Resonance

by A. J. Scudiere

  He shook his head. “I went in with Kelly’s release form, she had put CDCP on it. I had my badge and they never questioned it.”

  “That’s not really-”

  “I know,” He put his hands up in the air. “What do you want me to do? I never said anything, they assumed. And I had the complete file in my hands in under twenty minutes.”

  Jillian couldn’t smother her smile. “I’m fine with that; I was just curious if you knew that it was against policy.”

  His stance relaxed. “So what do you like on your pizza?”

  “Canadian bacon and pineapple-”

  His face immediately told her that he didn’t feel the same way about toppings.

  So she continued. “But I’ll eat pepperoni, or sausage or olives, or peppers.”

  He paced while he was on hold and she thumbed through the huge file; it would take hours just to see what was in there, but it wasn’t like she had a busy social life demanding her time. After a few minutes she had found nothing unusual and Jordan was ordering. A few phrases broke through while she was reading. “ . . . two-liter coke . . . large pizza . . . half Canadian-bacon and pineapple the other half . . .”

  She smiled. By the time he was sitting next to her at the old coffee table she had made a once over. “It looks normal - for a leukemia patient - up until that last stomach flu. So fill me in on the rest.”

  “You got the basics from the file. There were a few scares, but he kept pulling through. He was in remission since this time last year.” Jordan shoved his fingers through his hair. “It was the longest remission he had maintained over the five year course of the disease. His white count was normal up until the end. It was fine when he was brought in. It sounded like flu, but everything sounds like flu.”

  Her heart ached for him. It wasn’t just a medical mystery he was trying to solve. Jillian couldn’t remember him ever mentioning his cousin, but clearly Eddie’s death had shaken him up. “You know, there may not be an answer.”

  “I know. It’s just so odd. If it’s a disease that took advantage of his weak immune system . . . I work for a company that has the foremost technology to prevent these kinds of things from happening.” He shrugged.

  Jillian began dismantling the large folder into sections by visit and series. She handed one chunk back to Jordan. “Tell me about him.”

  He shook his head. “Twenty-nine year old, Caucasian male, mild smoker, mild drinker-”

  She cut him off. “No, really tell me. Where did he live? What is his place like? His family?”

  Two hours later, she was exhausted.

  Jordan probably would have been asleep except that he was pacing tracks into the carpet. “What do I do, Jilly?”

  “Let’s sleep now, and at noon, when we get in, we take it to Landerly.”

  David pushed his hair back off his face. In the wet wool of the thick air it clung like spiderwebs, giving him willies as he imagined the one thing he was really afraid of.

  Greer laughed at him, his usual low chuckle when David’s harsh personality amused him.

  “What are you laughing at? You’re okay because your people are from here, you darkie!”

  “Dude, you are way messed up. My people are from Africa. Trust me, we aren’t built for this kind of humidity.” Greer never stopped his careful chipping at the rock beneath him.

  “At least your hair sticks up and out of the way.”

  “Yup. Which is the reason my race is superior and yours felt the need to better yourselves by enslaving us.”

  David also never took his eyes off the ground layer beneath them. There was no good comeback, and so he avoided one all together, the conversation trickling off to nothing while they worked.

  There was water making constant background static nearby, and a damned obnoxious bird that had a call that just never quit. God had been laughing when he put the lungs on that thing. Just as soon as it shut up another one would answer it.

  Evidence of deer had been all over the first few days, and it had taken nearly a week to push back what time and the East Tennessee climate had done to the abandoned site.

  It was slow going in the back woods, with the rustles of forest and the slope of the Appalachians beneath them. The only sound that broke the peace was the two men calling each other names and the high ‘ching’ of the tiny picks striking rock. Neither of them had the easy swing of a student, so the calls of the birds were periodically interrupted by the sharp screech of metal glancing off rock followed by a colorful string of swear words. Then, after a brief pause, nature would resume its noise, hiding the fact that they were there from the cities and homes not that far away.

  “Greer, this one’s for you.” Carter brushed off his knees, and stood, not cursing out loud this time. The pain in his joints that told of age was not anything he wished to acknowledge to the world.

  “What is it?”

  “Fuck if I know. It’s a bone, maybe it’s a damn trilobite. If you’re lucky it’s one of your lizards.”

  He heard the edge in David’s voice. “Dinosaurs aren’t lizards. You know it, I’ve told you that.”

  “Ah.” David stood and stretched his hands over his head, taking in the thick mass of tall trees and virtually untouched wilderness that enclosed them. “That would imply that I listen to you.”

  He tried not to let his legs give him away as he moved to a new spot that had looked interesting. But, even from where he was bent over his dig, Greer saw it. “Well listen to this, my honky friend: I’m bigger than you, and stronger than you, and -” he pointed his pick at David’s knees, “not nearly as arthritic as you. So don’t call my dinos lizards. It’s insulting.”

  “Hey Greer, you do know that all your dinos died, right? That means that you’re studying an animal that is gone, gone, gone, and won’t ever come back. You have a totally useless profession.”

  Greer snorted. “Dude, you think the limestone you hold is going to reveal anything other than what happened a zillion years ago?”

  David held up one chunk that he had extracted, and smiled. “This baby can tell the future.”

  “Well, you just tell me what your Magic Eight Ball there says.”

  “We’re headed for another polarity shift.” David smiled. There he’d said it, out loud, even if it was only to Greer.

  But Greer snorted again. “Yeah, in another million years.” He pushed himself to his feet and dusted off. “Be sure to let me know how that pans out for you.”

  David started carefully picking his way through the grid lines. “Just go play with your petrified lizard.”

  But Greer was already standing over it looking down, trying to figure what the piece that David’s pick had revealed might be. He turned his head one way then another, before sliding the instrument into the hammer-loop of his carpenter jeans and pulling out a smaller, lighter one from a deep pocket somewhere. His voice was no longer the one that insulted David, but a little more thoughtful. “There’s a good chance this dig will help us solidify the dinosaur-therapsid link.”

  “Us? I don’t need a link.”

  “Us paleontologists.” Greer knelt down and spoke to the small whitish smooth piece buried within the packed limestone, “Come to Papa.” He took a few small swings at the peripheries before speaking to David. “Actually, you do need a dino-therapsid link. The therapsids were dinosaur-like pre-mammals and warm-blooded to boot. Which means they are absolutely pertinent to you, Mr. Mammal.”

  “Like I care about the distinction between dinos and lizards and theradons-”

  “Therapsids.”

  “Exactly, I don’t care. My kind survived. Me and my mammal friends.”

  David could see the edges of Greer’s smile even though he was bent over, softly chipping at the rock. “Come to think, I’m not so sure that you are a mammal. Mammals are warm-blooded.”

  “Ohhhhhh.” David drolled out the monotone. “That was low, Greer.” Then he smiled. “Congratulations, I didn’t think you had it in you. I thought ma
ybe ‘honky’ was the best you could do.”

  “At least I don’t have to carry limestone in my pockets. Seems to me that’s the only rocks swinging in your pants.”

  David turned to look at his friend, but Greer was on his hands and knees, and all he could see was an eyeful of upturned ass. So he looked away. “You’re sooo funny.”

  But Greer didn’t seem to hear him. At least, he didn’t respond. So, bending over, David went back to reading the tags hanging off the intersecting lines in the grid he and Greer had painstakingly mapped. They had tried to match it to the original site that Wharton had laid out, and they’d gotten damned close as best as they could tell.

  He turned to find the specimens that matched this location and came back with a few zipper baggies heavy in his hands. Wharton would kill if he knew that Carter was at this site. More specifically he would kill David. And bring shame upon his father. Ah, well. Wharton could go to hell. He was the one who had missed the geologic hotspot here. More the fool he.

  Turning the baggies over in his hands, David read the markings through the clear plastic. The KT boundary here was much closer to the surface, much of geological evidence of the past washed away by wind and time. The Appalachians were much older than the Rockies, the fault lines here all but inactive, and so they had been worn smooth and low, exposing things to the surface, or hiding them just barely underneath. For him and Greer to come and pick at.

  “Sweet!” The exclamation came from the spot he had abandoned to Greer moments before. “This was worth leaving my pregnant wife at home.”

  “That ain’t saying much.” Carter could hear the drawl developing in his voice, not that they spoke to much of anyone around here. But like the humidity, the accents were so thick in this part of the state that you couldn’t help but absorb it. Like some communicable disease. “What’d you find? Petrified turd?”

  “Dude, you have no sense at all. It’s an egg, maybe a whole nest, so back off.” The steady sound of the light pick striking stone picked up again as Greer tried to unearth his find.

  For the briefest of moments David wished for a team, where he and Greer could lead like they usually did, and have other people do the labor, the intensive and time-consuming picking and brushing and getting things out. But then he remembered why they were here alone; they had to be.

  Another baggie with another set of markings was telling the same story. The polarity here was reversed. This specimen from just at the KT boundary had a clear magnetic direction. But when it was lined up with the site, north was south and south was north. Wharton had fucked up. And David was more than certain that he had dug up another hotspot. He tried to keep his breathing regular even as he felt his stomach roll over.

  Greer let up a cheer as he unearthed something that would interest only him, so David just pressed his hand to his middle hoping to quell the churning there and did his best to ignore all of it. Damned birds started up again, and to add insult to injury a woodpecker started in on a nearby tree. He was only familiar with the Woody Woodpecker variety, so with a great sigh of misery, David lifted his head to see if he could see the thing. Sure enough it was racking its head at jackhammer speed against a trunk, but luckily no obnoxious laughter emerged.

  At this point the Deep South was so disturbing to him that he wouldn’t have been surprised if Injuns had popped out from behind the tall oaks with feathers in their hair, and looking for scalps. Or maybe the deer could just come out and do a tap dance.

  He had his hotspot, he knew it. Soon he’d be able to leave the land that time forgot. He just needed to unearth enough evidence so that there could be no argument. If Greer found a tie between the hotspots and the dieout times, well . . . there was no telling where it might go. Except that they would get themselves immortalized in every high school science textbook.

  Carter needed more evidence. The rest of the world might not know what he knew in his gut. It was here and he was standing on top of it.

  So he lowered himself to his knees and hunched-over again, and began wounding the earth beneath him, just a little more.

  “Botulism, botulism, and botulism” had been Jordan’s guess on the caseload that morning. Yesterday they had arrived at two in the afternoon, squinting in the bright sun, and trying to look like they hadn’t slept sideways on his couch, Eddie’s file dangling from their sleep slackened fingertips.

  So the guess hadn’t been very exuberant. It hadn’t been creative. And it sure as hell hadn’t been right. Jordan figured one of these days he had to hit. But then he began the worrying: Would he die of boredom writing reports about food poisoning while he never figured out what happened to Eddie?

  And why the hell did old man Landerly have to pick this week of all weeks to leave town? He was barely able to get around the office some days, so what was he doing climbing on a 747 and hitting the beach? Just when he was needed, too.

  He hadn’t said anything, but Jillian’s voice cut into his thoughts, so accurate that for a moment he wasn’t sure that she was actually speaking, “He’ll be back in a few days. Eddie’s file won’t change in that time.”

  He did look up to nod and force a small half-smile as thanks for her concern. Today she was well put together, her dark hair drawn back away from her face in a tight clip. Her usual look for the office. Her clothing was getting more casual, and she was questioning him less and less as she worked. She churned out files like she was writing emails to friends. And she didn’t question why his pace had ground to a near halt.

  A few blinks and he tried to clear his head. A quick scan down to the bottom of the front page showed that it was not, in fact, anything like botulism. He had a clear cut case of Legionnaire’s Disease in his hot little hands and he had stared at it blankly for half an hour.

  Something pestered him while he began to slowly type, tabbing across the open fields on the computer screen, inputting bits of information here and there. And . . .

  Jilly was watching him. Her keys didn’t click, they had stopped some time ago, and that’s what was bothering him. Just as his eyes lifted to meet her gaze, she spoke up. “Let’s go get lunch. My treat.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not keeping up, I’m just going to eat out of the vending machines. I just need to get back into the groove of things.” Why he wasn’t already in the groove of it, after a full day back, was beyond him though.

  “No you won’t-”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, doll.” But even though he had refused verbally, Jillian was walking around the large desk, shedding her labcoat and dropping it onto a hook on the old curly coatstand shoved into the corner of the room. But the cubby of an office was so small it was all in arms reach.

  “You need chicken nuggets.” Her smile got wider. “You’re frustrated because you lost someone you’ve been trained to save, and not only weren’t you there, you still can’t figure out what went wrong. And I can’t figure it out for you. And to make matters worse, Landerly is suddenly out of town, so you can’t get answers from the one person who might be able to provide them. But I can buy you chicken nuggets and I can help take up the slack a little so you can figure things out.” With a small shrug she dismissed her own generosity for nothing.

  She had his hand in hers, although he was unsure when it had gotten there. And suddenly it seemed like a rather intimate gesture. When added in to the fact that she had just put to words what was eating at him, he couldn’t stop the curl of his fingers around the heat she offered with just her hand. He couldn’t stop the first smile he had formed all day, and he let her lean her full weight back as she made the motions of pulling him up from his seat.

  They didn’t speak on the way over, and he let her order for him, not surprised that she knew exactly what he wanted; they’d been here at least six times in the past month and he hadn’t varied his order at all. So he tried not to dwell on Eddie. And three empty sauce containers later, he asked her, “So what did you find in the reports today? Botulism?”

  Sh
e shook her head, knowing that she had blasted his predictions all to hell. “Salmonella-” Her voice kept his mind from wandering too far astray, “Then there were the three old people in the nursing home. Some sort of vague guess at a staph infection. It killed them but there was no real conclusive evidence-”

  He looked up because her voice had just trailed off. Jilly’s mouth hung in a small open ‘o’, her blue eyes focused somewhere beyond his shoulder. The gears working in her brain were visible and he waited her out. The tension he hadn’t realized he was carrying tightening in his muscles every second. But he didn’t push her to voice her reasoning.

  Briefly it flashed across his thoughts again that he hadn’t been hired to be the brilliant theorist. And if she was both the workhorse and the genius then perhaps he was just window dressing. Her lip turned in, and just as he had leaned all the way forward, waiting on edge for whatever she was going to announce, she looked at him and spoke. “Jordan, we have to go back and double check that file.”

  4

  Becky sank into her wooden swivel chair, with her head cradled in her hands. Warden hadn’t let up on her regular load because of the frogs. Never mind that investigating animal oddities was what the Biodiversity lab was set up to do. Never mind that she had stayed and kept the paper with the university. Warden seemed to begrudge her the find because it had been hers. Angry birds here, creepy frogs there, it was all too much.

  But-

  Her head snapped up. Maybe . . .

  Maybe there was a connection between the screwed up frogs and the screwed up birds. She worked on it for the rest of the day, trying to come up with some sort of link. Then drove most of the way home until her little Jetta sputtered and died on her. She trudged the last mile, and arrived weary in her soul, brain, and body. From where she threw open the front door, Becky could see that her mother was in the kitchen and Brandon and Melanie were playing with two frogs loose on the living room carpet. “Those better not be my frogs.” It was meant to be a threat but she didn’t really have the energy to back it.