“I’m hungry.”
They both looked up at him. Maybe wondering why such normal words had fallen out of his mouth in such an absurd situation.
Becky shook her head, and he could feel the movement where her chest was smushed against him, just under his ribcage. “I forget how fast you two come around once you do wake.”
David stifled a perverted smile as Jillian shrugged and the movement drew her breast against him. She explained, “Once you come around, it’s just like any other day. . . except the part where you’re crazy.”
David actually laughed at that. He didn’t care to imagine the way that Abellard and Landerly must have grilled her. They had given him hell and they hardly knew him.
Her voice cut into his thoughts again. “So, let’s head over to the cafeteria.” She tugged on his arm, and he realized that even together, they couldn’t budge him.
“No.” He extricated himself from their grasp. “What I want is to drive my new Mercedes and go out somewhere and have someone cook me a nice big steak.”
“That sounds heavenly.”
They almost started drooling and he had a momentary vision of a bubbling hot tub, with the drooling faces inserted. Except he had once had Jillian in a bikini in a hot tub, and there had even been beer, and . . . nothing.
Becky’s voice chimed in, “I’m game. But where would we get a steak now?”
Still they proceeded with full hope that it was possible, the women shrugging into their jackets and Jillian tossing him his brown suede bomber after her hands were through her own sleeves. They filed out the tent flap, his fingers encircling the ring of keys in his pocket. A brief burst of relief settling into him that they were really there. That he had actually bought the car. Here.
He pulled the keys out, letting the short frigid gust of wind steal heat from his fingers. But he didn’t care. Looking up to see how far the chattering women had gotten ahead of him, he stopped dead.
No way in hell.
But it was.
In the flesh.
“David.” The old man spoke through thin lips. His hair whiter and wispier than the last time they had seen each other. His chest a little more of a barrel, but in general he seemed the same. Certainly in great shape for a man of sixty-nine. And David knew, with the certainty that he knew himself, that if the weight was there, then the old man simply hadn’t been able to get it off. “Dad.”
His right hand shot out, years of reflex and training, and grasped the slightly wizened version that met it.
“How long has it been?” His father’s voice was cultured and smooth. Of course. Naturally, everything about him spoke of wealth and power, just the way he planned. And David felt the added pressure of another disadvantage: David Carter The First also hadn’t just awoken from a coma.
God, he hadn’t even thought to check the lists to see if his old man was alive over here. And here he was - in Tennessee of all places.
David’s chest settled into lead. He came to see me. He gathered himself and answered his father’s question. “Two years.”
“Too long.”
Not long enough. But he mustered a weak smile.
Jillian and Becky stood in the background of the portrait his father made, behind the space the old man commanded. He wished they would go back to their female chatter, and stop watching this drama unfold, because David knew what happened every time he and the old man talked.
Damn, he had really thought he was done with the man when his name had turned up on the lists. But that was there. It would be best to just get it over with. “What are you doing here, Dad?”
He felt his body shrink back to adolescence, his maturity level drop several notches. And things he had carefully shoved to the back of his life begin a steady seep into the here and now.
“I came to see my son.” He gestured with the brilliant mahogany cane David had only just realized he was carrying. “I hear you’re the wizard who discovered all this.”
Where the hell was the old man going? David waited for the knife to come out, the other shoe to drop. But he only nodded. Knowing, even as he did it, that Jillian and Becky were standing right there listening, and that they deserved their due. But he couldn’t bring himself to give it, not when The First stood in front of him.
“Very impressive.”
David heard, but didn’t believe, the praise. Years of experience had taught him that the better the complement was, the harder the knife came from behind. So he waited, and the old man spoke again. “Did you use my hotspot theories?”
Ah, the joy of honesty. “I used a few. But in the end they didn’t pan out.” Again he fronted what he hoped looked like a genuine smile, and promptly changed the subject. “Dad, I’d like you to meet Dr. Jillian Brookwood and I believe you’ve met Dr. Rebecca Sorenson several years ago. They’re both with the CDC.”
Jillian nodded, of course she had already figured it out. His father scanned the two women, keeping his smile in place. But David knew. Dad wore a full business suit, and a small tic of the muscle along his jaw revealed what he thought of Jillian’s scrubs and sneakers, and worse yet, Becky’s faded old jeans and hiking boots. But his father just nodded in return, and acknowledged the two women in a polite way. Only David knew that it was less than his usual greeting. The one he reserved for esteemed colleagues and ornament women.
The invitation he extended was with his usual graciousness. “I was wondering if you would do me the honor of joining me for dinner.”
David felt both stares swing his way. He warred between being grateful that the females deferred to him in front of his father, and frustrated knowing there was no polite way out.
Before he could answer, his father stepped up to the plate and steered the conversation. “I have my limo waiting.”
Great. He felt his insides congeal and sink. Becky’s jaw dropped open and Jillian tried to hide the lift of her eyebrows but didn’t quite swing it.
David conceded defeat, a position he was used to when The First was around. And his father smiled, a big genuine grin that ate at David. Was it because he was happy that people would join him for dinner, or because he had succeeded in manipulating the situation?
The driver stepped over, decked in his full black suit, and held the door while Becky and Jillian slid in the back. They resembled puppies running loose in a mansion - young, out of place, and oblivious to all of it. He followed his father into the tight black confines of the car, wondering how the hell this had happened.
The earth had undergone a radical transformation. Over half the population had died. People were still trying to just get their lives back on track, to get institutions up and running. And his father had found a limousine, complete with a monkey-suited driver.
The voice, so like his own, broke through his thoughts. “Now, do you have a preference for dinner?”
Jillian and David looked to Becky, who shrugged as if to say, ‘I don’t live here either’. But her mouth opened and she spoke the words. “We were thinking about steak, but I’ll be honest, we have no idea where to get one right now.”
David bit down on the end of his tongue, wondering what his father would say. But the old man reached across the space between them, his hand clapping his son on the back. And for a brief moment David thanked the fates that his father had found him in this world and not the other one, that he hadn’t been forced to have this conversation from a gurney, behind the safety of the babyrail. “I’m staying at the Garden Plaza Hotel.”
“It’s open?” Becky’s voice cut the air with her shock. “The convenience store is still on the honor system. There are a few fast-food joints that are up and running, but-”
David watched while his father nodded at the plebes, unsurprised by their lack of understanding. The First always lived as though money could buy anything. “I had them open it. The driver will have called ahead to tell them how many to expect.”
The old embarrassment crept over him. He had been raised this way, but for whateve
r reason, it hadn’t stuck. His father considered it a huge shortcoming. And David was appalled that his father believed the world came running with the wave of a few bills. It was worse when The First believed that his son should, too.
He saw Becky and Jillian exchange glances. But whether it was awe over his father’s abilities, or a good moral sense that disliked the buying and selling of everything, he didn’t know.
It was clear that The First was through with their shock and he simply turned to David. “That was some very impressive work you did, son.” His father’s eyes caught his. The complement seemed genuine. “All the universities will be trying to grab you for next term.”
His father actually seemed proud - like he was glad The Second was his son. He never really had been before. There had been moments like this where it had felt like the rift was closing, not healing, but getting narrower. And always before, David had reached out. Always before, when he had pulled his hand back it was bloody.
Still, he wondered.
Jordan stared at the inert form as he felt his chest caving in on itself.
Jillian lay still and quiet, spread across the gurney in front of him. At a perpendicular was David. They had watched him slip away about ten hours ago. The geologist’s vital signs were dropping slowly but surely.
But it was Jillian who had already sunk into dangerously low numbers.
She was the one that worried him.
Jordan couldn’t say he’d feel anything but professional failure if David completely slipped away. But if Jillian did . . . he didn’t even want to examine that too closely.
They had initially covered her with a blanket, in a feeble attempt to retain some of the body heat she was so rapidly depleting. A few hours ago he had added an electric blanket, heating her from the outside. He and Landerly had made the call to run an IV into her just after David had slipped away.
But she’d been under now for sixteen hours.
A long time.
Her vitals were lower than he had ever seen them. And still slipping lower. The electric blanket made up for some of the cold leached into her system by the IV fluid. Her core temperature was ninety-seven - low, but close. He began tucking the blanket around her, under her feet, along her side. She made no response.
Not that he had thought she would. But he did keep hoping.
With a last look, he turned his ministrations to David, noting with professional detachment that his temperature was stable and very close to normal. Jordan pulled the hospital issue blanket up just under David’s chin after taking a full round of vital signs and recording them in the chart left open on the desk at his side.
With a glance at Jillian, Jordan reached down and calmly turned up the space heater. He told himself that it was chilly in the tent, that any additional help maintaining her body temperature would be welcome. But there was nothing else he could do. Techs were looking in on the pair every five minutes. And her vitals signs were ebbing away in a flow that was too slow to actually watch.
He wandered to the cafeteria and ate a dinner he couldn’t remember ten seconds after he swallowed the last bite, staring straight ahead the whole while.
Where was Jillian? If her theory was right, then she was somewhere with Becky and now David, too. And if there were two separate realms on top of each other, maybe she was here, in the cafeteria. His eyes darted from one spot to another. Thinking he might catch a shadow of Jillian, or, just maybe, see through to where she was.
He didn’t want to believe it. Coma was a medical mystery of sorts. Unlike near-death-experience, it was believed and quantifiable, but with no true underlying explanation. No solid evidence about what happened to patients’ conscious minds while they were under.
A black composition book sat unopened on the table beside him, and all around him real shadows existed, cast by other team members. They talked and waved like a hurricane around the silent eye, but they didn’t interact with him, these straggling last CDC scientists.
The tent town was still up in its entirety, but in the past day or two the population had thinned out as the scientists had returned to jobs and families. There was even talk of needing to re-open the high-school.
His watch showed that he had been sitting there, eating his forgettable food, for nearly an hour. He’d been lost in the blank walls of the cafeteria, looking for Jillian, when according to her, the other side was just as populated as here. There would be shadows and hints of people everywhere if he could see them.
He turned to make his way back out into the cold night, through small but vicious gusts of wind, that wouldn’t register with him at any level other than the most cursory. And he would begin again - go through his whole routine, checking on Jillian.
She looked exactly as she had when he left her. But when he counted, her heart rate was another beat per minute slower. She was another breath per minute slower, too. And that was very significant given the low rate she was already at.
He wandered off to get Landerly. “Her resps are slowing.” He spewed it out as he pushed through the tent flaps, any ‘hello’ a wasted formality on the old scientist.
“We shouldn’t interfere until she’s in serious danger. We’ll go back in an hour.”
Jordan felt his heart clench. The old man had simply brushed it off. But then again, he was an MD, too. He knew his numbers and had seen far more than anyone’s fair share of medical mysteries. So Jordan forced himself to sit. Then to open the notebook and pretend to do . . . something like working.
He felt Landerly’s eyes on him before he heard the voice. “So what do you think of our girl’s theory?”
Jordan shrugged. “She believes it.”
Landerly nodded. “That puts a lot of weight behind it for you.”
It wasn’t a question, so Jordan decided to neither acknowledge nor refute it. “She has all the right information. And I don’t know how she could have gotten it any other way. Nor how she could have gotten such perfect corroboration from David . . .”
Again Landerly nodded. “Let’s work from the assumption that she’s right. How does this second earth work? Where is it?”
He almost laughed. That was exactly what had been ricocheting around his brain since Jillian had slipped under. The only thing that occupied his thoughts except Jillian’s status. “It’s right here. It’s the same earth you and I are on.”
“Then why don’t we see them? Where are they?”
His brain focused. God bless the old man for the distraction. “It’s like x-rays. It passes right through and we don’t detect it.”
Landerly scrunched his face.
So he continued. “There’s more space between atoms than the atoms themselves take up.” He tapped his hand on the table. “My flesh doesn’t go through the table, not because there’s too much stuff but because they vibrate in the same range. That means they bump into each other. Higher and lower vibrations pass through us. Like UV light. It’s borderline, and it gets through the top layer of our skin. So if something was much higher or much lower, it wouldn’t even be in our range. We’d pass right through it and never know it was there. Like x-rays.
“If we follow Jillian’s theory, then at some point while everyone was under, the vibrations could have shifted into two distinct bands. And some people stayed with one and some with the other. Jason found that shift in the UV-vis scale. Jillian put a lot of stock in that. She’s probably running a panel on the other side right now.” Landerly didn’t say anything, so after a few seconds Jordan continued, just to fill the empty space. “It might explain some of the shifting. In fact, that shifting may be why everyone got sick in the first place. We just didn’t hold up well in the Earth’s splitting vibrational level.”
Landerly pondered it. Jordan could see it on his face. And saw that he, too, had found holes or gaps in the theory. It wasn’t a perfect theory, but as usual, Jordan was stuck waiting for a better one to come along. Certainly Miss Jillian could come up with something.
Landerly tapped
his thin lips with his pencil. “So how did it get decided who wound up on which side?”
“Jillian says there’s a job description bias.”
Landerly shrugged. “She’s right. They’ve got most all the cops, we’ve got the lawyers. They’ve got preachers and we’ve got teachers. We got the CIA almost to a man. Now that’s creepy.”
Jordan almost laughed. But it was creepy. “Surely there’s no God sitting up there saying ‘lawyers this way, cops that way’. What I can’t figure out is how it ended up that way. Geography would have made more sense, especially given that the root of the problem is a geological phenomenon.”
“There is some geographical bias.” Landerly leaned forward, the fact that he moved from his standard, laid back, steepled-fingers position indicated that he was interested in the topic. Very interested.
“Like what?”
“It’s not obvious, but it is statistically significant. We have more Californians, less southerners, more east coast, less bread basket.” He dragged a pencil across the map he had flipped open as he spoke.
“But there are greater and lesser populations in those areas. It just matches with the census.”
Landerly shook his head, and Jordan knew he’d been chastised, “Beyond that. Based on percentage of the population those areas are higher and lower.”
“Oh.” Of course Landerly hadn’t missed an obvious point like that. Jordan and Jillian had been hired to be the man’s field hands - not his brain. “Maybe there’s a meteorological factor, like humidity or cloud cover.”
There was never a response to his idea. The older man simply bent back to his work, flipping pages, making spreadsheets with data from the deceased lists and survivor lists, adding in colored bands with Jillian’s info.
It wasn’t long before the requisite hour had passed, and Jordan popped up to check on Jillian.
He was back within a heartbeat. “She’s too low.”
He reported the fact to Landerly, but he didn’t ask anything. He simply left, running through the tents, asking everyone where he could find a ventilator, wondering why he hadn’t been better prepared when he had seen this coming. Maybe because he hadn’t wanted to believe.
Resonance Page 40
