The Reincarnation

Grey had lost his quarry. He damned himself for following the tracker instead of going with his gut feeling. Now it might take weeks to find them. He calmed himself and plotted his next move.

He had resigned himself to finding Johnny Rotten again when the MCA Reconnaissance Lab called with the location of the car the Golden Child and the nurse had stolen. It was in a park. It was empty. Grey and his Army drove to it. On the floor under the passenger seat Grey found a gold tag with the name Hannibal on it. It was pried apart. Comparing it with the chip Grey found in the toilet, he knew this was where his quarry had been.

He instructed his Army to conduct a search for Johnny’s vehicle.

The man tied up in the kitchen chair stirred, rolled his head, then lifted it. He looked around the room, confused.

“Holy Christ,” Donna exclaimed. “I think that proves Laura’s theory.”

Laura jostled David, who sat up. “Did it work?” John’s head dropped like a marionette’s whose strings were cut.

“It sure did. But what if he did come with backup? We better get out of here.” Donna motioned toward the door, then ran over and grabbed her laptop computer, putting it under her arm. Then she picked up her tiny telephone – a device that didn’t look anything like a phone to David – and put it in her pants pocket.

David and Laura snatched up the rest of their things, and, once outside, realized how tight the squeeze would be. Fitting four people in the Bug wasn’t going to be easy, especially when one of them was the equivalent of a cadaver.

“I can walk over to the quarry,” David volunteered. “Think you can handle him?”

“Sure – just don’t fall asleep on the way and wake him up,” Donna answered.

“You can be sure of that. Anything I should bring?”

“Nope, everything we need’s under the hood. Let’s get out of here.”

Donna and David put John in the back seat of the Bug, his hands and feet securely tied. David walked toward the woods while Laura got herself situated in the passenger seat.

“See you soon,” she said to David as he made his way under the canopy.

Grey waited at the park while his Army conducted the search for Johnny Rotten. He had never been this far north before. The park vexed him. He could see trees, grass, birds. Nature bothered him. He felt unsure of himself this close to it.

Most of all, he didn’t recognize the things he was smelling. Soil, grass, dew, a tree-scented wind – these were new to him. He tried to study them, but didn’t know how to pinpoint them, to separate them. They seemed to come at him in a mad rush, all intermingled. Was this smell soil, and that one grass? Was this one a tree, and that one the leaves on the ground? He investigated.

By sniffing the grass he smelled at least two distinct scents. He pulled a clump of it up and rubbed it between his fingers. He smelled his fingers. Grass. He put his nose in the hole left where he uprooted the grass. Soil. He picked up a leaf, crumpled it, and smelled it. Leaf. He walked around the park, picking up things and smelling them. All of it was new to him. New smells to be catalogued. He was happy, and almost forgot he was on a manhunt as he walked around the park.

From a distance, it looked like he was skipping.

David made his way out of the woods and walked around the quarry. He was surprised to find Donna and Laura already behind the bluffs. Donna was right, they were totally out of sight. He helped Donna extract John from the back seat, wondering how they had ever managed to manhandle him in there in the first place.

“Okay, its time to get some answers,” David announced, handing the gun to Laura, who quickly passed it off to Donna as if it were hot to the touch. David nodded to Donna. “Keep him covered.”

David sat on the ground next to John, pushing.

John opened his eyes, confused. David looked at him with confidence and intrigue; he felt powerful next to this unkempt waif. By pushing, and remaining calm, David found that both he and John could be awake at the same time.

“Who are you? And why did you try to kill me?” David demanded.

“I wasn’t trying to kill you – or maybe I was.” John shook his head violently. “Who are you?” John tried to move his hands. “Why am I tied up?” He sat up. “And what the hell have you done to me?”

“Let’s start at the beginning. My name is David Sperling. I was part of an experiment and frozen for twenty-five years.” David paused, recollecting. “I woke up from the freezer last Friday night. I was in the Lab for a few days...up until Tuesday night. Then I left and went to the cabin we just left.”

“I remember...barely. I was at an office party Friday night and basically lost my mind. Saturday...I was blacked out for most of it. Then I saw you on TV with my cat,” John pointed to Hannibal, who had crawled onto David’s lap, and now stared at John with disgust, “and decided to find you. Something told me you were the cause of all my problems.”

“Well, maybe I am, but why kill me?”

“I wasn’t going to kill you, I just wanted some answers. I mean, look at me.”

Donna shuddered, but kept the gun held out.

“I see what you mean,” David continued. “But how did you find me?”

“A pull. Here.” John pointed with his chin to his chest.

“In your chest. Just like me. The Church was right. They planned this – they expected it.”

“The Church? MCA? They did this?”

“I don’t think they knew exactly what would happen, but they set it up to anyway.”

“Is this some new disease of theirs? Why can’t I remember anything? Why do I smell so bad? Why am I losing my eyesight? What’s happening to me?”

David tried to send soothing energy to John to calm him. “I think it’s because you’re supposed to be dead – not dead, but never born. Not never born, but...not supposed to exist the way you did. Your soul...our soul –” David paused, not knowing how to go on. “When I was frozen, I think my soul went into you. Now I’m awake –”

“And you want it back?” John went on, surer, angrier. “You’re the reason I’m like this. It’s your fault. Do you have any idea what I’ve been through? Do you know what it’s like to lose your...soul? What it’s like to have your soul torn out of your body, leaving you an empty pit – leaving you with only a hollow, moldering shell?”

John was furious and desperate, and David could feel it, not just in John’s words but in the sensation in his chest. It was stronger the angrier John got. David felt his ch’i pulling further from himself, and coldly realized that John could take it all if he got angry enough. David quickly “pulled” it back in much the same way he had been pushing it to John. He was relieved to feel it flow back to him and see John immediately calm down; going limp, but remaining conscious.

“It won’t do you any good to get ugly. It may be unfair, but I can knock you right out if I want to. Let’s try to discuss this rationally, okay?”

John felt sapped of his energy. He tried to speak, but couldn’t work his jaw. He felt a warmth in his chest, and assumed this was David’s doing. He found his voice. “Okay. Just keep me conscious. I’ll try not to get too emotional.”

“Let’s go further back. Tell me about your life and I’ll tell you about mine...”

David and John talked for hours as Laura and Donna made up their makeshift campground. David and John went over their lives broadly at first, then slowed them down after college. John’s past was extremely sketchy to his memory, with huge sections of it simply gone. He tried to piece it together, but there wasn’t much left.

David, though, could somehow fill in the gaps. When John was stumped with how to go on, David would continue the story, as if he himself had lived John’s life. When this happened, David became more and more certain that buried deep within himself were experiences he only needed a jostling from John to remember. After a brief reminder from John, these experiences would bloom eerily in his mind. He was filled with a sustained feeling of déjà vu. Whenever he had gotten this feeling before, it would disappear before he could analyze it. But now, his mind kept up, and rode along with it.

They both learned a great deal about each other. They’d had many parallels in life, some that might have been coincidental, others that were too close to be. By the time David had to stop because he was too hungry to go on, he realized that John’s life seemed to be a continuation of his. John had merely picked up where he had left off. John worked in a different field, but the qualities David found so lacking in himself, mainly confidence, were experienced in John’s life. Where David always felt like he was floundering in a play he hadn’t written, John wrote his own, demanding from life what David thought would be given to him. It was really remarkable, and both David and John felt a feeling of completeness the more they talked.

But when they stopped, and their conversation ended, the eerie sensation vanished with it and was gone. It became unseizable, and it left them both with a feeling of loss and isolation, of homelessness.

“We’re soulmates,” David concluded, looking at John with a genuine smile.