ANOM: Awakening (The ANOM Series Book 1) by Jason R. James Read Free Book Online Page A

Brown and confident that Mandel would
follow his orders even if Brown couldn’t. One problem, at least, was solved.
    As
for Hayden, he was right. They had learned an important lesson tonight. Ellison
saw now that he had underestimated the man. A simple mistake he wouldn’t make
again. Hayden was going to be a very different problem, and sooner or later,
Ellison knew he would have to handle him.
    “Sergeant,”
Ellison barked.
    “Sir.”
    “I
want to know everything Agent Hayden does on this base. Watch him. Make note of
his movements. Report it directly to me; no one else.”
    “Yes,
sir,” Mandel answered, raising his hand in salute. Ellison returned the gesture
with a quick swipe of his brow. Then he turned and walked back inside the
hangar.

Chapter
3
     
    “Jeremy,”
a whispered voice in the darkness—low, familiar, pleading.
    “Jeremy,”
the voice called again, louder this time. It sounded close, like it was right
in front of him. But why couldn’t he see the speaker?
    Jeremy
blinked his eyes, and the darkness melted into white, fuzzy light. It didn’t
last. The shadows crept back in. Then Jeremy realized the shadows were forming
into people. He blinked his eyes again, and the blurred images sharpened into
focus. That’s when he saw him, the person standing closest to him, the one who
had been calling his name. It was his father.
    All
at once Jeremy was aware of everything. He knew where he was. He was standing
in the emergency room at the University of Pennsylvania—his dad’s hospital. He
hadn’t been there since the explosion, but it didn’t matter. Everything still
looked the same. The beige walls. The off-white tile floor. The pale
fluorescent lights.
    On
his left, out of the corner of his eye, Jeremy could see a huddle of doctors
and nurses standing around a patient. Over his dad’s shoulder, in the waiting
room, he could see a row of chairs filled with more patients. Some of them held
gauze bandages to their faces or on their arms, but no one was moving. At least
Jeremy didn’t think they were moving—not the doctors or the nurses or the
patients—they all looked frozen in place. He looked closer and then he realized
they weren’t completely still either, not entirely. They were moving, only very
slowly. It was like everyone in the hospital was swimming through tar.
    Then
there was his dad. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, Jeremy knew that his
father was dead. He knew that what he was seeing was impossible, but right now
he didn’t care.
    Jeremy
found his voice. “Dad!”
    “Hey,
bud. How you feeling?”
    Jeremy
laughed. “I feel like I got hit by a bus.”
    His
dad laughed too. “Well, you look good, all things considered.”
    “Dad,
how is this even possible? How are you here?” Then a sudden thought, “Am I…?”
    “No,
you’re not dead, Jeremy. You’re here in a memory—my last memory, a couple of
seconds captured and stretched in time. You’re here because I need to talk to
you.”
    Jeremy
looked closer at his dad. Something was off. Even though he was talking, his
dad wasn’t looking at him. Instead, his father’s head was turned away to the
side and his eyes were fixed on something in the waiting area.
    Jeremy
turned his head too, following his father’s eyes toward the ER doors. “What are
you looking at?”
    Then
Jeremy heard his dad shouting next to him, “No! Jeremy! Don’t—”
    It
was too late. In the waiting area, Jeremy could see a man wearing a gray
uniform. He was standing between two rows of chairs, but the man wasn’t a
patient. He was dressed like a paramedic. He held his right arm up to his
chest, and his hand was clenched in a fist. Jeremy looked closer at the man’s
face. He was young, maybe a few years older than Jeremy, with dark hair and
patchy stubble across his jawline. His heavy brows were knit together and his
lips were contorted as if in the middle of a voiceless scream.
    Then,
all at once, life came back to the emergency room. There