Chapter 643

The Retreat

... Diana parked near the back steps. “Well, here we are. Let’s have a light snack and something cold to drink, then I’ll run you through an exercise routine. After that, we’ll go see the Sergeant.”

“If I’m able to walk,” Morales said with a grimace as he unfolded himself from the back.

Inside, as they followed the Clan Queen down the hall, Morales’ group was sweaty, exhausted and unsteady on their feet, while Diana could have stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine. She did have on a sports bra and a pull-over top, but with expecting only to jog/walk two miles, she hadn’t bothered putting on running shorts made of a material designed to keep her body from chafing. She had put her long, thick ponytail through the adjustment hole in her cap and looked like a college freshman as she turned into the kitchen ahead of them, the ponytail swinging from side to side as it had throughout the run.

“What?” she said as she stood holding the door open for them as she realized Jasmine was staring at her.

“How can you be so fresh, not to mention looking as if you are twenty or less?” Jasmine asked, frustrated.

“I...” the Clan Queen began to respond but stopped. “Girl, have you looked in the mirror lately?”

“I know we’ve been enhanced, but you seem so young. The thermometer out back says 80 degrees. That isn’t that hot, but after our jog, we’re all covered in sweat. All except you. You’re as fresh as can be.”

“Let’s get a snack and something cold to drink. We can chat then.”

A moment later, when Diana opened one of the refrigerators and brought out a large lemon icebox pie, she caught Ashley’s eye and pointed to where the plates were. Christine found the forks and something to cut the pie with. While the girls were cutting the pie and putting pieces on plates, Diana brought out a big jug of freshly squeezed lemonade. Jasmine had found the glasses and was putting crushed ice in them from one of the refrigerators.

“We have enough pie for everyone at the Retreat several times over, but I would caution you to eat only one piece now. Otherwise, you might well see it again after you have been working out for a while.”

Morales downed half a glass of lemonade before he forced himself to stop, thinking it tasted better than anything he’d had for a long time — until he took his first bite of the pie.

“It’s amazing how good something cold tastes after a little exercise,” Diana said, tongue in cheek. “We have gallons of the lemonade, so drink all you want. It, however, might not taste as good coming back up as it did going down.”

Morales grinned at her. “Note taken. Uh, I think we — well, at least I need to apologize for being such a wuss out there. As much hard work as we all do, I expected to do better at running than I did and to be truthful, my women did far better than I did.”

“Hush,” Diana said as she reached to put her hand over his for a moment. “Hard work and beautiful muscles don’t necessarily mean that you can drop right into being a runner. To state the obvious, you use different muscle groups, and stamina also plays a large part. Sometimes someone thin and not strong can more easily become a runner than someone heavy with heavy muscle structure. Also, don’t expect that just because you’re a man, you will do better than a woman would when you start out running. Again, you have all those heavy muscles to carry down the road by other muscles that have been used very little, comparatively.”

“But from what you say, none of you can keep up with Jeff...”

Diana interrupted him with a much stronger laugh. “I know we’ve told you this, but sometimes it needs to be repeated. Jeff is a Prime — an Alpha Prime. I jokingly say he isn’t human, but sometimes I think there is a lot of truth in that statement. Most of the time, he won’t even let us wives know what he can actually do, but since the enhancement, he’s ... Look, he holds back on everything just because he’s Jeff, and he doesn’t want to embarrass us and maybe make us seem, well, less, I suppose. The only exception to what I’ve just said might be the knife fight where he split Buckmann almost in half. To see what actually happened, you have to slow the video way down. It’s in the theater if you decide you want to view it. There are puke bags in the cabinet. I would suggest propping the bathroom door open for easy access or else have the puke bags ready. There is a lot of blood. Morales, no matter what you have seen him do, he’s faster and better at it than what he has allowed you to see. With the possible exception of the knife fight, he holds back on just about everything. There’s something else. I think he’s getting better at everything — way better — and I also think it’s, maybe, scaring him a little.”

Jasmine frowned. “Scaring him?”

“Ah, possibly that’s the wrong word. Maybe I should say that he’s becoming concerned where this will all wind up.”

“You mean the thing with the saber tooth and the bull?”

“Yeah. He said that he knew there wasn’t time, especially with the bull, but he did it anyway. He had never done anything exactly like that before, and something seemed to take over when he thought about building the wall. I think those were his exact words. He chuckled and said it felt like calling up a subroutine for a computer program. Instead of having to do each part separately, he just knew he could call up this — whatever it was — and it was as if that part of him had done it many times and there was no need to stress his brain with the whole routine when the subroutine had it down. He said it should have taken him minutes that he didn’t have, instead of a second or two. He said it was so easy that he almost felt as if he had cheated. If he hadn’t at first tried to do it himself and had called the subroutine to begin with, he would have had more time to cushion the wall.”

“I wonder how many ‘subroutines’ he has in there somewhere,” Morales said, obviously trying to lighten the subject that had suddenly become very serious, if the expression on Diana’s face was any indication.

Before more could be said, Jeff walked in, obviously having heard at least part of the conversation. “My thoughts exactly,” he said as Diana got up to return shortly with a glass full of ice. Smiling his thanks, he filled the glass with lemonade before taking several large swallows just as Arlene, Ann, Kei and Aiko, the latter two bedraggled looking, walked into the kitchen. One look at the lemonade, and they all got glasses before sitting at the table with the rest.

Despite what Diana had said, Jeff did have some sweat on him, but not nearly enough to have run as far as he had. It was evident Arlene and Ann had been exercising, but they weren’t stressed. Kei and Aiko, on the other hand, looked every bit as bad as Morales, but they wore a grin that seemed to be permanently plastered across their faces.

“I take it that you made your ten miles in the allotted time?”

“Well,” Aiko began but was interrupted by Arlene.

“Kei made her ten, eight-minute miles with Aiko only a few minutes behind her. We are so very proud of both of them. That is an astonishing accomplishment in the short time they have been running.”

The tiny woman spoke up. “I did not make it in the time my daughter did. However, I am improving every day, and shortly I hope to do the ten miles in eighty minutes.”

Jeff stood, walked over and kissed both Kei and Aiko deeply. “Well done,” he quietly said to both of them, then to Arlene and Ann, “and well done to you two as well.”

“Mom and I could not have done it without Arlene and Ann,” Kei agreed.

As he returned to his seat, Jeff saw Jasmine checking her watch, and it didn’t take a genius to surmise she was doing a little arithmetic in her head.

Christine cleared her throat to get their attention. “When Jeff, Arlene, Ann, Aiko and Kei got out of their Escalade at the bottom of the drive prior to beginning their run, I heard Jeff say something about twenty miles, and I heard Arlene say that you four were going to run ten miles, hopefully at an eight-minute pace. Now admittedly, I’m guessing how long it took him to run or jog up the driveway. With what Diana said about his running a marathon a day unless something interfered, I suspect our family was part of that interference today and probably made him cut his run to 20 miles. I would assume that he did that twenty miles in roughly 80 minutes. How far off am I?” she asked him.

“Jeff,” Diana said in that voice. “Do not even think about lying.”

“Uh ... fairly close,” he finished with a glare at his wife.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” Morales whispered barely audibly. “He runs twenty miles while I’m stumbling through two.”

“Not really,” Jasmine said. “We spent time with pushups and just having fun talking.”

“And, he’s not even breathing hard,” Morales insisted.

“Oh, but I was. I just had time to return to normal as I slow jogged up the drive, plus I wiped off in the mudroom before entering the Retreat proper.”

“You jogged up that ... thing out there?” Christine asked incredulously.

“Not that big a deal once you get used to it,” Jeff insisted, but no one seemed to be listening.

“Several years ago,” Christine said, “I watched several one-mile races on TV with people who were training to try and beat the mile record. I can’t remember what the best time for the mile is, but I know it’s somewhat less than four minutes. There are too many variables that prevent me from arriving with a precise number, but he said he was going to run twenty miles. The world record time for a marathon is something like two hours and two or three minutes, I think, so let’s say 122 minutes. That’s...”

“Approximately 4.65 minutes per mile,” Arlene, who had grabbed a kitchen calculator, said.

“Jeff ran 20 miles in approximately 80 minutes. So, that’s 4 minutes per mile for 20 miles,” she said. “Twenty isn’t a marathon, but I’d be willing to bet he could have maintained the same pace for the next 6 point 2 miles.” She hesitated for a moment before going on. “Our Prime here has matched or maybe exceeded the best world record time while running on a frigging mountain, and since he doesn’t seem to be that tired, I’m guessing he wasn’t even trying, probably just cruising along. There were far too many variables involved today to arrive at a solid number, but I would love to time you for real,” Christine said as she locked eyes with Jeff.

“Fat chance of that,” Diana grumped.

Damn, Jeff thought as he smiled over at Ashley, most of what she said was only guesses or speculation, but I had to lie, or she would have really gotten interested. It’s a good thing that I deliberately mentioned twenty miles before we started. If she had factored in twenty-six instead of twenty, I would have been in big trouble. Oh, well, I told her I wiped the sweat off in the mudroom. If she had seen me dripping sweat, she would have been more curious and might have suspected that I did run my full route, and she would have gotten all excited about my actual time.

As he smiled to himself, he looked up to see Diana staring back at him. A second later, her eyes opened wider as she put it all together before her smile turned into a frown. Shit, she caught me in a lie. Crap, how does that woman do that? Subtly, he shook his head, warning her to leave it for now, but he knew he would have to do some explaining shortly. Security knows, but they also know their jobs depend on keeping their mouths shut about what goes on here. Oh, they can’t say anything to an outsider, but they know they had better not discuss anything of that nature with anyone not on our Security force. All the General’s people are blocked, of course, but they don’t need to know the particulars of our life here.

I pushed today, thinking with all that was going on, I would get away with it without anyone noticing. I just wanted to know what my time would be if I really pushed it. I thought with my having mentioned twenty miles, everyone would think that was how far I ran. Well, everybody did — except Diana. Now, she and my other wives will make a big deal out of it. I don’t want people to look at me as if I’m some kind of weirdo.

The Clan Queen was thinking of him, but not as a weirdo. The enhancement has changed all of us. To me, it seems natural to expect that it will affect him more than anyone else. Being a Prime is more than just being a great-looking guy with some type of title. Ship says Primes were very rare on her planet and could do things no one else could — the reason their society gave Primes so much power. She acts as if it was destiny that he came to her. He’s still my man, but he’s changed a lot since he returned from that assignment with his team.