Famine

Chapter One

Jonah awakens in the year 2103 but at first thought he was still back in the 1970's.

Chapter One

Jonah woke with an unexpected feeling.  It seemed he remembered them giving him something before he blacked out after speaking with Michelle.   The pain was gone for a while, as least.  Before it returned again, he hoped someone would give him so more, whatever it was.  The pain had been unbearable, and he didn’t want to suffer again like that last time it racked his body.  Just how long does it take for someone to die?  Maybe Michelle could get a little rest.  She had to be exhausted from being by his side, just to say she loved him one more time before they gave his body over to cryonic freezing.

   Funny, he could even breathe better.  He remembered that they had taken him off of life support in anticipation that he would pass soon without it.  They must have taken it away.  There was a lot of high-tech electronic hardware.  He wondered how they got rid of it so fast.  As a matter of fact, Dr. Freund’s special cryonics team ought still to have been there.  Where were they, Jonah wondered?  That bothered him now.

   Was he just so doped up on morphine that he couldn’t feel anything?  Strange, he felt like sitting up.  Maybe Michelle had been given some kind of treatment option at the last minute.  For a moment a warm feeling came over him.  Would it be possible that there was a breakthrough, and he would be with Michelle for a lifetime after all?  God, how he loved her!

   He sat up and looked around.  Sure enough, the room was different: everything white and sanitized looking.  There was a black and white television on with Elvis Presley wiggling like he did that night on the old Ed Sullivan Variety Show.  Where on earth would a hospital get an old archived show?  Why would they even bother to show it to terminal patients?

  Jonah had paid a bundle out of his own pocket for the hospital stay.  They could have afforded a color TV.  In came a nurse with a beehive hairdo.  Her stethoscope resembled a small bugle. Jonah felt a lot like complaining.  He must indeed be feeling better.  So he did what he was good at: complain.

   “Is this a joke, nurse?  Look at your ancient uniform.  The room looks like a museum.  I pay half of my income for this procedure, and I get something that looks like 1901’s Gibson Girl.  Are you auditioning for a part?  Try Broadway, not Vanderbilt Hospital.  By the way, will you go get Dr. Freund? I want to give him a piece of my mind.

   It surprised Jonah that he could speak like this without being exhausted.

   In walked another woman dressed in a blue smock.  Her nametag read Dr. Rene Estes, Reclamation Specialist.  She looked like Diana Ross to Jonah, but younger.

   Jonah sat straight up. “Where’s Dr. Freund?  I feel great, but this stuff you gave me is bound to wear off soon and the worst pain in my life is going to come back with a vengeance.  If you went through what I went through last night, you wouldn’t act so casual!”  Jonah was giving Dr. Estes what for.

   At first Dr. Estes had a puzzled look.  “Dr. Freund?  Now I remember.  I’m Dr. Rene Estes, head of the Owensboro Cryonics Reclamation Center located here within the hospital. She opened the curtain.  There was the Owensboro skyline with the old water tower by Fourth Street and Crabtree Avenue way in the distance.

   Dr. Estes smiled. “It’s okay to tell you now.  If I remember my history of the twentieth century, Dr. Freund was a pioneer in cryogenic freezing in Nashville, Tennessee.  You are among the first successful people we have been able to bring back from cold storage.  Most of them thawed and had to be buried when the storage facility went bankrupt in the mid-twenty-first century. Some unknown somebody put up extra money to get you out on time.  We still have to wait for our technology to get better before trying to bring back you early cold ones.”