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  THE LANCASTER RULE

  The Lancaster Trilogy Vol. I

  T.K. Toppin

  The Lancaster Rule – The Lancaster Trilogy Vol. I

  ©2017 by T.K. Toppin

  Cover Art © 2017 by Tomomi Ink

  Edited by Kriegler Editing Services

  Formatted by WriteIntoPrint.com

  All rights reserved.

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material contained herein is prohibited without express written permission of the author.

  This book was previously published by Champagne Books/Burst Books (2010) under the title The Lancaster Rule.

  Contents

  A Reflection

  AWAKE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  PART 2 – ALIVE

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  A Look Forward

  My Thanks…And a preamble

  About the Author

  A Reflection

  This is the future.

  My future.

  Not my descendants’…

  Mine.

  The year is 2333. Three hundred and twenty-seven years have passed since my birth. I was born in 2006; so long ago its practically ancient history.

  I’m only twenty-five. I went to sleep when I was twenty-four. I didn’t just lose a year; I lost three centuries!

  In the fall of 2030 I lived in a modest, two-story brownstone in a quiet neighborhood just north of downtown Toronto. Though a rental, it was my first grown-up home. I’d used up all my savings to cover the first and last, and made just enough as a part-time art instructor to make rent each month. Occasionally I’d sell a painting, and that cash went straight into my savings. But that place, that house, no longer exists. No one remembers the street name. No one even cares. The playgrounds and parks I used to play in as a kid are all gone, and the schools I went to, the streets I walked, the places, my friends…

  Gone.

  Like them, I should be dead. But I’m not.

  I look the same, just…older. And like an initiation rite to be allowed entry into this future, I have scars. I earned those, and brandish them like medals. In the years to come, they will grow pale and thin, but the memory of each will always remain sharp and painful like the day they were placed there. To see my scars gives me great pride. Without them, I’d have no life here.

  My time in this future has been short, but I’ve come a long way to get here. I look forward to each new day as if it were the first, and live it like it’s the last. Death has come knocking many times, especially since the life I lead now is a far cry from what it used to be. I’m a different person now. Very different. I’m stronger, and more aware.

  Many times I’ve cursed the day I climbed into my father’s suspension chamber. But, in the name of science, I helped Dad achieve the next level toward the advancement of stasis technology. While I curse myself, I also rejoice in it. If I hadn’t helped, my life might’ve been normal. I would’ve grown old with my family and friends, married and maybe had a family of my own, lived in a quaint little house with a dog and cat, and my painting.

  Maybe.

  But since I took that first step into the future I’ve learned the reality of death, of grieving, of being drowned in a sadness—a darkness bordering madness—that’s so unimaginably bleak. I’ve felt the pain of being wrenched from a place familiar, which I understood, and taken to a strange new world. And because I took that step, I’ve discovered the true meaning of living, and of love. And what it means to be alive.

  I am living my destiny.

  I am Josie Bettencourt, and I live.

  Really live.

  AWAKE

  Chapter 1

  “Josie, please forgive me.”

  Tears blurred my vision as I watched the image of my father struggle with emotion. He sat at his computer as it recorded his confession—three hundred and two years ago. I remembered that computer, that desk, littered with files and notes, scattered with odd bits of items, dust, coffee stains, and everywhere, discarded wrappers from butterscotch candies.

  “It was a mistake, I know…” he struggled on, swallowing hard, fighting with his own tears. “But I had no choice. They left me with no choice. I should’ve told you, but I—I couldn’t.” Dad’s voice wavered as he clasped his hands together, as if asking for my forgiveness. “And for that I’m truly, truly sorry.”

  A thick tear fell from his puffy eyes, evidence this wasn’t his first tear. The normally clear blue of his irises were bloodshot. He looked disheveled. Old. One side of his graying hair stuck out above his ears. I knew he’d been pulling at it in agitation. He did that, usually with his head bent over some complicated calculation or theory. Unlike now, where he looked like he was about to face the executioner.

  “You see,” he continued, “they’ve been after me for months—years, really. It’s when they found out I’d actually done it that things got tricky. They killed Peru—right in front of me! As if he was nothing. Just…killed him. It wasn’t a fall down the stairs, like the police report. They broke his neck. They wanted it that badly. My experiment…I’m so sorry, but it attracted the wrong sort of attention. I thought it was a secret, but I guess I must’ve slipped somewhere.”

  He paused and rubbed his face, quick and rough. I stared at his long, elegant fingers. Fingers I knew always smelled like his favorite candy. “I should’ve sent you away and never involved you in this. Oh, Josie. What have I done? I lied, I’m sorry. I told you sixty days, but, if you live, if you…by some small chance survive and you see this…please, oh God, please forgive me, please!” Dad broke down in spasms and wept.

  So did I. Wailing. The lancing pain of betrayal pierced me, leaving me drained. How could he?

  The woman tried to take the imager away from me. She clucked softly, insisting I’d had enough and should rest a little. I was done with rest. I’d been resting for nearly four weeks. I wanted to run outside and scream at the top of my voice. I wanted to pick something up and smash it to the ground. And I wanted to crawl into a ho
le. And die. Instead, I closed my eyes to make everything disappear.

  This was all some manic dream. That was it; I’d gone mad. What was I even doing here? I didn’t belong here. The holographic image of my father…clearly I’d just imagined it. Holotech wasn’t so stable and clear, nor had they invented such small devices to project the image from. This was all wrong. This wasn’t real.

  None of this was real!

  But the pain was real enough, a constant agony deep down in my very core. The physical aches from joints unused for centuries seemed dull compared to what I felt now, what I’d slowly been feeling since that day I woke up. Like an inevitable, impending sense of doom, it clenched from within as if in anticipation of whatever ill fate was to come.

  That day. I wished now I’d never woken up. Reality, or what passed for it, was too horrific to face. That day. The day I woke from my dreams and stepped into a nightmare…

  * * *

  It felt like wads of cotton and grit were embedded under my eyelids when I opened my eyes. They were dry, painful, and sensitive to the piercing light all around me. My mind swirled with chaos. A shooting pain, like the instant headache when you drink something cold on a sensitive tooth, blazed a trail straight to the depths of my brain. For a panicked second, I thought I was at the dentist and he forgot the anesthetic. I squeezed my eyes tight and groaned, but no sound came. My throat burned.

  Vague awareness filtered through my confused state. Something was wrong. My last coherent memory was lying down in the suspension chamber and giving my father a wink. But wait…sixty days sleeping shouldn’t make me feel this way.

  In a rush, I recalled the time I’d done it before and tried to make sense of it, compare it to what I experienced now. That time I’d slept for two weeks, and woken up with a mild headache, soreness in my lungs and throat from the respirator, and some discomfort in my nether regions from the catheter. And when Moo-Moo, our dog, had been under for two months, he simply woke up, shook himself, and went back to sleep. The next day he’d gone back to chasing the lab mice.

  Voices surrounded me in a muddle. A shot of fear sliced through me. Something was so very wrong. A woman; her tone sounded soothing, calm. The other, a man, his voice accented, piped with excitement. Perhaps my father had left me in the care of his research partner, Peru. That wasn’t his real name, only that he came from Peru. His real name was a four-word tongue twister that ended with Ximenez. Peru was easier. But something felt wrong. It smelled wrong. And Peru died before I went into the chamber.

  A heaviness pressed against me, like extreme tiredness. I couldn’t move, and had no strength to lift my head or move my eyes. My whole body seemed slack. Perhaps I was still in suspension. My coherent thoughts seemed broken, like erratic flashes, filled with intense imagery, then blackness. I must’ve fallen back into that darkness countless times, resuming muddling dreams about painting a cloud but having no white paint, only ochre. And the cloud kept changing into a roiling ocean, and in that briny abyss bobbed people, places, and objects I knew, dotted with lab mice like the froth from the waves. They were all laughing and smiling, happy, waving absurdly at me, and someone I didn’t recognize kept telling me that it smelled wrong and Peru was dead because he jumped off the stairs.

  I’m not certain how long this lasted, but it seemed like forever. Days, weeks…months? Between sporadic moments of consciousness and semi-consciousness, my eyes finally adjusted enough to show me a spartanly furnished room. A simple table at my left, on which sat a silver canister, a small roundish object, and water in a glass shaped like a teardrop. I spent an inordinate amount of time just staring at the items, focusing and refocusing my eyes on them. Light passed through the glass, reflected on the silverware, and splashed a rainbow of colors like a halo. Above me a series of small round lights clustered at the center of the ceiling. The overall color of the room was something close to yellow, but more like…ochre. When I was able, with effort, I heaved my head to my right. A wobble of dizziness blurred my vision, and when it passed, an upholstered chair on wheels greeted me. Next to it was another small table littered with instruments very similar to those found at the dentist, which made me frown. I turned left again. A moderate-sized window graced the wall; the glass pane was clouded and permitted only light. I wished I could see out from it to get a sense of where I was. What time of day it was. Anything. Maybe Dad was just beyond that window, and I was in some sort of quarantine. Could he see me? And I vaguely recalled hearing a dog barking. Was that Moo-Moo?

  I grew aware of the woman. She’d come in silently, sat on the edge of my bed and touched my forehead, then moved to the chair and pulled up close. I watched, detached, as she poked and touched me, and ran smooth hands over my face and body, gently massaging. Then she kneaded the heels on her palms into my arms and legs and all over my thin, wasted body. She stuck things on me, then wedged a straw in my mouth and made me drink something vile. I got an injection I barely felt, and a bath, with a soft cloth soaked in hot water, that made me sleepy. I must’ve fallen asleep, because the next day, at least I think it was since the woman wore different clothes, she did the same massages again. She continued this many times over. I lost count, but every day, throughout these ministrations, an immense tiredness and lethargy stamped down on me. I couldn’t even muster the strength to talk. My throat was still raw and swollen. Each time I wished for death to take me, since the mere effort of staying alive was exhausting.

  Yesterday the woman hacked off my hair. It had grown so long. It confused me even more. When I saw the length she’d taken off and stuffed into a bin, I knew I must’ve been incapacitated for…years. Fear crept into me. How long had I been asleep? My weak neck could barely support my head, let alone the lengths of hair on it, so the woman had kept it braided and looped up over the pillow, out of the way. When she finished with my hair, she raised my arms and pressed a warm, fabric-like patch under each of my arms. I registered a tingling sensation as if someone was sucking as hard as they could on my skin, making the blood rush there to turn purple. When she removed the patches, I saw my own brown armpit hairs embedded in them. I barely heard her say something about them being gone for good, and that I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. She did the same to my legs and crotch, winking, saying every girl needed a spa treatment to feel like a new woman.

  Whether it was the removal of all that hair, or feeling lighter from it, I felt a little better. Enough that my focus was sharper for longer periods and a deluge of questions were lining up to be answered. But my throat failed to cooperate. Instead, I stared out the clouded window, thinking of my father, hoping he was behind it. He had all the answers, if only I could just see him. Why wasn’t I allowed to see him?

  Most of the time, my body was encased in some silky material, which made my skin tingle cool like mint as it warmed and soothed. Days followed, weeks, forever it seemed; I flitted between sleep and restless awareness such that my conscious scenes were like random snapshots. Sometimes the woman sat with me, talking softly and smiling, her auburn hair held tight in a ponytail, her exotic face calming as I watched her. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if it was all just a dream.

  Her name was Madge. With a mix of Asian and Middle Eastern ethnicities, she was tall and had an etherealness to her. She appeared to be a young sixty with only a few, thin wrinkles on her face. But her eyes were ancient, as if they had seen many things, and added to her sage look. From under the hairline, along her forehead and temples and creeping out from over her ears, I saw an intricate network of tattoos. They appeared to be vines and flowers, branches and leaves with birds and small creatures entwined and dancing together. And like henna tattoos, she also had them trailing along the tops of her fingers and up the back of her hand, where they ended in delicate flowers around her wrists. Madge had dark gray eyes that sometimes looked black, and her nose was long, graceful. Her full lips were stained with a sort of reddish-orange. Perhaps she’d had them tattooed to that color. She also had the most calming smile. And
best of all, she smelled of verbena and other exotic herbs, like she’d just crawled out from those vines that graced her body.

  The man, Madge’s husband, was Quin, and sometimes accompanied her. He had delicate, fine-boned features, and was almost gaunt like how people who were too preoccupied to eat looked. He scurried about in an excitable manner, squirrely, monkeyish. Without meaning too, my lips twitched every time I saw him. His rosy complexion and an expression that always seemed to be surprised, in wait for a good joke, were comical. Quin smiled with uncontained joy, chattering mostly to himself. I saw immediately what a happy soul he was. His twinkling hazel eyes were enchanting, darting about while he talked and talked…and talked. Sometimes he laughed at what he said, seemingly ignoring everyone else. I didn’t understand half of what he said, mostly because I couldn’t hear him coherently and my brain still seemed fogged and unfocused.

  My arms were the first to start moving, but they ached constantly with sharp pins and needles. They wouldn’t function normally, and lifting anything weighing more than a feather, let alone being able to hold onto a glass of water, was difficult. My muscles had atrophied so much it was like I only had skin over my bones. The hideous sight of my limbs brought fresh tears to my eyes each time I saw them.

  Despite the steady supply of saline patches adhered to my arm, I thirsted constantly for water as I stayed awake for longer periods. Then my voice came back, and I was able to make a few hoarse grunts and groans, and moaning wails for cries. In my mind I wanted to scream: Where am I? What’s happening? Instead, all I managed was a raspy whisper, to which Madge would soothe me with “rest now,” assuring me all would be explained soon. Despite her reassuring tone, I couldn’t dispel a feeling of foreboding. Everything felt wrong. The edges of hysteria were slowly creeping in. I desperately wanted to know what had happened. But I knew the answer would scare me. Terrify me.

  Weeks later, when I was still horribly thin but my legs had finally cooperated and I could at least sit up on my own without assistance, they finally told me. They sat with me and told me everything. Everything. Some parts I needed telling twice, as I must’ve looked as though I didn’t understand. When they finished I lay down, curled myself into a ball and stared at the clouded window. Dad wasn’t behind the glass after all. No one was there. No one I knew was even alive. I was all alone. There was nothing else. Everything was…gone.