Savant ; Rising Read online

  To the reader….

  I released ‘Savant – Rising’ towards the end of August 2018 and ‘Savant – Risen’ in October 2019.

  These two books are a departure from my previous work – for those of you who are unaware, I’m referring to my ‘Z Series’ books about a zombie apocalypse.

  This is my foray into the world of aliens.

  These books are mainly fictitious, hopefully non-libellous or breaching any Copyright©, and I hope you enjoy them.

  As usual, whilst I have tried to be as accurate as possible, all mistakes and inaccuracies are all mine.

  Here goes….

  Hatch

  Savant Syndrome

  Savant syndrome is a very rare condition where people with significant mental disabilities demonstrate certain abilities far in excess of the average. i.e. an overdeveloped skill, or in extremely rare cases, more than one skill.

  Around half the cases identified are people with autism*, and the other half due to some form of brain damage**.

  There are no reliable estimates for the number of people with savant syndrome, although one in a million would not be considered unrealistic.

  Cases of female savants are even less common than males, with a ratio of roughly 6 to 1.

  It is estimated that there are fewer than 100 savants with extraordinary skills currently living.

  *It is estimated that less than 10% of people with autism show any form of savant abilities.

  **Brain damage specifically to the left anterior (front) temporal lobe in the brain, a key area for processing sensory input. The temporal lobe is one of four major lobes in the brain and plays a key role in memory, perception, language, attention, awareness, cognition, thought and consciousness.

  SAVANT – RISING

  Prologue

  At just after two in the morning, Jessie Richardson was sitting in the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s white BMW M4 sportscar, speeding Northwards along the A3 dual carriageway towards Guildford, Surrey, and her apartment near the centre of the city. There was hardly any traffic on the road; not surprising considering the time, but in just a few hours, this same road would be jammed with rush hour traffic, and no doubt the odd accident to cause additional frustration for commuters and employers alike.

  Jess was nineteen and an under-graduate student at the University of Surrey in Guildford, where she was studying for a Batchelor’s degree in Computer Science. At five feet eight inches tall, she was a very good-looking young woman with straight long brown hair which went half-way down her back, a soft-featured and friendly face with deep brown eyes, a small straight nose, full lips and a slim, sporty figure. And she had a brain.

  ‘A damn fine one,’ she thought to herself.

  She had met her boyfriend, Nick Barrington, at the university bar, and they had now been together a couple of months, not that she was counting. Nick was a couple of years older than her, six feet tall and well-built, with light brown unruly hair which stuck out in all directions despite the copious amounts of gel he used. He wasn’t the best-looking guy in the room, never mind the world; he played rugby and had received more than his fair share of hits to his head and face; he’d broken his nose twice, so it was slightly askew, cracked his cheekbone, broken his jaw and lost count of the number of concussions he had endured. But he was down to earth, laid-back, funny and generous with an outgoing personality, and his connections had introduced her to a whole new world and lavish lifestyle.

  They were returning from a house party near Petersfield, hosted by one of Nick’s friends. The friend’s parents were away on holiday or business in Dubai, Jess wasn’t sure which, and cared even less.

  ‘House party’s not right,’ she thought, ‘Mansion party or massive estate party is probably a bit closer to the mark.’

  Even halfway back to Guildford, the fields on either side of the road were probably still owned by the ‘Whittington-Gray’s’.

  Jess had met a lot of people at the party – there were over a hundred and fifty there – but it didn’t take long to realise that it simply wasn’t her scene; the guests were clearly more interested in themselves, and on the odd occasion when they weren’t talking about what they had done or bought, they reverted to the usual boring ‘getting to know you’ questions. Which wouldn’t have been too bad, but you could tell they weren’t listening to any of her answers.

  ‘So, what do you do?’

  ‘I’m a prostitute’.

  ‘That’s cool’.

  With one guy, Jess had thrown in a whole sentence of ‘blah blah, blah’ and he didn’t even notice before he came back with, ‘really? very interesting,’ as he finally raised his eyes to look at her face. She thought she must have dropped something down her cleavage and waited until he was distracted again before she could take a quick peak.

  ‘Better to be safe than sorry’, as her Mum was fond of saying.

  So, when the guys weren’t staring at her tits and ignoring what came out of her mouth, they were sweeping the room looking for another opportunity to brag to someone new, and Jess was more than happy when they moved on to their next victim.

  And then there were the girls; she’d been introduced to a number of snotty bitches who’d started the conversation along the lines of ‘Oh, so this is the lovely Jessica everyone’s been talking about’, which when said in their disparaging upper class tone really meant ‘Oh, so this is the outsider / commoner / slapper – take your pick – everyone’s been talking about.’ At the same time, they had their nose turned slightly upwards as if she smelled of something unfamiliar to them. Perhaps her perfume wasn’t as expensive as theirs.

  Jess was pretty sure that none of the attendees had done a day’s work in their privileged lives. Still, she had sort of enjoyed the party, partly because she’d had fun playing with the toffs, but mostly because she eventually moved out of the firing line and started to ‘people watch’, whilst sipping a delightful glass of Chablis. What fun! She looked critically at what people were wearing and listened in on their conversations.

  For example, she overheard that one girl had spent over two thousand pounds on her outfit (well, her Dad had), and Jess just thought that she looked like a pair of curtains and that the money could have been better spent on a nose job. See, she could be bitchy too when the situation demanded it. Then there was what Jemima ‘50 Shades’ Pritchard had got up to with Henry ‘The Stallion’ Whitely the previous weekend. Strictly not repeatable – what happens in the barn, stays in the barn! Ultimately though, the party was a waste of her time and she realised that the only polo she was interested in was the sort with the round hole and tasted of mint. Nick, on the other hand, had grown up in that environment, so it was just business as usual for him.

  Jess was snuggling back into the car’s soft cream leather seat, surrounded by low lighting and the hissing of heated air coming out of the vents as it warmed the cold interior. The radio was on low, the local station playing the odd song between bouts of waffle from some unknown DJ. The guy was obviously trying to make the best of his graveyard shift, but it wasn’t doing anything for her.

  ‘Perhaps it’s pre-recorded’, she thought to herself as her eyelids drooped for the fourth or fifth time.

  The time, the recent lack of sleep, the creeping warmth and motion of the car together with the constant thrumming of the tyres on the road’s surface were slowly lulling Jess towards sleep, although she was trying her very best to stay awake.

  ‘Just resting my eyes.’

  Jess briefly opened her eyes when she heard the windscreen wipers start up with their monotonous thumping and dreamily thought that it must have started to rain before she drifted off again, drawing ever closer to the darkness calling to her.

  Jess jolted awake as she felt the c
ar’s tyres cross the rumble strip at the side of the road. In the fraction of a second it took to open her eyes, the car had already veered across to the hard shoulder and was accelerating very quickly towards a massive concrete bridge support at the side of the road. As a scream built in her throat, she turned to see that Nick’s head was lolling against his chest and instinctively reached out to grab the steering wheel. She managed to jerk it towards the right just as the bridge support loomed large in the windscreen.

  The front of the BMW lurched to the right and Jess lost her grip on the steering wheel as she was thrown hard against the passenger door. The car oversteered and the back whipped around, the twenty-inch alloy wheels spinning uselessly on the greasy surface before the back end collided with the bridge support. The impact flipped the car up into the air and turned it one hundred and eighty degrees so that when it landed it was aiming directly at the side of the road. Nick was awoken by the crash but struggled to work out where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. The momentum of the car and the fact that Nick still had his foot jammed down on the accelerator took it screaming towards the side of the road and the trees awaiting them on the other side. Both Jess and Nick had just started to scream when there was a massive bang, and everything went dark.

  1

  18 Months Later

  Jess thought she’d been having a nightmare, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember what it had been about. With her eyes still closed, she tried to work out where she was, but that also eluded her. All she could hear was a repetitive beeping sound.

  Slowly and cautiously, Jess opened her eyelids a fraction and closed them again quickly as a blinding flash of pain hit her.

  ‘Not a good start.’

  Once the pain had subsided, she slowly tried again, letting her eyes adjust, and this time saw that she was propped up in a bed in a white painted room. Light was streaming through a window to her right, but she found she couldn’t move her head in that direction, or any direction for that matter. In fact, she couldn’t feel a thing.

  There was a woman sitting in a chair under the window, just a few feet from the bed, and she was clearly asleep. Jess had no idea who she was. She looked further to her right, but there was a limit to how far she could move her eyes. She just managed to see the beeping machine in her peripheral vision before looking back towards the rest of the room. On the wall opposite, there was a doorway which looked like it led to a bathroom, and on the wall to her left there was another door set in a row of shaded windows which looked like it led to a corridor. Oh, and there seemed to be lots of tubes and leads attached to her.

  As she was staring at the door to the corridor, it opened and a black nurse in a blue uniform entered, carrying a metal tray.

  ‘So, I’m in a hospital.’

  The nurse came towards Jess and placed the metal tray onto a side table before she finally looked up and realised that Jess’s eyes were open and staring straight back at her.

  “Oh my God, child, you’re awake!” the nurse exclaimed as her right hand went to her mouth in surprise.

  There was a brief moment of incredulity and indecision before the nurse pulled herself together and lent forward to press a button on the wall behind Jess’s head, then she stepped back and looked at her in amazement.

  “Oh, Jess. Thank God you’re ok!” the nurse said, beginning to weep tears of joy, and taking out a tissue from her pocket to wipe her eyes. “Mrs Richardson!” the nurse almost shouted at the woman sleeping in the chair.

  ‘So, my name’s Jess. Presumably Richardson?’

  There was some yawning and stretching as the woman in the chair slowly raised her head. She looked fairly old and haggard and Jess still had no idea who she was. The woman’s face suddenly transformed and broke into a glorious smile before crumpling once again as she started to cry. She stood up and came across to the bed and picked up Jess’s right hand to squeeze it. Jess knew it was her hand because she could see it being held in front of her, but she couldn’t feel a thing.

  “Oh Jess, oh Jess, oh Jess,” Mrs Richardson kept repeating over and over again like some kind of mantra as tears of joy continued to stream down her face.

  Jess heard a commotion and turned towards the door as a couple of doctors in their long white coats and another couple of other nurses came rushing into the room. The lead doctor came straight up to the bed, almost knocking the first nurse out of the way, grabbed Jess’s left wrist and proceeded to check her pulse. Jess saw that he was very tall and perceived that he was good looking in a superficial kind of way, the epitome of tall, dark and handsome. In comparison, the second doctor was short and plain. He had withdrawn a penlight and began shining it into her eyes.

  “I don’t believe it,” the first doctor muttered under his breath.

  It was funny, but Jess was struggling to focus on him, although she didn’t appear to have the same problem with anyone else in the room.

  ‘Perhaps he’s too close.’

  “The eyes are reacting,” the second doctor noted from the other side of the bed, clearly sounding very excited. “Jess, can you hear us?”

  Jess looked directly at him and she could hear and see him fine.

  “She looked at me, she looked at me!” he shouted, almost hyperventilating.

  “Jess, can you look at me?” This came from the first doctor and Jess did as she was asked, although she still couldn’t focus on him for some reason. “My God! Not only can she hear us, but she can understand!” he exclaimed.

  Jess didn’t know what all the fuss was about.

  The doctors carried out a few more basic tests and it soon became clear that whilst Jess could see and hear, they didn’t know how much she could understand. Further, she had no movement other than her eyes. The doctors soon left the room to discuss the developments and their next course of action while the nurses busied themselves trying to make Jess comfortable, not that it mattered to her.

  Jess felt tired and drifted off to sleep.

  2

  When Jess awoke again the room was dark, save for a lamp which had been switched on by the side of her bed.

  She looked to her right and saw that Mrs Richardson – her mother – was still in her chair, although it had now been dragged away from the window and placed right next to the bed.

  Her mother was awake, although she looked as if she hadn’t slept properly in a very long time.

  “Oh, you’re awake again,” she said, a smile spreading across her face.

  Jess thought she looked pretty when she smiled.

  Diane Richardson – Di to her friends – was closing in on fifty and although she was still a good-looking woman, she had been stunning in her youth, just like Jess had been before the accident. She stood at five feet eight inches tall, the same height as Jess, and had the same brown eyes and brown hair, although her hair was less shiny than it had been and now contained the first signs of grey and was cut a lot shorter than her daughter’s had been. The last eighteen months had been hell for Di; she had put on a little weight and had let herself go a bit. Wrinkles had started appearing where they had no right to be at her age and she had lost some pride in her appearance. But she supposed that was bound to happen when she had spent almost all day, every day in this hospital since Jess’s accident. And a lot of nights. She had given up her job as a Company Secretary because she simply couldn’t focus on it, and if truth be told, she didn’t really give a shit about it compared to her daughter. Jess meant everything to her; Jess was her only child and she felt the need to spend as much time as possible with her. This had put a strain on her relationship with her husband, Jess’s father, although they were still together and still loved each other very much. Di just didn’t have as much time for him as she once had, although she knew that she was being unfair to him.

  ‘I wonder if I take after her,’ Jess mused and realised that she had no idea what she looked like.

  “Everyone is amazed that you’re awake,” her mother continued. “I’ve be
en phoning all our friends and relatives to tell them the good news and your Dad is on his way and should be here anytime now. We really thought you wouldn’t make it Jess, so it really is a miracle. The accident was very bad and none of the doctors gave you any chance of recovery.”

  ‘Accident, what accident?’

  “The car you were in was unrecognisable. Poor old Nick didn’t make it. He died at the scene.”

  ‘Nick? Who’s Nick?’

  “Somehow, you were still breathing when the medics arrived although there was hardly a bone in your body which wasn’t broken. They had to call in the air ambulance to get you here, although it was still a struggle because you were trapped in the wreckage. It took the fire brigade three hours to get you free as they had to tread very carefully. It was like your body had been welded into the car itself.”

  ‘What is she talking about? Accident. Nick. Car. Medics. Ambulance.’

  Jess tried to remember as her mother kept up the commentary in the background.

  “They put you in an induced coma to allow your body to start healing and allow them to carry out various operations, but when they tried to bring you out of it you couldn’t or wouldn’t wake up. I can’t remember what they called it, but you were effectively in your own coma. You’ve been in a coma for eighteen months.”

  ‘Eighteen months? What?! So now I’m...how old am I?’

  Inside, Jess started to panic, but as far as Di was concerned her daughter was just listening and watching showing no emotion whatsoever.

  “You’ve had twenty-three operations in total. The doctors couldn’t tell how badly injured you were at the start, except for all the broken bones of course. They were sure that you had sustained brain damage, but they had no idea of how bad it was, and they were convinced that you’d never pull though, but if by some miracle you did, then you’d effectively be a cabbage for the rest of your life. If it hadn’t been for John and Paula Barrington, they would have turned off your life support a long time ago.”