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

ill, but changed the topic as soon as he knew that Jordan had already been notified. It was Sunday again, and Jordan had heard the hiss of the waffle iron in the background of the call, making the Nevada heat all that much more unbearable.

 

There were eight more prisoners sick this morning, even though they had removed everyone from the bubbles. Maybe they had just been in for too long. Maybe David’s numbers, which Jordan had leaned his head across the tapes to read, were indicating that this was another phase.

 

A voice shouted from off to his right and Jordan began to jog to the zippered tent where the metallic voice was coming from. When he arrived, a yellow suit was standing over a prisoner, the man’s arm cuffed to the gurney he was on.

 

The voice came again, filtered through a microphone inside the head piece and a polarizing layer of fear.

 

“He’s down!”

 

“Back off!” Jordan shoved the nurse aside, wishing he could claw the suit off of her and make her be human, make her participate in this. But he couldn’t and he knew he had no right. Even through the refraction of the plexi-paned face plate he could see her perturbed expression. But he didn’t care.

 

His left hand grabbed for the wrist not cuffed to the bed, already feeling for a pulse, even as his right hand grabbed the stethoscope from around his neck and with nimble fingers spread the earpieces, popping them into his ears. By the time he had the bell of the scope on the prisoner’s slow moving chest, he had found the pulse, and was counting it. Although far too slowly. In another second he had ascertained that the man’s breath sounds were as weak as his pulse and he was slipping.

 

Another practiced action put the stethoscope back where it had begun, draped around his neck, and brought the flashlight from his right pocket. A quick move had the light snapped on and shining into dull green eyes held open only by his own fingers.

 

He sighed, knowing that it was too late. But he practiced his Jillian maneuver and shoved it to the furthest corner of his mind swearing it wouldn’t bother him, and dove back into the task at hand.

 

He turned to check the other two sleeping patients in this tent, realizing that they, too, were barely responsive. They weren’t categorized as comatose yet, but their pupils were slow to respond to his flashlight, their respirations depressed, their pulses slower, indicating a heart that was overburdened and giving up. Son of a bitch.

 

Ducking through the zippered entrance, opposite the one the nurse had left through, Jordan walked out away from the soft burr of the fans and into the light, feeling the heat start to suck at him again. But he gathered his voice and called for portable ventilators and oxygen tubing.

 

In just a few minutes mechanics showed, his voice having carried easily in the still desert air, unencumbered by the electronics of a microphone. But they carried none of the equipment that was their job. “We got almost nothing.”

 

“You’re kidding.” Jordan snapped, biting back the words that in a few weeks it might be their families that would need the ventilators and tubing. “I don’t care what you have to do. There has to be a hospital or a company with the machinery. Find it. Appropriate it if you have to.”

 

The two men managed to produce one ventilator, and within five minutes their big truck rolled out of the prison yard and cleared the gates without much in the way of a security check, kicking up desert dust on the way into town.

 

The nurse was called back to help hook up the slowly sinking patient to the last ventilator. All three of the men in the tent got oxygen tubing and prongs delivering the last tanks of O2 to their lungs. They worked quickly and efficiently, without speaking. You didn’t get to be on a CDCP field team without knowing your stuff. And you certainly didn’t get snapped at by the doctor and not get pissed at him.

 

Jordan wanted to conjure up some regret. But he was flat out.

 

Jillian held the page out to Jordan. Her back ached and her shoulders couldn’t bear the weight of the world any more. Jordan didn’t reach out to take it, just gave a little shake of his head as he carelessly peeled first his green cotton scrubs top, then the t-shirt underneath. For a moment her mother’s voice popped into her head, warning her about casualness and sex. Somewhere inside Jillian laughed. She was a physician, and a naked male form was nothing other than a body, especially when she could see the bone deep weariness from the outside. Jordan tossed the shirts aside and met her eyes, a motion without words to read the fax page to him.

 

But Jillian shook her head. She was ready to cry, and losing ground every day. Only David seemed to still be enjoying plowing headlong into whatever hell awaited them. In the half hour she had napped while Jordan added to the charts in the room next door, she had been plagued and finally jolted awake in a cold sweat by the nightmares that found her whenever she slept alone.

 

Yet right now she wasn’t asleep. And this nightmare in print wouldn’t give up. But Jordan would have to read this with his own two eyes, and those eyes peered at her from above dark smudges, read her face, and saw her refusal with the stiffening of her arm again motioning the paper to him before finally he took it.

 

Jillian followed where his vision tracked on the page, saw his features contract on the first few smeared words from the archaic fax machine. Then she saw him twist, and she knew. His gaze didn’t trace the rest of the paper, he just looked up, piercing her with his eyes.

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

The words took the remaining starch from him, and he collapsed, doll-like, laid out on the bed. For a moment she sat and watched the even movements of his chest, listening as the air passed through his mouth, in a far too perfect rhythm to be anything but forced.

 

The minutes stretched, and the room was quiet enough to reveal the creaks and ticks of an older building as it shifted. All the sounds normally masked by human conversation and motion,

 

none of which existed in this room. Finally, knowing it was the right thing to do, she stood and walked the five steps to the edge of the bed. His eyes stared at the ceiling and leaked tears from the corners. Though she looked him up and down, he never made eye contact with her, effectively shutting her out.

 

The aching bones turned to ice. Jordan was in a space she couldn’t get into. Her own family was safe. She slid and crawled onto the bed next to him, sitting against the headboard, waiting. It was all of a second before he rotated to her, her arms automatically opening in a maternal gesture she didn’t realize she knew.

 

Still without making any eye contact he curled into her embrace like a hurt child. Her arms closed on smooth skin as his head sank to her shoulder. She felt his hair against her cheek, not realizing that she had cocooned around him until she found herself there. “I’m so sorry.” The raw whispering sound of her voice started her own eyes watering. But she couldn’t distinguish if she was crying for him or for herself or simply from the abrasions her eyes had taken from seven days of desert air.

 

It started in soft confessional tones with his unmistakable timbre, “I left them all behind for school.”

 

She wanted to say that she understood, that she too had left her family, had left their ideals to pursue her dreams. But she didn’t think she really did understand. And in a moment he explained. “No one else there went off to college. My Dad worked in the factory. My mother ran a daycare when she was alive. Eddie was the most successful, starting his own construction business. But I was educated and no one knew what to make of me. No one knew what to say or how to speak to me, so no one really did.”

 

His breath sucked in, and as he shifted she felt the wetness that soaked so easily through the shoulder of her scrubs. It dawned that the awkwardness she felt was due to the fact that she herself had cried to no one since she was small and no one had come crying to her.

 

“Eddie was my best friend growing up… and we got so far apart. I feel like I’m trained to be the hero here and I’m failing.” A soft intake of air was all that revealed the depth of his regret, the pain as he saw his family falling away from him. “I left so I could save people, and I can’t save them.”

 

As he turned his face back into her shoulder, she could feel the muscles of his cheeks and mouth, biting his lip or such, and her hands slowly moved down the hot expanse of his back. Wrapping themselves around her waist, his arms stood out in muscled, bronze relief against the green of her scrubs, but the fabric blended from fold to fold making their legs virtually indistinguishable where they were tangled on the covers.

 

She felt and heard the two deep breaths at the same time, the only harbinger before he stood and turned quickly away, hiding the streaks that marked his face. But he didn’t bring his hands up to wipe them away.

 

Jillian saw one more deep breath before he announced that he would be on the next flight to Minneapolis.

 

Her legs curled under her of their own will, perhaps her body unconsciously seeking a more protected position before she told him what she knew. “You didn’t read the whole thing.”

 

Jordan slowly turned to face her, no longer ashamed of the tracks on his face, his hands on his hips and his eyes steady.

 

“Landerly forbade you to go back. He wants you to stay here.” She felt the cringe before she realized she was doing it.

 

But he didn’t flinch at the news at all. And she knew before she heard it what his decision was. “Then I quit. I’m going back.” He calmly walked into the bathroom where she heard the water running for a few moments before it shut off and was replaced by the sounds of zippers and the small clunks of things thrown into bags.

 

That galvanized her and she sprang from the bed, to find him in the bathroom doing exactly what she had expected. “Wait!”

 

That stopped him. Cold as stone he turned to her, “Do you want me to not go?”

 

“No. That’s not what I’m saying.” Jillian felt the desperation rising inside her in a tidal panic she hadn’t felt before this. “You should go. Let me make the arrangements through the CDC”

 

“Maybe you didn’t hear me. I’m quitting.”

 

With a ferocity she hadn’t applied in way too long, she stood up to both Jordan and the encroaching hysteria. “No you’re not. I’m getting on the phone and talking Landerly into this. He’ll pay for it out of his own pocket by the time I’m through. Keep packing.”

 

She didn’t wait for an answer because she didn’t want to hear it. Too afraid he would disagree, she fled to the phone and began pushing buttons, unsure what she was going to say to change Landerly’s mind and send them to Lake James. Her fingers dialed of their own accord, her brain having long ago memorized all five of Landerly’s numbers, and while she got her thoughts together Landerly answered. “Hello, Dr. Brookwood.”

 

It would have been nice, to have such a distinguished colleague address her so formally, if he hadn’t followed the first phrase with “I figured it would be you to call. So did