Chapter 1

At the old time camp meeting, the fire and brimstone Baptist evangelist had done a bang up job. They were going whole hog for the good old ways, and there were more than fifty in line to be baptized in the small muddy river's cold water.

The preacher held a young boy in his arms, lowered him beneath the surface and then brought him back up sputtering.

"Do you believe?" the preacher asked.

"I'm not sure," the boy replied, and the preacher repeated the process.

"Do you believe now?" the preacher asked when the boy was above the water again.

"I'm still not sure," the boy replied, and so the preacher tried again, holding the boy under much longer this time.

"Now, do you believe?" the preacher asked, as the boy coughed and wheezed.

"Yes, preacher. I believe. I believe," the boys said.

"And what do you believe?" the preacher asked.

"I believe you're trying to drown me, you crazy old bastard."

I know it's and old joke, but dammit, it was about the way I felt right now, because I hadn't believed, not for a second. Oh, not about God or anything. I hadn't ever bothered with a real opinion about God.

I hadn't believed in spacemen, or aliens, or UFOs - I hadn't believed any of that crap. I didn't know Area 51 from Studio 54 and didn't really give a shit about either until recently. You see, lately things had been happening, to me.

Now not a damned one of the things that happened had been bad, but they'd been things that just couldn't happen. Oh, maybe it wasn't completely unheard of for a pretty much pumped out oil well to start flowing oil again, but it was damned nearly impossible.

Johnson Manufacturing Company Number One was as close to dry as a well got if it was still called a well. Even after the last work-over rig got done it only produced about two to three barrels a day, barely enough to bother with. Then all of a sudden one fine November Second - my birthday at that - something happened down below, and crude oil started coming up by itself, as if it was under pressure down there. Clearly it couldn't be because there'd been no noticeable seismic activity anywhere within a thousand miles. Oil wells just didn't change like that without something noticeable going on.

Still the well was now making five hundred barrels of oil per eight-hour shift. I'd gone from scraping by to filthy rich in a few weeks. See, I owned the mineral rights on that well, I owned them all for that one well. The production company got their share but mostly the oil, and more importantly the money from it, was mine.

Of course some government men from one agency or the next came around to see what we'd done that might be illegal, but they didn't find shit because we hadn't done shit. Hell, there's nothing you can do to turn a well around like that. If there was everybody would do it and the Arabs would be broke. We knew it was impossible just like they did, but there it was. They shook their heads and went home after a month or so.

The well wasn't the only impossible thing happening to me though. I was getting younger, and it started on the same day the well did. Oh I didn't go to bed fifty-nine and wake up twelve or anything stupid like that, but I knew that morning something was happening, because half an hour after I took my glyburide, I checked my blood sugar, and it was in the low seventies. I damned near ran to the refrigerator for a Coke.

And the miracles just kept coming. The next morning when I woke I was clear headed as soon as my eyes opened, instead of the half an hour of moving around it normally took. And that was another thing; I'd slept through the night without having to get up once to pee.

By the time a week had gone by I knew I had no use for the glyburide at all. Not only that, my diabetic retinopathy had cleared up on its own too, and I could see perfectly again. Not to mention I felt great. I was also gaining weight, and it wasn't fat.

Never in my life had I done any serious exercising, and I hadn't started lately either. It didn't seem to matter though. I was gaining weight and it wasn't going to fat. I was getting stronger and I didn't know why. It was even visible, to me at least. I mean, after you've been looking at yourself for fifty-nine years you're damned sure going to notice when something starts looking better, instead of the other way around.

By December 2, 2007, I was convinced that somehow I was getting younger. I looked better and I felt better, inside and out. What the hell, I wasn't complaining, especially since I seemed to be getting rich without doing one damned thing about it.

The only things that weren't changing were my externally visible features. My beard was still almost completely gray and my face still matched my chronological age. Oh, a few things had changed about my appearance. My eyebrows had stopped growing the few extra long ones that were a hassle and the hair in my ears and nose had stopped gaining ground. But anything that would have been immediately noticeable stayed the same. Things that were always covered by clothes didn't though; they seemed to look younger and younger every day.

Miracles were happening to me goddammit! Miracles. I couldn't think of one damned reason they should be, and I sure as hell didn't have any idea why they seemed to be only happening to the parts of me that wouldn't show up.

Oh, I'm sure if I went to a doctor for a physical they would be obvious. Then again, why would I? My health seemed better than it had been since I was twenty-one. Still the facts of the matter were obvious to me, if not to anyone else. I was getting younger, in stealth mode. It didn't make sense, but I wasn't bitching about it.

The next major shock in my life came on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2007, and it wasn't a shock for me alone. Apparently, while on his appointed rounds that night, Santa Claus dropped his biggest gift ever onto the United States of America while he was buzzing around Washington, DC.

Without making one peep, George W Bush died in his sleep. He died silently from acute myocardial infarction. No one even noticed until a White House staffer came in to wake he and his wife. Laura was confused at first because W always woke and woke her at least a half-hour before the staffer arrived. Imagine the scene when they realized W was as cold as a turd in a milk bucket.

Dick Cheney was elevated to President before breakfast, but the sorry bastard, who was not in the best of health himself, died of the same malady before noon Christmas Day. The Presidents are dead - all hail the President, Nancy Pelosi.

Talk about a fucking shock for the good old U S of A, and the whole world too. This one took top billing. News coverage from around the world claimed that opinions of whether it was good news or bad news seemed about equally divided worldwide, but we didn't have to wait long for more highly placed heads of state to roll along with George and Dick.

North Korea was the next country to suffer the same type of leadership vacuum, if you could call such a gift suffering, and they didn't even have the benefit of serial tragedies. Nearly two hundred of their most highly placed officials were blessed with the same treatment in one big orgy of heart failure on New Years Eve that year.

And the shocks just kept coming. Every political leader on Earth must have been beside their selves with worry, since by now barely a night passed without some widely recognized asshole biting the proverbial bullet. Good old Nancy hung tough in the White House, but her former peers in Congress and the Senate dropped like flies all through January, along with almost every one who ruled anything in the Middle East.

A seeming side benefit popped up too. Suicide bombings, car bombs, and truck bombs and the like quit exploding. Almost every day for a while there someone would discover a body with a bomb taped around its chest and it's head removed. The missing part was usually lying somewhere nearby, unless they had happened to be on a steep hill at the time.

My personal favorites were the truck bombs that weren't intended to be suicide style. Some policeman or other would find a truck bomb parked somewhere with the driver's body slumped in the seat and his head lying on the ground beside the driver's door. Apparently their heads just fell off once they tried to exit the vehicle. Man, what a neat trick. I wished I could do it. It didn't take long for the potential suicide bombers to lose interest in that scheme. After all, they were fanatics, not idiots.

Though there was literal panic in the streets in dozens upon dozens of countries, things in the United States stayed fairly calm. Bureaucrats kept the country rocking along on a mostly even keel, and for some reason that I couldn't understand, none of them bit the dirt, but lawmakers were getting hard to come by.

Nancy was in perfect health, but it seemed that almost half of the replacements for places in the Congress or Senate died before they had time to fondle a page's ass. A few of them did fine, but the biggest part of those pressed into service by their states were actually pressed into burials shortly afterward, and it was getting so there were damned few who would allow themselves to be considered for the duty now-a-days.

By the time Easter rolled around things were settling down. It was as if men who knew that they were sorry sacks of shit also knew they wouldn't last in office until the water got hot. Not only were candidates refusing to serve, many of the jerks that were already in office resigned, just in case. Easter showed them how wise they'd been.

Edward - Teddy - Kennedy shuffled off this mortal coil early Easter morning, but he wasn't alone. Almost everyone that was still alive from those that had helped him cover up drowning Mary Jo Kopechne were in turd in the milk bucket shape too. It had taken a hell of a long time for the chickens of July 18, 1969 to come home to roost, but after the Easter massacre you couldn't find one person who hadn't been sure Teddy had pulled a no no, oh so long ago.

The State of the Union that Nancy Pelosi had explained to us just a few months before was changed completely again. It seemed that every day more and more political assholes had heart attacks. I wasn't too worried about it, since no one I'd ever miss or lament had died, so far. Sure, things were near low-level panic all around, but what the hell. People were still buying gasoline and I was still coining money and getting healthier by the day.

That didn't mean no one I knew had died, they had, but I knew I wouldn't miss a fucking one of them. A recent District Attorney who'd given me some grief was pushing up daisies, and while I figured his wife and kids would miss him, I sure didn't. Hell, as far as I could tell, somebody or something was doing the world a world of good.

Terrorism, which had been a growing problem worldwide, was practically unheard of now, barely three months later. There'd been rumors that whole training camps for them died on the same night. Whether that was correct or not I couldn't say. I had noticed that Iraq had settled amazingly, and Iran too for that matter, and I couldn't even remember the last time I'd heard about some atrocity happening anywhere. No matter what was causing all this heart trouble, they had my thanks, so far.

It turned out that heart attacks weren't the only new development. Abortions, which I didn't think were any of my business at all, since I didn't happen to own a womb, had come to an end too. Not from any new laws but from a very strange development. Women who didn't want to get pregnant stopped getting pregnant, and they weren't the only ones.

With all the obvious confusion it had gone unnoticed for a while, but three months or so down the road it was obvious that most women were not able to get pregnant, and the numbers were a little alarming for many of them. Poor people were hardest hit. If a family couldn't be expected to properly support a new member, they didn't get one, and financial considerations weren't the only ones in effect.

Somehow someone or something was deciding which families could be good parents and the females in that family were the only ones getting pregnant. In fact, only women who were in stable relationships with a sane and caring partner seemed able to be blessed with motherhood, as if you didn't get a baby unless you could be reasonably expected to raise it in a sensible manner.

What a concept, you had to be a good parental prospect before you got a child. One of the most distressing things about it for some was that it seemed one hell of a lot of Baptist women were now barren, but they weren't alone. Zero population growth had come and gone in a heartbeat. Understandably, figures were hard to come up with, but the most educated guesses were that the Earth would be down under two billion in population within forty years.

I didn't know about what was happening in other countries, but here in the United States no one had done much to change their ways since Christmas. People were still dying by the thousands in automobile and other types of accidents. Criminal behavior of all types had slacked off a little, but accidental death and injury were still going strong. Maybe the new facts of life hadn't hit home to them yet.

These new facts of life hit home for me on June 19, 2007. No, I didn't die in my sleep. I was pretty sure my heart had to be in great shape, just like the rest of me. It was a good thing too, because after I woke, showered, and dressed I went into my kitchen, and there was a guest sitting at my table. He must have made himself at home already, because he had a pot of coffee made and was even drinking a cup. Hell, I got a cup for myself. I needed it.

"Good morning, Jake," he said; as I sat down to join him at my table.

"I believe it is safe to say you have the advantage of me."

"I apologize for that. My name is Shikictaawa, or that is as close as your language can come. We couldn't decide on a better way to meet you, and I hope the improvements we've made to you will go some way toward redressing our poor manners," he said.

"If you're responsible for the miracles that have happened in my life since my last birthday you can consider yourself forgiven," I said, and with a straight face too.

"Thank you."

"Is it safe to assume you have something more in mind for me?"

"Oh, yes, but it isn't mandatory. You may decline with no penalty. In truth, there will be no advantage to you for accepting. Well, maybe that isn't exactly the truth. There will be no material advantage to you if you accept," Shikictaawa said.

"That may be a good thing, I've already come across more material advantage than I can shake a stick at," I said.