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

the chest, as the words absorbed.

 

Those officers hadn’t been inside anywhere near as long as they had, and yet the wardens had all fallen, most even before they could ask for help. They were rapidly affected by the reversal, the symptoms showing instantaneous onset to a man.

 

As his own eyes focused on Jillian he saw the thought pattern in her head change. Her eyes averted and she grabbed for her stomach. Tumbling to her knees, Jillian lost the contents of her breakfast in the hot sand.

Chapter 13

His father’s hand was slack and lifeless. Not warm, not cold. Not dead, but not the house of a living soul.

 

Mr. Abellard’s eyes didn’t open, didn’t show the telltale movements of tracking a dream. Nor would they.

 

Jordan knew that, and felt the sharp stab somewhere untouched.

 

Eddie’s death had been tough. Hearing about Lindsay and Kelly slipping away had hurt. Opened old wounds. Rubbed areas already raw. But when his father took one last look at him, before his eyes pulled closed and his breathing pattern changed, Jordan felt the world undergo some subtle shift.

 

In that moment Lake James had ceased to be his home. It was simply a cluster of people he knew, or knew of, and a house that he had grown up in. The promise of waffles on Sunday was forever rescinded. The smile his father would get when thinking of his mother. The last person who remembered her as Jordan did. All of it was gone.

 

Now he waited. Until his father took his last breath and died. Or until Landerly called his number and drafted him into service again. But now he would only fight for others. So they wouldn’t lose like he had.

 

Another man lay comatose in the second bed against the window. Jordan didn’t know him, but his Dad had once referred to him as Albert, and Jordan got the feeling that the two men had worked together.

 

As he often did, he squeezed his father’s hand. Just enough to send pressure signals to the dormant brain, in hopes that Jackson Abellard was only sleeping, that his son’s hand would get even the slightest squeeze back. But it didn’t. Not any of the tries before, and not this time either.

 

The smell blanketed the room, not just with the odor of ‘hospital’ but of death. The whole room was waiting - the chairs, the window, the light that didn’t quite filter in. Why should it bother? It was all just a matter of time.

 

Jordan stood and stretched, needing to get out where things lived and breathed, even if they didn’t really connect with him. The cafeteria seemed like a logical choice - the eating of food being the road to sustaining a body. He put his feet in a rhythmic pattern on the floor, moving himself out the door and down the hallway, even though it required far too much thought. He was halfway there when his cell phone went off. Tugging it from the waistband of his blue scrubs, he checked the caller ID.

 

Landerly.

 

Well, that didn’t take long. He flipped the phone open. “Yes?”

 

“We have two new cities near McCann that are losing people, and very rapidly. I want you there.”

Jordan blinked twice. Thinking through … . nothing. He would leave his father here, because there was nothing more he could do. And did he need to sit here for the two more days it would take, and simply wait? No. He could be helpful.

 

“Abellard? Anne will call you back with your arrangements.” With a few more short sentences, Landerly conveyed the seriousness of the issue. These were cities, they were on the maps and had populations in the tens of thousands. Huge compared to what they had seen in McCann or even Lake James. Jillian and David had seen everyone at the prison go under, and they would meet him in Nashville and fly into Knoxville together on a small charter.

 

With only a click and no real closing words, Jordan was left holding the cell phone. Staring at it like an alien in his grasp as the staff in the hall flowed around him in a sea of blues and greens.

 

He turned and headed back to his father’s room, he hadn’t really been hungry anyway. And in a minute he had re-perched himself at the side of the mechanical gurney. Again he held his father’s hand, but this time he spoke. With gentle words he explained that he’d be back after he packed, but only briefly, before he was off again to East Tennessee, to pursue his place as a physician. Something he had only in the past few days understood that his father admired him for.

 

“I’ll be back in a bit, Dad.” Taking a deep breath he forced himself to stand and let go of the shell that had housed his father.

 

On lead feet he made the turns down the corridor, waited at the elevator, and walked through the chill air to the physician’s parking lot. His father’s beat-up Ford Falcon took the turns like a steamer, slow and wide, heavy and solid feeling. Like his father, the car was from a different era, and with a slight smile he decided he would come back to claim the antique as his own.

 

Within minutes he was pulling up to the house where his father had spent his whole adult life. The house was emptier than it had ever been. The souls had vacated it a while ago it seemed. With quick leaps Jordan took the stairs two at a time and raided his drawers for what he had brought, so much for settling in and staying a while.

 

The duffle was packed and slung over his shoulder without a second thought. He was, by now, too used to picking up and fleeing with only his bag to let sentimentality rule him. Key in hand, he bolted the front door behind him, and sank into the driver’s seat of the car.

 

He pulled out, driving in the exact reverse order to get back to the clinic where his Dad lay. He managed to get another fifteen minutes of time with his father. Not that that time made any difference to either of them.

 

Jordan didn’t speak, didn’t think, didn’t cast silent wishes. When the cell finally rang again, he took the call where he sat, Anne’s dulcet tones telling him that his flight was leaving in just barely enough time to get himself to the airport, and maybe not even that. She mentioned the charter terminal in Nashville and how to get to it.

 

He hung up, and waved the phone at his Dad, thinking to make a little joke. “Stop me now Dad, or I’m off to Tennessee.”

 

His father made no response. No shift or hitch in his breathing, no twitch of a finger. Jordan watched for all of it and saw none of it. So he stood, stretched, and after a brief hesitation he leaned over and gently pressed a kiss to his father’s forehead. “I love you, Dad. I’ll see you on the other side.”

 

“What!?” Becky shouted into the cell phone. John had called her three times while she was out trekking with Leon and Jess. Not that her super CDC phone had picked up anything in the back wilds of Minnesota.

 

“Clinton, Oak Ridge-” static. She wanted to throw the phone, but upon recognizing towns just beyond her parents’ land she knew she couldn’t lose it over a cell phone. There were far better things to lose it for these days.

 

Like Leon and Jess making angry faces at her. Here she was yelling on a cell phone in the middle of their pristine wilderness. Well they could stuff it.

 

“Come … back … in … .w-… .-eeed … . talk.”

 

“I’m coming.” She practically shouted it, again knowing it was useless. Louder only worked when you were yelling to a person far away, but Becky was beginning to wonder if maybe that wouldn’t be a better method of communication. John said something else, even more indistinguishable than the previous sentences, so she yelled “Goodbye!” and hung up. Only to turn and face the Peppersmith guys and their angry glares.

 

With a sigh, she ignored their expressions, just as she had learned to ignore the menacing way they held their tranq guns. That was for her protection, she had found out the other day when a wolf had come too close. “We have to go in, guys. John called me back. Something about other towns.”

 

“Other towns?” That from Leon, his deep voice and blue eyes not hiding his surprise or concern.

 

Crap. She had no idea what kind of clearance these guys held. But she also knew her place. And her place was not to give information out. So she weaseled. Another great skill she had learned since hiring on at the CDC. Telling the truth to lie. “I don’t know what it is. I really couldn’t hear much of anything except that I had to come back in.”

 

But she had heard a whole lot more. John sounded not scared exactly, but disturbed. Oak Ridge and Clinton were just beyond the boundaries of the little acreage her folks held. And she knew what the reversals were doing. More than she wanted to know.

 

She was under contract to not tell her family anything, even though death might be at their doorstep.

 

Literally.

 

That thought set an ulcer to forming. She could feel the hydrochloric acid in her stomach pinching and wearing away at the delicate tissue even as she hiked back toward their base. The trucks stood ready, cages open and waiting for animals stupid or unlucky enough to get in their way, or to catch John’s eye. It seemed that John, who had never held a gun in his life, who had always excelled at science and never sports, enjoyed having the raw power of the Peppersmiths at his command. Becky on the other hand felt guilty every time she gave the word to bring a creature down, to haul it in. She kept telling herself it was a necessary evil.

 

The hike seemed much longer this way, even though she knew for certain that they were taking a more direct route and walking at a faster pace. Pines passed by with a speed that was likely to have her wind up with a twisted ankle. But she was fueled by adrenaline, her brain not acknowledging the sounds of birds. Even though it categorized that the aviary itself was changing here, day by day.

 

The Nevada prison scared the living daylights out of her. According to what she read, it was very lucky that Jillian and David were alive. They had actually run into the reversal, several times. Dr. Abellard was supposed to be monitoring them for signs of turning to the worse. That was enough to give her the willies.

 

From what she and John had gleaned that morning, it sounded like the suits were standing at the edge of the reversal and jumping back as it got bigger. They were using ultrasound and heat sensors to detect who was still alive. It seemed most of them were. They were looking to see who was moving. At last count that was no one.

 

Becky chewed her lip. The sharp retort of the rifle just behind her