The Protocol: A Prescription to Die (23 page)

Chapter 73

Eat held Andy’s hand as they walked across the bridge spanning the Minnehaha Creek. Things had finally calmed down. Eat was in a temporary cast, and the pain only flared when he spent too much time at the keyboard.

“What do you think is going to happen next?” she asked.

“Right now, I’m not sure. How do you feel about commuting though?”

“What?”

“I think it’s time to leave the city.”

As they walked along the creek’s path, they were interrupted by a man yelling.

“Bob! Bob! Get over here, now!”

Then they saw what he was yelling at, and it was coming straight for them. They were directly in its path.

A beautiful sable collie was running straight for them. Eat carefully crouched down on his knees, and held out his hands for the dog to sniff.

Bob answered with a swift wag of his tail, a lick across Eat’s nose, and a loud set of barks.

“So your name is Bob? That’s a cool name,” Eat laughed as he scratched the dog’s ears.

“I’m sorry. He has trouble listening at times,” yelled the man. “Bob! Get back here. Come.”

“He’s beautiful. Very furry,” said Eat as he picked fur from his pants and hands.

Andy started to laugh.

“Look. He’s wearing a bandana.”

Eat laughed after he read it.

“No Bob, that bandana doesn’t make your butt look big.” Eat scratched Bob’s chin. “You better go back to the guy who feeds you before he gets mad.”

Bob seemed to understand what he was told. He barked, turned around, and then ran back to the man.

“Sorry!” he yelled to Eat and Andy.

“I’ve been wondering,” said Eat as he watched the dog run back.

“No. We don’t need a dog,” preempted Andy.

“No. Not that,” he said as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small blue box. “I was wondering if you’d marry me.”

Epilogue

They left the lights and noise of the big city.

It was very quiet at their new place.

And that was a good thing.

They were now Wisconsinites. Eat wasn’t sure if that was really a word, but that’s what he called them. He bought twenty acres on a small, somewhat secluded lake 97.358 miles east of Minneapolis, and built a nice house for his family.

Eat didn’t think they’d be bothered here.

He hadn’t had any visits from any insurance company employees or government types since everything went to hell in a hand basket for them. The fallout from the three videos he uploaded was initially sensational but soon died down as the news outlets followed the directions provided by the Administration, downplaying, and eventually forgetting the videos.

The networks followed the scripts from the Administration, and claimed the videos were expertly made but clearly fiction. Once that was reported, the other networks followed suit. But the videos remained ever-present on the Internet.

They were, after all, just data.

Sometime later, there were reports that Barbara Nordstrom had committed suicide. There was only a brief mention of Aequalis in the article. This led to a revival of the videos, and more conspiracy theories. It only lasted a week or so as it was quickly debunked by the networks as a political conspiracy by the opposing party. Part of the problem was that Carl Titmueller could not be found to substantiate any of the videos.

Eat knew where Carl was. Despite a thorough cleaning, there were probably still bits of his face embedded between the floor boards in his loft.

Eat hoped Barbara’s was an excruciatingly long and painful death. He seriously doubted that she’d committed suicide.

She didn’t have that much class.

Or courage.

She relished power and influence to check herself out.

Eat hoped that a dog would someday find her remains.

*

Eat had all of the things needed to continue his work. A laptop. An Internet connection. He was set. Of course, he couldn’t end with that. He modified the boathouse that existed on the property to act as his office, and a new home for Mother.

It was pretty sweet.

The back room had its own cooling system, and contained all of the local servers. He also installed redundant backups, UPS’s, and a more robust security system. Nothing was spared. The front half of the boathouse, where Eat worked, was bulletproof, and soundproof. The walls inside were lined with cedar.

It smelled wonderful.

There were two sliding doors that he could open to the lakeshore five feet away. His father’s agarwood box was here too. He had dumped the chicken bones and concrete mix into the lake without a wisp of hesitation. He had been able to get the sock from Andy, and was now the only item in the box. It wasn’t his ashes, but it was the only thing left. It belonged here with his family.

The box was placed on a bookshelf next to the picture of him and Eat holding their prize walleye.

And there his father would stay, in socked spirit at least.

*

Eat and Andy had been married for 457 days.

Fifteen months.

Eat was trying to break his habit of being so “annoyingly numerically precise” as Andy referred to it. Eat had a ways to go but he was getting better. He’d slip up every now and then, approximately 1.5 times per day on average.

But who, besides Andy, was counting?

They had a new addition to the family.

A baby boy.

He just had his first birthday last week. They named him after Eat’s father: Anderson Charles Teague. Eat called him ACT II. Sometimes, usually, it was just Two. Eat had a penchant for monosyllabic names.

Eat rescued his mother from the center. He couldn’t bring himself to leave her there by herself when he was two hours away. His trust in the bureaucracy was shattered.

He and Andy also enticed her nurse, Joey, to come along. He made sure she was doing what was needed with her meds, checked her blood sugar, and brought her out for short walks. He read to her too. Right now, they were in the middle of
The Count of Monte Cristo
. She was now on a new regimen of meds, and seemed to have more good days than bad. Her clear days were like nothing at all was wrong. Her sense of humor peeked through her fog every now and then. Sometimes she even called him Eat.

She’d giggle and say, “I guess your father and I weren’t thinking, were we?”

Eat loved having his mother back from the brink. She had her bad days too, though. Some days Eat was back to being his father, and she was positive that someone had robbed her. The disease’s progression had been slowed with her new meds. It wasn’t cured, nor would it ever be. She was frailer now than what Eat ever remembered.

Her doctor was a nice woman who gladly accepted self-pay customers. She preferred them. She was local too. Joey was a lifesaver. Eat paid him in cash, included a bedroom, and a seat at their dinner table. He had become a member of the family. He was wonderful. He even helped with Two every now and then. He had Sundays and Wednesdays off, but he rarely took them.

Eat tried to stay off the grid as much as he could. He had enough money saved to live a dozen lives extremely comfortably. His accounts were unfrozen as promised. It only took a couple of minutes to get that done.

Eat remembered when his financial advisor called him, “I don’t know what you did, Eat, but all of the freeze orders are gone. It’s like they never existed.”

“I suppose that’s a good thing, right?”

Eat couldn’t say much more.

*

Andy and Two were in his bedroom, and Eat could hear him giggling. It was an incredible sound. He was cute, in a non-professorial sort of way.

But Eat was biased.

He had giant blue eyes like his mother. Two was blonde at this point, but so was Eat at his age. Eat was sure Two’s hair would turn out curly like his. Two had a plush smiley-faced laptop, like a stuffed animal but shaped like a computer, in his crib that Eat found on the Internet somewhere and had to buy.

Two loved it.

Eat saw him pressing the giant fuzzy enter key every now and then.

Like father. Like son.

Now they wanted a daughter someday. They were in the practicing stage now. But as with everything, there were no guarantees Eat would get his BLT II on the second try.

It could be an ACT III.

Eat didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. But Andy wasn’t completely sold on his naming conventions.

Betty Lou enjoyed being outside during the day. Eat could see her on the deck sitting in her rocker watching the bald eagles soaring in the therms way above her head. She loved doing that, and seemed to be content to watch them for hours on end.

“Anderson come and watch the eagles with me,” she’d say every now and then when the fog in her mind was heavier than usual.

She had her music playing. Conway Twitty was crooning her to sleep. Sometimes she’d venture back into her room for a new batch of CDs. Most of the time, Eat made sure she had a nice supply on the deck, right next to her rocker. He didn’t want her to have to worry about it. Sometimes she just paged through her gardening magazines, and cut out pictures of things she wanted to plant in the garden that she didn’t have.

She had taken care of Eat when he was growing up.

Now it was his turn.

She still resided on that famously high pedestal in Eat’s heart.

Andy bought her a calico kitten when they first moved her in with the family. The kitten is forever at her side. It was curled up on her lap now, listening to Twitty with her. He and Andy tried to give it a name, but she insisted on something simple: Kitty.

So Kitty it was.

They did give it a middle name: Ann.

Kitty Ann Teague.

KAT.

It was approaching 11:45, almost noon, so Eat thought he should get moving. The doctor said, and Joey confirmed, that keeping his mother on a relatively precise schedule was best. It was her lunchtime.

Eat began making his mother her favorite lunch: charred grilled cheese where the cheese was still cold and solid and the bread was black. It turned out she loved them that way. When her fog was light, Eat had learned that it was the way her mother made them when she was growing up.

What Eat and his father could never fathom, was actually done on purpose.

Who would have known?

Eat pulled a plate down from the cupboard, put the sandwich on it, filled a small plastic cup with milk, and put them on the lunch tray. He was just about to take it out to her when her, when he noticed two men walking down the stairs to the cabin. They were being escorted by Butch.

Eat’s stomach flipped.

Was it starting again?

Butch was on his payroll as well. He was the Vice President of Security Operations for 314159. He was also the soccer coach at the local high school. The kids loved him. He lived on a small house on the property that Eat had built just for him. Eat also moved Butch’s mother here.

The two men wore three-piece suites. One man Eat immediately recognized.

Frank Ignacious Allen.

The other man, Eat recognized but had never met.

“Hey Joey. Can you take this out to mom? It looks like we have visitors. They’re in suits. Can’t be good.”

Butch opened the door. He allowed them into the porch area, but did not permit them in the house. He stood to the side. His gaze fixed on the two men.

“Frank,” said Eat. “Been a while.”

Eat then turned towards the other man.

Martin Washbourne.

Senator.

Presidential candidate.

“Senator,” Eat said and nodded at the man. Eat did not extend his hand to shake. His remained in his pockets.

“Mother?”

“Yes, Eat.”

“Record.”

“Working,” she replied.

Frank and the Senator exchanged glances. Frank smiled, and then gave the Senator a slight nod of approval.

Frank looked at the Senator, raised his eyebrows, and smiled, slightly.

“I told you.”

“Mr. Teague,” said the Senator. “I have a proposition for you.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The impetus of this book started when Jenna, my sable collie, found a sock while on our walk along the Minnehaha Creek in Minneapolis. The one we found didn’t have a foot in it, though. So, I guess my first acknowledgement has to go out to Jenna as without her, the seed for this novel would not have ever been planted. She deserves a new bandana, and an extra cookie. Probably an entire box.

Several humans also played a major role. I’m so lucky to have all of you in my life right now: Jeremy Goetz, Laura Goetz, Robb Jensen, Deb Atkinson, Frank Atkinson, Marie Zetocha, Mary Lou Jensen, Lynn Peterson, and Gary Peterson. I also want to thank my good friend, Scott Schorr for providing me the valuable information about mortuary science. All of you kept me going through the entire process.

The cover was designed by Mandy Tutas. It’s great when you find someone with such incredible artistic ability that they can not only do the work, but read your mind.