Resonance, J. B. Everett [the top 100 crime novels of all time txt] 📗

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 ravenhaired 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? Sobeware evil. The wolf that comes as sheep in wool … Then, of course, there was that whole rain offrogs 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.

 

With force, she shoved her brain in gear. Her frogs should be reorienting at the magnetic halfway point.

 

That meant they were either very close to a smaller site, far from a big site, or exactly as far away from a site of the same size. Becky turned the wheel and followed the frogs noses.

 

Jordan looked at the page from the cheap printer they had brought along to spit out test results. It seemed a shame to get the scoop on whether you would likely live or die from a $79 printer that wheezed and beeped like an abused photocopier when it ran out of paper.

 

Dr. Carter’s results rested in his fingertips at the moment. The only person that they weren’t sure of until just now. His white count was textbook, and he didn’t test positive for anything else interfering with normal immune function. Meaning it was highly unlikely that he’d be in the next batch to come down with Brookwood-Abellard, as Jordan was already calling it to himself. It also meant the geologist was likely to come around trying to read the slopes on Jilly again. Maybe he just shouldn’t start ‘David’ on the supplements yet, give him a little time to weaken up.

 

While it was supremely tempting, it did violate that whole Hippocratic Oath thing. Jordan scowled to himself.

 

Instantaneously, Jilly’s voice reacted to his expression. “Does David have something?”

 

“No, David doesn’t.” He forced a smile, and forced down the thoughts that were bubbling up about Jillian.

 

He set the printout aside, stacking it on top of the pages of blood tests from every person in McCann. His and Jilly’s were at the bottom of the pile, along with a flood of nerves.

 

“What we need to do is go out and get the good sheriff and his boy to help us set up the road blocks.”

 

Jillian’s giggles mingled sweetly with the harsh ring of the old yellow phone and, covering her mouth, she ran off to the kitchen to answer it.

 

Jordan knew what she was laughing about, too. In an earlier attempt to find the appropriate methods of shutting down the town, they had set up your basic D.O.T. barricades. Only McCann wasn’t a town. So they set up James Hann’s two sawhorses at the east entrance of Main, and Sheriff Beard produced a real barricade from the trunk of his cruiser, only it said “City of Kingsport” in black, sprayed-on letters. Neither Jordan nor Jillian had questioned the sheriff on that.

 

Sheriff Beard was McCann born and bred, and he’d informed them in a deeply twisted drawl that ‘them bear’cades ain’t gone keep anyone in or out, folks’ll just pick’em up and go on by.’ So they had hopped into the Rav4, desperate for a trip out of town anyway, and searched every store they could find, finally stumbling across some old Halloween barricade tape reading “Beware. Beyond this point lies certain death”. Jordan had wound up being the voice of reason on that one. Jilly had begged him to get it and laughed herself into tears.

 

And Jordan knew then that it was true: when the serious ones go, everybody better watch out.

 

She came back into the room now, all trace of laughter gone from her face. She took in a deep breath to help expel the nasty thought she was about to speak. “Jeb Parson’s daughter just found him on his living room floor.”

 

He bit his tongue to keep from making the inappropriate response that Jillian should claim that ten dollars she had wanted to bet. She had the first piece of her Trifecta. Jordan pulled up to the conversation on a medical level instead. “He’s in a coma?”

 

Her head shook slightly. “He was dead when she found him.”

 

It was only then that he noticed she was fingering the rolls of yellow ‘do not cross’ tape that had arrived via one very perturbed FedEx driver this morning. His truck was splattered in mud unbecoming a professional. But he had delivered thousand-foot rolls of bright red biohazard and yellow quarantine tape, warning signs and corrugated waxed paper road barricades that assembled like cardboard dinosaurs. None of it would keep out a scooter, but it looked pretty official.

 

“We need to go to the Parson’s house then and-”

 

“We need to seal up the town.” Jillian’s firm voice pushed his concern down deeper. “Mr. Parson went down fast. We need to keep everyone who’s in in and everyone who’s out out. Until the men in suits get here tomorrow. Then we need to visit Sandy Parson and …” She turned around to walk out, but he heard her voice from the hallway. “-pray.”

 

They didn’t bother to unpack the remaining two boxes of barricade supplies, just shoved back what they had already inspected and threw the boxes into the trunk of the Rav4. They would have what they needed when they got there. Jillian tossed Jordan the keys, and was already flipping open her cell phone and dialing up some number she knew by heart. She paid little attention as she climbed into the passenger side of her own car. “Yes, David please.”

 

David please. He tamped down the urge to tell her that the polite form of address was ‘Doctor Carter’.

 

Then he spent another round of thought on the fact that she had known the number by heart, and even if he was beginning to think something, he was too late. Too bad, so sad. And he’d better shove it down quick. If Jillian wanted to monkey around with someone it would have to be David Carter the second. Jordan had critical work to attend.

 

The conversation was brief and since the cell reception was so horrible, Jillian had to repeat everything she said at least three times. And Jordan had the whole conversation by the time she hung up. David Carter was not to leave his hotel room unless he spoke to her first. Not them, her.

 

It took fifteen minutes to drive the less-than-mile to the edge of town where Parson became Main. Hann’s sawhorses were still there, but true to Sheriff Beard’s prediction, they had been moved. Whoever drove through must have stopped to put them back, the gap wasn’t wide enough for a car.

 

Jordan parked the Rav4 right in the middle of the street after abandoning the idea of pulling over, and was greeted by a series of fresh hoofprints, dead center of the slightly widened gap. And he didn’t have a guess as to who the hell they belonged to. At this point in the game he wouldn’t have been shocked if a Conestoga wagon full of settlers showed up.

 

Jillian joined him and silently they each grabbed both red biohazard and yellow ‘Do Not Cross’ tape rolls and handfuls of wire. They separated and went about a hundred yards out from the road, winding tape around trees and wiring it to branches, sealing off the place at waist level. Jordan added tape and wire to hold the sawhorses into place. Someone would basically have to rip his work down in order to cross. Or jump it on their horse. He put his hands on his hips, and went about adding another level of tape at eye height. The yellow and red barricade looked flimsy but the tape was strong and wouldn’t rip. A good pair of shears would make short work of it