Free 2084 The End of Days by Derek Beaugarde Page A

his parents’ mess. In one vivid memory, five-year-old Jack was in his trailer bunk with a high fever and he lay there tossing and turning in sweat and pain. Suddenly, he woke up and there in front of him stood a shadowy figure with his arm outstretched. He jumped out of bed and rushed past the figure and straight into his parents’ bedroom crying in anguish.
    “Mom - Mom! Pop! Come quick! There’s a man in ma room with a gun –“
    His parents both lay sprawled on their bed shit-faced on crack coke. Only his father Andy could muster a muted response.
    “Jo-ohn – muss be a bad dr-eam. Go back ta be-ed son…”
    He looked down in helpless dismay at his parents for a few moments and then he very slowly crept back and peered cautiously into his room. The man with the gun had gone. Was he real or was he just a dream like Andy had stammered in his drug-fuelled stupor. Young Jack got back into bed and slept off the fever. Jack grew up fast despite his parents. He was extremely intelligent and a real battler, a thirsty fighter for knowledge and understanding. His ambition was to get into the US Air Force when he graduated from school. If Jack was truthful his real deep-seeded ambition was one day to become an astronaut on the NASA space program, but he was realistic enough to set his achievable goals on a more down to Earth target. Once an obnoxious teacher had spat in Jack’s face that ‘trailer-trash don’t get to go to Mars’ but he was gutsy enough to convince himself that ‘one day I’ll get jets’. Jack was always fascinated by space travel but his early burning desire to become an astronaut arose from a strange incident that occurred when Jack was aged six. Jack had been playing alone not far from the family trailer in a patch of allotments nicknamed ‘the Gardens of Gethsemane’, although it was colloquially corrupted to ‘Geth’s Gardens’. It was not unusual for Jack to be playing alone. The other kids tended to avoid playing with Jack, mainly because their parents called Jack’s parents ‘alkies’ and ‘druggies’. He was not bullied as such by the other kids as he was not afraid to beat the crap out of someone twice his age. Jack was happy as a loner and just as happy feeding his fertile imagination by himself. That day as usual Jack played happily just outside the green-painted picket fence of old Jimmy Reid’s tidy little garden lot. Jimmy, known as Uncle Jimmy to everyone, had been a railroad engineer before the tracks in Lexington had been all torn up and they pensioned off old Jimmy. At that particular moment old Jimmy had not been working in amongst his potatoes, tomatoes and pumpkin rows and Jack amused himself. He had been running wildly in circles burning off his youthful energy– a little spaceman orbiting some far distant planet light years from Earth. But he had to stop in front of the green picket fence to catch his breath. Puffing hard to replenish his oxygen tanks, Jack grabbed hold of the painted railing of the fence with both hands. He was now a rocket back on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral on the clear blue Florida coast. Jack prepared for lift-off and began the launch sequence countdown.
    “Five – four – three – two – one - Houston Control - we have lift-off!”
    Jack squeezed his hands tightly on the wooden rail of the picket fence and concentrated with all his might on the lift-off, imagining his feet to be the huge booster rockets of his ‘Santa Maria Super-shuttle’. Suddenly he felt his two feet start to rise off the ground, which at first startled him, but he continued to concentrate. Soon Jack was levitating, still holding on to the picket fence, his body floating completely level in the air above the grassy ground below his body. He cried out excitedly.
    “Ah’m floatin’ - ah’m floatin’ in space!”
    This immediately broke his concentration and his body came quickly back down to grassy Earth. Jack held on to the fence and tried to repeat the