Heart of Ezdar

By Don Falloon

Jason Hayward wakes in the middle of the night to a surreal experience that leaves him terrified and confused, then lands him in the hospital. A mysterious doctor appears at his bedside the next morning, declaring he attached a living alien organism to Jason's heart for safekeeping some years prior, and has now come to retrieve it.
Professing to come from the planet Ezdar and calling himself ‘Bob,’ the galactic visitor must remove The Key from Jason’s body before a warring alien race called the Krytons learns of its true whereabouts. If the Krytons get their hands on it, it spells the destruction of Ezdar and its inhabitants.

Safely detaching The Key from Jason’s heart requires Bob’s spaceship. Unfortunately, Bob has no idea where they must go to rendezvous with his craft, meaning Jason must somehow locate the place where Bob will meet his ship. And if it isn’t removed soon, The Key – and Jason – will die.

Along the way Bob monitors the health of Jason and The Key between attacks from Kryton Death Squads. The death and destruction left in their wake draws the attention of law enforcement and eventually Homeland Security, led by the attractive but no-nonsense lady agent, Greer.

To complicate things further, Jason comes down with a serious case of love at first sight for the pretty federal agent. All he has to do is survive his dilemma and get past her blatant dislike of him.

At the literal heart of all of this is The Key. The Ezdarians want it. The Krytons want it. The United States Government wants it. The only one who doesn't want it is Jason Hayward, who must somehow survive 72 insane hours and 1,000 hard-fought miles of self-preservation, self-defense, and self-sacrifice as The Heart of Ezdar.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Don Falloon
• Release date: Sep 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301399734

Don Falloon

Born in and raised all around Sacramento, CA, despite my many travels, I tend to base my novels here in the Golden State. I have many eclectic interests and experiences (race announcer, radio deejay, tour guide, car restorer, motorcyclist, and more) that are reflected in my stories, and are the reason I haven't restricted my writings to any single genre. Be it Historic NASCAR (Hiding Behind Thunder), auto racing (SPECTRUM: A Hero of a Different Color), playing a pirate at many a Renaissance Faire (The Captain of the Coin and the Lord Admiral), or simply my skewed sense of humor (Heart of Ezdar), I take whatever sparks my creativity and run with it. Enjoy the ride!

Book preview

Chapter 1

Pink. All I could see was pink. It wasn’t a pink sky, or a pink wall. I was saturated in pink, as if I were swimming, drowning in the color pink.

Bluish shadows suddenly dotted the pink, looming larger as they approached. They stopped and floated near me, but remained undefined. I sensed something reaching toward me, a dull notion until the image focused and formed into blue hands. Hands with flowing fingers – more like tentacles, really – that hovered over my chest, working with something.

I turned my head down to find the flowing hands holding a human heart. A beating human heart, alive and pulsing and writhing within the grasp of the blue tentacles.

My heart!

I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t breathe. I fought to suck air into my lungs, but drew nothing in. I was straining my chest, consciously working my diaphragm, fighting to create the vacuum needed to feed oxygen to my body before I…

Something broke; something gave. In an instant I was inhaling cool air, wheezing shrilly as I gasped and quickly filled my straining lungs almost to bursting. Now I was gulping oxygen like a man breaking the water’s surface just milliseconds before giving in to drowning. My chest heaved while I panted audibly like an old, abused accordion.

My eyes snapped open. Gone was the liquid pink. I was in a room filled with streaks of light that appeared to shoot off in every direction while my ears were assaulted by a sound that could be felt as well as heard; a bizarre blend of the whooshing of a jet, the whipping thumps of helicopter blades, and a buzz akin to a giant mosquito on steroids filling the air around me.

I was on my back on a soft surface. A sense of familiarity told me I was in my bedroom and I sat bolt upright in my bed. To my right, the entire length of the windows that fronted my bedroom were splashed in a bright, white light from what appeared to be a string of headlights at window level, split repeatedly into horizontal shadows by the blinds against the panes.

And then it all stopped. As if a switch had been thrown, there were no more bright lights, no body-numbing sounds. When my eyes adjusted again, the still room around me was painted with a palette of grays and indigos borne of night; my ears hearing only my own labored breaths and the muted barking of a dog somewhere in the distance. A glance at my bedside clock revealed a time of 2:05 a.m.

I was bathed in sweat. It rolled off my face and trickled down my bare chest, while still more droplets traveled down my back. My sheets were soaked with my salty excretions and clung to my body like a second skin. I gingerly peeled the sheets off me and turned to climb from my bed.

When my feet touched the carpet a static spark snapped sharply. My knees were shaking as I stood up weakly and padded the few steps to my window. I slipped my fingers between the blinds and scanned the night sky before shifting my gaze down to the vacant street below, but there was no activity anywhere outside my window. My second-floor window. My second-floor window where lights had pierced into my room only moments before as if they had been parked just inches from the other side of the glass.

The fu–…? I muttered aloud, actually startling myself with the sound of my own voice. Speaking revealed a metallic taste in my dry mouth.

I withdrew my fingers from the blinds and turned away from the window, looking about the darkness for any sign of… of what? What was there to look for? What wasn’t there that I should notice?

What the hell just happened?

I’ve had some fantastic dreams in my time, but never one that so completely involved every one of my senses. Even my sense of smell was engaged as the faint scent of my sweat seeped into my nostrils. And I had showered just before climbing into bed! I had no doubt it was a scent of fear; not at all surprising given the fright I had just woken to.

I felt dizzy and nauseous. My heart was still pounding wildly, refusing to slow or soften as it thudded in my chest, my head throbbing in concert with the ferocious pulse. I imagine the blood pressure numbers I had to be putting up at that moment would have been off the scale.

Prompted by a pang from my bladder, I decided to attempt walking again. Moving past my bed with slow and cautious steps, the floor felt unsteady, as if the carpet had been laid over a pond or pool. Even the linoleum of my bathroom floor felt like it had been cast over soft mud, making every step feel as if I were on the edge of falling over. It was as if my apartment had been relocated to a carnival fun house, only there was nothing fun about the unsettling feelings it left me with.

Standing at the toilet I bent down to lift the seat when it felt as if my heart had suddenly exploded, and then – BAM! – Vertigo City. Looking down into the bowl was like gazing into a deep abyss while the walls around me turned fluid. My legs gave out from beneath me and I crashed to the floor, banging my head on the porcelain top of the toilet tank on my descent. I found myself again on my back while my head ached, my heart strained to pump inside me, the room swirled around me, and I peed all over myself.

Minutes later – hell, it could have been a freaking hour; I didn’t know – I came to enough to again assess my surroundings, but my foremost emotion was that of panic. I was dying. I had to be. I writhed on the floor in my puddle of piss until I was on my stomach, and then crawled from the bathroom like a drunken crab until I was alongside my bed.

I clawed at my nightstand until my fingers found the cord to the phone. Pulling it down, it bounced off my head before landing beside me on the carpet. I knew full well that I was injured; I was obviously determined to heap as much insult onto it as possible. I snagged the handset and punched in the numbers. A crackling on the other end, then:

Nine-one-one operator. What is your emergency?

Chapter 2

I hate hospitals. Except, maybe, Sky Lakes Medical Center of Klamath Falls at this particular moment.

I was the lone occupant of the small room, resting on a gurney and plumbed with enough tubes and wires to appear more like a fifth-grader’s science fair project than a 27 year-old man.

I glanced down at the customary hospital wristband that had been attached to my wrist. Heywood, Jason W. Oh, for crying out loud! Is it really all that tough to spell my name correctly? It’s Hayward. Hay-WARD. Geez, if they can’t spell my name right, what confidence should I put into their medical expertise?

Then again, whether through the magic of modern medicine or the normal progression of healing, except for a little weakness I was actually feeling pretty good at the moment. Okay, if you didn’t count the headache from a sore spot at the top of my forehead. I reached up and found a gauze pad taped just below my hairline and recalled the double dose of injury from the toilet and the falling phone. But my chest, my heart, felt fine.

An IV bag hung above me, its contents being fed into my right arm drip by steady drip, while a machine beside the bed on my left periodically pumped up an arm cuff to check my blood pressure. On my last glance, I was reading 112 over 69. That was good, right? And another machine – I’m confidently assuming an electrocardiograph given the wired pads stuck all over my torso and near my wrists and ankles – showed a regular graphic pattern while reading a heart rate that varied between 72 and 77 beats per minute. Hell, I was downright textbook normal!

But that still didn’t explain what it was that landed me here. Was it really just all some kind of crazy hallucination?

Answers, if there were any, would likely have to come from someone on the hospital staff. Unfortunately, I couldn’t recall actually seeing any such folks attending to me. Maybe I was under some quarantine for some really rare and deadly disease. Maybe I had some terminal condition and they were out looking for my next of kin. Maybe they had forgotten about me. Or, most likely, I was okay enough for the staff to focus their efforts on those who really needed it.

But that didn’t mean that I had to be totally ignored. Besides, I was starting to get hungry.

I was looking for the call button when the lights in the room suddenly dimmed to about half of their previous brightness, drawing my attention to a lone figure in the doorway. Dressed in a white lab coat and sporting a stethoscope hanging from the neck, my keen interpretation of the obvious told me that this was a doctor coming to check up on me.

Oh, good, I sighed. I was beginning to think I’d been forgotten back here.

Wordlessly, the doctor approached my bed, coming to a halt at the foot of the gurney. He remained silent and still as his eyes appeared to scan the room, taking note of the equipment in use and tracing their connections to me. He then looked directly at me, his face void of any emotion. Hell, it was void of just about anything.

I mean there was nothing spectacular about his features, nor anything even remotely noteworthy, for that matter. With his skin so seemingly void of any texture, he could have been a mannequin or statue. He was so plain that he could have been made of plastic or clay.

He had no hair, facial or otherwise, and that included the ridge where his eyebrows should have been. I couldn’t make out any lips. Even his ears were so simple as to almost not be ears. They were more like afterthoughts; simple rounded flaps welded to the sides of his skull.

If there was a distinct feature to the doctor’s face, it would be the eyes, if only because they were as featureless as the rest of him. They were… empty. Maybe it was the light, but I couldn’t make out any white to his eyes. The gaze was unwavering. Intense. Unsettling.

Dude, I said uncomfortably, you’re really beginning to creep me out here.

Still no response.

His arms hung limply at his sides, hands barely extending beyond the cuffs, and that's when I took notice of his fingers. Like his face, they were unlined, even where his knuckles should be. My heart skipped when I realized the doctor’s hands were more like… tentacles.

Uh, doc? I said shakily.

Hello again, Jason Hayward, he said in a voice that sounded much like a recorded version of my own.

To his credit, he had called me by my correct name. Maybe it was because, as he had hinted in his greeting, we had met before. But I’m sure I’d have remembered a face like that. Or, the lack of a face like that. He came around to the right side of my bed and I glanced at his nametag.

Yeah, thanks, Doctor, uh… Chang, I replied. His name didn’t ring a bell with me at all, and there was nothing in his appearance even remotely hinting of Oriental lineage.

He leaned over me and placed the business end of his stethoscope over my heart. I glanced down at the rather large disk in his hand, and that’s when I noticed that there weren’t any tubes connecting the disk to his ears. I was about to ask him what he was doing when the disk flashed in patterns of blue and gold lights. Doctor Chang stepped back, apparently satisfied.

So, what’s the diagnosis? I asked.

You are well. It is now time to leave, Jason.

I’m all for that. I’m being discharged, then?

He didn’t answer before someone dressed in scrubs stepped through the doorway. Perhaps an intern or physician’s assistant, he halted briefly as he looked around the darkened room, then stepped over to Doctor Chang.

Doctor, he acknowledged as he handed over a clipboard. Uh, blood tests don’t show indicators of a heart attack, there don’t appear to be any blockages, and his risk factors and lifestyle habits don’t raise any red flags.

Risk factors and lifestyle habits? That must have been part of the barrage of questions from the paramedics as I was being transported in the ambulance. Did I drink? (Barely.) Did I smoke? (Never.) Did I, or have I ever, use recreational drugs? (Okay, I was tempted a time or two, but no.)

I wasn’t taking any medications, no dietary or herbal supplements, had no real known allergies except for hay fever and mold spores, and, up to now, a rather clean bill of health. In a medical sense I was pretty friggin’ boring. Which made it all the more nerve-wracking to be hit with something so debilitating so suddenly.

Doctor Chang said nothing to the physician’s assistant, but only nodded. This prompted him to continue, pointing out some printed images.

X-rays revealed nothing much out of the ordinary, except that the heart appeared more opaque than what the radiology tech believed should be expected. And that’s when an MRI was ordered. Another page flip. The MRI revealed an anomaly, something like a thick membrane on the back of Mister Heywood’s heart. It isn’t metallic, so it didn’t wig out the imager. It actually appears to be attached to the heart, and it definitely appears to be foreign.

What? I interrupted with an uneasy chuckle. Foreign? As in ‘Hecho in Mexico’ kind of foreign or something?

The intern respectfully waited for the doctor to respond. When Chang remained silent, the intern replied, Foreign, as in something that isn’t natural in origin and probably shouldn’t be there. Have you had any kind of surgery, any implants of any kind?

No. None.

No military service? No otherwise valid reason to have an implant that appears to generate an EMR signature?

EMR? You mean, like, electromagnetic radiation? I shook my head.

The intern kind of smirked and then turned to Doctor Chang. He startled when he took note of the doctor’s bizarre eyes, but the shock was short-lived. Holding the clipboard to shield me from reading his lips, the intern appeared to whisper something to the doctor in private. But, while he was doing this I clearly heard the doctor’s voice say, Do not say anything aloud, Jason. This man is informing me that the radiology technician questions if you have been implanted with what he refers to as ‘some kind of top-secret government device.’

When the intern backed away, Doctor Chang grinned and winked at him, sealing their little secret between them. The intern turned to me, looking a little too smug for my comfort. My eyes fogged over for a moment and a green glow seemed to flash around him just before he left the room. Maybe I wasn’t 100 percent well after all. As soon as it seemed long enough for the intern to be out of range I blurted out, "What in the hell was that?"

That, Jason, was our signal that we have to get you out of here.

No, I snarled. You openly told me what the guy said as if he wasn’t even in the room. And he didn’t hear it! What’s up with that?

There is much to be explained, and this is neither the time nor the place to do so, replied Doctor Chang firmly. The last thing either of us needs is for this radiology technician to raise the suspicion of any more of your doctors.

"And you’re not suspicious? I asked with an uneasy laugh. That guy says there’s something attached to my heart, and you’re okay with that?"

Jason, suspicious doctors tend to perform exploratory surgeries to satisfy their curiosities. That would be a bad thing. For both of us.

"But… there’s something attached to my heart, I stressed. Why doesn’t that seem to concern you?"

Doctor Chang rested his tentacled hand on my shoulder.

Because I placed it there.

Chapter 3

You put it there? I squeaked out, trying not to draw unneeded attention from outside the room. "You stuck this thing into me? Into my heart?"

The doctor seemed to ponder my question, followed by a nod and a nonchalant, Yes.

Was last night’s frightening dream not a dream? My mind swirled as my thoughts bounced between surprise, confusion, and bitter anger. Reason finally stepped forward, prompting me to ask, When would – could – you have even done this?

Seven of your Earth years ago.

I tried to imagine what might have happened to me seven years ago, but I was having enough trouble trying to clearly recall anything that might have happened seven hours ago.

I call bullshit, I rebutted. I’m pretty sure I’d remember some surgery where someone stuck something into me. I pulled the collar of my hospital gown away from my body and peered down at my bare chest, praying that the dream was just that; a dream. I don’t have any surgical scars or anything, either.

That is because I am very good at what I do, replied Doctor Chang. I have come to retrieve it, but your insistence on discussing matters that are really not up for discussion at the moment could very quickly make all my efforts for naught.

"Look, doctor, I said indignantly, none of this is making any sense, and I’m not going anywhere – wait… seven Earth years ago?"

Six years, nine months and 17 days ago, Chang replied with a sigh. Would you like minutes and seconds as well? Every second we waste here brings you closer to becoming a prisoner and test subject at someone else’s whim, and I guarantee they will leave many scars in their quest for The Key.

"The Key?"

Something outside the room seemed to catch the doctor’s attention, although I couldn’t sense anything going on.

Jason Hayward, said Chang, your very life depends upon you believing me and the two of us getting out of here immediately.

Along with the urgency, there was a strange sincerity in his voice. And there was that damned dream… and the doc’s freaky fingers.

Last night wasn’t a hallucination then?

"If you want any more answers, Jason, then we must go! Now!"

This was creepy and off-the-scale weird. I still wanted some real answers, but something beyond the doctor’s words told me that I had best get moving. I began stripping myself of my connections to the monitoring machines, then stopped short.

These are gonna start setting off alarms all to hell when they don’t read anything, I said anxiously.

I will attend to that.

I returned to popping the cables off the electrodes on my body and undoing the blood pressure cuff. Doctor Chang’s hands flew over the monitoring devices and, amazingly, no alarms sounded even after seeing readouts go into flatline.

You brought clothes for me, right? I asked. " ‘Cuz