Surviving Immortality

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Prologue

  Part One: Escape

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Part Two: Kindred Spirits

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Part Three: Razor’s Edge

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Afterword

  More from Alan Chin

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  About the Author

  By Alan Chin

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  Copyright

  Surviving Immortality

  By Alan Chin

  This is the story of the fountain of youth.

  When Kenji Hiroshige discovers a formula that will keep people youthful and healthy for several thousand years, he tells the world he will not divulge his secret until every gun, tank, battleship, and bomb has been destroyed. When the world is free of weapons, everyone can live forever. And then he goes into hiding.

  Before he disappears, his son Matt Reece is exposed to the formula. Kenji takes Matt Reece on the run with him, but as they struggle to elude both government agencies and corporations who will do anything to profit from Kenji’s discovery, Matt Reece learns that world peace might not be his father’s only goal. But what can a young man who’s barely stepped foot off his isolated ranch do in the face of something so sinister?

  This is the story of human greed and the lust for violence. It’s the story of a world on the brink of destruction, but it’s also a tale of one young man who finds in himself the will, courage, and compassion to stand against the darkness—both outside and within himself.

  This is a story of hope.

  Prologue

  THROUGHOUT RECORDED history, many humans were labeled monsters. Some were born physically misshapen, no legs or arms, enormous heads and spindly bodies, crooked backs, joined twins, no sexual organs, or both sexual organs. The list is endless. These corporeal abnormalities were once considered God’s retribution for the sins of the parents, but now they are thought of as nature’s accidents, an unlucky roll of the dice, no one’s fault.

  There is, however, a different breed of monster, where the deformity is hidden from the eye. The face and body may be faultless, yet a twisted gene or benevolent drug with devilish side effects taken during pregnancy results in a malformed psyche.

  Monsters are deviations from the traditional norms. As one child is born without legs, another can be born lacking empathy and a conscience. The child born without legs eventually learns he is handicapped and struggles to overcome his physical abnormality. But the child born with no compassion goes through life unaware of his defect, because he has nothing visible to compare with others. He wrongly assumes everyone is like him, cold-blooded, calculating, unfeeling, self-absorbed. To this kind of fiend, a soul-stricken man seems weak, even comical, in the same way that to a criminal, honesty seems pathetically ludicrous.

  This means, of course, that to an inner fiend, integrity and simple human kindness seems abnormal, dishonest, and perhaps even monstrous. They will, therefore, do everything possible to expose the monster in everyone around them, and they will interpret that as an act of righteousness.

  Part One: Escape

  The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death becomes more and more acute. What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of his reach! His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.

  —Chuang Tzu

  Chapter One

  MATT REECE Connors straddled his Appaloosa stallion, Comet, loping along a ridge at the eastern foothills of the White Mountains. Bitter cold air kept him anxious for the sunrise, which, if nothing else, would warm horse and rider a few degrees.

  Minutes later, winter curled into an early spring. With a single spectacular dawn, the season changed. A rush of amethyst and gold flooded the sky as the sun inched above the horizon, and the Nevada desert awakened with a new and inexplicable hope. Wind rushed down the mountain carrying the crisp scent of snow, and it sweetened the sunrays tumbling over the scrublands, lifting Matt Reece’s spirits to the point he forgot about the sorrow that awaited him back at the ranch house.

  To the unpracticed eye, this land seemed a place of absence, but Matt Reece saw carved gorges and wind-sharpened peaks and undulating mounds spread over the sprawling panorama. To the west, the mountains rose and rose, smoky blue and snowcapped. To the south, they grew tamer, the colors muted, and the edges faded into the prairie where the land seemed as endless as time. To the east lay the Promesa Rota, which is Spanish for Broken Promise. But this landscape’s promises were never broken; how could they be? These clattering streams and sculpted canyons swallowed him whole with their fathomless, uncomplicated beauty.

  It was impossible to wallow in sadness on such a morning. His life seemed one with all creation, and he took no more heed of death than he did the dormant dogwood trees or fading stars. This daybreak feels like freedom, he thought, a glimpse of immortality.

  The moment came, however, while scuttling by rock formations heavy with history, when an icy hush at his core told him a long-awaited death had occurred. It could be Grandpa Blake, or it could be his dog, Groucho. Both had weltered on the threshold for weeks. In this country, you trusted your instincts, and so he turned Comet east and prodded him into a gallop. He was near the Promesa Rota’s western property line, with twenty miles of raw country between him and the ranch house. He had over an hour of hard riding before he faced the inevitable heartbreak.

  Once he reached the lower pastures skirting the river, he heard a rumbling. He glanced north and saw a bay stallion, six mares, and four colts thundering in a tight group, heads and tails held high and proud. He admired the movement of shoulders and flanks. When the stallion veered east and the herd followed in a sweeping arc, Matt Reece noticed Kenji riding Pepper, a black Arabian saddle horse. Kenji’s shoulders were straight, chin tucked in, and his Stetson sat square on his hea
d. He held himself in flawless dignity. Even Pepper was curried and gleaming.

  Kenji drove the herd toward the corrals.

  A stab of shame rose up in Matt Reece. Kenji rounded up a herd, and he hadn’t. Spring was branding time, and his job was to find mustangs in the hills and ravines and deliver them to the holding pens. It didn’t matter that he was only eighteen years old while Kenji was a middle-aged man. On the ranch, he needed to pull his weight. He figured he could ride and rope as well as anyone, and he hated being bested.

  He leaned forward and gave Comet a spiteful kick, as if coming up short was his fault. Comet jolted into a run. Matt Reece pressed the horse’s flanks between his boot heels. They blue-streaked toward the herd, and the hard-packed ground careened under them. He urged Comet on until they were flat out. He held the reins with his right hand and held his hat on his head with his left. From his perspective, Comet flew like a mythical figure, legs outstretched, mane streaming, tail billowing behind. Horse and rider became a force rocketing through space. Matt Reece knew that a misstep or a prairie-dog hole would put their chance of survival a notch below none. Electric waves sizzled his head, but he kept Comet redlining; the thrill of running down Kenji proved too great for caution.

  When he caught up with the bay stallion, he reined Comet into a lope. He and Kenji flanked the herd, Kenji north, he on the south.

  He saw disapproval etched on Kenji’s face. Yes, he was reckless, endangering a beautiful animal, not to mention himself. He didn’t care. He experienced a last burst of elation before they reached the ranch house, and perhaps he could cling to that feeling over the next few weeks, a spark of candlelight in a world gone dark.

  They rode over a rise, and the Promesa Rota came into view. The compound crouched at the end of a dirt road, two miles off County Road 124, near an area the locals called Dead Bull Butte. Named after the river that flowed through the property, the Promesa Rota had ten sections of grazing pastures bordering each side of the stream. The rest was desert scrub populated by rattlesnakes, coyotes, and mountain lions.

  A putty-colored barn dominated the work yard, and an assortment of corrals, sheds, and a windmill over a water tank hovered around it like moons around Jupiter. A two-story Victorian house nestled within a grove of cottonwoods. Farther south stood a dozen pippin and Red Delicious apple trees, the fruit from which Matt Reece’s great-grandmother, Audrey Connors, had made the best cider in the county.

  Knowing what awaited him there, a bizarre feeling came over him: that he was, and always had been, too fragile for this lonely landscape. As they rode nearer, he tried to imagine how life would be if he had never been born into this desolate place. He wondered what he would be like if he had not spent the last eighteen years absorbing the silent vistas, the river’s hypnotic pull, the meadow lark’s ascending three-note song. Until his older brother, Patrick, went off to college, he’d been happy enough, but over the last two years, loneliness weighed on his shoulders to the point where any kind of life somewhere else seemed an improvement.

  Kenji spurred Pepper into a run, and they dashed ahead to open the corral gates. When Matt Reece reached the compound, a sour taste worked its way up his throat, and he swallowed it down.

  He drove the mustangs into the main holding pen to join a dozen horses grouped at the far end. They were a mixed lot, duns and roans and bays and paints. They varied in size, sex, age, and conformation. Kenji closed the gate after them.

  Kenji and Matt Reece dismounted and led their horses into the barn without a word. Matt Reece pulled his Hamley saddle and blanket from Comet and sat them over a sawhorse. He lifted the bridle off Comet, haltered him, and led him into his stall. He gave the horse’s damp coat a rubdown with a gunnysack before he closed and latched the gate, and then hung the bridle on a peg on the wall.

  The lecture he was expecting never came. Instead, Kenji wrapped an arm over his shoulders and said, “Go start on breakfast. I’ll feed and water the stock and milk Lucy.”

  His offer to do the chores convinced Matt Reece that he also had an inkling of what awaited them in the house.

  “If you say so, sir.” Matt Reece leaned into Kenji, finding the warmth he searched for. Kenji Hiroshige was his stepfather, a Japanese man in his forties who looked younger than any thirty-year-old, which was an impressive feat in this godless territory. He was strong yet lissome, with a stomach as flat as Matt Reece’s. The only things that showed his age were his eyes. Beneath his Zen-like gaze lurked something wounded, ancient… and untouchable.

  Feeling that reassuring heat, he thought of how admirable Kenji was, a Buddhist, a vegetarian, and a veterinarian working at Golden Eagle Industries, a research firm studying the aging process and age-related illnesses. The company experimented on a variety of animals, and Kenji helped with the research while caring for the livestock. He was a scientist, for God’s sake, working with Consuela Rocha y Villareal, one of the most celebrated minds in the scientific world, and a household name, like Einstein and Stephen Hawking. That alone made Kenji everything Matt Reece longed for, but he held no illusions that he would ever rise so high in life. He seemed destined to be stuck on this ranch, where it was impossible to become anything more interesting or useful than a cowboy.

  Like Matt Reece’s paternal father, Jessup Connors, Kenji had made something of himself before coming to the ranch. That was the key, Matt Reece knew. Try as he might, he couldn’t make something of his life without abandoning this ranch and the people he loved.

  He shucked off his canvas chore coat and draped it over the top rail, then pulled off his rawhide gloves and stuffed them in his hip pocket. Kenji squeezed Matt Reece’s neck and nudged him in the direction of the house. Matt Reece picked up a pail by the barn door, swung by the chicken coop, and gathered seven eggs before climbing the steps to the mudroom. Slipping inside confirmed his suspicions. Under the sink where the men washed up before entering the house, Groucho lay on his patch of carpet, too weak to even lift his head.

  A wirehaired pointer with blue roan coloration, Groucho owned a face only his mother—and Matt Reece—could love. The dog was bloated and wheezing.

  He was relieved that it was Groucho—not Grandpa Blake—who was near dead, but that did little to lessen his heartbreak.

  He set his pail on the floor, knelt, and scooped Groucho into his arms. One bleary red eye showed like a signal in a fog; the cold and dripping nose pressed to his neck. The dog broke wind, and his face pulled into what looked like an apology. Matt Reece knew it was cruel to prolong what must be done, but after Patrick moved away to attend UC Berkeley, Groucho became his only friend. Clutching that head to his chest, he tried to will energy back into the limp body that held no warmth. What little life remaining had retreated to the dog’s core, leaving the extremities cold.

  Matt Reece’s heart felt like it squeezed up into his throat, his typical reaction to death or violence or abandonment. A harsh pressure in the back of his esophagus tugged at his solar plexus, pitching him into a coughing fit. Each coughing rasp clogged his windpipe with mucus until he couldn’t take in enough air. A suffocating, nervy rush drove him to his feet.

  “Oh—” He drew in a painful breath. “—shit.” He stared at Groucho’s peaceful face. Can I live here without him? Doubt settled over him, which gave birth to despair.

  He thought of Patrick, visualizing his smooth face, thin lips, black hair, and fatally blue eyes. They’d slept in the same bed until Matt Reece became a teen, their heads angled toward each other, their legs and torsos touching. Patrick outgrew that intimacy, but Matt Reece still longed for it, still hankered to wake with the feel of his brother’s breath on his neck. He thought about his mother, Gail, now living in Long Beach with Lester. All the people who abandoned him. And now Groucho. He felt sorry for them. He imagined walking to the barn, saddling Comet, and riding away. He could, for the first time, forsake them instead. He could reach the foothills by noon and be lost in the mountains by dark. It would take them weeks to find him. Bu
t the need for air spurred him into a different direction.

  With his heart racing, he rushed through the kitchen and into the living room. Jessup had fallen asleep on the sofa the night before and was still there, snoring, his red shirt unbuttoned, his jeans fly open. A near-empty glass of rye sat on the coffee table. Jessup drank lately because his father, Blake Connors, was in the same condition as Groucho. They had been a reasonably happy family until six months ago when Blake became bedridden. In Hawthorn, the doctors did biopsies, and the news was as bad as it gets, well into stage four. All the doctors could do was administer drugs to keep him comfortable. He had, however, wanted to die at home, so Jessup and Kenji packed him up and brought his sorrow to the ranch.

  That’s when Jessup’s deterioration kicked into high gear. Each night at sunset, in the name of unwinding, Jessup threw back a glass of rye, and another, and so on, until he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He often passed out before he made it to the bedroom.

  The two bedrooms on the first floor were down the hall from the living room. Jessup and Kenji shared one, and across the hall Blake lay dying. Matt Reece’s bedroom, his sanctuary, was upstairs.

  Matt Reece’s lungs were clinching, and he didn’t have much time. He tugged on Jessup’s elbow with no effect and then slapped his face hard enough to rattle teeth. Jessup opened one eye. The act of focusing proved too much for him, and he mumbled, “Leave me be, dammit.”

  For a moment, still, it seemed like nothing too serious—another desertion, the loss of one more loved one. He was used to that, right? But anxiety wrapped itself around his chest and squeezed, taking him with such force that it felt like being squashed by a python.

  Matt Reece tried to speak, but his lungs refused to draw air. He shook Jessup harder. He believed in Jessup, trusted his strength; his touch was nourishment from a realm beyond normal human interaction. Jessup had never let him down. He slapped his face again, harder. This time Jessup opened both eyes.

  “Is Grandpa dead?” Jessup asked.