Free 2084 The End of Days by Derek Beaugarde Page B

levitation but nothing happened. He was wondering if he had imagined what had just occurred or whether he had just been dreaming, when he heard footsteps behind him. Jack looked round to see the tiny frame of kindly old bald-headed Jimmy Reid striding down the path towards him. Jack and Jimmy got on famously and the boy often helped him in the small garden lot where he could talk easily with the old man. Jack ran up to his old gardener friend.
    “Uncle Jimmy – did ya see me? Ah was floatin’ in space –“
    “Whassat you said, Jacky boy?”
    “Over there at your fence – ah was just floatin’ up in the air!”
    “Ah dunno ‘bout that, Jack? Heard tell that long time ago there wez an ole canal came right through this area. Filled in hunners a’ years back - maybe ya wez jest floatin’ on the ghost of that there ole canal, ma little Jacko?”
    The old man laughed and ruffled Jack’s dark mop of hair.
    “But ah definitely was floatin’, Uncle Jimmy!”
    “Okay, Jacky boy, but you an’ ah’s got tomatoes ta pick for Missus Reid’s dinner table. So we best get workin’ at that pickin’ –“
    Jack’s excellent grades at Lexington High earned him a scholarship to Cal Tech where he studied for a degree in Aviation and Avionics. Of course, his parents both missed his graduation, even if they could have afforded the flight from Virginia to California. His father Andy had been arrested on a drugs misdemeanour and was being held in the County Jail for the umpteenth time. His mother Annabel was so out of her face on crack that she would not have been able to state where either of the two men in her life were at that particular time. In 2058, Jack got a place on the flight programme at Quantico back in Virginia and graduated top of his class. His father Andy, who by that time was doing better in a private rehabilitation programme in Lexington funded from Jack’s salary, made it to the flight school graduation. Sadly, Annabel had died of a drugs overdose the previous year. Andy looked about twenty years older than the mid-fifties that he actually was, but Jack felt that he showed a new spirit and resolution of character that the young Jack had never seen before. It struck Jack that his father, who had been miserably broken by his own parents in his youth, demonstrated some of the genetic traits that Jack had to muster as he grew up through his torrid adolescence. Jack could see where his fighting spirit came from now and he was pleased to recognise that. After the graduation and parade of the newly qualified pilots Andy came up to his son, sporting the new suit, badly ill-fitting, that Jack had paid for. Andy’s chest was just bursting with pride and the tears were welling up on the rims of his bloodshot eyes. He spoke chokingly to his son in his slow Virginian drawl.
    “Son, ah don’t have the words really. What ah would like to say to you? Ah jest don’t quite know. Ah’m jest real proud of ya. Never thought ah’d see ma son in one a them swanky U-S-A-F duds. Ah only wished that your mom could see ya today, son…”
    Andy’s voice finally cracked and the tears streamed down his face. Jack’s tears were flowing freely too and the father and son hugged each other like they had never hugged before. They were never quite as close again as they were that day on the parade ground at Quantico, but Andy never slipped back to the sordid addictive life-style that he had led since he was that wild teenager with the big chip on his shoulder. After Quantico Jack went to ‘get jets’ flying on the F-69 ultra-stealth fighter programme based at Andrews Air Force base in Maryland and again his intelligence and air prowess saw him rise to ‘Top Gun’ in the F-69 fighter squadron. He had tours with the squadron in the Persian Gulf, Japan and the South China Seas before returning to Maryland in the spring of 2063. It was that year at a club in the New Holiday Inn in Silver Springs, a few miles from Andrews, that he met