pressure. Five assistants burst through the door as soon as it could be electronically unlatched, each of them armed with a tiny weapon like the one Lieutenant Dan and his men had wielded. The weapons were set to the minimum limits, which, thankfully for the terrified staff members, was more than enough to paralyze the massive and angry lieutenant general. Though, one of the assistants had to fire his weapon twice before the raging lieutenant general was as unconscious as the doctor and the telepathic patient he had just mauled beyond recognition, his gargantuan hands still had to be pried from Geoffrey’s flattened neck. Dr. Crangler began to stir painfully back to life. As soon as he had returned to the world around him, he instinctively looked over at Delilah, and not a moment too soon, because she needed him desperately. All the excitement around her, as well as her own ensuing panic, had induced premature labor.
She was no longer thrashing, but she was still screaming, as her body prepared of its own accord to expel the very special baby within her. Dr. Crangler’s chest was smarting terribly from the hit he had taken. He shook it off as best he could and leapt into action. Even after the completely unanticipated happenings of the last few minutes, the proper birth of this child was still the most important thing by a vast margin. The umbilical cord blood necessary to synthesize a cure to the The Virus had to be extracted while mother and child were still alive and healthy for it to be viable. Then, that blood had to be maintained under very strict conditions and properly cultured and used within a very limited amount of time for this to work successfully. Dr. Crangler had but a single shot to make all this happen, and that shot was right now. Dr. Crangler instructed his staff member to move both Geoffrey’s and Lieutenant Dan’s body out in the hall until other staff members could get to them.
More staff members were quickly summoned, while the doctor and the present staff members tended to Delilah. It took four stout men to haul the lieutenant general into the hallway, and Geoffrey went out next, leaving behind a near continuous line of blood in his wake. The doctor yelled at a group of the newly-arrived assistants to clean up the blood, as it would pose a slip hazard for other assistants that the doctor needed. Afterward, Lieutenant Dan and Geoffrey were carted away on gurneys and off for medical attention of their own. The lieutenant general would likely suffer no more damage than a sore body and a throbbing headache when he awoke, but Geoffrey…well, that was another story. His poor brutalized body had lain helplessly and without the urgent attention it needed for over forty minutes. From the beating, he was sure to have suffered brain swelling and a crushed airway at the very least. He was breathing shallowly—very shallowly—as they took him off, but there no was telling how long that miracle would continue.
Chapter 31
“Get that IV over here, now!” Dr. Crangler demanded “Where’s that clamp? I need it, now!” The doctor’s elevated voice seemed to fill the entire room to beyond capacity and spill out in thick waves into the hallway every time the door was opened to let a rushing assistant or two out to retrieve something being yelled for now! Once a steady flow of panicked and rushing assistants surrounded Delilah’s bed with most of what Dr. Crangler demanded, his voice lowered to something like a soft cooing, slightly above a whisper. “Okay, Delilah, I need you to calm down and breathe.” The doctor said.
“Fuck you! You calm down and breathe!” was the spirited reply, “This hurts!”
Unfazed, Dr. Crangler continued, “It’s going to be all right, I’m here.” Certainly, Delilah was not soothed by his presence, but it was the most natural thing to say, “Just breathe.” Delilah wanted to yell again, but the baby was coming based on the pain that was surging through her. Nearly hyperventilating, she was forced to take the doctor’s advice and struggle to take long, deep breaths. Dr. Crangler was seated between her legs now, ready to receive the child. At his command, two assistants—one holding one of Delilah’s sweating hands and forearms, and the other gently stroking her sweating forehead—were stationed at the head of Delilah’s bed. Five or six other assistants were positioned some feet away, also per the doctor’s command, near the door in case he needed anything further. Though his head never turned from the woman before him, the doctor yelled toward the assistants near the door, “Oliver, get over here and get that anesthesia started like I showed you! Get some painkillers in this young woman!” Even in the midst of her great painful distraction and labored breathing Delilah had never wanted to thank the doctor so much after hearing this.
One of the assistants leapt forward toward the IV machine and obeyed the doctor’s orders. Even before the medicine was in Delilah’s blood stream, her breathing seemed to calm. Just the knowledge that some powerful high-grade pharmaceutical help was on the way was apparently enough to help smooth things some. And things continued to smooth out from that point. Delilah’s breathing was still harsh, but much less so, as the doctor continued to talk to her in that cooing voice that would’ve never been used for anything less important than this. He reassured her the entire time that everything was all right, always reminding her to breath and occasionally to push, and in the process deliberately keeping her distracted as the elongated head, then narrow shoulders, then torso, then purplish discolored legs and feet, of the savior of the wo
rld were pushed from her. The desperately needed umbilical cord followed, as did the placenta, and with the baby’s first breath and first resonant cry, the birth was said to be a resounding success. Birthing children was not Doctor Crangler’s primary profession, but, looking down at this screaming baby boy, and realizing, as if for the very first time, that because this life had taken place, all other newborn lives would be able to take place, stirred something deep within him. In an instant, he saw in this newborn’s existence every new life to come: Black babies, white babies, Asian babies, Taiwanese babies, Mexican babies, Middle Eastern babies, and every other baby in between. Every single one of them symbolizing the hope and future of their people, every single one of them gasping would live because this child gasped its first breath. Every one of them would see the light, hear the sounds, and feel the warmth of the world that had been prepared for them, all because of this child.
It nearly brought the great doctor to tears, and likely would have, except this was not the time. Shaking himself back into the reality at hand, the doctor promptly clamped and cut the precious umbilical cord, handed the baby to its mother, instructed his assistants to tend to her and the newborn right away, and disappeared from the room. He raced down the labyrinth of hallways, umbilical cord in a special dish, to the room set up for the purpose, where the blood could be properly cultured and stored, and a cure to the mercilessly destructive Virus synthesized. Meanwhile, back in Delilah’s room, she was allowed to hold her son while the machines were quickly taken away and replaced with things more suitable for attending baby and mother such as soft towels, warm water and swaddling clothes. As this was going on, Delilah gazed into her child’s eyes for the first time. Until now, the life that had been growing inside her was as foreign as the alien intelligence that made the child necessary. It was not her child, it was a thing she had been forced to have because other people’s lives, people she had never cared about other than as paid servants, depended on it.
Now, looking into the small face that resembled her own, she realized that this child would need her, would cherish her, would love her, not because of what she had but because of who she was. She was his mother and he would love and need her for that fact and that fact alone. Tears that she didn’t know were there began to stream down her face as she gazed deep into her little boy’s eyes—eyes that were gazing back at her with more than equal interest—as it continued to dawn on her that this was not an ‘it’ but an authentic human life. She couldn’t put into words what she felt. It couldn’t be described, it could only be experienced. And she was experiencing it now, true love for the very first time in her life, breaking her haughty spirit and rebuilding in its place a more humble and receptive one. It was also only now that it really dawned on her what this child of hers was affording to the world. This child’s life would grant that this indescribable experience of love could be enjoyed by countless other mothers and fathers too, throughout the annals of history to come, until time and relationship, the only immutable besides God Himself, were no more. She beamed at the child because the truth filled her mind that even if this child never accomplished a single other thing of worth in its entire existence, it had already, here and now, accomplished more than any other child, save the Savior Himself. She pressed the child, her child, to herself, as her warm tears covered both their faces.
Chapter 32
SUCCESS OF THE CENTURY! CURE FOR VIRUS FOUND FROM CHILD WORLD NEVER KNEW EXISTED!
This was the headline of just one major newspaper as news swept the globe like a tidal wave that a viable cure had been synthesized. The Virus had at last met its match. Clinics and hospitals, two of the only institutions or buildings that had not been burned to ruin or leveled completely, were packed. In some places, lines stretched for miles, with people crowding in makeshifts tents to get a dose of the cure. Besides the few lucky women who were yet pregnant but not so far advanced that they would succumb before the cure could be administered, nearly every other woman able to bear seed wanted to be pregnant now. Over half the population of the planet had been wiped clean from existence, many by The Virus itself, but many more by the ensuing chaos. Now, with a cure present, and in the wake of all this, the women of the world wanted to repopulate the planet with a vengeance. A global feeling of rebellion against the faceless alien intelligence that would dare perpetrate such a heinous destruction upon the planet, our planet, had materialized and crystallized and would not be denied. The loved ones that had been lost could never be replaced, true, but new loved ones could certainly be produced, and if the strong, healthy women left in the world had anything to do with it, they damn sure would be.
Without doubt, the devastation and loss would not be undone quickly or forgotten, but even the longest road to recovery begins with a single step, and the first of the those single steps, which is also the most important of the steps, had been granted by ‘a child no one knew existed’. As per Dr. Crangler’s—now an overnight global celebrity of the highest order—advice, the entire military complex was converted to a facility by which to stockpile the cure in massive quantities. The base’s huge number of military vehicles, planes, and helicopters were used to distribute those massive stores to the world’s clinics and hospitals. Where there were people who could not get to the cure, hospitals and clinics were set up in what was left of their villages and cities so that that would not stop them from receiving the cure as well. The worst was finally over and the world, though still broken and reeling, was anxious to rebuild.
Lieutenant Dan recovered with no permanent damage, and his brief moment of insanity was never rehashed again. Geoffrey, on the other hand, didn’t fare as well. The lieutenant general’s thrashing had left him in a coma from which no one knew if he would ever recover, but fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on the things that were to happen next) that was not the end of his story. A strange incident took place with the doctor while he was supervising one of the larger remaining hospitals in what was left of one of the U.S.’s major cities. As was normal since word of the cure had reached the world, the doctor was working around the clock. He was sitting in a special, protected room that had been set up as his personal quarters and had been helping with the overwhelming workload for the last sixteen straight hours, when something like radio static began to fill his head.
He looked around this way and that, and, discovering no possible source of the static, listened more carefully, as an evil foreboding began to settle upon him even before he realized what was going on. As he listened intently, he began to fancy that the static was not static at all, but a meshing of voices…mental voices. “Oh, God!” he shouted, bolting to his feet, but resisting the powerful urge to box his ears because he knew that that would do no good against these sounds. “Please, God, no!” Now Dr. Crangler was a professional, a medical professional. He had always prided himself on not believing in fairy tales, even ones as elaborate as ‘God’, but all that had begun to change the moment he first laid eyes on the child back at the once-secret facility that had helped to usher in this whole global revival. Though he still didn’t fancy himself a religious man even now, he could think of no one higher, no one with more authority to call upon to stop what he was sure was happening. “Please, God!” he shouted again, genuinely terrified to the very marrow of his bones. “Don’t let us defeat the alien intelligence, only to become them!”
Unfortunately for Dr. Ian Crangler, the famed synthesizer of the cure that would save the world’s progeny and thus its future, only God Himself knew if that was a prayer He would choose to answer.
DEER HAWK
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