Resonance

by A. J. Scudiere

  And Jordan almost turned tail and ran. Dear God, he was stuck in a small tent with two of them. Falling hopelessly head over heels for one of them, and she wasn’t speaking to him. Instead of fleeing screaming, he opened his mouth. “There’s a gender bias that the females fell under and woke up or died first. But beyond that, there’s no statistically significant difference in who woke up and who died.”

  Jillian cocked her head. “Did you check for a religious difference?”

  “Huh?” Jordan heard it come out of his own mouth. Years of education and student loans down the drain.

  “The Jewish people are the only religion that’s its own race, but there may be a religious bias in the sorting. I don’t know anything about the physiology of religion, but something must exist.”

  Jordan resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Of course, he and Landerly had been wracking their brains, but Jillian in her first few minutes in the tent proposed something they hadn’t thought of. She drove him nuts, so why the hell did he like her so much?

  Without being asked, Jordan slipped out of the tent and went in search of Jason. Lucy was gone now, and she had been a fantastic go-to girl. He’d wondered if she’d had some sort of crush on him, or if she was just that efficient and willing to do whatever needed to be done. Jason was simply driven. He saw the opportunity afforded by the drastic shift in population, and he was going to come out on top.

  Jason was in one of the other lit up tents. Of course. He would work well into the night, sleep a few hours and wake up early. He’d make sure he was indispensable. And certainly that’s how Jordan found him, sitting at a desk, frowning at the yards of graphs in front of him. “What’s the trouble?”

  Jason looked up, a hint of startle showing on his face. “I must have messed it up, but . . .”

  Jordan almost smiled. Messing up didn’t seem like much of an option for someone like Jason. “What did you mess up?”

  “Well, I figured that if compasses were acting up, maybe other things had, too. My first thought was the MRI. It’s magnetic, so that made sense.”

  “Is it messed up?” Jordan stifled his inward sigh. The last thing anyone needed was more problems, but if they existed they needed to be checked out.

  Jason shook his head, still looking confused. “No, it was fine. I guess the internal field is just too strong to be bothered by the earth’s field. The NMR was next. Same issue. But both the IR and UV-vis are honked up.”

  “Honked up?” That was one he hadn’t heard in a scientific sense before.

  “I got nothing. So I tried to recalibrate it.”

  Jordan felt his fists hit his hipbones. “And . . . ?” It felt like he was pulling teeth over messed up machinery when he needed Jason working on finding out what he could about Jillian’s religious bias theory.

  “I recalibrated the UV-vis.”

  “Oh.” Well, that certainly hadn’t been what he expected, not given the look on Jason’s face. So he launched into what he needed. “We-”

  “No. I recalibrated it. But our visual red recalibrated in the UV scale. The whole thing’s off by a frequency of 300 hertz.”

  “Hmmmm.” So the machine was fucked. He tried again to speak.

  But Jason wasn’t having any of it. “I got my Dad to check the ones out at the labs. They all recalibrate the same. I even called U Mass and UCLA. They’re the same.”

  Jordan nodded. “Good, I’m glad you got that solved.” And he shifted mental gears. After explaining what they needed, Jordan headed back, pushing aside thoughts of the future. If Jason reacted by over-working and over-thinking, others would react by shutting down. Suicides were a highly likely outcome. Some had lost their entire families. And it was inherent in the human species that some people just didn’t survive that.

  He shook his head, trying to make out the two voices as he approached. Jillian’s soft lilt, her laugh, and Landerly’s response, for the first time Jordan detected a scratch in the old man’s voice and wondered how many years of his younger life the man had spent smoking. He pushed through the canvas flap, enjoying the feeling of the heat enveloping him. Lord knows, the two of them had probably solved all the earth’s problems while he was out.

  Jillian was at a desk, her seat turned to face Landerly’s, while she sifted through reams of printouts, talking as she went, and Dr. Landerly was polishing off the last bites of the dinner she had put together for him.

  “Jordan,” It was the first time this evening she had spoken directly to him, since he had dared to indicate that he wasn’t completely on the dual-earth bandwagon. Landerly wasn’t either, but for some reason the old man remained in her good graces. Jordan looked at her, eyes up, waiting. “Didn’t they say something about the wardens all dying in Nevada?”

  He frowned. “They didn’t all die.”

  “Yeah, but wasn’t there a disproportionately large number? Far more than fifty percent?”

  Landerly nodded, wondering where she was going. “All the first people who woke up were murderers. Single killings, passion killings. You found that.”

  But Jordan shook his head, for the first time since Jillian spouted off about her dreams, he and Landerly were on the same page. But Jillian wasn’t and Jordan put voice to his concerns. “I don’t think that murderer / non-murderer is going to be the sorting factor, I’ve looked at the list.”

  She brushed them both aside with her hand. “Of course not, but job description might. Oh-” Her eyes widened as she cut off her own thought.

  Again he and Landerly waited.

  “You weren’t there. . .” He could see her getting excited. But even when she opened her mouth she still didn’t make sense. “I wasn’t there either!”

  For a moment he wondered if they were really going to wind up putting her into a straight jacket. And he barely managed a sad sigh before she spoke again.

  “Becky mentioned something on the way over to the coroner’s. That she’d been over to the Civic Center across the street and they were having a rally.”

  “I didn’t see a rally.” He looked askance to Landerly and the old man just shrugged.

  Jilly’s eyes narrowed and her face took on the expression of a viper ready to strike. “Of course you didn’t see it. Becky did. It wasn’t here.” She gave a long suffering sigh. “So try this on for size: At the rally they believed the reversal was the Ascension because all the lawyers had died and . . . the police force had mostly lived. So had the FBI,” she paused, her eyes rolling up skyward as she relived the memory, certainly in her brain she could hear Becky speaking. “But almost no CIA. Low survival among thieves and murderers.”

  She pinned him with a glare. “Check it.”

  “What?” He still wasn’t quite up to speed on what the idea was, even though he’d understood what she said as plain English.

  “Job descriptions. The lawyers and CIA and thieves and murderers are alive. Here. Because they’re dead there. We’ll also be short a good police force, and the FBI.”

  He frowned. He understood; he just wasn’t buying what she was selling. “The FBI just all died?”

  “I doubt it was all of them!” She was as frustrated with him as he was with her. And from off to the side he could see Landerly watching the whole exchange with his eyebrows so high they almost popped off his head. Jordan was just too damn frustrated to laugh about it.

  Jillian started in on him again. “Most of the FBI is dead. I’ll bank on that just like I’ll bank on David corroborating my story. Has anyone thought to check on him?”

  Of course not, no one really likes him.

  Jordan tried to squelch the thought. His mother had taught him better. And as a physician he had taken an oath to be better.

  But it was Jillian who stomped out of the tent and went on her way to check on David.

  He tried to take a moment to gather himself. But it was practically impossible with Landerly sitting there watching him. So he forced himself to don the appearance of not being wound into knots. He faced Landerl
y, “Now what?”

  Landerly shrugged from the seat he had occupied the whole time. “I guess we get cracking on checking the job descriptions of everyone we can find.”

  “Dammit Leon.” Becky muttered under her breath.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She managed about half a smile and shook her head at David. She wasn’t going to repeat it. Not the cursing of the dead. Not her anger at Leon for leaving her here to sort out the species by herself.

  Of all the people who had died in the reversal, Leon was the one she had been sure would make it if anyone would. He radiated health. It was worse that he had died of a hit to the head - nothing more than a scratch to Leon. But there had been no one awake to lift him into a bed and stitch him up.

  The only remaining Peppersmiths were still in Minnesota, faxing in fabulous data on some seriously unfabulous extinctions. Leon’s sister had stepped up to fill the lead spot, the business running smoothly in the face of personal and global tragedy. John Overton had died as well. And Becky let out a breath when she thought of the gleam in his eyes when they talked about the downed moose. Overton hadn’t been anywhere as useful as Leon had been. And it was wrong of her, but she couldn’t muster up any real pain at the loss.

  David went back to working on his hands and knees some five yards away. He was chipping at an exposed surface of granite, the tiny pickaxe making a rhythmic ping against the scar he was creating in the earth. He was making too much noise now to hear her if she muttered.

  The crickets had stopped for a mile in every direction when he had started the nasty noise that signaled to the wildlife that they were not alone. The predators had gone into hiding, away from the now rotting feast that had been left out for them. Luckily they had eaten enough that the smell wasn’t overwhelming and Becky had adjusted to it. David worked like he didn’t notice anything, quiet except for his little axe and his breathing, in a circle of illuminated glare. One knee flat, the other up, with his elbow resting on it, his fit torso encased in a red L L Bean jacket that spoke of money and sport. He looked like an ad rather than a scientist. The only glimmer of truth in the whole bright image was that his hair was thinning on top.

  Becky went back to unearthing the things that had taken great pains to earth themselves in the first place. They squirmed and fought, but only rarely did they escape. She apologized to the souls of each of them, and again wondered what God thought of what she did to his creatures.

  Her minister when she’d been in high school had thought God wanted the people to use the creatures to help the people. She was certain there wasn’t any real danger of being smote down by anyone organic or overly holistic in the East Tennessee Baptist Church. But nowhere in the bible was there any good solid reference to God’s or Jesus’ ideas about the worms and their scientific versus holy purposes.

  So she dug them up.

  “You about done?” David’s voice was clear in the unearthly quiet.

  “Yup!” She scrambled to gather the few containers she had brought with her. Her cell phone shoved deep into her pocket. She wasn’t ‘finished’; she hadn’t really started. She was simply taking advantage of being out. David had said he was coming out here to check the rock formations, either with her or without her.

  And after Jillian had gone back comatose, Becky didn’t think any of them should be anywhere alone, and certainly not David. He was the one who seemed to function the most like Jillian. And he could simply pass out and slip under at any moment.

  Granted, Jillian had been triggered. She had seen Jordan Abellard’s body in the morgue and let out that soul shattering scream. The hideous noise had only ended when Jillian had passed out.

  So Becky didn’t find the brilliant Dr. Carter so all-knowing wise when he decided to come out to the back of beyond in the middle of the night to chip rock, even if it was her own backyard. Her mother and father would be bringing Brandon back here. They had Melanie and Aaron buried in Charlotte where he had been working, where the reversal had hit them.

  For a moment she had to scrunch up her face to keep the thoughts and therefore the tears at bay. The steady ringing of metal on rock had stopped. And with a sniff, she looked to her right, to the perfect size twelve tan hiking boots that bore just enough scuffs to show that they had been worn, once before, maybe. “Need a hand?”

  The fitted black glove reached down into her view, and she was certain he was offering to tug her to her feet, but she couldn’t face him yet. And David wasn’t the kind of man you just threw yourself at when you needed a good cry. So she slapped a salamander in a clear container into his palm.

  The palm lifted out of her vision and came back empty, so she held up another and another, until she had corralled her thoughts and was able to face the man.

  And to think she had come out here believing she was protecting him from going comatose out in the woods. Nope, he was far more stable than she. It was just Jillian with the issue.

  She stepped pace behind him on the trail, only briefly musing at following him down trails she had walked since she was old enough to wander away from home. But before she realized that they had come that far, she was blinded by the sudden glare of the motion-sensor spotlight on the side of the empty house. Her hand flew up to shade her eyes and she caught a brief burning glimpse of David doing the same thing, just before she ran into his back.

  “Umph.”

  Well, that was beautiful. With a deep breath in, she apologized.

  “Don’t worry.” He pushed the button on the car key and the sleek black Mercedes in front of them blinked and made a few laser-like noises. Becky figured he’d gone out and bought it. But she wasn’t sure when. Or why. There were tons of available cars these days. But it seemed that David just needed the black Mercedes. Or maybe it had needed a man that wore L L Bean and breathed money.

  Again, she held out her gloved palm, waiting patiently until he relented and handed over the keys. She wasn’t about to let him drive. No matter how sure she was that he wasn’t going to slip into a coma.

  A few minutes later the black leather, hand-stitched backseat was covered with pieces of rock, baggies of silt and soil, and plastic containers of water and writhing creatures. Definitely not what the Mercedes-Benz corporation had built this luxury-mobile for. Why couldn’t the man just admit that he played in the dirt for a living and get a truck?

  Becky turned the key, threw the car in gear and, when the gas pedal made the car start reversing out of the bumpy gravel drive, she figured the engine was running. The flood light snapped off as they pulled out of range, shutting down the still picture the house had made beyond the windshield.

  But Becky put that thought out of her mind, too. At least her folks would be back in a couple of days and it wouldn’t feel so eerie. She hadn’t even brought herself to go inside this time. Even though the dust layer would have been microscopic, she would know it was there, feel that the house no longer had a family in it. That it knew it was unused.

  So she pulled away, using the high-beams to illuminate a road she knew by heart.

  David stared out the side window, although if he could see anything other than the green reflection of the dash lights, she wasn’t certain.

  Twenty-five minutes later she pulled into the lot at the high school. The tent town was ghostly white, moving slightly in the breeze. A few of the tents were lit up from the inside, like Japanese paper lanterns. But David didn’t see any of it.

  He had fallen sound asleep on the ride back, having reclined his seat and wedged his head against the door jamb.

  “David.” She kept her voice soft, as though maybe it weren’t her intention to wake him.

  But he didn’t respond.

  A seed of thought began forming at the back of her brain, and she decided that she didn’t care if she startled the hell out of him. She grabbed his shoulder and shook him for all she could. “David! David!”

  21

  “David! David!”

  The voice seemed muffled,
and at a distance. It was a wonder he could make out his own name it was so murky. And he was tired. Why couldn’t Becky let him sleep? It seemed like he had just slid away. Finally, peacefully getting the rest he needed. The seat of the Mercedes was warm and soothing, because he’d turned on the ass-warmer.

  The salesman had a better name for it than that, but David didn’t care. It made everything else about the car worthwhile. Even the pricetag. So David wrote yet another check out of his trust fund. He’d sworn never to touch the account, but lately it seemed that was all he had done.

  He started to roll sideways, away from the sound of her voice, but the sheets were cool, and her voice was receding. Good. She was going to let him sleep.

  He slid away, letting the recesses of dreams come close and fold him into a place where he simply didn’t care that he was in a car, sleeping in the parking lot. A thought about hubcaps slipped through his head and he could see the parking lot filled with rows of little black Mercedes.

  “David.”

  Damn, her voice had gotten-

  It was a man. A male voice. And he remembered that she had left, that he had heard her skittering out of the- . . . the car?

  “David.” A hand clasped his shoulder, the grip commanding rather than soothing. “I can see that you’re coming around. Watch that arm.”

  Arm?

  Son of a bitch. They weren’t going to let him sleep. He sighed and rolled toward the sound, trying to force open his eyes, but it wasn’t working. He rubbed at his face.

  His arm was ripped from his body. For just a moment causing a blinding pain, then the feeling rescinded to a bright burn.