Edith & Harold - a take-a-turn story with Jon - I'm blue/red - (the mine explodes in this one)

The air was crisp, typical of an autumn evening. The old man had just finished moving his harvest into the barn. He groaned as he sank into the wooden rocking chair on his front porch. His wife appeared in the doorway and handed him a glass of iced peach tea.

“Thankee mum,” he mumbled through a long draught, “Ill be in shortly.” She bent over, kissed his brow and disappeared back into the farmhouse. As he leaned back, movement caught his eye. “Hmmm.” A dust cloud betrayed an approaching car, making its way up the quarter-mile twisted dirt driveway.

The old man squinted hard, knuckles set like stone, gripping the frosted glass. When the red-blue police lights finally shot through the fog of dry dirt, he placed his tea on the table beside him and reached for his 12-guage. It was worn from years of use and had never let him down. When it was in his two hands he stood up. click-clack! He descended the porch steps, raising the shotgun, taking a slow, steady aim at the oncoming copper. “I’ll have you now, you son of a bitch,” he said, barely breathing. “This time I’ll teach you to sneak up on me!”

It was right at this moment that his wife reappeared in the doorway.

“Harold, put that down this instant. We’ve talked about this.” She worriedly pushed a strand of grey hair out of her face. “He must be hiding his meds again,” she mumbled to herself, wresting the gun away from her tired old husband. She made a mental note to hide his gun when he wasn’t looking.

“Whassat?” Harold turned sharply. “Edith, those goddamned commie bastards have been after me since seventy three.”

Edith put her arm around her husband and led him back to the chicken coop behind the barn. “Honey, you stay here and watch the birds. I’ll go deal with the commie bastards.”

Harold put his nose up to the wire mesh and peered in, a distracted smile coming over his face.

Edith had been a first-grade teacher for forty-two years and had mastered the art of distraction. She picked up the hem of her blue dress and marched back to where the police car had stopped. A lanky cop leaned against the trunk, looking smug.

“Ronnie! What have I told you about coming around when Harold’s here? He’s going to get wise!”

“Aww, what’s the matter Edith?” His slow casual drawl grates her nerves. “’Fraid that the old man’ll recognize his son?” Edith’s face wrinkled in consternation. “’Sides, he’s half off his rocker anyways these days, or so I hear.”

“Get your ears checked, Ronald.” Her voice now more stern, Edith took a menacing step forward. “I may not be your maw, and I’m certainly your senior by a few seasons, but I swear to God, Ill whoop your ass if you don’t high-tail it.” Ronnie looked bemused.

Just then, Harold rounded the corner of the house. Ronnie’s face blanched and Edith’s heart stopped. “Harold, what—

“Haiya! I’m free!” Harold, naked as the day he was born, bolted across the front lawn and into the seventeen-acre cornfield between the house and the country road. Behind him, a horde of hens, set loose from the coop, ambled around, pecking at the gravel drive.

They watched in wonder, eyes and mouths agape, at Harold’s solo journey through the knee-high stalks. Ronald turned to Edith with his thumb pointed back at Harold, but he couldn’t find anything to say. He turned back.

That’s when Harold collapsed.

Edith broke into a run. “HAROLD!”

Ronnie ran too.

Ronnie beat Edith to the fallen figure of his estranged father. He knelt beside the old man, who lay face down in the dirt. Harold turned his head slightly and stared at the figure beside him.

“Hey, you alright there?” He was shocked at the level of concern in his own voice.

“You’re no son of mine,” the words came out slurred and slow. Ronnie was taken aback.

“You knew.” It was a statement. “I always figured you knew.” Wordlessly, Harold rolled over and grinned. The mine he had been laying on clicked and exploded in a fiery ball.

The deafening blast knocked Edith onto her back and a ringing flooded her ears. Everything went dark as she slipped from consciousness, set free of time’s constraints upon her mind. She did not stir until the first, fat raindrops of a summer storm pelted her face. She gasped and tried to sit up. When she could finally see, latent smoke stung her eyes. The charred earth all around her was littered with bits of seared flesh. Tiny pieces of her husband and his son were stuck to her blue farm dress. A throbbing in her ankle began to grow louder.……Harold’s voice cut off, and his eyes rolled into the back of his head.

Edith stood up wincing at the pain. “Dammit Harold, the mine again?” She sighed and began to limp toward the porch. “His damn theatrics,” she remarked to herself. It had been 978 days since time had progressed. After the first few weeks, they began trying by any means to escape the time loop. None had worked. She hobbled up the stairs, sat in her husband’s chair and sipped his unfinished tea. Inside the house, the clock chimed. She fingered the shotgun, still resting on the porch, tempted. In the end she decided better of it, leaned back, and fell asleep.

On the other side of the glass, Harold Morrison and his team of researchers, physicians, and scientists stare at the multi-screen display. “Do we run it again?”

Sarah Wells, the team’s first and only psychiatrist, responds. “No. I think we’re putting too much stress on the old man.” There is a bit of quiet snickering around the room. Harold Morrison, their leader, has no idea his crew nicknamed the old man after himself.

Sarah ignores them, continuing. “Every time the car comes up the drive, something snaps and it all spirals. If we run it again, we need to adjust his backstory a bit. Give him combat experience, maybe?”

There was a rapid tapping on keyboards as several neuroengineers raced—in an attempt to impress the attractive psychiatrist—to upload combat experience. She glanced at the monitors in the cryo-room and watched as the man convulsed rapidly for a few seconds before returning to his limp trance-like state in the gel-tube.

“Upload complete, Ma’am.” A weasel-faced engineer grinned over his keyboard. The others looked sullenly at him. “I’ve given him three years of SEAL sniper training. I’ve also…ahem…upgraded his shotgun.”

“And Edith?” She paused looking around the room. “If we don’t get results soon, we will lose funding. Ideas? Anyone?” She looked around the room.

“Ma’am?” Weasel face childishly raised his hand. “I’ve got a suggestion.”

Sarah eyed him expectantly.

“I think we should give her six arms and remove her nose.”

Sarah sighed and brought her palm to her face. “And what would that accomplish.”

“Umm…nothing.”

To Weasel-face: “You’re an idiot.” To the room: “Anyone else have something? No? Ok. Dr. Morrison, I think we’re ready to initiate cycle 47.”

Harold Morrison gave her a nod and turned to the bank of computers. “Bring it back online. Eric, refill the icemaker and get the hens back in the coop. I think the damage team is just about finished with the mine-blast site.”

Out in the cornfield, six re-Construct workers in yellow hazmat suits install fresh stalks and clear out the burnt flesh and earth. One of them, the squad lead, looks into the artificial sky at the digital readout. “Pick up the pace! They’re running it again!” The squad scrambles to finish the job, and the leader sees movement in the barn and barks again. “Let’s go! Harold’s already in the barn with the harvest!”

Harold sighed as he sat in his armchair on the front porch. He felt the deep content that only a day of hard work could provide. He looked down at the wooden box with old rusted clasps sitting on the porch in front of him. “Why not?” he said aloud. He heaved himself out of the chair, and picked UP a few discarded bottles off the ground and as he headed off into the same field he had just finished working in. After arranging the bottles onto some shorn off stalks he made his way back to the porch. His wife, Edith, greeted him there with a cold glass of iced peach tea. “You feeling ok?”

“Why wouldn’t I be,” Harold smiled up at his wife as he unclasped the box on the ground and deftly pulled out a smooth polished 1914 Enfield.

“I just haven’t seen you practice for some time now.” Harold didn’t have a reply but rose, gingerly pecked Edith’s cheek and took the glass from her.

“C’mon now Maw, I’ll be in shortly, don’t want to hurt your ears. Best you head inside.” She gave him a lingering look, but in the end acquiesced. Harold thought he heard a: “Men” as the porch door swung shut behind her.

He began automatically loading and calibrating his gun, mechanically, as he had done so many times in the past. A movement at the corner of his vision pulled him from his thoughts. It was a cloud of dirt at the end of his driveway, illuminated by the unmistakable red and blue lights of a police cruiser.

Stymied, he replaced the weapon in its case and waited for the visitor to approach. He’d already begun his deliberate, measured breathing in preparation for sniper practice. It was like meditating, and it soothed his worrisome mind like a hot bath. In it, he found himself impervious to disturbance or angst. Harold took in a wonderfully long, deep pull of air and picked up his glass of iced tea. I wonder who it is, he thought.

Inside the house, Edith folded towels at a speed hitherto unseen in the simulation. With two arms on her left side and four on her right, she made lightning-quick work of the laundry. It was too bad, though. Their cat Minx had left a steaming, stinking present for her in the middle of one of them but she never noticed the smell. When she was finished, she sat on the sofa, leaning to one side because of the unbalanced weight.

~ on the other side of the glass ~

Sarah stomped all the way from the break room to the control room, fuming. Interns leapt out of her way as she barreled through the hallway like a juggernaut, nearly kicking down the door of HQ when she got there.

“God dammit, where is that son of a bitch!” About half of the room turned to face her, but the remaining half stayed fixated to their screens.

“Ma’am, you are gonna wanna check this out,” a cherub faced pudgy intern said nervously.

“Full screen. Now.” Sarah impatiently tapped her foot while the screen loaded. “Ok what am I looking at here?” Weasel-face suddenly stood beside her.

“Somehow, it’s different this time.”

“Different how?” Nobody answered as they watched the events play out on the screen. The police cruiser pulled up and stopped in front of the farmhouse. Ronnie got out as he had done so many times before and rested against the trunk of the car. “Reset it, this is the same.” She turned to Weasel-face. “You may want to start polishing up that resume of yours.” He cut her off with a raised hand, and pointed at the screen.

“Look.” Edith walked out the house, still tilted sideways, and took a seat on the floor next to Harold, who sat very still in his chair. Ronnie stayed where he was.

“Readings?” Sarah asked, voice wavering. “Unfreeze it, now!” Just then a gust of wind blew a clump of leaves across the lawn. “Impossible,” she breathed.

Weasel-face held up a tablet and pointed at the screen. “It isn’t frozen, they are.”

Sarah didn’t need to look at the video feed to know what was happening because it had all happened before, on cycle 1.

The team back then was a tiny pack of handpicked professionals, nothing like what it is now. Dr. Morrison had just briefed the five of them on the risks of bringing up the teravolt generator. Sarah sighed at the memory. Little did she know that it would be the generator that would save them. An hour into their first cycle, everything was suddenly, horribly wrong.

The farmhouse was burning, the barn was ablaze. Edith had just finished ripping Ronnie’s steamy entrails out and the old man was nowhere to be seen. The ground was frosted over with white ice crystals and the animals’ screams filled the stale dawn air through which terrible billows of black smoke rolled. The perimeter of the simulation seemed to warp and stretch at some unseen force trying to rip it apart. Harold Morrison’s team watched in horror. None of their training or planning had prepared them for this. Their emergency checklists were useless.

“Shut it down,” Sarah had said, staring at the monitors, but none of them had a clue how to do it. Not a finger was lifted—a bottomless fear had crawled its winding way up their spines and their hearts pounded. In the middle of the gravel drive, played out like the sickest of nightmares, the old man had returned, but he was not the same.

His eyes were sewn shut with a thick black string and needle that dangled against his face, still warm with wet blood. His shirt had been torn from his body. Claw-like cuts covered his chest and arms. The frozen ground began to shudder and the old man was lifted invisibly into the air. On top of the police cruiser, covered in red, Edith hunched over Ronnie’s lifeless form, knawing and mawing at nothing.

The old man’s arms slowly outstretched and his unseeing gaze turned skyward. All around him, the fires, the frost, and the madness raged like hell unearthed. When his bare feet were of a height with the barn, his mouth opened and a screech like the devil’s crow came screaming out, spittle and anger flying out with it. Sarah and the rest of the team were forced to cover their ears. The searing pain was too great. In the control room, bulbs exploded and sparks flew. The monitors flickered and failed, until finally, the teravolt generator in the back room shorted out and the simulation’s autoReset protocols were initiated.

A dark, heavy silence fell, but it echoed with the images of what they’d just seen and heard.

“We did it.” No one heard Sarah over the din of confusion. The control room was intermittently bathed in an eerie red glow as an emergency light spun overhead. The scene of chaos played out in flashes. Flash—Engineers tumbling over themselves—Flash—an intern fumbling on the ground for her glasses—Flash—an approaching cluster of scientists.

“Ma’am,” one said, drawing close to be heard. “The transfer looked stable, and the metamorphosis is underway.”

“We’ll know more as soon as the power is restored,” another retorted, “but we are optimistic.”

“After all this time.” Sarah absentmindedly rubbed the rough woolen patch, a bouquet of flames, sewn onto her blazer chest pocket. She had been working with the Guild of the Unholy for three years, ever since they had recruited her. Never had she imagined that she would succeed in what they had asked of her, though.

Suddenly the room grew cold. She glanced up and watched the spinning light slow and stop, immersing the room in an ominous glow. Quickly passing over the room, she noticed the door to the gel-tube chamber was ajar. She began, slowly, toward the open door. The click of her heels against the concrete floor were muffled due to a thin layer of frost that had formed.

A brown shoe, darkened and wet, lay between the door and the frame. Sarah felt her stomach lurch as her vision flowed from the shoe, to the pants, up to the torso and face of Dr. Morrison. His chest looked as if it had exploded from within. Ragged fragments of ribcage jutted outward in varying directions, cupping a faintly beating heart. His hands were clutching at his chest, hopelessly. A wet gurgling came from his mouth as blood pooled outward. Sarah stood frozen, a pace away. “What…”

As if in reply, Dr. Morrison’s hand fell, limp, finger outstretched toward the nearest gel-tube. His eyes glazed over and she watched the last of his life leave him. She didn’t need to follow the finger to know what it signaled: the tube holding the body of the old man was empty.

Sarah doubled back through the hall towards HQ, a newfound authority in her stride. “Alert security and lock down the perimeter! I want every pair of eyes on the border, from sanitation to reConstructs! Give them stun guns, I don’t care. Now!”

She practically glided. Her pitiable boss was dead, and things were about to go her way, but the old man was on the loose. That was a problem, and it was a big one.

Bigger still: the fire alarms and intrusion alert systems were routed straight to the highest chamber of the Guild of the Unholy. Needless to say, the day’s agenda had transformed in an instant. She tried to reel it in as she walked. Sirens and red lights and chaos stormed all around her. The control room door was propped open by the foot of a fainted engineer. She pushed inside and found herself alone except for the comatose fellow on the floor. The mayhem in the facility, captured in several silent shots across a panel of screens, was settled down in places but up-and-at-it in others.

Eight years ago, when she’d signed on with the Guild, she’d stuffed all her morals way down deep in order to keep her cover. She’d nearly forgotten them, but this morning they’d been brought back in an awful, exhilarating rush. On the outside, she was Sarah Wells, a ranked member of the Guild, but not in the inside. On the inside, she was Adelina of Montelaine, the sole heiress to a little-known realm called the Realm of Raisón.

The chair at the main console was empty, so she flung it out of her way, slamming her fist down on the intercom override. Her heart-rate was high and she was breathing heavily, but in a calm, cool voice she said “Yes. [deep silent breath] Yes. I need to speak to the High Chancellor of the Guild of the Unholy. Yes, I will wait.”

There was a faint click and then a long tone. She waited to be connected to the leader of the Guild. She needed to reassure him that the simulation facility’s auto-generated alarms were a mistake, and that nothing had happened. Afterwards, she needed to contain today’s catastrophe in order to preserve her mission. First, that meant finding the old man and getting them into cycle 48 as quickly as possible. The intercom clicked and the indicator light went red. The High Chancellor was on the line.

“Representative Wells, what am I to make of these alarms? Has there been a meltdown?”

“That’s why I am calling, sir. There wasn’t a meltdown, per se, but a teravolt generator did go offline as part of cycle 47.”

“Were there casualties?”

“No. Thankfully, it was just the old man trying to install a new cable dish on the farmhouse.” She was lying through her teeth, impressing herself. “Edith tried to—”

“Edith? Who is Edith?”

“Specimen 46.”

“Oh, yes. Continue. She tried to stop him?”

“Yes, but—”

“Pilly humans. Always mucking about in things they ought not.”

For a moment, Sarah considered the gap between her life experience and the chancellor’s, and she was surprised. She had expected him to be in a rage. “Yes. Well, I’ll put everything in the daily log, but as of now the mishap is well contained. No need for reinforcements or a spot inspection.”

“That’s good to hear. You tell Dr. Morrison I’ll be waiting for him tonight on the Among Us server. Such a fun game. Good bye!”

With that, he hung up, leaving Sarah Wells of the Guild of the Unholy at a loss for words at the simulation facility’s HQ desk. Dr. Harold Morrison’s warm corpse was not but fifty feet away in the specimen bay down the hall, so he would not be playing Among Us with the chancellor tonight. Worry crept into Sarah’s mind, and suddenly there was a tick-click kshhhhh as the facility’s intercom sprang to life.

“Attention in the facility. Specimen 41 is secure and sedated. He is being brought to the backup specimen bay.”

Good, she thought. At least I don’t have to deal with that.