As David watched Jillian rushed, helpless, from one man to another. Not able to help any of them without sacrificing the others. Not able to help any of them anyway. And one by one they dropped. Creating a pattern of fallen bodies in grey-green uniforms, aligned in small clusters, attesting to how they had tried to help each other.
The whole shift down.
“Jillian!” He paced up to her in several hard steps, again grabbing her behind the elbow and dragging her along. “We have to get out of here. Look at what it’s doing to people.”
He thought of nothing else but reaching the edge of this freak of nature and walking beyond it. He hauled her with him, completely unconcerned for her well-being. Mostly he figured he should take the only other standing person out of the reversal with him.
When he felt he was far enough beyond, probably way further than necessary, he pulled out the old boy scout compass again. This time he was able to use it in its intended style, standing still. Although his hand shook like Richter seven.
North.
Again the needle direction freed his lungs of their breath.
Jillian just stood next to him, a statue in kelly green, her eyes blinking on and off azure blue. He wanted to lean over and put his hands on his knees and breathe like he had just finished wind sprints. Feeling his lungs contract so rapidly and painfully was almost a relief.
“Why are we still standing? Why did they collapse and we didn’t?”
He looked up to see her eyes connect with his. He felt it like a hit, square in the chest, as the words absorbed.
Those officers hadn’t been inside anywhere near as long as they had, and yet the wardens had all fallen, most even before they could ask for help. They were rapidly affected by the reversal, the symptoms showing instantaneous onset to a man.
As his own eyes focused on Jillian he saw the thought pattern in her head change. Her eyes averted and she grabbed for her stomach. Tumbling to her knees, Jillian lost the contents of her breakfast in the hot sand.
13
His father’s hand was slack and lifeless. Not warm, not cold. Not dead, but not the house of a living soul. Mr. Abellard’s eyes didn’t open, didn’t show the telltale movements of tracking a dream. Nor would they. Jordan knew that, and felt the sharp stab somewhere untouched.
Eddie’s death had been tough. Hearing about Lindsay and Kelly slipping away had hurt. Opened old wounds. Rubbed areas already raw. But when his father took one last look at him, before his eyes pulled closed and his breathing pattern changed, Jordan felt the world undergo some subtle shift.
In that moment Lake James had ceased to be his home. It was simply a cluster of people he knew, or knew of, and a house that he had grown up in. The promise of waffles on Sunday was forever rescinded. The smile his father would get when thinking of his mother. The last person who remembered her as Jordan did. All of it was gone.
Now he waited. Until his father took his last breath and died. Or until Landerly called his number and drafted him into service again. But now he would only fight for others. So they wouldn’t lose like he had.
Another man lay comatose in the second bed against the window. Jordan didn’t know him, but his Dad had once referred to him as Albert, and Jordan got the feeling that the two men had worked together.
As he often did, he squeezed his father’s hand. Just enough to send pressure signals to the dormant brain, in hopes that Jackson Abellard was only sleeping, that his son’s hand would get even the slightest squeeze back. But it didn’t. Not any of the tries before, and not this time either.
The smell blanketed the room, not just with the odor of ‘hospital’ but of death. The whole room was waiting - the chairs, the window, the light that didn’t quite filter in. Why should it bother? It was all just a matter of time.
Jordan stood and stretched, needing to get out where things lived and breathed, even if they didn’t really connect with him. The cafeteria seemed like a logical choice - the eating of food being the road to sustaining a body. He put his feet in a rhythmic pattern on the floor, moving himself out the door and down the hallway, even though it required far too much thought. He was halfway there when his cell phone went off. Tugging it from the waistband of his blue scrubs, he checked the caller ID.
Landerly.
Well, that didn’t take long. He flipped the phone open. “Yes?”
“We have two new cities near McCann that are losing people, and very rapidly. I want you there.”
Jordan blinked twice. Thinking through . . . . nothing. He would leave his father here, because there was nothing more he could do. And did he need to sit here for the two more days it would take, and simply wait? No. He could be helpful.
“Abellard? Anne will call you back with your arrangements.” With a few more short sentences, Landerly conveyed the seriousness of the issue. These were cities, they were on the maps and had populations in the tens of thousands. Huge compared to what they had seen in McCann or even Lake James. Jillian and David had seen everyone at the prison go under, and they would meet him in Nashville and fly into Knoxville together on a small charter.
With only a click and no real closing words, Jordan was left holding the cell phone. Staring at it like an alien in his grasp as the staff in the hall flowed around him in a sea of blues and greens.
He turned and headed back to his father’s room, he hadn’t really been hungry anyway. And in a minute he had re-perched himself at the side of the mechanical gurney. Again he held his father’s hand, but this time he spoke. With gentle words he explained that he’d be back after he packed, but only briefly, before he was off again to East Tennessee, to pursue his place as a physician. Something he had only in the past few days understood that his father admired him for.
“I’ll be back in a bit, Dad.” Taking a deep breath he forced himself to stand and let go of the shell that had housed his father.
On lead feet he made the turns down the corridor, waited at the elevator, and walked through the chill air to the physician’s parking lot. His father’s beat-up Ford Falcon took the turns like a steamer, slow and wide, heavy and solid feeling. Like his father, the car was from a different era, and with a slight smile he decided he would come back to claim the antique as his own.
Within minutes he was pulling up to the house where his father had spent his whole adult life. The house was emptier than it had ever been. The souls had vacated it a while ago it seemed. With quick leaps Jordan took the stairs two at a time and raided his drawers for what he had brought - so much for settling in and staying a while.
The duffle was packed and slung over his shoulder without a second thought. He was, by now, too used to picking up and fleeing with only his bag to let sentimentality rule him. Key in hand, he bolted the front door behind him, and sank into the driver’s seat of the car.
He pulled out, driving in the exact reverse order to get back to the clinic where his Dad lay. He managed to get another fifteen minutes of time with his father. Not that that time made any difference to either of them. Jordan didn’t speak, didn’t think, didn’t cast silent wishes. When the cell finally rang again, he took the call where he sat, Anne’s dulcet tones telling him that his flight was leaving in just barely enough time to get himself to the airport, and maybe not even that. She mentioned the charter terminal in Nashville and how to get to it.
He hung up, and waved the phone at his Dad, thinking to make a little joke. “Stop me now Dad, or I’m off to Tennessee.”
His father made no response. No shift or hitch in his breathing, no twitch of a finger. Jordan watched for all of it and saw none of it. So he stood, stretched, and after a brief hesitation he leaned over and gently pressed a kiss to his father’s forehead. “I love you, Dad. I’ll see you on the other side.”
“What!?” Becky shouted into the cell phone. John had called her three times while she was out trekking with Leon and Jess. Not that her super CDC phone had picked up anything in the back wilds of Minnesota.
“Clinton,
Oak Ridge-” static. She wanted to throw the phone, but upon recognizing towns just beyond her parents’ land she knew she couldn’t lose it over a cell phone. There were far better things to lose it for these days.
Like Leon and Jess making angry faces at her. Here she was yelling on a cell phone in the middle of their pristine wilderness. Well they could stuff it.
“Come . . . back . . . in . . . .w- . . . .-eeed . . . . talk.”
“I’m coming.” She practically shouted it, again knowing it was useless. Louder only worked when you were yelling to a person far away, but Becky was beginning to wonder if maybe that wouldn’t be a better method of communication. John said something else, even more indistinguishable than the previous sentences, so she yelled “Good-bye!” and hung up. Only to turn and face the Peppersmith guys and their angry glares.
With a sigh, she ignored their expressions, just as she had learned to ignore the menacing way they held their tranq guns. That was for her protection, she had found out the other day when a wolf had come too close. “We have to go in, guys. John called me back. Something about other towns.”
“Other towns?” That from Leon, his deep voice and blue eyes not hiding his surprise or concern.
Crap. She had no idea what kind of clearance these guys held. But she also knew her place. And her place was not to give information out. So she weaseled. Another great skill she had learned since hiring on at the CDC. Telling the truth to lie. “I don’t know what it is. I really couldn’t hear much of anything except that I had to come back in.”
But she had heard a whole lot more. John sounded not scared exactly, but disturbed. Oak Ridge and Clinton were just beyond the boundaries of the little acreage her folks held. And she knew what the reversals were doing. More than she wanted to know.
She was under contract to not tell her family anything, even though death might be at their doorstep. Literally.
That thought set an ulcer to forming. She could feel the hydrochloric acid in her stomach pinching and wearing away at the delicate tissue even as she hiked back toward their base. The trucks stood ready, cages open and waiting for animals stupid or unlucky enough to get in their way, or to catch John’s eye. It seemed that John, who had never held a gun in his life, who had always excelled at science and never sports, enjoyed having the raw power of the Peppersmiths at his command. Becky on the other hand felt guilty every time she gave the word to bring a creature down, to haul it in. She kept telling herself it was a necessary evil.
The hike seemed much longer this way, even though she knew for certain that they were taking a more direct route and walking at a faster pace. Pines passed by with a speed that was likely to have her wind up with a twisted ankle. But she was fueled by adrenaline, her brain not acknowledging the sounds of birds. Even though it categorized that the aviary itself was changing here, day by day.
The Nevada prison scared the living daylights out of her. According to what she read, it was very lucky that Jillian and David were alive. They had actually run into the reversal, several times. Dr. Abellard was supposed to be monitoring them for signs of turning to the worse. That was enough to give her the willies.
From what she and John had gleaned that morning, it sounded like the suits were standing at the edge of the reversal and jumping back as it got bigger. They were using ultrasound and heat sensors to detect who was still alive. It seemed most of them were. They were looking to see who was moving. At last count that was no one.
Becky chewed her lip. The sharp retort of the rifle just behind her made her jump and nearly bite through it. She turned to glare at Leon who was holding his gun still aimed and practically smoking. But it was Jess who pointed just a few feet to her left where a lynx was teetering on its feet and falling with a soft thud to the forest floor. Becky closed her eyes, wondering whether she should thank Leon or yell at John for this crazy adventure.
As casually as if it was a discarded towel on his living room floor, Leon picked up the lynx and slung it over his shoulder. He motioned for Becky to keep trudging forward. Her ankles were sore from three days of this. Her nerves were stretched. And the ground was giving way beneath her feet. But she slid down the small incline, touching her hand to various branches to stay upright, sending small rocks skittering in front of her. Leon and Jesse brought up a tight watch behind her as she picked her way back with very little grace. At least compared to the two men whose big booted feet were no more than cat’s paws in the thick pine wilderness. But she tried to breathe clean air and pretend it was all okay.
Becky knew it wouldn’t last long. If she ran, the clean smell would give way to the bloody scene they had twice visited at the riverside. The deer would be only juveniles, and unless she could turn her brain off, she would worry that thought in her head forever. Then there was also the promise of the maniacal gleam that would light John’s eyes when he sent the Peppersmiths off after her to bring her down with their tranq guns. She, too, could come back to camp unconscious and slung across Leon’s wide shoulder, arms hanging limp, flapping with the rhythm of his gait.
Her two low ponytails stirred in the wind that reached them as they neared the edge of the clearing. John approached, carelessly picking his way through the brush, branches snapping back behind him. “Oak Ridge is losing people and so is Clinton.”
He held up a map in front of her asking what she knew. All Becky could think was that the whole of Anderson County was going under and the two Peppersmiths behind her were getting a serious education in what was happening. She could feel Leon approach even though she couldn’t see or hear him. Her instincts were the best detection for him, probably the only one.
John circled the map area, pointing with his pen. “People are going down fast! One hundred since our update this morning.”
She watched as the tip of his capped red pen passed right through her parents’ property as he made generous circles around the affected area.
She simply nodded, and waited.
“I want you on the next plane back down there.” He turned at last to acknowledge Leon. “Can you drive her?”
Becky’s mouth almost hung slack. Like a dog with a bone, John’s manners had gotten just as canine. She was turning to apologize for her boss when John spoke again. “I’d like you to fly down there with her. See what you can check out. Catch what you can. I just have to stay here. It’s way too interesting.”
He half handed, half shoved a page at Becky. She recognized it as a species list, just as John spoke. “It’s a list of all the species we’re losing.” His eyes were almost bright with anticipation. As though it were just a game, that the paper she held in her hand listed imaginary armies from a too serious game of ‘Risk’, not Bengal Tigers and Canada Moose and Elk and, of course, Georgia Warblers.
Jordan took in the scene before him. They had come in on the promised charter. Only this was no Lear jet, it was a wobbly Cessna, that had wound its way down to a field in the open space between Clinton and Oak Ridge. After a touchdown that had felt as though the earth had risen up to them and the plane had stayed stationary, they cranked open the doors and tumbled out.
He let Jillian go first, being gentlemanly, and instantly regretted it. She stumbled a little as her feet hit ground. Her soft blue scrubs showing the buckling of her knees, her hands tucking into her stomach as she folded over. He felt the raw stab of fear that knifed him in the gut every time she wavered. Again he came up with an excuse, it was just the plane ride. He was nauseous, too.
She didn’t have ‘it’.
With an ungraceful thump, he landed beside her and took her elbow, seeing David come out the other side, compasses already in hand, briefcase and leather bag hanging from his arms. He looked ready to walk into the hotel and spend his workweek. Jordan’s gaze naturally pulled back to Jillian, his hands encircling her upper arms, his eyes finding hers. “Are you all right?”
Even as he asked it, he told himself the pain was just because he had already lost everyone. Not because anything was
so special about her.
She pushed at his chest. “I’m okay. Just need to get my feet under me.” With that, she straightened. Shoved her hair out of her face. The dark strands, for once loose, had bothered her on the whole flight over. Wet and hanging limp when they entered the plane, they had a gentle wave to them now that rubbed beneath his fingers as he let her stand on her own.
He felt and heard her take a deep breath, and he grabbed both their bags as had become his custom. David had already planted himself behind the wheel of the midsized, mid-aged gold sedan. Why they didn’t have grey or even a black hearse was beyond him. For the thousandth time Jordan felt like they were walking blind. Only this time they were walking into a serious tragedy.
Holding the passenger door for Jillian he waited while she situated herself, most of the green color having faded from her features. Then he let himself into the backseat while David gunned the engine, testing the feel of the car and his own level of testosterone.
With the map Anne had provided they wound an uncertain way through the countryside. It looked much like the area outside McCann. The Appalachian Mountains cradled the sides of the small road, only this time they nestled ATV shops, car dealerships, and the occasional small windowless strip joint up along the sides of the two lane highway.
The shops gave way to churches, hillsides dotted with houses, and at last a storage unit of long gray buildings fronted by rows of garage doors. The chain link fence was a good fifteen feet high, winding its way around the property and then across the road in front of them. That made Jordan frown.
A uniformed security guard stood sentry at the gate that spanned the street, on the outside of the town, and David pulled up even as the guard approached them. But David was already whipping out his compass, and making Jordan wish someone else had driven.
Resonance Page 23
