The End of the Ice Age

Author's note: I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who gave feedback and votes for my first story here on Literotica. All the encouragement gave me the inspiration to write another one. So please rate this one too, and send me a note if you have something to say, or just to say hi. /Icingsugar

Lori opened her eyes.

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She had called it the Ice Age. It was a name that she had chosen to reassure herself. Yes, it was cold. And yes, it was lonely. And yes yes yes it went on and on and on. But an ice age, however cold, barren, sterile and seemingly eternal, would one day be over. Ages ended, right?

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She opened her eyes. The ceiling was white, not grey.

What? Wait, woah, shit! Hold on, back up, rewind. What the hell just happened?

She had opened her eyes. Her EYES! No, nonono! This couldn't be for real, this could NOT be true!

Lori's mind spun as the impact of what had happened to her slowly became clear. For any normal person, opening your eyes after a night's sleep was not something that sent you into a state of confusion bordering on cataclysmic chock. But Lori was not a normal person. Not by a long shot.

Lori hadn't opened her eyes in a very long time. Last time it happened was so incredibly long ago that she could not remember what the movement of eyelids felt like. It had been over fifty years. Yes, fifty insanely long years. Not that she had counted. How could she?

There was a very simple explanation to all this. And there was also a very complicated one. The simple explanation was this: The last fifty years she couldn't open her eyes, because they were already open.

The complicated explanation would answer why.

But now she had woken up. She...had...just...woke...up. Oh my god!

Ok, don't panic! Calm down, calm down. Breathe Lori, breathe.

Breathe?

Yes. She breathed. She took real breaths, tasted real air. Her lungs sucked in the light, dry sensation, and her chest heaved, straining against the sheets above her. And her lids blinked. And her lips parted, her tongue moved against the back of her teeth, her eyes danced around in their sockets. Thousands of such little things happening to her, around her, inside of her, all at the same time.

And there was something else. She was no longer cold.

Warmth, comfort, softness, air, heartbeats, eyelids. And more? Carefully, as if trying to remember the right set of instructions, she moved her fingers.

Will. Motion. Freedom. Ohmygod. Dearsweetjesusholyshitfuck! It worked!

She shot up into a sitting position, held up her hand and marvelled at the sight of her wriggling fingers. It wasn't until after a few seconds that she realised that she had moved so much more than just her fingers in the process. It was too much for her. Just too much. She couldn't keep anything in now. Tears welled up in her eyes and butterflies danced in her heart. She giggled hysterically, cried like a child and her face was a three-way tug-of-war between confusion, terror and utter untainted joy.

She was back. She was free. She WAS. And it scared the shit out of her.

She stayed in bed, fearing to stand up, not knowing if there was anyone around her to help her if she fell. Instead she studied the sparse room. Four neutral white walls, her sturdy, comfortable bed and a pair of chairs by the foot. There was a window too, but it was covered by shades. Later she'd pull them open, look out, and see sky. Yes. She was sure of it. It would be the bluest of blue. Just like her eyes.

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The Ice Age had begun on the 19:th of April 1999, and from that day, she hadn't closed her eyes. It was perfectly normal, she had been told, when she was guided through the surreal room full of sterile looking pods of steel and glass. Many Sleepers had their eyes open, it meant nothing. Only that they had looked that way when they were put to sleep. Lori had silently decided that when she went, she'd keep her eyes opened. The ones with their lids shut looked dead. She'd have none of that.

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A rush of weariness washed over her and she felt her balance slip. Damn. She knew it. She was in a hospital, she assumed, and should be resting. She knew better than to sit up. With that thought still nagging in her head, her gaze went blank, her body limp and she slumped back into the welcoming pillows.

After flickering dreams of a big, clear blue sky and a cold, grey concrete ceiling, she woke up again. She realised that she loved waking up. It was the strangest thing. A paradigm shift of the consciousness from one universe to the other in a heartbeat. She immediately wished she could fall asleep again.

But then she noticed something different about the room. There was something new in it, just outside her frame of vision. Lori raised her head from the pillow, and the something new stirred and turned to her. It was a Person.

Apart from the Boy, this was the first human being she'd seen since the beginning of the Ice Age.

"Hello there." said the Person.

The Person was an old woman. Well, maybe not ancient, but Lori wasn't used to look at people.

Only the Boy. Now what did he say his name was? How could she not remember?!

The woman went to pick up a chair in the corner and brought it to the side of the bed. She sat down, and looked at Lori with warm eyes and a friendly smile. She looked like someone's grandmother. She probably was, Lori concluded.

"Hi." said Lori. It was hard to speak. It surprised her that she still remembered how to form words like that at all.

"How are you feeling, dear?"

She thought about it for a while. What did you reply to something like that? Real? Euphoric? Like a kid in a candy store?

"Wonderful." she concluded. "Alive. I can wriggle my toes."

"So... Lorelei, are you aware of what has happened to you?"

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She had woken up, and everything had been wrong. She was staring out into the inside of a sleeping pod. Stainless steel and glass and wires and a grey concrete ceiling outside the glass window over her. Pain shot up at her from every nerve end on her body. It was cold. So incredibly cold. She panicked, shut her eyes and tensed her body to shield off the onslaught. No. She tried, but she didn't. She couldn't move, she couldn't breathe, she couldn't close her eyes.

She looked out at the world with tranquil, frozen eyes. She looked so peaceful, so content in her cryogenic state. But inside, her mind was screaming.

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Was she aware? Lori nodded. She knew. At least she thought she knew. The years were gnawing on her childhood. Life before the Ice Age was mostly a blur.

"I was sick. Some really bad cancer."

"You were diagnosed with a very malign case of bone cancer. You weren't going to last more than a couple of months. So your father contacted us, and you entered our cryo-stasis program. We put you in what is called suspended animation, where you were to wait out the advances in medicine until you could be properly cured." The old woman smiled warmly at her. "Well, that would be now. I can inform you that you have already begun your medical treatment, and that you're regenerating as we speak. But my, where are my manners?"

The lady extended a hand, Lori took it.

"My name is Dr Cathryn Albright. I'm a psychiatrist, your counsellor. You can call me Cate."

"Cate." Lori tasted the word, the first name she'd heard in an eternity.

Except the Boy's name. The name, the name...damn it!

Dr Albright looked into the girl's eyes and said "Lorelei, dear, there is no easy way of saying this, but it has to be said: You were suspended - frozen - for fifty two years and tree months."

Lori knew it had been long. But not how long. For all she knew, she had walked into the Ice Age just a short while before the Boy came along. Time before him had seen eternal, or like nothing. A week. Or a million years.

"Fif..fifty years? Wow...that's long."

"Yes," Dr Albright said "yes it is. So I have to warn you, coming to terms with your new life can be quite a dramatic experience."

"So, your job is to make sure that I don't freak?" Lori asked with a tired little smile.

Dr Albright raised a curious eyebrow.

"Now, that's a novel way of putting it. But yes, to stop you from freaking will be my full time job the next day or two. You have all the right to be confused, and to grief." she said softly. "Many of those you left behind are probably not with us anymore, you know."

She'd thought of that. But it was not something that she enjoyed dwelling on. It might as well hit her, Lori thought, and looked up into the doctor's eyes.

"Who? Who are gone?" Lori whispered. "Please don't sugar coat it. Just tell me."

"Ok." Dr Albright said. "Dear, your mother and father are dead. And your grandparents, naturally. And your brother Richard passed away in an accident two years ago."

Lori just nodded, feeling a little lump in her chest grow colder with each person counted. No family. A few friends maybe? They'd all be due for retirement by now. But the real pain never arrived. It had already passed.

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She had grieved, ages ago. She had screamed silently into the cold, dry air, wept tears she didn't have and drowned herself in the loss of everything she knew. For a long time she had grieved, gone under, gone insane. For a very long, cold time. But also a very long time ago.

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"Yes," she said. "but it happened way back then, it's hard to even remember.

She wanted to ask the counselor about the Boy with the dark hair. But she didn't know where to start.

"It may feel that way, dear. But I'll have to warn you, the pain might come back to you when you least expect it. It have only really been one long night's sleep, even if you try to tell yourself otherwise."

"But...I didn't." Lori protested.

"Didn't do what, dear?"

"I didn't sleep."

Dr Albright took her hand and stroked it gently with her thumb. She spoke in a patient, explaining voice, as if talking to a child.

"I see. It may seem that way to you, that you just took an instant jump in time. You probably had no sense of self, no consciousness, not even on a sub-level. Only a select few of the sleepers seems to dream, and they often have the most problem adjusting to a regular life after waking up. Ignorance is bliss, I guess."

"No, you don't understand." Lori insisted. "I didn't sleep. I was there."

"Where is that, Lorelei?" Dr Albright said.

"Right here! Down there. In the cellar, or wherever it was you kept me."

Dr Albright looked down at her with her kind eyes and smiled a motherly smile.

"If you have memories, it seems your subconscious was still ticking in there. Don't worry, dear. To have dreams is perfectly normal."

She didn't believe. The doctor didn't believe her. And frankly, Lori was not altogether sure of what she had been experiencing. It had seemed so cold, so quiet, for so very very long. Could it had been just a slow, stale dream? Had she been asleep? Was there no dark haired boy? No golden voice? Was she that very alone? Alone... No! With a desperate need to know, Lori began pulling bits and pieces of what she remembered the boy reading to her from newspapers of recent years. The past was all a haze, and most of the time she could not recollect what had happened in what order. So she just threw random data at the lady beside her bed to see if anything stuck.

"There was...there was a big war in Indonesia. And another one all over central Africa. Lots of people died, millions. And there was a solar flare...thing that fried computers and a president called Mason and a nuke that went off in China by mistake and no more AIDS and a Mars expedition and, and...and people are still seeing Elvis!"

It was just random babble, but did it stick. It stuck like glue. Dr Albright had dropped her pen, dropped her jaw and dropped her self control. She looked sharply at the girl.

"Who? Who told you this?" she asked.

"I can't remember. A man, a boy, a...something. He read me things. Is it true, did any of that happen?" Lori demanded.

But the doctor's mind was somewhere else.

"But, you just woke up. Have anyone been in here before me? Who did you talk to?" Then, seeing the girl's question burning in her eyes, "Yes...yes, those are all things that have happened in the last decade or so."

She took something out of her pocket. It looked like a pen, but she held it up and spoke into it.

"Corgan?"

"Yes ma'am?" came the prompt reply in a deep, booming voice from the tip of the pen. Some kind if intercom, Lori guessed, absently impressed by the sound quality of the little speaker.

"Has anyone been in to see Lorelei here before me?"

"No ma'am, you told me not to let anyone in."

"None of the others? Dr Kaminsky perhaps?"

"I carried her here, I tucked her in and I closed the door. Nobody has passed since, ma'am. Besides, Dr Kaminsky is in Canada."

"Are you sure nobody slipped past you?"

Lori heard the man sigh. Then the door opened and a 20-something man of enormous proportions peeked in. He wore green nurse clothes over his dark brown skin and had a name tag in a thin chain around his neck. He looked like an NBA player, with long, muscular arms hanging out from a short-sleeved shirt and a bald, shiny head. He looked at the doctor with an indignated but also slightly amused smirk.

"Ma'am, please. I adore you, we all do. But don't insult me, I'm a professional. Not a soul passed through." He looked at Lori with a big smile. "Hello, pretty. Good to see you're awake, feeling ok?"

"I think so. I'm a bit tired, I guess."

"No wonder. You've been a popsicle for fifty years." he said, and she couldn't help but to laugh a bit. "Name's Andy, Andy Corgan. I'm a caretaker, which means I look after the newcomers and keep unwanted intruders out. It you need anything I am the one to call. You have a com there by the bed." He nodded in her direction, and she saw a pen similar to Dr Albright's on her bedside table.

"Unwanted intruders?" she asked.

"Germs, actually. It will take a while to get your immune system back on track. Meanwhile I'll bounce anyone who hasn't been properly checked. And reporters. Newcomers are kind of big news, but you need to rest, pretty."

He turned to Dr Albright once again. "So what's the matter, Doctor? What's going on?"

The grey-haired woman looked awestruck into Lori's old, old eyes. "Something extraordinary."

That was all Lori needed to hear. She knew now. She had been awake, she was not insane, and there was a boy who had kept her company for almost ten years. A big wave of relief rushed over the her. She was not alone.

Dr Albright was visibly shaken now.

"Oh, dear. Oh, god. You didn't sleep? Conscious...all the time? What happened?" she asked.

"I don't know. I just didn't sleep. I could see and hear stuff. And I felt the cold, too. It was really bad and hurt like hell at first. But I got used to it. After some time I didn't feel the pain anymore. And then the panic, and worries and weirdness went away too. After that I just felt alone. Just really bored."

"Then what? Did you just lie there, all by yourself? For all those...years... Jesus, I can't even begin to comprehend what that must have been be like. Lorelei, I know there are no words...but I'm really sorry."

"There was... There was this boy. He started showing up, turning up the light and sat beside me. He talked to me, read stuff. Books, newspapers, he had a really nice voice. Sometimes he played music. And he kissed me goodnight when he left. He kissed the glass on the pod. That's when I saw his face. Dark hair...kinda cute. He told me his name once. But i forgot."

"Ah, the basement loonies." Andy said. "That's what we use to call them. They're a group of volunteers. They visit the Sleepers to keep them company. They're harmless, so we let them have their fun. The official explanation have always been that they are just plain nuts. I guess the official explanation can go screw itself, huh?"

"Yeah... Hey, do you think he is still down there?" Lori asked. "After a while I started counting the kisses. Four thousand. Almost four thousand kisses. What's that? He must have been there with me for more than ten years, right?"

She looked up at the doctor and the big man with determination in her face.

"Can I see him? I wanna see him. I need to, I must see him!"

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The Boy had come. And nothing would ever be the same. Before him, all Lori had had as a frame of reference, except for random visits of engineers in lab coats, or doctors touring another would-be Sleeper, was her own thoughts. One Mississippi, two Mississippi... No, that was no good. She could not possibly keep track of the passing hours, days, years. Her own biological rhythm had also shut down completely. Not only did she not Sleep, she didn't sleep at night. She had almost accepted that there was no time in the Ice Age. But there was. The Boy showed her. He kissed her goodnight. He gave her Days.

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Andy the caretaker nodded thoughtfully. "Yeah, I'll bet you want to. I'll ask around and see if I can pinpoint who it was that visited you."

"But for now," Dr Albright said. "you need to rest. Sleep away a day or two, and you'll be stronger. Goodnight, dear."

She stood up and gave Lori a kiss in the forehead. It felt nice. Lori wished it was the Boy. Andy dimmed the lights down and he and Dr Albright left the room. Soon enough, weariness overcame the girl, and she once again drifted away into the land of dreams. Her last conscious thought was how lovely it would feel to wake up again later.

She dreamed of The Boy. Still, she couldn't remember his name.

Or maybe...wait!

Her eyes popped open, and she sat straight up in bed. Frantically, she grabbed the pen-like com from the bedside table, fumbled with it for a while until she found a small button on the side. A green light came on. Did that mean it worked?

"Jonathan!" she shouted into the tip of the pen. Outside her door she heard a thump and some rumbling, before Andy's voice answered back.

"Jesus, girl! Don't scare me like that. I had that thing behind my ear. You made me fell off my chair out here."

"Sorry. It's just... I remembered something. His name. He said his name was Jonathan."

"Jonathan, huh? Well, it's not too common a name. That should narrow down the search a bit. I'll get the word out."

"Thank you."

"Anything for you, pretty. Now please, get back to sleep."

"I will. Goodnight. And thanks again."

This time nothing disturbed her sleep.

When she woke up, something was different. She shades on the window were pulled open, and Lori could see a little patch of blue sky outside. It looked wonderful, just as blue as her eyes. But she didn't see much of it. Somebody was standing by the window blocking the view. Somebody in the shape of a man, looking out at the sunny day.

As he heard her sit up in the bed Somebody turned to face her.

All thought and reason evaporated from Lori's mind. It was Jonathan. It was The Boy. He was real, and finally, after ten years of loving and longing, within reach. Lori was beyond self control. Beyond wit. Beyond words.

"You..." she tried. "Jon... I... Uh..." Nothing comprehensible came out. But that didn't matter. Jonathan was looking at her, and he was smiling. A shy little smile, but a smile.

She just gaped at him with tears welling up in her eyes, and held out her arms to him, like a baby wanting to be carried by her mother. A bit embarrassed by Lori's over-emotional welcoming, he slowly approached her. But not fast enough. For the first time in fifty-two years, Lori stood up. She threw herself out of the bed, and half a second or three steps later she clung to the surprised man as if her life depended on it. When Jonathan, after a few seconds of hesitation, returned the embrace her speechless spell finally broke. She knew exactly what to say. She had waited ten years to say it.