I am wondering if any of you would consider reviewing the book. It will be released on Amazon/Kindle on October 18th. I need reviews from regular folks posted to amazon on the release day, if possible. You get a FREE pdf, word.doc or .mobi (Kindle ebook file) copy and plenty of time between now and mid-October to read it. Let me know, friends!
In Chapter 15 Kate learns some stories about the folks on the cryopods from Norm, Mike's tech guy. Norm tries to get Kate to realize that each person there is real and has a story and a personality--they're not just a pod number. Kate also finally learns what happened to her predecessor in the company, Elzo Saltieri! Chapter One's mystery is finally revealed!
The mother and daughter here in this chapter are are very important toward the end of the book!
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“How’s Jerry today, Miss Kate?”
Kate pulled herself out of her foggy reverie to see Clipboard Norm standing next to her with his usual lopsided grin and truly unfortunate Moe Howard haircut. “Huh, what?” she muttered.
“Touchdown Jerry. You two are having a chat? Is he bragging about that bootleg touchdown he scored in the Super Bowl a zillion years ago? He never shuts up about it.”
Kate suddenly realized who Norm and his monotone delivery reminded her of—Droopy, the ultra-droll Warner Brothers cartoon dog. “Oh yes, patient C1. Jerry Hastings. I’m trying to memorize all the patient numbers.”
“Seems like an odd way to memorize. Make him come to life, think of him as Touchdown Jerry, a man who made the Pro Bowl five times. A bit conceited, but he had a hearty handshake and a million-dollar smile. Forget the C1 label.”
“The C1 label is science, Norm. We’re supposed to be scientists.”
“Ugh. Just numbers, Kate? Just data? Are you telling me you want to be one of those dreadful scientists without a sense of humanity? You don’t want to be that person, do you?”
“Yeah, whatever. You can claim touché there, I guess,” Kate answered tiredly. “Mike talked like you do about these folks when he first showed me the pods. But you guys knew these people. I never met a single one of them when they were alive. It’s hard for me to visualize them as real people, especially in this sci-fi cryopod environment.”
“Well, just learn their nicknames. Touchdown Jerry—not C1. That’ll put you more on track. Hey, over here, C9, ‘The Darling Diva,’ Michaela Gretry. Famous opera singer and really sweet woman—so much talent and a whacked out sense of humor. Matter of fact, Mike asked all these people their nicknames, and if they didn’t have one, he’d ask them to make one up that they liked before they entered cryo. Mike is a nickname guy—surprised he hasn’t slapped one on you yet.”
“I’m afraid of what some of you might call me—like Overachieving Girl, or Nose-to-the-Grindstone Girl, or something far worse. Oh well, that Mike is different, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah, Kate. He’s out there sometimes. But I enjoy it.”
“I’m frustrated, Norm. There’s a lot of crazy in Mike. Also, a lot of ‘you figure it out yourself, Kate’ in him, too. He won’t help me with anything other than giving me Enzo’s mess to trudge through. He doesn’t want to talk at all about Enzo’s personal life and why he’s not in cryo. There’s all sorts of stuff where he’s closed the door on me. He gave me ninety days, plus clerical help from Deirdre, to come up with a report. Here I am closing in on ten weeks, totally exhausted, and I’m still struggling for some kind of direction. I’m afraid I’m totally failing this.”
“I’m sure you can do it. We all believe in you. You don’t have any quit in you, that’s for sure. Besides, Mike’s intent is to keep you unbiased. Didn’t he tell you from day one that’s what he wanted? And he’s told the rest of us to leave you alone, not to compromise your take on all this. He keeps talking to me and Chrissy about your fresh set of eyes.”
Kate sighed, wishing Norm hadn’t happened upon her. “Well, they’re very tired eyes right now. Anyway, thanks for the pep talk. Say, so what if you hate nicknames?”
“You don’t have to have one. And we also have some anons in here. Only the Burgess boys know who they are. Heck, for all we know Elvis may be here anonymously.”
“That’s funny, Norm.” Kate giggled, finally letting go of some tension.
“Kate, have you met Rainbow Jenny? Or Jenny’s Mom? They’re here together—C3 and C5.” Norm tapped on the two pods gently. “Starting here and all the way down are all your patients most likely to become President of the USA in 2060 or so. These people benefit from our most recent advances in procedures, hardware, software. Rainbow Jenny and Jenny’s Mom—or C3 and C5, if you must—have you researched them yet?”
“No, I haven’t. What’s their story?”
“Jenny has Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome; it’s quite rare—accelerated aging. She was only ten years old when she went into cryo, but she looked like a tiny old lady.”
“Oh, that’s sad. I’ve read about that. Genetic, right?” Kate seemed to remember reading an article in Scientific American about the syndrome. And now here, in the strange world of ExitStrategy, she was encountering it.
“Right, and absolutely no clue how to solve it presently. But that’s the beauty of cryo. Maybe in ten or twenty years there will be an easy cure. Stem cell research, genetic manipulation. There’s going to be a cure for this. She just has to wait it out.”
“And her mother—Jenny’s Mom? That’s a sweet name. How is she here?”
“Cancer, metastasized. She’s a feisty one. Gave Mike and Franklin a lot of grief. She was darned if death was going to defeat her daughter and herself all at once. You’ll run into her husband sometime. He comes by about once a month to visit his girls. Andrea, Jenny’s Mom, that is, wrote a lot of passionate and sometimes even angry letters to her MD and to Mike and Enzo, looking for a cure, or some kind of hope. You should read them sometime. She really stirred the pot.”
“Norm, that’s an amazing story—the two of them here side by side, waiting for cures, for a miracle. Really sad, but amazing. I’m beginning to get it now. We have to know each person’s story. We have to be passionate about them being under our care, right? I think you just taught me a lesson. Thank you.” Kate gave Norm a long hug, then sighed deeply.
“That’s what old-timers like me are supposed to do, Kate. Pass on our supposed wisdom. Too bad you have to listen to all our complaining to hear the occasional nugget of truth! So, stroll with me down the row.” As Norm passed each pod, he gave it a little pat, a little touch. Kate copied him, trying to force herself to truly connect with the people inside. “Kate, I’m sorry Mike has been so reticent to talk about Enzo with you. I didn’t know that. So here’s the last occupied pod, C53, one of the anons, and then here we are, C54; this was supposed to be Enzo’s pod. We were actually getting ready for his journey into cryo. The lung cancer and the Alzheimer’s were getting quite bad. He kept working even when he was so sick. And we’d have to watch him closely. He would wander off from the building when the Alzheimer’s was extreme.”
“Someone keeps putting flowers here. I see them all the time.”
“It’s Mike. Sometimes Chrissy. They really loved him.”
“So, Norm, can you, for my edification, tell me why he’s not here? He had lung cancer, the Alzheimer’s. Why couldn’t they put him in cryo when he died?”
“You have no clue, do you? Seriously?”
“No. No one has told me, Norm. Please, what happened?”
“Remember I said he would wander at times? One night he took off. We didn’t know where he was. He’d been muttering stuff all day that we couldn’t understand. Reciting numbers—Celsius temperatures that would not have anything to do with what we do here, his usual gibberish about the ocean or water or something, healing this or that. Anyway, he disappeared that night.”
“Then what?”
“He must have been wandering aimlessly in the cold for hours—we don’t know. But at some point he wandered onto a frozen lake not far from here. A small lake, but the water is pretty deep. This couple drove by, saw that he had broken through the ice and was in big trouble, and rescued him. Pulled him out and got him to their car. Heroes, really. They started to get his wet clothes off of him, but they looked away for a few seconds and he started to cross the road again—said he had to go back, he had friends under the ice, in the water—crazy stuff. Just then a semi drove by. The poor driver didn’t have a chance to avoid hitting him. Enzo walked straight in front of the truck. He was killed instantly. The truck jackknifed severely, but the driver was okay. The whole scene was such a bloody mess that they had to close the road down for hours. We didn’t find out what happened until the next afternoon since Enzo wasn’t carrying any ID. We had filed a missing person report that morning, but you know how those usually go. Mike was devastated—utterly devastated. We all were, but especially him. I’m not surprised he doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s hiding his grief from us all, and mostly from you. I’m guessing he doesn’t want you to have to grieve for someone you didn’t know, to bear any of Mike’s own guilt. That’s the story, Kate, the whole story.”
“Oh, my God,” Kate murmured, shaking her head slowly. “Now I understand.” Tears welled up, even though she had never met the man so beloved by everyone at the company. “He was sick, but he never got to go to cryo like he and Mike assumed would happen. The redemption was ripped away. I get it. In an instant Mike lost his best friend, his business partner, his colleague. Instead of being alive and working, or in a cryopod here at ExitStrategy with a possible future, he’s six feet under. That wasn’t how it was supposed to go.”
“Yes, you’re right. And you see these—all the flowers? They don’t heal the pain, Kate. They’re here, mute. They don’t change anything, but I think we’ll be placing flowers here anyway for a long time, maybe forever. And we’ll never use C54, this pod—Enzo’s.”
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