She looked around the makeshift lab in the bedroom with the broken bed. Her bag was stashed in the corner; the slanted bed wasn’t even good as storage space, everything just rolled off. James Hann had offered to come over and fix it. So she had waited until he declared that he needed a ‘part’ and that he would come back with it in a few days.
Jillian wondered what ‘part’ one needed to fix an old wooden slat bed. A nail? A screw? And she stared around the obnoxious room feeling desperate. She couldn’t come up with a solution or any idea of what they had. She wasn’t even sure if it was viral, bacterial, or chemical. All she knew was that the weaker your immune system was the more likely you were to get it. And that they’d been living in ‘it’ for days. Bathing in it? Eating it? Breathing it?
And that wasn’t anything more than they had known in Florida. Except that here they could trace a link. In Jordan’s bold print it graced the wall - the connections from patient zero to the other locals who had come down with ‘it’. Not that there was a standard incubation period or anything. Jillian couldn’t wrap her mind around it. No matter how patiently Jordan waited on her. And she didn’t want to have to tell Landerly that.
So Jillian forced herself to trail behind him to the kitchen where the old yellow phone was mounted on the wall. The push buttons were its only bow before modern technology. If it had been dial-up . . . well, she didn’t think the CDCP even accepted dial-up calls anymore.
Jordan smiled at her, the large ugly receiver held against his head, the short coil holding him captive against the far wall of the be-roostered kitchen. “Hey Dr. Landerly.”
Breath pushed into her lungs. She would never have addressed him with ‘Hey, Dr. Landerly.’ But then again, she wasn’t Jordan. She listened, waiting for the screech that was sure to come. The questions as to why their assays hadn’t showed anything. The makeshift desk top in the ‘lab’ was covered with test plates. But nothing had turned up.
Jordan nodded, knowing full well that Landerly couldn’t see him. “Yessir. Problem is - we hit criteria for quarantine. . . . about fifteen minutes ago. . . . 19 . . . down or deceased. . . well, yes, but here that’s the necessary 8 percent of the population. . . . do it ourselves? . . . .” His eyes looked up finally meeting Jillian’s. He looked bewildered.
She was certain his expression mirrored her own as she imagined the two of them rolling yards of yellow tape around the outskirts of town.
“I thought we would call in a team. How do we hold quarantine with just two people? . . . .” The pause seemed interminable. “The law enforcement? This place isn’t a city, so there’s no police. . . sheriff? . . .” He looked at Jillian, eyebrows up waiting for her to provide the answer.
So she did. In a situation like this at least she was useful as a storage and retrieval center for seemingly useless trivia. “Just one man and his son. Jerome Beard.”
“How many exits to the town?” Jordan beseeched her again, and while she got the original faxed map that James Hann had sent them she heard Jordan becoming irked with the old man. “No, I do not think better when I repeat your questions like an idiot. Jillian thinks better when I repeat your questions like an idiot.”
She tried not to laugh as she held up the map. His look shut her up. Jordan’s face clearly displayed that she would be the one making the next of these phone calls.
His shoulders slumped and his free hand went to his eyes. “Yessir. It looks like four exits. But that’s -”
Jillian waited while Jordan’s teeth clenched, her own lower lip folding in to be chewed on, a habit she had thought she had broken years ago.
It sounded a bit like Charlie Brown’s schoolteacher was on the other end of the line, she could only make out that Landerly was speaking. And since she hadn’t heard anything before, she gave serious thought to the possibility that he was yelling at Jordan. If she was braver she would have grabbed the phone out of his hand and told Landerly where to stuff it. If she hadn’t landed her dream job with the CDCP right out of her residency . . . well, she had to admit to herself that there were enough ifs to leave the phone right in Jordan’s hands where it already was.
Finally, Jordan spoke again. “It’s a hand drawn map sir. It looks reasonably accurate but to be truthful checking out Mr. Hann’s cartography skills wasn’t on our list of things to do. So there may well be undrawn roads or paths - . . . . well, we’re in backwoods Tennessee. And these people walk or even ride horses a lot of places so there’s no way we can cover all the exits. . . .”
Jillian stood there for forever while Jordan talked about the fact that they had checked every criterion they could think of. They were almost out of needles and reagents. All they had achieved was that they could reasonably predict who would come down with it next. Jillian’s money was on Mr. Parson. He was married to a victim – exposure was strike one, was old - strike two, and his Chem panel showed that he had a very low TSH - strike three
But that was morbid.
And probably correct.
Jordan looked ready to explode. And Jillian stood nearby to offer support, but made a desperate effort to drown out what was actually being said.
How long she stood there like that, watching Jordan move his hand from his hip to his temples, switch the phone from one side to the other, talk about McCann and how little information they had, she had no idea. The first thing that registered was “Jillian and I thank you, sir.” As he hung up the phone.
His stance slugged even a little further down. His eyes all but closed. His back found the wall and he looked up at the ceiling, though Jillian had to wonder what he was looking at. She stepped forward to give him a hug, to thank him for handling that . . . monstrosity of a phone call.
For a brief moment she thought he didn’t see her, and she saw her arms extend to him and she saw an awkward moment in the immediate future. But he was Jordan. He saw her coming and alleviated any tension by reacting. Just loosely draped his arm around her waist in a limp return-hug and mumbled ‘thank-you’ into her shoulder.
Her own voice was stronger, having not just been through the wringer with Landerly. “So, what? We just go to BigLots and buy about thirty rolls of ‘quarantine’ tape and make some makeshift roadblocks?”
Jordan chuckled a little. “Something like that. We try to keep the people contained as best we can. More recording than anything else. The backup ‘rural’ team will be here in two days.”
“Two days!” She stood up straight, planting her hands on her hips as she removed herself from his embrace.
“Yup.”
“Well - . . . how- . . . oh, fuck it. I’m not even going to try to figure that one out.”
Jordan’s eyebrows raised again, and his blue-green eyes rolled her way.
She pressed her lips together. “Yes, I know the F-word.” Then she shrugged. Perhaps the best plan was avoidance. “Thank you for fielding that call. Landerly is going to kill us one of these days.”
Jordan shook his head. “No he won’t. He’s just going to name this disease after us. So whenever anyone feels nauseated they’ll think ‘Brookwood-Abellard’. It’s how I always imagined my life.” His tone changed to a little more wistful. “People will say, ‘oh, Abellard, like that horrid disease that makes you vomit and die?’”
Jillian was trying to get the picture. “Why isn’t it ‘Abellard-Brookwood’?”
“Doesn’t sound as good.”
“Oh, and there’s a law about discordant names for vicious fatal diseases.”
He finally looked up and smiled at her, a real, full-on Jordan smile. And she was grateful that Landerly hadn’t been too much of an ass.
“We should call and see if we can interview David Carter again.”
“We do need to see him. We need to get him quarantined. He’s been in McCann, right?”
Jillian stilled. “In and out. Repeatedly.” Then more quietly “Oh, God.”
Jordan took her hand, pulling her behind him and out the door. “Not ‘Oh, God’. Everyone�
�s been in and out of McCann. And there’s no way to track it or to have prevented it.”
Jillian nodded, guessing that he was right. Her imagination that they were responsible was only partly true, and it was impossible, not to mention improper, to impose quarantine without the proper criteria. Still, Oh God.
7
There was a knock at the hotel room door. David opened his mouth to yell that he didn’t need room service, before realizing that room service didn’t exist here.
And that meant someone was really knocking on his door. He was hardly awake, and barely moving, given that he had spent the day climbing trails in the mountains. He’d been taking topsoil samples and testing them as best he could out in the middle of nowhere. But now he was sore, and slow, and he pushed his hands against the cheap paint job of the door and stuck his face flush against it before realizing that there wasn’t even a peephole.
Well, there was a chain lock, not that that offered him any real protection . . . So he turned the knob, while muttering something about ‘coming’ and looked out the crack that the chain afforded. Not anyone he knew. Just some guy with a sweatshirt on.
“Are you Dr. David Carter?”
David nodded, still trying to clear his head, and a slightly familiar voice gave her name before he could place the melody and cadence in his memory.
“I’m Dr. Jillian Brookwood, we spoke a few days ago -”
He nodded and closed the door on the young man, jerking the chain out of its slot and letting the door swing freely this time. “Come in.” He smiled and pretended he was awake. “What can I do for you?”
For a brief moment he considered apologizing for the state of the motel room. But it wasn’t messy, just . . . awful. And he remembered that the good Dr. Brookwood had mentioned that she was staying in McCann, so his accommodations were probably better than either of theirs. He finally realized that the thing nagging the edges of his conscious thought was her voice, offering pleasantries and introducing her partner, who was scowling at David who was eyeing Dr. Brookwood. “-Dr. Jordan Abellard.”
So David stuck his hand out and pretended he’d heard the whole thing. “Nice to meet you Dr. Abellard. Are you staying in McCann as well?” See, he could fake it with the best of them. He’d had whole conversations with his father where he hadn’t paid attention to one piece of the shit his father was trying to feed him.
“Yes, Dr. Brookwood and I have rented a house there.”
A house? “Oh, are you married?”
“No.” Her voice.
“Yes.” His.
But then Dr. Abellard looked sideways at his partner and laughed. Raising his eyebrows and putting his hands up like he’d been caught, he confessed. “No, we’re not married, but the people who own the house are very religious. So we told them we were.”
“Ahhh.” So the Doc was off limits. That was a damn shame. But David just smiled and waited.
It was Abellard who caught on first. “May I sit down?” He motioned to the end of the unused queen bed near the door. “Jillian’s report stated that you were doing research in the area and that you had come back for a personal visit.”
David nodded. Yeah, get to the point.
“I have to tell you that this doesn’t look like a personal visit. We haven’t seen you in town at all.”
David started to protest, but Abellard raised his hand. “Hear me out. . . people are getting sick.”
David raised his eyebrows in surprise, before cursing himself for giving away his hand. Dr. Abellard nodded at him, acknowledging his slip. “Yeah, I didn’t think you knew.”
Jillian looked as surprised as David felt about Abellard’s accusations. But she had the grace to sink down beside him on the green and gold-ish comforter and look up at David questioningly.
With a sigh, he fessed up. “You’re right. What do you want?”
“People are dying in McCann.”
This was just getting too weird. The CDC was sitting on his crappy motel bed telling him that people were dying in the town he was researching. “What is it that they have?”
Abellard’s lips were tight. “That’s just it. We don’t know.” He opened his mouth but no sound came and he closed it just as fast. Making David wonder what the doctor wasn’t telling him.
But he wasn’t about to find out.
“We do know it starts with a stomach upset. And you had that, but you have no other symptoms.”
“So, I don’t have it, right?” David felt the worry festering in him.
Jillian nodded. “We’d like your permission to run a series of assays on your blood, testing for the profile we’ve seen in the victims.” She pulled a rubber tourniquet, blood vials, gloves and a huge needle from her jacket pocket. Unlike her partner, she went straight for the punch, her eyes looking into his waiting for his yes/no response.
His chest moved. It was a gesture of resignation. They hadn’t mentioned the odd piles of stones stacked in the corner or asked him anything about his research. They only wanted his blood. “Sure. Just leave me enough to get a good night’s sleep.”
Dr. Jillian popped up off the bed with a surprising amount of energy, and she was shoving up his sleeve and had the rubber strap around him before he even had his arm fully extended to her. Her fingers were quite gentle given the amount of enthusiasm she had for getting his blood sample. Her gloves slid into place with seemingly no effort on her part, and she pushed the vein with her finger before sliding in the needle that he hadn’t even seen her attach to the vacuum tube. He felt the pinch then watched as his blood pumped into the vial.
After a moment she jerked open the tourniquet allowing him feeling in his lower arm again. Then held a cotton ball over the needle while she quickly slid it out of his vein without him feeling a thing. Only after inspecting the blood in the vial and turning it one way then another, did she look him in the eyes. “Thank you.”
Yea, she could poke him in the veins anytime she liked.
David pushed back a happy thought that she was over eighteen, and he couldn’t suppress a smile, “Is that all you guys came for?”
“No.” David followed the sound of the voice and stopped his musings about the raven-haired Jillian, remembering that the two were probably involved.
Abellard spoke again. “If your business here isn’t personal then what is it?”
Damn. “Well, actually that’s personal.” He saw Jillian’s lips press together, like she’d been hoping he’d just tell them everything. Too bad, honey.
“All right.” Dr. Abellard stayed in his seat on the bed, his head two feet lower than David’s standing height, but not showing any sign of weakness. “Let me take a stab at it then: you and your colleague came here to do some clandestine research. And you found something.”
Shit.
He turned to see if Jillian had that I’m close, aren’t I? look on her face, too, but she didn’t. She looked surprised, her attention finally pulled away from looking at the blood vial as though she didn’t need the tests but could just read the red ooze itself.
Abellard continued. “You came back here to do more research-”
“Listen, I don’t know what the two of you are doing here, but I don’t need people prying into my life like this.” Whatever blood that bewitching little vampire had left him raced faster, flooding his face with his anger.
Abellard held up a hand, palm out. “If I’m right, then you’ve stumbled onto something you aren’t sharing with your university.” His expression stayed David from kicking them both out the door right then. Barely. “And you know something very unusual and significant about an area where people are dying of a disease we know nothing about. . . we don’t want to interfere with your research. We just need to know if the two are linked. We need to save lives.”
Bastard. Abellard had him by the short and curlies.
Becky sighed watching miles of interstate roll by and gallons of gas get guzzled on her MasterCard. She had gone around the area west of home yesterday.
With her compass and her frogs along for measurement. But nothing had happened. The frogs always faced the same way. Just like they had when she had traveled the area south of home the day before. Today was east, and she could see that she wasn’t going to open up any new discoveries to take back to the team and impress Warden.
She had been paying attention to where she was headed, but somehow she was out on highway 144, heading past the old route to the airport. She drove five more minutes with no real movement from the frogs before she gave up. And she didn’t know how in hell she was going to explain this in an expense report to Warden. Hell, he wanted her five-dollar dinners pre-approved before he’d reimburse them.
“Aaaaagggghhhhh.” The sound of her frustrated voice startled the frogs in the seat next to her. She had meant to just think it. The little harbingers of the apocalypse looked at her. All three of them, so sweet and froggy and innocent looking. But wasn’t there a bible passage about that? So beware evil. The wolf that comes as sheep in wool . . . Then, of course, there was that whole rain of frogs stuff.
“Stop staring at me!”
Yeah, that was mature. Yell at frogs. So she growled at them. And the far one diverted his eyes. Then his head. Then he began a slow shuffle to facing away from her.
Becky almost stood on the brakes. She did slap on the blinker and pull off on the shoulder. One of the other frogs shuffled, too. Just a mild reorienting, but way more than these froggies were supposed to do.
“Holy . . .”
She slammed the old pile of parts in gear and pushed back out into traffic, cutting someone off. He flipped her the bird, but she quickly asked God’s forgiveness; she knew she’d never get the other driver’s.
The frogs’ noses were all pointing off to the south by now. They faced an area that looked about as well traveled as the moon, and she had been on some of those back roads. She’d be stranded and eaten by cougars, or bears, or worse. She knew one man up there who swore the scientists in Oak Ridge had coordinated the whole thing with the aliens.
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