Chapter 1

The New Beginning

I could feel my soul accelerating through the dark, empty, place of the dead. How can something that has no substance accelerate? I had no idea, and put it on my list of things to ponder. The place of the dead held me captive for so long, I wasn't sure if this time it was permanent. If so than this was eternity.

The dark, silent, nothingness had held me like a prisoner for so long that my mind became unsure if I even existed, or if I'd ever existed. The questions rush in when the universe is so black that not even silence can make its way in. Those questions hounded me like a deranged madman, seeking my swiftly dissolving sanity in its wake.

In the quickening emptiness I remembered everything...

Time has no meaning to the dead, because the moment we die, time ceases to impact us. Without time, everything – past, present, and future – happen at the same time. Without a beginning, there is no point of departure, or time of arrival. We simply are, and in being we are everywhere, and nowhere. We are here, and definitely not here.

I died...

My last thoughts were of the universe and my assigned task. I thought of the couple who adopted my last body, a damaged, young, girl, and loved her without rules. Angela DeBusque was loved by her last parents, even if she was never loved by her first ones, and her last parents happened to be the President of the United States and First Lady, which was ironic, since in one of my most prolific lives, I served as President, and was the one who appointed him to the Office of Vice President, just to die and watch him succeed me, while I struggled to adjust to the body of a child killed by the same assassin that killed my body when I was president.

If I'd tried to describe my lives to a bystander, it would sound so perverse that I could be hailed as the second coming of the great science fiction writers of the past. So unbelievable was my story, that no one would ever even consider believing a word of it, unless they'd lived multiple journeys of my lives, with me, like my one great, but lost love, Colleen.

I died...

... and stayed dead for so long, I wondered if death was my new life...

To die is to wait ... and wait ... and wait in a place with no exits, no windows, and no light. In the place of the dead there was no sound, no sensations, and no comfort. I lived a victim of my thoughts, and they tortured me with second guesses, failed hopes, and tired dreams.

I was truly and completely dead when my soul accelerated toward...

What???

The first thing I felt was ... hot. My body – I suddenly knew I had one – was hot. It was terribly hot and I needed rescue from the heat that tormented the body I didn't know I had.

Hands...

I felt hands all over my body. They traveled everywhere, and they were very wet. The wetness contained some elixir that cooled me every place it touched. The coolness was a blessing, and the blessing spread across my front until it reached an impediment.

Voices...

The first voice I heard was quite firm, and stern. "There is no time for modesty, my dear girl. Lift the sheet and let's get to cooling him down before the temperature damages his brain." The voice was decidedly female, albeit, not so feminine. Whoever was the target of her wrath, quickly complied, and I could feel those hands bringing blessed coolness to my lower extremities.

The question of my gender answered itself, for the stern one said, "He." Whatever I was, man or boy, I was no longer a young girl, dying of the plague. That news gave me an enormous amount of pleasure. Having been a girl for such a short time was a challenge, a burden, and an enormous wealth of knowledge about the fairer sex.

'He' worked just fine for me. It was pleasant to think of myself as, once again, a 'he.'

The hands ceased to touch me, and the quiet was broken by the sound of other voices. "The fever is breaking. We need to keep cooling him. Don't stop, no matter what, until I tell you."

A third voice joined the catalog I was making in my head. "Doctor, did anyone else survive?"

Uh-Ohhh...

"As far as I know, he is the only one. The orphanage is a total loss, and the gas line explosion killed everyone but this boy, and he only survived because he was blown through the kitchen screen door. His injuries are not all that severe, but the fever could a killer..."

My new body was poked, prodded, injected, washed, cooled, and toweled off, before it all started again. For what had to be years, they abused me until all at once it stopped. Everyone stopped touching me, and a new voice joined the discussion. "He'll live. His temperature is coming down just as we hoped. Let's get him up to a private room, and I'll assign round-the-clock nursing care.

"It will be Ok. He's going to be fine."

Another doctor must have joined the circus being held around my bed, because the first one started to fill him in. "This young man was injured when a gas line exploded at the home where he was staying. His injuries are not life threatening on the surface, but the explosion clearly concussed him very badly, as well as all the unavoidable impacts of wood, plaster, household goods, and other things dislodged by the event.

"His respiration, BP, and most other vital signs are encouraging, but he suffered an extremely high fever that must have been brought on by the explosion, and we have just now gotten it down below one-hundred degrees. He is resting quietly, and should regain consciousness within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

"Our young patient is remarkably resilient, Connor. He is the only survivor of the explosion, and, according to the Rescue Squad that brought him in, was blown approximately forty feet beyond the screen door that he tore from the hinges when the explosion picked him up and tossed him out."

I could hear someone presumably the other doctor, taking notes, and the next hours were a blur of voices, lights, movement, and pain. It seemed like the body I'd inhabited was violated in every possible way, known to medical science. I felt tubes going down my throat, up my bottom, and in my penis, as well as the discomfort caused by IV's, X-Rays, and of the other kinds of testing apparatus that were used on me.

Sometime – very much later – my brain had had enough, and shut down.

I slept.

Sleeping did nothing to lessen the noise that filtered into my conscious mind. I experienced alternating periods of light and dark, sound and silence. At no time was I alone, because my heightened senses alerted me to the steady breathing of others all the time.

When I opened my eyes for the first time I thought I'd died yet again, because looking down into my face was an angel. She smiled when she saw me awake, and her closest hand brushed something away from my face, so that I could better see her dazzling smile.

"Well ... Hello to you. It is very, very good to see that you have eyeballs. For days I've waited here, wondering if there was anything behind those eyelids, while you gave me no evidence at all that anyone lived in there ... I am happy to meet you, Carl."

CARL???

Could I be ... was it possible???

Surely not.

For me to be ... me ... I'd have had to journeyed back to my fourteenth year, when my mother died, and the explosion would have had to be the orphanage where I was treated to the horror show that was imposed on the parentless in the modern age of nineteen-eighty one.

The angel spoke once more. "You look like you've seen a ghost, Carl. It's Ok. I promise you, sweetie. It's all Ok, now." She brushed my hair with her beatific fingers, setting off all kinds of alarms inside my adolescent body. Nothing much happened as far as arousal, because I was far too wired up for my more ... masculine ... appendages to respond, so I was safe from that embarrassment, at least for right now.

"I know, baby ... You've been through so much, but things are about to get better for you. I promise. Your life will settle down and you'll be loved and cared for, instead of warehoused in that awful orphanage." My personal angel felt the same antipathy for that awful hell hole that I did.

Good.

I needed to speak but my throat fought my every attempt. My angel saw my distress and mistook it for a medical crisis, and pressed the call button, then screamed down the hall for help. Her alert seemed to set off all kinds of alarms, as nurses, doctors, aides, and technicians crowded in to help. My terror must have shown on my face, because one man, obviously the one in charge, shushed everyone and began to mess with the tubes in my nose and mouth.