Science, Eternal Life, and a Traveling Circus |1|

Chapter One

Sometime in July, 2815

There wasn't a muscle left that functioned beneath his shriveled yellow skin. There wasn't a speck of clear vision left in his filmy eyes, or a moment of peace from the ringing in his weeping ears.

He stood in Death's reception, the others in His office. They'd been avoiding the appointment for months. But it was inevitable, as it always had been.

Abraham, the man that had been determined from the beginning to outlive the others, woke that bleak day to triumph. The patience of Death had run out.

There wasn't a heartbeat left in Tulip. His eyes searched hers, until a fly landed on her filmy iris. He smiled and propped himself up on his elbow to look past.

The faint breath of Gage shuffled the sand at his thin, cracked lips. The mute's eyes were fixed in a squint by clotted mucus. The very faintest glint of life flickered behind; a dying candle in the desert wind.

Abraham laughed, seeing them at the ends of their ropes, at last. He fell onto his back and threw his fists into the air.

"Hallelujah!" he crowed, as though he saw rescue and sanctuary on the horizon only now that he, and he alone, stole haggard breaths.

Unlike his faded companions, he had served time as a guard under the Shir family's protection. He had started their journey stronger, fresh from a privileged life. With all said and done, he would have given anything to have the privileges back; his arm, his leg... anything he had left, he would surrender. Just one slice of orange, a glass of bourbon, and he'd desire nothing more. Or, everything more.

Alas, his stomach was empty, and hunger, a beast, clawed his innards mercilessly. His spindly skeleton was near to breaking from his calloused skin.

All he had to go on was the hope for survival, which he glimpsed through the clouds of bronze-painted dust that hovered in the starkness. There were buildings out there, just visible behind low-hanging smog and grainy clumps of disturbed earth.

Where there were buildings, there were people. Where there were people, there was food, there was water, there was hope.

You would think Indiana was a desert, he marveled, as he picked his weary bones up and gathered his resolve. He wiped the sweat from his brow and started into the vastness, sand-scorched feet stumbling beneath his weight. It was dry and barren as far as the eye could see, littered with crumbling and scrapped waste from the old days. Antiques like cars reduced to frames and hubcaps. The train that they had camped by for the night had been stripped of its wheels and passenger seats. The wind had whistled through rust-eaten holes and glassless window frames and thundered in its hollow cabin.

Since his banishment from Ban-Ken, he—with the others—had passed through five settlements, and from each had been turned away, humiliated and hungry, and looking for nothing more than some human decency, some sympathy. It had been months. They had been staggering at the ends of their lives for months and hadn't met a single caring soul. Everyone was too interested in saving themselves. That was the world, wasn't it? Selfish!

Abraham's companions had run out of bread six days prior.

Cunning from the beginning, he had hoarded a secret share to himself. Each night while the others slept, he had sparingly indulged.

He had expected Tulip to have died a lot sooner; in the first month with the other three from their group. The fact that she had survived so long had only reduced their limited supplies further. Abraham stole water from her and her lover, Gage, every night when they were asleep.

He had considered snapping Gage's neck at multiple points to be rid of his stomach, for the man, a mute, couldn't have screamed. Abraham had always been regrettably susceptible to the screaming and the pleading, and in his work under Shir employ, it had wracked him with guilt, accumulated over years of service. It was the guilt that had caused him to falter, to become sloppy, and in the end, to be banished. He had been injected with a concentrated dose of Ban-Ken's notorious plague, and a reversal to the cure that he had taken for granted for his entire loyal life. He had felt the effects instantaneously.