Prologue

“I’m scared to death about this virus. From what my husband said, he suffered greatly before his death. I’ve had a premonition about this spreading not only to the U.S. but to the entire world,” Caroline said. “Do you really think you can help me?”

The technician at the Cryogenics Lab examined the paperwork Caroline filled out earlier. “It looks like you’re a good candidate for our services, Ms. Lewis. So far you have no symptoms of the virus, making you an ideal choice. You do know our services don’t come for free.”

Caroline reached into her purse and pulled out a stack of hundred-dollar bills. “From what I’ve read, you charge twenty thousand dollars. I have that amount right here. If you think you’re going to raise the price just because of this virus, I’ll leave right now.”

“Don’t be hasty, Ms. Lewis. Although there has been talk about raising the price, because of the current situation, no one has acted upon it. The twenty thousand will completely cover it. We can set your appointment for four thirty tomorrow afternoon. How long do you want to be frozen for?”

Caroline thought for a moment. With the virus spreading throughout the world, she prayed a cure would be found within the next fifty years. “I think until March of 2070 should be sufficient time. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She left the office, secure in the knowledge that by this time tomorrow, she would be freeze dried until this pandemic was eradicated once and for all.

~ * ~

“Are you out of your mind, Caroline?” her brother Jonathan asked when she arrived at his home for supper that evening. “How could you throw away twenty thousand dollars on something this foolish? Those guys are nothing but shysters. Who knows what will happen to you in that place? I’m not ready to lose my sister.”

“I’m willing to take that chance. My premonition about this virus, combined with my compromised immune system, is almost a death sentence in and of itself. If I can wake up fifty years in the future and not have to worry about any of these health problems, it’s worth a shot. You know my husband was in China when this thing broke out and he died there. Other than you, I have no one else I care about left. This is the ideal solution for me.”

“It’s your decision and your money. Who am I to stop you, other than being your baby brother? I wish you well and I hope the future you’re looking forward to is everything you want it to be.”

“The cost of what I’m planning to do is only minimal considering what I’m worth. I have a document I want you to sign. It will transfer all of my assets to you. All I ask is that you take a minute part of them and invest wisely, so I will have money to live on when they awaken me in fifty years. I promise, I will come back to you. You are much younger than me and I am certain you will still be alive in 2070. We will meet again.”

Chapter One

Los Angeles 2120

“I don’t know what you’re looking to find here, Nick. Los Angeles has been a wasteland since the pandemic, combined with the forces of nature, destroyed everything and everyone on the west coast a hundred years ago.”

“It has, Lori, but something tells me we will make a find of great importance here. It could set the archaeology community on its ear with the biggest discovery of this century. We’ve got another three hours of time before they’re expecting us back at headquarters. Let’s just take a look through the ruins of this building.”

Lori looked at the sign above the ruined building in front of them. “Cryogenics? What do you think that means?”

Nick stopped in his tracks, pulling up the Internet on his watch. After typing in the word that seemed alien to both of them, he waited for the response. “Let’s see, it says that during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, cryogenics was the freezing of human bodies to be awakened in the future when there was hope there would be a cure for some of the diseases plaguing the planet at that time. From what it says here, the quacks that promised eternal life through freezing the body in liquid nitrogen made a bundle off the people who came to them. It says here that people paid ten thousand dollars in the beginning and it went to twenty thousand dollars after the turn of the century. By the time the pandemic was at its peak, the price skyrocketed to over fifty thousand dollars. The people who were promoting this crap became millionaires overnight, for all the good it did them.”

Lori thought about this history she’d learned, not only in high school but in college. The pandemic of 2020 had encompassed the world within a matter of weeks and disappeared just as quickly. With the world in chaos, it was the ideal time for World War III to be launched. Before it could, natural disasters wreaked havoc on both the east and west coasts of the United States, leaving millions of their citizens dead or dying. Now, a hundred years later, the government had declared the areas safe for the archeological teams to come in to reap the benefits of the knowledge from one hundred years ago in the hopes of keeping something like this from happening again.

“Okay, it won’t hurt to go in there,” Lori conceded. “It could prove quite interesting.”

Carefully, they picked their way through the ruins of what once must have been a beautiful building. The lobby still sported a spectacular marble floor with the remains of what once must have been a receptionist desk. In front of them a spiral staircase led to a now non-existent second floor. To the right of it were stairs leading to what must have been a basement.

With trepidation, they made their way down the steps. Without the sunlight that illuminated the upper floor, they each switched on their flashlights as well as the lamps on their hardhats. As they did, they saw several chambers, with decaying bodies of men and women inside of the glass protective doors that looked like they cracked sometime over the past century, allowing the nitrogen gas to leak out and destroy them.

“So much for preserving eternal life,” Lori quipped. “All they got for their tens of thousands of dollars was just as dead as anyone else. What a scam.”

“Maybe not. Look here, this one is really well preserved. We’d better radio the team and see if anyone knows how to reverse this process. Think of the possibilities if we could resurrect a woman from 2020 or maybe before.”

“I think you’re right about 2020. There’s a tag on the outside of her chamber and it says her name is Caroline Lewis and she was frozen on March 17, 2020.”

It didn’t take long for Nick to hurry up the stairs in order to make contact with their base camp. While he did, Lori continued to look at not only the decaying bodies, but the perfectly preserved body of the woman named Caroline drew her like a magnet.

“Why did you do it, Caroline?” she asked aloud, knowing she wouldn’t get an answer.

As she continued to look around, she found a cabinet with several three ring binders in it. Being careful with the binders, she finally found one with the name of Caroline Lewis printed on the spine of the book.

She’d just pulled it out when Nick reappeared.

“I got a hold of Dr. Jamison and she is researching how to handle this. She said she should be here within the hour. Our instructions are to stay and guard this find until she gets here. I have a feeling this discovery is going to make us as famous as the archaeologists who discovered King Tut’s tomb back in the early twentieth century.”

“If I remember my history correctly, they all fell victim to a curse the ancient Egyptian put on Tut’s tomb. I hope there isn’t any kind of curse out on Caroline.”

“Now you’re being paranoid. Curses were things from ancient history and the dark ages. People were too advanced in the twenty-first century to believe in those things.”

Lori agreed with Nick. There were no such things as curses but the three-ring binders she’d found in the file drawer could shed some light on the people in the damaged cryogenics chambers.

“I found these binders. The only one I took out was the one with Caroline’s name on it. Since we have to wait for Dr. Jamison, we might as well see what it says about our sleeping beauty.”

Lori opened the book and smiled to see the pages were encased in protective plastic. At least they wouldn’t be too fragile to be touched.

“Caroline Lewis, female, forty-two years of age, no sign of the virus. Even though she suffered from breast cancer in 2017, she is cancer free,” she read aloud. “It also says she paid twenty thousand dollars to the facility for her chance at eternal life. She wanted to be reawakened in 2070. Oh well, Caroline, you’re only about fifty years overdue. I wonder how you will react to the state the world is in today.”

Nick nodded his agreement. “We should take the remainder of the binders back to headquarters. They could be a treasure trove of information about the others who weren’t as lucky as Caroline.”

Lori agreed and started trying to figure out how they would be able to transport these important documents without a box or anything else to put them in.

~ * ~

Doctor Kirsten Jamison studied the information about cryogenics she found on her computer. While she’d been in college, she studied the ancient practice. She’d doubted it was anything more than an urban myth. Now after what Nick and Lori had discovered in the ruins of one of the buildings in what was once Los Angeles, they had debunked the urban myth theory.

Confident she could successfully reverse the process, she prepared to go out to the location where Nick and Lori made the discovery. Her hands shook as she packed her bags with the equipment her research told her would be necessary to reverse the effects of the cryogenics chamber.

Even though she’d never put much stock in the stories about cryogenics, she did recall the stories her grandmother often told her about her great-grandfather’s sister, Caroline Lewis. According to what her grandmother told her, Caroline had been distraught over the loss of her husband who had been in China at the outbreak of the 2020 pandemic and died before he could return to the States. At the time she thought she had nothing to live for and went to the cryogenics facility. After her disappearance, the natural disasters began and Kirsten’s great-grandfather took his family to the Midwest when the evacuation order had been issued. No one knew what happened to Great Aunt Caroline Lewis. Had she gone through with her plans to be frozen alive or had she lost her life during the disasters? It was one of those family legends that would forever be a mystery.

Outside of her office, her hovercraft pilot waited for her. She knew he wasn’t thrilled about flying through the ruins of what was once Los Angeles, but they’d all signed on for this assignment. There were dangers, even mutant animals that roamed the streets of the long-forgotten city, but those were things that archaeologists had been dealing with for years all over the globe. In the past it had been curses on mu-mmies as well as snakes with the venomous bites. These new perils were just as real, forcing everyone who traveled to the area to be well-armed against whatever they might encounter.

“Are you sure you want to go into the inner city, Doctor?”

“That’s where Nick and Lori have made the find. I can’t very well examine the artifacts if I don’t go there myself.”

“I understand. I have my laser pistol as well as my rifle loaded, in case we should need to use them. I just hope Nick and Lori are all right. Even though they’re armed, they could be in danger.”

“From what Nick told me, what they found is in the basement of the ruins of a building. I doubt any animals would be going down a flight of stairs. There certainly isn’t any food for them down there. I’ve heard most of them have retreated to the forests and the mountains.”

Her pilot, Alex, nodded his agreement and they took off for the fifteen-minute flight to the area where they knew they would find Nick and Lori.

As they made their way through the now ruined streets of what was once a great city, Kirsten remembered the old pictures she’d found in her grandmother’s attic when they cleaned out the house. Some of them were dated during the twentieth century, long before the pandemic or the natural disasters changed life as everyone knew it. The one picture that always drew her back to the old albums was of her great-grandfather, Jonathan Evers, and his sister, the mysterious Caroline Lewis. In the picture was Caroline’s husband, Adam, along with great-grandmother Trudy Evers. They stood in front of a large home with well-groomed lawn as well as beds of colorful flowers. The date on the back of the picture was April 2016.

They must have thought they were living in paradise. What a difference those pictures are from the devastation we see now.

The hovercraft landed and parked next to the craft Kirsten knew Nick and Lori took out earlier in the day. The information she received from Nick told her that from here on she would have to go on foot, as there was so much debris there was nowhere closer to park their vehicles.

Alex flanked her as they made their way through the deserted streets of what was once the mecca of the entertainment world. As soon as she saw the sign denoting the cryogenics building, she turned to Alex. “This has to be the place.”

Together they went into what had once been the lobby, turned on their flashlights, and made their way to the basement storage room.

“Dr. Jamison, it’s good to see you,” Nick said.

“I had to see what you have. From the condition of most of these bodies, I can see none of them survived. You did say there was one in perfect condition. Where will I find her?”

Lori got up from her seat at the desk where several three-ring binders were spread out. “She’s over here,” she said. “We do have a name for her. It’s Caroline Lewis. I have all of her information in this binder. They certainly did keep good records on all of the people they put into a state of suspended animation.”

“C-Caroline Lewis? Are you sure?”

“Positive. I have all the information on her right here and her name along with the date she was put in the tube is on the front of it. Does it mean something to you?”

“That’s the name of my great aunt, the sister of my great-grandfather. I thought the stories about her visiting the cryogenics facility were just that; stories. She disappeared and no one seemed to know whatever happened to her.”

Kirsten stepped around Nick and Lori to stare into the face of the woman whose picture had haunted her ever since she found it. Although she appeared older and thinner than the picture, this was definitely her great aunt. She took a deep breath, before she started the procedure she’d researched earlier. If her research was right, Caroline Lewis would slowly awaken, be disoriented, and regain full use of her body within a couple of hours. Of course, they didn’t have the luxury of waiting for a couple of hours. Once she was awake, they would have to transport her back to headquarters, where she could be examined under better conditions than the remains of a crumbling building.

“Alex, I want you to help Nick take these binders out to his hovercraft. Lori, you’ll have to stay here and help me.”

Nick and Alex nodded and started taking armloads of binders back up to where the hovercrafts were parked.

“Did you check to see if there were any other survivors?” Kirsten asked.

“I don’t know how it happened, but this was the only chamber that wasn’t disturbed. If this is your great aunt, how do you think she’ll adjust to waking up fifty years later than she thought she would?”

“Time will tell, but that’s something we don’t have now. I can reverse the process but it’s hard telling if she will wake up immediately. At any rate, we have to get her back to headquarters as soon as we can. There we have the medical facility to take care of her that we don’t have here.”

From the notes Lori found in another of the binders, Kirsten started the process to awaken Caroline. There were some tense minutes waiting for the chamber to open. She certainly didn’t know what she expected to find. Would the body turn black once the liquid nitrogen was released as had the other bodies, or would the controls take over and prevent something like that from happening. When the proper procedures were put in place, everything should go according to the plans of the original people who ran this facility in 2020.

She listened as the seal released and slowly the lifegiving oxygen reached the lungs of its lone occupant. Kirsten watched as Caroline’s chest rose and fell with the breathing she hadn’t done in over one hundred years.

Knowing complete awareness would not return for some time, Kirsten waited for Nick and Alex to return. Between the two of them they would have to carry the semi-conscious woman back to where their hovercrafts were parked.

“We put the binders in Nick’s craft,” Alex said. “Do you want us to make another trip with the rest of them?”

“Lori and I can get them. You need to take Caroline and put her in our hovercraft. We need to get her back to the lab so she can have access to the hospital facilities.”

Kirsten watched as Alex and Nick lifted the bed on which Caroline and been lying inside the chamber and used it like a stretcher to transport her out to the hovercraft. Once they were on their way up the stairs, she and Lori picked up the remaining binders and carried them out of the basement. Luckily, they were able to illuminate the darkness with the headlamps on their hardhats while they attached their flashlights to their belts, freeing up their hands.

“That’s the last of them, at least from the first drawer. I didn’t get into the lower ones.”

“I have a feeling there will be other archaeologists coming back here several times in the future, Lori. We can retrieve the rest of the files later or even send out another team to bring them back to headquarters. For now, I’m anxious to get Aunt Caroline back where she can be made comfortable.”