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

was almost too familiar, as though those jokes about small town families being too close were true. The blonde looked up at him expectantly, a sheen of tears covering her eyes. It was all he could do to keep from telling her that those tears wouldn’t work on him, and this problem wouldn’t be solved unless she could get it together. “There are two closed doors at the end of the hall. Can I go in?”

 

She nodded, and he realized how much he hated getting permission. What if she had said ‘no’ then died?

 

Well, at least it would be her own fault. The first room he went into was the little girl’s. More of the creepy, plastic horses covered the available surfaces of the bedspread and the white, standard issue, matching dresser and canopy bed, complete with pink ruffles. For a moment all he could do was stare at the girl-ness all around him, too frozen to do his job. Sure this house was warm, but tasteless. He’d be damned if he didn’t vomit from all the ruffles around him before he left. Or was it the magnetic field? Either way he was bound to puke. As he ran the meter next to the wall he began picking up a level change as he approached the corner.

 

“Sonofabitch.”

 

It wasn’t much. Not even a reversal. But at this point he’d seen enough to know it was coming. This was either the top edge of a coming bubble or the side edge of an already existing bubble. The normal field gave way, over a distance of about five inches. First weakening, then, if you could locate the exact spot and hold steady, you could find it – where the field went to zero. A phenomenon that should not occur on this earth.

 

He had zero.

 

Far in the back corner, right at the floor.

 

And he had a wall in his way.

 

The mother’s room was at least more tasteful. Though it looked like the Dad was still here, too. David didn’t analyze that any further, just headed for the corner that abutted the other room, where he had to move furniture and get down on his hands and knees.

 

It was here, too - the edge of an already existing bubble - and the thing was decent in size. A good part of the bedroom was affected.

 

“Sonofabitch.”

 

“What is it?” The voice belonged to Jordan.

 

“Got one.”

 

Even in the space of the two words, Jordan was at his side, kneeling, reading the meter over his shoulder. “Bet this is what got Eddie.” His voice had trailed off at the end of the sentence. David knew he should be sympathetic. But he wasn’t. He was having the time of his life. His old man had never seen shit like this. And there were going to be papers until pigs flew out his ass. And Greer was going to ride that dino theory all the way to the bank. “Yeah, it’s great.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

The sarcasm wasn’t unnoticed, but David left it to sit, unresponded to. It’s why he wasn’t a preschool teacher. He heard the widow in the doorway, but didn’t look up, didn’t care to see that he had offended her.

 

Let Jordan soothe the woman and explain to her that she needed to pack for herself and her daughter and that the CDC would be putting them into a hotel and starting them on medications.

 

“Lindsay was sick yesterday morning.” There was a sound to the voice such that David wouldn’t have been surprised if he turned around to find the woman actually wringing her hands.

 

“Vomiting?” Jillian’s voice broke in, and he closed his mind to all of them. They voluntarily cleared themselves from the room, leaving him with his bubble anomaly. He smiled. The swap was coming. Like nothing any of them had ever seen before. And he was sitting right on top of it.

 

For a brief moment he pictured his father’s face when he heard.

Chapter 10

Jillian stared at the wall, suffering the strange sense of Déjà vu she had. She had stared at a wall just like this. In three cites that looked just like this. Well, from the inside of a hotel room they all did. The only difference was the handful of medications she swallowed. The carpet was the same, a bizarre floral pattern that was created just for this hotel. They were all in reds and browns and creams, though, and all just as ugly.

 

Designed by the humans that she was trying to save. Looking around herself, she shook her head. Maybe she should be trying to save Becky’s amphibs. It might be a more noble cause. Landerly had called again.

 

The four bubbles here were to be abandoned. Again there was another team coming up behind them, and Jillian had to wonder where and why they were being moved. It seemed all they could do was show up and say “there it is.” And steep in it a little more. Becky had found another spot on the side of a freeway in LA.

 

Jordan should have been happy about that. But Jillian knew that he was worried about his family. He was sworn not to say anything. They couldn’t start a panic.

 

Well, no, they could start a panic. A damned good one too, if she put her mind to it. David had already popped up with an excited grin and told them he was trying to calculate when the shift would occur. He was looking at the number and growth rate of the reversal spots. He was calculating in the historical data from the KT boundary, the evidence that he and his paleontologist friend had been on the phone for hours discussing.

 

And had left Jillian for the first time realizing what it felt like to be her family listening to her talk. God, it was boring. And he had told her Greer’s reversal/dinosaur die-out theory.

 

Jillian still got cold inside when she thought about that conversation. “David, all the dinosaurs died. There was mass extinction. There were volcanoes, which you are now telling me might have been triggered by magnetic reversal? The kind that we are looking at seeing here in the next what? Year? Month? Are we talking of going the way of the dinosaurs?”

 

“Well,” Rather proud of himself, he had looked her in the eyes and almost smiled. “Most of the mammals lived through it.”

 

She wanted to scream until her throat hurt too much to ever talk again. But she didn’t want Jordan to come running. Or admit her to an asylum. Then again, there was comfort in just sitting in a corner, rocking on her heels and mumbling about human extinction and magnetic poles, while nurses soothed her and gave her medication to make her happy and calm. But the phone rang.

 

“Brookwood.” She held the receiver to her ear. It was a CDC phone, and the damned thing was a secure line. What the hell was she doing with a secure line? She was supposed to be writing reports on other doctors’ evaluations of things as simple as E. coli and botulism.

 

“Landerly.”

 

She snapped to and didn’t say anything. Landerly would just start talking when he was ready and there was a certain charming efficiency to it.

 

“You’re not going to LA.”

 

Yea! Follow-through. Finally they could stay in one spot and-

 

“There’s a prison at the Nevada-California line and they have a bubble, too.”

 

He paused. Jillian absorbed. And waited.

 

“We can’t move them. There aren’t enough facilities, and these are maximum security prisoners.” He sighed and Jillian knew what was coming, but she let him say it. “Our deadline for solving this thing just bumped way up. After the AIDS debacle the CDC can’t afford to let prisoners die. Start packing. Your tickets are waiting for you at the airport.”

 

And with a sharp click in her ear he was gone.

 

Jillian stood, the phone still clutched uselessly in her hand, her brain churning. The CDC had suffered from the AIDS issue. No one had cared enough, no one had done enough, because those suffering were gay men.

 

It wasn’t all the CDC’s fault. They had actually done a lot. Private funding had failed to foot the necessary bill until grandmas started getting AIDS from blood transfusions and Ryan White became a tiny mirror with a big reflection of America’s ugly underbelly of prejudice.

 

And the CDC wasn’t about to be on the short end of that stick again.

 

So just in case Jillian didn’t feel enough pressure, there were now politics involved. Suddenly she understood physicians who medicated themselves. Demerol, Statol, Percocet all sounded fantastic about now.

 

She allowed herself the dream of a good drug addiction for a brief moment before she hollered out to Jordan.

 

“We’re not going to LA.”

 

She didn’t move from her spot, couldn’t bear to see his face. Not when she knew that he looked happy, and she was about to open her mouth and dash it. “There’s a maximum security prison in Nevada that has a reversal and we can’t move the prisoners.”

 

“What!?”

 

She could hear his feet hitting the floor. That meant he had been leaning back in the chair, thinking. For a moment she was glad that he hadn’t fallen backwards. Although she could have used a good laugh right now.

 

Jillian started to yell out her response, but Jordan was capable of movement and his footfalls were pounding her way from just beyond the open door. So she sighed. “We’re on a plane out tonight. We have to solve this thing and quick.”

 

“Why us?” His feet caught up to his head and he stood upright, shoving overworked fingers into undertended hair. Pieces of it stood straight up. And his blue eyes blinked slowly, like a man told that he’d just been sentenced to the electric chair.

 

Her voice was softer than she had intended. “It’s punishment.”

 

“For what?”

 

“Forging Landerly’s signature? I don’t know. We must have been very bad in our past lives. Do you remember torturing puppies or something?”

 

Jordan shook his head. “Very funny, Jilly.”

 

“Hey don’t mock me! I ran out of ‘very funny’ about two weeks ago.” She finally found the source of energy needed to move herself to the nearby desk and she plopped down into it unceremoniously while Jordan melted onto the bed. He rolled all the way through, onto his back, as though there was something to be learned from the ceiling.

 

After a minute Jillian interrupted the hum of the air conditioning. “It’s because of Eddie.”

 

“How is this because of Eddie?”

 

“That’s why we went to Florida, forged signature and all. That’s how we found those cases and linked it all together. Eddie was the start of it. If he hadn’t been your cousin I don’t know if we would have been this far along.”

 

“Fat lot of good it’s done us.”

 

“I know.” She resisted the urge to go to him and offer a hug. Although that wasn’t hard given that the phone call from Landerly had drained her of all her energy. With an effort far greater than should have been necessary, she pushed herself up out of the chair and plucked the hotel phone from the cradle punching the four digit code to David’s room.

 

Only David didn’t answer.

 

She mumbled into the black handset, “Sorry, wrong number.” Then stared at it like it had bitten her. How was that not David? She