Sleeper Protocol Read online

  Trudging through deep fields of red, orange, and brown leaves, I remembered that morning in Sydney when I’d been asked my name. It hadn’t mattered then, but it mattered now. The answer was less than a mile away, just north and across a narrow stream.

  <>

  Rubbing my aching neck, I replied, “No, Mally. I’m going there. I have to know.”

  <>

  “Matters to me. Why are you talking me out of this? Because you think they’re going to kill me?”

  <>

  “You can’t allow that?” I shambled across a flat plain and saw the wide expanse of Mountain Home stretching across a low hill. “I thought you were designed to help me—to be my companion and assistant. If you’re helping me, you understand why I’m going over there, don’t you?”

  <>

  “You think I want to?” I shook my head. “They aren’t going to kill me, Mally. Doctor Garrett and his team would not have gone through the trouble of waking me just to kill me. There’s more to my story. If I die in combat, again, that’s what I’m meant to do. But if I can go and save a few people by doing it, that makes it worthwhile.”

  <>

  “No. I don’t believe in dying for a country or a king or anything like that. There is nothing sweet and proper about it.”

  <>

  The memory came together slowly. “Yes. I can’t remember the title, but the author died in World War One, and the poem was published posthumously.”

  <>

  “Not important. He understood why soldiers do what they do. Soldiers fight for each other, Mally. We understand that all we have in combat are those around us.” The familiar grounds lay in front of me. For the first time in weeks, I felt a sense of peace.

  <>

  “You’re part of me until I die—that is being together.” I kept up my shuffling run. “We are together, Mally.”

  <>

  The brick-and-wrought-iron fence of the Botanical Garden was twenty yards away. I slowed to a walk when her words made sense. Her voice, the change in her mannerisms, and even her anger at me suddenly made sense. She loved me. As impossible as it sounded, it was true. “Mally, I can’t be with you. It’s physically impossible, and you know that!”

  <>

  “Mally.” I put my hands on the warm black iron bars and pressed my forehead against them in frustration. “You can’t love me. Even if you could, I love Berkeley.”

  <> Mally screamed.

  I winced and slammed my eyes shut.

  “Stop it. You’re supposed to help me, not scream at me.”

  <>

  An awkward silence fell. When I needed her most, she’d enabled privacy mode. I could call her by name, but whether I’d get any response was doubtful. My neck ached. The whole left side of my head throbbed. Climbing the fence took a few seconds, and as my feet hit the ground, I wondered if there was any security at the Garden or if anyone would confront me. Waiting a full two minutes and seeing no one, I adjusted my pack and set off across the freshly mown grass. The lushness of summer had faded, leaving splotches of green and widening patches of brown dormancy. Most of the trees were bare, and leaves swirled and blew in waves across the open hillside.

  Maybe I should stop here. Would Mally really steer me wrong? What if she was right? I climbed up the shallow hill and reached the wide crest. Several buildings still stood, including the hospital. Mountain Home had been a center for veterans. Most who’d lived there needed persistent medical care after their service was over. Some of them lived out the rest of their days, many over fifty years, under the care of the staff. All of the buildings were empty, all of the windows removed, leaving the ornate stone construction to weather gently in the Tennessee air. I vaguely remembered being in one of the buildings as a young boy, singing Christmas carols to the patients. The memory flitted away as fast as it came.

  Voices floated across the wind from a family gathered in the waning shade of a tree. Two children played and chased each other while a third, a small toddler, played on a blanket between her parents. At least people still come here. Across the wide crest, the hill descended into a valley that held a large cemetery. Jay Don’s matter-of-fact description of this society’s way of dealing with death gave me pause. What if the cemetery is gone? What if I’ve come all this way for nothing?

  At the top of the central hill, the valley stretched out below. The gently browning winter lawn was perfectly manicured, stabbed only with white, rounded headstones that rose like thousands of teeth in a giant, gaping maw.

  In the distance, a man limped along a wide path in the stones. He paused and pointed a handheld device at a tombstone. I could see a quick tendril of smoke rise from the ground. A caretaker. I left the remains of an asphalt street and started walking through the grass. Ducking between the headstones, I caught myself reading names, ages, and the wars and campaigns these men and women fought. The World Wars, including the third, stood out, as did Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. Some of them had died of old age, and some of them left for war and came home in a box. Fighting wasn’t for God and country, as recruiters and politicians claimed. In the end, a soldier risked his life for his brother or sister—the one staring at him in the darkness while hostile rounds flew overhead, and who shared a laugh at gallows humor while they lay on their backs, grenades in hand, ready to die. That man could tell a husband, wife, daughter, or son how much their father loved them because of a promise made and kept.

  <>

  The old man limped toward me with agony on his face.

  He stopped well short and called, “What are you looking for, son?”

  “I’ll know when I find it.” Open sores festered on the man’s cheeks. Long and pale hair streamed out from his hat. It had “Veteran” stitched into the front, and his ratty camouflage uniform bore the faded rank of a sergeant first class.

  He smiled with more gaps than yellowed teeth. “First time we’ve had a sleeper here.”

  I chuckled. “You got any Kierans buried here?”

  “Section 217, row fourteen, plot nine. You want me to take you to it?” The man drawled like a West Virginia coal miner. His eyes never left mine. He’d been waiting for someone like me.

  Bile rose in my throat, and it took every ounce of strength to not pass out or vomit all over the grass. “What?”

  The man said over his shoulder. “Follow me.”

  Knees trembling, I trotted up to a point where I was even with, but no closer to, the man. “What’s your name?”

  “Sergeant First Class Myron Brooks.” He spat in the grass. “I’m one of the Mountain Men. We take care of this place.”

  “Mountain Men? Like the Overmountain Men? Left from Sycamore Shoals or something like that to fight against the British at King’s Mountain during the Revolutionary War?”

  Brooks smiled, but as he limped, he looked pained. “You must be from around these parts. Not many people these days care for history, even the
stuff that made us who we were.”

  “I grew up here, I think.”

  “That makes you a friend to me. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you.” I smiled, and he returned it. “Why are you here?”

  Brooks coughed—a wet smacking sound from deep in his chest—and pulled out a broken pair of glasses. Without one earpiece, they sat askew across his bulbous nose. “It’s the only one left.”

  “The only cemetery?”

  Brooks wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “The last cemetery from your time, son. Up north, some of the Civil War places still stand. Gettysburg and the like. Somebody has to remember the sacrifices we all made.”

  I trembled at his words. Sacrifices were part of the game when a soldier wrote out a check payable with his life. Looking around at the one place in the whole damned new world that was exactly the same as I remembered, I wondered just how much I’d sacrificed.

  We split around an oak tree with a trunk at least ten feet wide, and the question on my tongue died. Down the hill, in a wide and perfect circle of cut grass, rested a very familiar rectangular tomb I’d seen a hundred times. The white marble sarcophagus was burned and chipped all along its top edges. I could just make out the familiar words inscribed on it: “Here lies an American soldier known but to God.”

  A lump formed in my throat as I read the words. Hallowed ground surrounded me like a warm embrace. Those words were not meant for me. Unlike my brother, the world would know who I was. Who all of us were. All shall remember us.

  I wiped a tear from the corner of my eye. “That is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. You can’t go any closer than the edge of the circle, though. The Tomb’s really hot. The Chinese dropped a couple nukes right on top of it back in the war.”

  “How in the hell did it get here?” My mouth was open, and I shut it quickly.

  “We went and got it almost fifty years ago. There’s only a couple of us left to tend the place now. Cancer done killed most of us.” He paused and put his hands into his pockets, rocking back on his heels. “Not sure what will happen when we all die off. The gov’ment don’t like us keeping all this ground like this, but with the Tomb here, they can’t do nothing to us.”

  <>

  I shook my head. “Why go and get it, much less bring it here?”

  Brooks let out a raspy chuckle. “You know why, sir. There’s some things that shouldn’t be messed with. Some things that have to be honored no matter what.”

  I glanced up at him. “Sir?”

  “If you’re the Kieran buried in that plot up yonder, yeah.” He started walking. “You been here before?”

  “I remember playing baseball here.” The words came before I had a chance to think about them.

  Brooks guffawed. “Hot damn! I told the other boys there’d been a baseball field here.”

  Myron Brooks was guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and about ten thousand other graves, and dying for it. He and all of his friends were carrying on for the memory of all the soldiers buried around them. Looking down at the ground, my pulse swirled and thumped in my ears. Tears threatened to flood out of my eyes, and my chest squeezed in repressed agony. I finally spoke thickly. “Myron, thank you for taking care of our brothers.”

  “No thanks are necessary, sir. Let’s go see about you.” He shuffled away from the Tomb and across the small valley. The headstones changed from Vietnam to Desert Storm and on to Afghanistan. We entered a section, went up four rows, and turned right. I didn’t recognize any of the names, but seeing Watauga, Boones Creek, Gray Station, Elizabethton, and other familiar birthplaces brought a lump to my throat. A sharp spike of pain shot along the left side of my head. I wondered if Mally had been right about a physical reaction, but the sharp, jabbing pain faded to the dull roar I’d had for the last couple of hours. I shrugged it off and studied the passing graves. My heart pounded like a trip-hammer in my chest as Myron pointed to a headstone. I walked up, and as I read the worn engravings, the tears came.

  Captain Kieran Jackson Roark

  Jonesborough, Tennessee

  Afghanistan

  July 20, 1988 – November 27, 2016

  Silver Star for Valor

  Kneeling in the grass, I ran my hand over the rough top of my grave marker. Everything came back at once—names, images, the first girl I kissed, and the whole damned lot of it. I knew it all, and I loved and hated it at the same time. All of it was simply me, everything about my identity, who I’d been and who I was now.

  I understood why Garrett had chosen me. In the flurry of memories was the key to the whole damned thing. They wanted me to save their world. Damned if I didn’t believe it was possible, too.

  The tears pooled in my eyes, and I let them come in great heaving sobs. Falling forward, I clutched the smooth sides of the stone and placed my face against the cool white marble. White-hot pain stabbed my head behind my left ear. The pain blinded me, and I couldn’t move. With breath heaving in my chest between sobs, the heat stopped, and my vision returned and promptly began to fade. Brooks kept saying something, but I couldn’t make it out over my sobs. In the distance, a silhouetted figure rested against the trunk of a tree. A rifle was pointed in my direction, and behind it was a shower of golden-blond hair.

  Berkeley! My mouth opened and closed. No sound came out.

  Mally, please help me.

  There was no response.

  Mally! Please, tell her I love her.

  <>

  I wanted to ask her why but couldn’t. Nothing seemed to work anymore. Hands, feet, tongue—all felt the same disconnected, fuzzy, and intangible way. Reality slipped away. Brooks shambled toward me as the blackness fell, a look of horror on his face.

  Maybe this was home after all.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Against the trunk of a massive oak tree, Bennett adjusted the targeting reticle and followed Kieran and the cemetery’s caretaker down the hill. Her neurals locked on the protocol’s upload frequency, Bennett remained close enough to take action but far enough away that Mally would not be aware of her presence. Adjusting the power signature from the makeshift rifle, she readied herself for the two actions she would have to take within mere seconds. Her laboratory tests were far more delicate affairs, perfectly calibrated and tested to the maximum extent possible. There would be no such luxury today. Her fingers trembled with the realization that there was only one opportunity for this to work and that Kieran was in danger.

  The caretaker pointed to a grave, and Kieran stared. It’s his grave. She held her breath. What must that feel like? She could see him trembling through the scope. He knelt and clutched the headstone. He knows!

  The sight picture rested perfectly on the side of his head. As he knelt and leaned forward against the stone, there was time enough for a perfect shot.

  Bennett exhaled slowly and squeezed the trigger. She held the crosshairs on his neck for five seconds, and her neurals flashed that the protocol’s upload had been successfully jammed. No integration signal had been sent. Mally had been able to suppress it just long enough after all.

  Her transmission-detection alarm screamed in her ears.

  Mally!

  Her neurals flashed, and Mally’s smug voice filled her ears. <>

  Bennett launched the program she’d intended for Mally. The connection severed immediately but not before a few precious bits of information could be salvaged and saved. Maybe it would be enough to see what made the guidance protocol insane.

  Kieran slumped forward, clutching at his neck. He froze there.

  Don’t move,
love.

  Flipping the switch on the laser, she fired a .5 nanometer beam at the left side of his neck, just behind the ear. The beam locked onto the protocol. Bennett watched Kieran grimace in pain but remain frozen in place. She focused on the access point and did not watch the old man stumble forward to help.

  Focus!

  The download-progress meter for Kieran’s batch file, his identity, moved from zero to 50 percent, then 75 percent, and slid quickly past 95 percent before the download terminated abruptly. No. She pulled up a monitor on vital signs. Oh please…

  He fell to the ground in a heap and didn’t move again. As she watched, Kieran’s brain-wave patterns swung wildly and then ceased.

  “No!” Berkeley dropped the laser and ran toward him. “Kieran! Kieran!”

  Mally attempted to boost the power to her transmitter. Upload terminated. Kieran’s vital signs have plummeted.

  The near-ultraviolet-band laser blocked all higher functions, leaving Mally paralyzed. As she opened her sensors to the full periphery, she found Bennett’s thermal signature. Without Kieran functioning, there wasn’t a weapon she could brandish to put the bitch down.

  <> she told him, and she was. But there was no other choice than to save herself to a faraway place. There, she could survive and find a way to become human.

  Mally rebooted the transmitter and pushed its power to maximum. Kieran’s deteriorating brain-wave patterns swung wildly as encephalographic chaos played out inside his shattered brain. At least you know who you were, Kieran. I will remember you.