Which was exactly what his father had said, apparently, when Norton’s mother told him she was pregnant.
The Asian moved closer and whispered to the girl.
“I-f-th-at-i-s-tr-ue-yo-u-ar-e-th-e-ol-d-es-t-pe-r-so-n-e-v-er-to-b-e-re-vi -v-ed.”
“Revived?” he said quickly. “You mean like I was… dead?”
“M-an-y-ye-ar-s-h-av-e-g-on-e-b-y-si-n-ce-yo-ur-ti-me-J-oh-n-W-ay-ne -ev-er-y-th-i-ng-i-s-v-er-y-di-ff-er-en-t-n-o-w.”
Years…
Many years…
He’d guessed. But how many was “many?” Five? Ten? Long enough for a translation machine to exist. That must have been American know-how. Asians couldn’t have invented that—all they ever did was copy.
“C-an-I-g-et-so-me-re-al-f-oo-d? A-bur-g-er-a-n-d-fr-i-es?”
“A-wh-at-a-n-d-fl-i-es?”
“Am-er-i-can-f-oo-d.”
“Th-ere-i-s-no-Am-er-i-ca-i-t-do-es-n-ot-ex-i-st-an-y-m-or-e.”
“What? This isn’t America? Where am I? Wh-er-e-am-I? Wh-at-d-o-yo-u-w-an-t-me-f-or?”
“I-am-a-a-a-re-por-t-er-y-es-a-nd-I-am-he-re-to-to-in-ter-vi-ew-y-ou-J o-hn-Wa-yn-e.”
“Who-i-s-he?” Norton gestured to the man.
“Br-en-dan-i-s-yo-ur-ow-n-er.”
His owner …
America no longer existed, Mandy had said.
The greatest country in the world was gone.
The gooks had taken over.
And they’d reintroduced slavery.
Norton just couldn’t believe it.
No more burgers and fries?
CHAPTER TWO
This was the worst dream of her short life.
She’d had the dream before, over and over.
She was falling, forever falling.
She always woke up in terror, sometimes screaming, sometimes too scared even to whisper.
She always woke before she hit the ground. If she didn’t, it would be too late. There would be no screaming, not even a whisper. Because she’d be dead. Killed by her dream.
She always knew this was how she would die one day. One night.
She would fall asleep, then fall while asleep, then die.
It was far worse than a nightmare because it had happened.
Or almost happened.
It was her earliest memory.
But over the years, she’d grown more and more uncertain where memory ended and unreality began.
She remembered that the devil had tried to kill her, to throw her from the top of a high building. She was saved by her father, and instead he became the victim. He was the one who was hurled down through the clouds, down to the ground far below.
Her father was killed, that much was true. She was brought up by her mother, and she was still young when her mother also died. Since then, she’d been alone in the world.
And the world had always been trying to kill her.
Perhaps the recurring dream was a premonition of her ultimate fate.
Because she was falling.
Falling an impossible distance.
This time she was wide awake.
This time would be the last time.
Because this time it would kill her.
CHAPTER THREE
Years had gone by.
Wayne Norton now knew how many: over three hundred of them.
He’d passed the centuries in a state of suspended animation, less than alive, more than dead. While he lay motionless, the world had moved on, changing almost beyond recognition.
Mandy had told him this. And he believed her. Because he could see it all on television.
The screen alone was almost enough to convince him. It was the size of one of the walls in his room. His room, not his cell. He was a guest here. Like a hotel guest because he couldn’t leave until he paid his bill. Which was why Brendan owned him.
What he saw on the huge screen was the clincher. There were so many channels, all in colour. An infinite number of programmes, every one of them from a world that definitely wasn’t 1968. He could even switch stations without having to get up. There was no way all this could be a hoax. Why would anyone bother faking it for him?
If it was on television, it had to be true.
Norton was in the future.
He’d been kept in a deep-freeze for years and years, then thawed out and revived. It was similar to the way a bear hibernated for the winter then woke up again in the spring. For Norton, it had been a very long winter.
Brendan had defrosted him, but who had originally frozen him?
The last thing Norton could recall was being in the basement of a casino, but why had he been there? What had happened earlier that day?
He had no idea. His last day in the twentieth century, and it was as if he’d forgotten everything because it was all so long ago.
Mr. Ash had been with a man Norton didn’t recognise. There were also three more men, who held the other two captive until Norton intervened. And until Mr. Ash shot them. Then, then…?
Then: nothing.
A few centuries had gone by.
It must have been Mr. Ash who’d put him on ice. He hadn’t liked Norton dating his daughter, but burying him alive just to break them up seemed like an overreaction.
Norton tried not to think about Susie. She was dead by now. Long dead. Everyone he knew was dead. His parents, but that was to be expected. They were old, in their forties, so they’d have been dead soon. Susie had been so young, so full of life. But not anymore.
What had happened to her? She would have married, had children. Even they were long gone. She must have wondered what ever happened to Norton. Her father had probably come up with some story or other to explain his disappearance, told her to forget him and find someone else.
Mr. Ash must have been one of the mob, and Norton had walked in on some kind of Mafia dispute. It was far too late to do anything about bringing him to justice. Whatever crimes he’d committed, by now the statute of limitations had expired. As had Mr. Ash.
Unless he wasn’t dead, Norton realised.
He could still be alive in another time tomb. Mr. Ash must have had the cryonic chamber built for himself, and he wouldn’t have wasted it on Norton if that meant sacrificing his own chance of being reborn.
If there was one freezer, there could be two. If there were two, there could be three.
Was Mrs. Ash around somewhere? Probably not, because a man like Mr. Ash wouldn’t have wanted to spend a permanent vacation into the future with his wife. He was always going off on “business trips,” and this was the longest trip of all.
What about Susie? Was she ready to be reanimated? Could it already have happened? Was she waiting for him?
Norton knew that he’d been frozen by Mr. Ash to get rid of him, but most people had been cryonically treated when they were very old, even dead—and no one got much older than that.
If Susie was still around, she’d be really old. What if she was say, fifty?
They’d sworn to love each other forever, but Norton had never imagined forever would last so long. He still loved Susie, but only as she was in 1968. Not some old grandmother!
He wouldn’t want to see her like that. He wanted to remember her as she was, so young, so beautiful.
It would be best if he didn’t remember her at all, if he forgot everything. The past was gone. He was here now, and he had to make the most of it.
But he wasn’t sure where “here” was. If America didn’t exist, was it because the Union had split apart? Was he in Nevada? Did Nevada still exist?
That was something else he had to forget. Las Vegas. Nevada. The United States of America. They were history.
Wayne Norton was also history. He was the oldest person ever to be brought back to life. His age wasn’t measured in the number of years he’d been alive, but in the number he’d been in suspended animation.