Chapter 423: Offline for Your Protection

I remember showering and Ellen telling me my phone was off, but not why.

Damn! I have a catheter! Why?

I checked the place in my head, and it was neon purple. It made no sense. My shield was doing as always, and I had no harmful bacteria inside me. The implant was there still. I did a quick double-check from head to toe, and I was fine.

I tried to sit up, but I found myself strapped down. I knew I could snap the straps with my muscles alone, without any power from my shield or place in my head, but I didn’t. It was the same each time I woke up. No one came to talk to me. I couldn’t see outside this room, even using the place in my head, and had difficulty staying awake. No matter how much I tried to fight it, I couldn’t.

I’m getting scared. Did one of the governments find me and learn a way to keep me from escaping? I need to burn out the implant.

I tried to do that too, but I couldn’t.

“Please stop trying to fight it, David. It is taking all we have to keep you like this,” a voice said into my brain. “Relax. You’ve always trusted us. Just a little longer, please.”

I’m scared.

“Don’t be. You are safe. No one can get to you here.”

I quit counting how many times I woke up and went back to sleep.

“David,” a person said near me.

What is all this weight on me? Why is something cold all around me?

“DAVID!” they yelled to get my attention. “Focus. Please. You have responsibilities and people relying on you.”

“What? Huh? Why?” I babbled.

“Deep breaths. Slow deep breaths,” they said calmingly. “You will feel a slow tugging on your shield for energy. Let the energy flow out of you.”

Ok. That is easy. I won’t even notice that amount.

The voice told me, “Good. It is going to increase slowly. Let it happen. You will stop the flow if you run low. Here you can’t pull any back to fill the void. It is a one-way process.”

I let it happen the way that they said. Slowly, the energy pulling out of me through my shield began to increase. When it stopped adding more to how much was sucked from me, I hardly noticed it even tapping my energy. I felt myself slowly slipping back to sleep again.

“Time for you to wake up already, sleepy-head-daddy,” Ellen said, shaking me. “We’ve been here for days, and I’m bored.”

“Where are we?” I asked.

Ellen told me that we were at one of my houses out in the middle of nowhere. I had slept the entire way to the complex with the groups of kids we picked up along the way. Because I was sleepy, she went to get the kids. One time someone decided to challenge Ellen. They decided they were better off with the crazies that the place knew than one they didn’t.

At some point, I woke up enough to get into bed at the complex, but I wouldn’t stay awake for very long. Some people came that told Ellen I had to get checked at a place that she couldn’t go with me, so she stayed at the complex for three days before someone brought her out to this big house. For a few days, she was glued to the T.V., then found the Internet, MineCrap, Street Barriers, and then some porn. It had been a week since we arrived by the time that bored her. One of the people here took her out into the desert to let her burn off some energy hunting. She now had enough rattlesnake skins to make a pair of shoes, pants, vest, hat, and a matching purse.

“Sir,” a man said from the other side of the bed. “We did our best to keep your daughter entertained, but the three nearest taxidermists begged us to keep her out of the dessert for a few weeks, at least. Unofficially, the local animal control said that it looks like she resolved several wild animal problems they were having around the area. Officially, they aren’t going to let anyone know that she killed two mountain lions, three bobcats, an aggressive juvenile male black bear, and who knows how many coyotes that were killing off local pets.”

“Hey! I would have gotten rid of the other black bear and mountain lion if you had told me to put on sunscreen. There wasn’t this much direct sun around my last home. The local game wardens won’t need to worry about either of those two males breeding, though,” Ellen said to him.

To me, she said, “I think I am going to love being your daughter so much. People here rubbed aloe all over me since I had to hunt naked to hide my scent. They kept my room like a refrigerator and a big bed with plenty of room to find some cold sheets to sleep on. Whenever I got sunburned before, I just got a spot in the river where I could sleep with cold water going around me but not have to worry about drowning. They wouldn’t let me do that. Anyway, get up already. After you eat, we are going to run. Grandaddy said that you can run a long time and fast.”

She giggled as she pulled back the covers, undid the part that kept the sterile water in the catheter, got that to drain out, and yanked that unwanted tube from my dick. After she skipped off happily somewhere, I got some of an explanation.

“We would have told you what was going on, but we don’t know. You had your implant send out an SOS and then went to sleep. It took seven of your unique friends to keep you offline for the few days at your complex, for lack of a better term. Then we had to move you nearby. Ellen got small doses of natural sleep aids to keep her sleeping for twelve to fourteen hours at a time, only having her be awake for four to six hours each day. You went to a location where someone said you had to be encased in a superconductor and then connected to the electrical grid. Someone did some magic that had you powering all the Western U.S. and the top half of Mexico for two days straight before you slowly decreased the power you were sending out. From the few times that they allowed you to wake enough to talk, you kept saying the place in your head was purple. You expected it to be blue.”

I took the time to look at the energy I was now storing inside me. I checked the place in my head, and it was now a royal purple, which felt like a new normal for me. Reddish-purple is not good, but not pulse and destroy the universe type of thing.

Shaking my head, I told them, “Royal purple now seems to be the new normal for me. The energy I have inside me now is purer than what I had before. I can’t quite explain how only that is how it feels. I can only guess that whatever changed inside me didn’t like what it found and would cause something catastrophic to happen. Why else would I still have the implant? I sort of remember me trying to burn it out without letting myself do it.”

“That does explain why we cannot detect any energy being stored inside you now as we could before. It must be perfectly in tune with your body now. I can’t even guess what that could mean in the scheme of things. We chatted with an old weather witch who said that it was beyond even her knowledge,” he told me. “Now, you better go eat and see if you can exhaust your daughter. If she can’t keep herself from hunting, I’ve heard we have problems with squirrels to the south of here. Don’t let her kill any snakes in that area, or we will get overrun with rats and mice.”

Breakfast was a table full of some of everything, and I cleared the table almost by myself.

“Miss Ellen,” a woman in black leather and Kevlar said to get Ellen’s attention. “You are not going out in the nude anymore, young lady. Do that where there isn’t a large population of old retired men with heart conditions. If seeing you in the buff didn’t cause them to have their heart rate rising, popping in out of nowhere with a Bobcat skin over your head did. Before you even start to give me a hard time, I am bringing you a gift to take with you after you get that knife, and other things, out of your vagina.”

Ellen wasn’t happy about the demands, but I told her to do as the woman said. When a giant knife and one of the wire saws inside a clear tube came out, Ellen put her hands on her hips to demand why she had to do that.

“Because, dear little girl, you aren’t putting anything in there except what nature intended or a replica,” the woman told her. “Now that you have gotten regular healthy meals, you’ve begun growing. Those will cause you problems if you keep those items in there. You only use the main blade anyway, so we have made something for you that you must keep a secret from anyone but your father. We put you to sleep and did some work on your body. The scar on your right thigh just below your hip was cut out, and something that looks like it got put into place. We did the same for that long gash on your left shin.”

The woman had Ellen put her foot on the chair. Ellen had a scar on that leg from just above her foot to a few inches below her knee. The woman showed her how to find what was now hidden inside there. Without any pain. Ellen pulled out a long, thin, bone-colored blade. That went onto the table. From the scar on her right side, she pulled out a pouch that looked like a chunk of muscle. On the inside was a flat bag that could hold four bills. It had four one-hundred-dollar bills now. It also had the small pocket knife her father had given her.

“Sorry to have removed a small bit of fat, Ellen, but I doubt you will ever miss it,” the woman told her. “This is something that doesn’t exist as far as the world is concerned. We made the pocket in your legs from a mixture of your muscle and fat cells suspended in a material your body will assume is meant to be there. The one beside your shin cannot be cut, so you need not worry about that. The scar composition will only be separated by the custom sequence of multiple magnets. We pushed them into your fingertips and glued them to the bone. They cannot get by any tools available to anyone except those who put them there. The blade from your left leg is made from a material that will never get dull. All your secret hiding places had one neater trick. They bend the signals from an MRI, CT Scan, and x-rays around them as if they aren’t even there. Even rubbing a hand against them during an exam by a doctor will have them feel exactly as your opposite leg and thigh. Now that takes care of your need to put things in your vagina. It isn’t the surprise I promised. We will let you try to locate the hidden blade in your right leg. There is no scar on that leg.”

After Ellen could put the things back and remove them with ease, the woman brought over a small box.

Putting her hand on Ellen’s, the woman said, “This is a gift from a friend of your father who got very saddened at what happened to him. He told me that your father was a good man. Inside you will find what looks like your twenty-two-rodent pistol, but this one isn’t lethal. It uses small stun projectiles. They have enough electricity to work like a Taser on rodents and snakes. It is also silent due to the customized firing system that works similarly to a rail gun. Look it up. I’m not a schoolteacher. It has unique properties to keep it from showing on x-ray, even if laying right on the bed in plain sight. Not using any form of fuel keeps it from being classified as a firearm. If anyone else tries to fire it, all they get is plastic bb-sized balls like a cheap toy gun. The magnets under your fingertips are required to turn on the firing system and make the needed changes to the balls to make them able to stun. Here, let me show you.”

The woman pulled out the gun, and the magazine was transparent, showing lots of tiny yellow plastic balls. In the middle, the place in my head showed me was a dense power source that only generates an electrical charge when in the gun, and Ellen is holding it. When Ellen aimed it at a box down the hall, the yellow ball hit it as soon as Ellen pulled the trigger far enough. Pulling the trigger by anyone else did cause the yellow ball to go about afoot. When we went to look, the yellow ball had been flash-melted inside the gun to expose the micro-electrodes that delivered the stunning shock.

“When you run today, you will have a bright, pink, with pastel flowers, vinyl, child’s holster for it. David will be carrying one of his sidearms loaded with rubber, stun, and Black Window projectiles, just in case they are needed. Now you two go get dressed to run already.”

I didn’t even get up too much more than a fast walk when Ellen was running along beside me, at least until she saw something. There were more than a reasonable number of squirrels in the south part of town, as I had been told. Ellen was about to stalk off to hunt them as she had for years. I had to stop her before she got going.

“Remember, Ellen. You don’t have to stalk them as you have in the past. When you see one, pull out your gun and fire two stun shots. You can then go up to kill it without worrying about trying to navigate electric fences, barbed wires, aggressive dogs, or any of the dozens of ways you can get hurt in the city that you didn’t have at the R.V. park. The woman didn’t tell you, but one shot stuns them for five to ten minutes. The second one effectively fries their nervous system,” I explained. “You hit them twice and go collect them when you want or leave them to the other predators.”

As we ran, we took turns seeing who could hit one first. A rubber bullet in the right spot killed them. I knew my stun rounds would kill them.

“Daddy, get low, and then don’t move. We are being tracked. A mountain lion is getting ready to pounce on me. I’ve got it,” Ellen told me.

As she reached for the blade in her leg, I stopped her and said, “Remember the dogs? This cat is going to know an alpha male. If it wants to fight, then that is what it will get. I’m bigger and faster. Just watch your dad and be surprised.”