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

the yellow-lined paper but didn’t look up.

 

In seconds the pad was spread across his knees and his hand went automatically to the pen in his breast pocket, carefully engraved with the words Jordan Abellard, M.D. It had been a graduation gift, unaccompanied by a tag or even words, from his father. He began writing furiously.

 

Men.

 

All prisoners. No guards.

 

White counts. Prior: normal. In coma: Low. Awake: high

 

All wing 3

 

Down date: 12, 14, 12, 11, 12, 12, 13, 14, 13, 12, 12, 12, 12, 14, 14.

 

All 12s down in pm, all 14s down in am.

 

He grabbed at his cell phone and hit Landerly on speed dial.

 

“What do you have boy?”

 

“There’s a 53 hour window from when the first of these men fell to the last one. The down times correlate loosely to the waking times.”

 

“What else?”

 

Landerly was seeing the same things he was, he knew. “There are no guards. Just prisoners. All from the same wing. These are the guys who went down before the reversal swept the CDC set-up. So it makes sense that there aren’t any guards awake… Yet.” He rattled off what he saw about the white counts, probably still not giving Landerly anything new.

 

“Abellard!” It came from far off. And in that instant Jordan recognized the voice. David.

 

“Gotta go.” He closed the phone, left the pages where they were and took off at a run, not realizing that it was the first time he had hung up on Landerly.

 

He arrived at the flag line marking the edge of the reversal as David pulled into view. The figure sagging at his side was Jillian. Her left arm was slung over David’s shoulder which was far too high to be comfortable, and her right arm wrapped ominously across her stomach.

 

Once he recognized what he was seeing, he moved without thinking, crossing the unseen boundary into the reversal. He ran toward the two figures, who came into sharper focus as he approached. “Jillian!”

 

“I’m fine!” Her voice snapped, but lacked true conviction. David’s face appeared grim, although if he was suffering any nausea it didn’t show. Jordan didn’t care.

 

With one hand he lifted Jillian’s arm from where it clung fiercely to David’s jacket, and in the same motion pulled her feet from the ground, lifting her to settle in his arms. His only thought was getting her the hell out of the reversal, even as she curled both arms around her stomach and rolled even tighter into a ball within his grip.

 

It was David’s voice that cut through to him. “Don’t run with her. I tried it, it just makes her worse.”

 

Jordan clenched his jaw with the effort it took to maintain a reasonable pace. The whole time he wondered if it was better to let her get more nauseated and get her out faster, or keep her feeling better, even though the yellow flag line didn’t approach as quickly as he’d like.

 

He bit down on his tongue to keep from flinging out insults, to not yell at David. This iswhat you get for taking her into the heart of darkness.

 

Her brows pulled tighter, and he could see the pain even though half her face was obscured by the neck of her jacket zipped all the way up and over her mouth. “Come on, Jilly, hang in there.”

 

At last he made it, and even though he couldn’t detect it with any of his usual senses, he felt his whole body react the moment he crossed the boundary. He got her to the nearest triage tent and laid her out on a gurney. But that only lasted a second. She was sitting up before he had his stethoscope in his ears, her palm out to him.

 

“My heart rate is eighty-eight. My resps are twenty-two, and I need a GI cocktail, now.”

 

It would have made him smile at any other time. But the stethoscope was folded back around his neck in one fluid movement as he pulled a plastic cup from a makeshift shelf next to him. All the ingredients were there, and he felt like a bartender, measuring out Donnatal, then peeling back the foil lid on the dose of viscous lidocaine, revealing the eerily green goo. He poured it into the cup, not watching it sink under the Donnatal, his hands already grabbing for the Mylanta bottle. He added the antacid, almost topping off the cup and ignoring a century of medical procedure as he stirred quickly with his finger. He handed her the concoction licking his finger clean as he watched her toss her head and shoot it back.

 

It would numb her stomach and settle what she was feeling. At least at this stage in the game she didn’t have to play guinea pig, suffering through all of it because they didn’t know how to treat it, or if what they did would make her worse. He could at least offer a little relief.

 

His hand found her hair; she’d worn it down to give warmth from the wind, and his chest eased a little feeling her solid within his grasp. He prayed out loud, “It’s just something you ate.”

 

But she denied him. “I have ear pain.”

 

Son of a bitch.

Chapter 15

Jordan heard David walk into the tent behind him, a little out of breath. That fact revealing that he must have carried, or helped haul Jillian, a good long way. “We didn’t make it to the center.”

 

Jordan almost exploded with who gives a flying fuck?! But he held it in check by the barest of glimmers.

 

Jillian started speaking. “No one was in there. We found a few bodies, though. The smell was enough to explain the nausea.” She almost smiled. “The field is stronger as we got closer in.”

 

Leave it to Jillian to be in mortal danger and worry about rattling off statistics.

 

Ignoring David, he put his forehead against hers, easy enough to do since she was still sitting on the gurney, hunched over, guarded against the pain that pulled her down. “They’re waking from the comas in Nevada.”

 

“What!” She sat upright, almost forgetting her own discomfort.

 

He nodded. Not mentioning that they were all men. All prisoners. That there were only fifteen of them. Less than a percent.

 

Lucy Whitman appeared at the doorway just then, nudging David further inside in the process. “I just got off the phone with Dr. Landerly at the CDC. He said to give you these.” She held out a sheaf of papers, still slightly warm from the fax machine.

 

It was Jillian who reached out for them, taking the folder from the perfect hand, “Are these the stats on the prisoners who woke up?”

 

Lucy shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. I just gather the papers.”

 

Jordan almost called her on her lie, but Jillian was already reading. Sitting straighter, looking like the lidocaine had numbed her from the inside out. “They’re all men. All prisoners. The white counts are high when they wake.” She thumbed through a little further. Noting how long they’d been under, when they’d fallen, asking how many had fallen in that time, and what percentage of those men did these represent. She asked all the same questions, noticed all the same things in minutes that he and Landerly had spent the morning working through.

 

Her fingers shuffled quickly through the papers. “Murder, murder, … murder, … arson and murder…”

 

“What?”

 

“They’re all murderers.” She looked up finally. “Is that because they’re all from the same wing?”

 

Jordan pulled out the cell and called Landerly even as she was talking.

 

“No, the wing that fell first wasn’t this one. It wasn’t maximum security.” She paused and looked blankly at the canvas top of the tent, seeing something far beyond it. “But none of these are maximum security prisoners.” She read again. “Single murders. Wife’s boyfriend. Boss. Father.”

 

“Landerly, listen to this…” Jordan held the phone up to catch her thinking out loud, even though she didn’t realize he was doing it.

 

“All one time murders… . Other prisoners fell at the same time. But they aren’t awake.”

 

She paused long enough for Jordan to hear Landerly swear in the space she left.

 

“Oh, shit.”

 

Holding the phone to his ear, Jordan initiated the conversation again. “Sir?”

 

“We have three more awake, since two hours ago.” He heard the shuffling of paper through the line as Landerly looked to connect Jilly’s ideas. “All murderers. No first degree. No longer considered a threat to society.”

 

Jillian tilted her head. “Who’s dead?”

 

Another question he and Landerly hadn’t posed, so hung up on their break that they hadn’t stopped to look. He passed the question on to his boss, even as he heard his name hollered out from somewhere out in the tents.

 

“Bye.” Again, he hung up on Landerly. Not even telling him that the brilliant idea of sending Jillian and David into the reversal had backfired. David had emerged unscathed with Jillian at death’s door. Landerly could call Jillian directly if he wanted. And surely she would fill him in on all the stats she had collected, along with her own vitals.

 

Jordan figured she had a few more hours at the least. And maybe a day at most, before she slipped away.

 

If he was going to help her he had to gather what information he could. So, without a word, he turned and ran from the tent, leaving her to her musings and the paperwork on the prisoners in Nevada. He followed the voice that was calling out to him.

 

He didn’t recognize it, although whoever it was knew him enough to boom his name at decibels high enough to shake the tents. He paused a few times, at last emerging on the north side of the field.

 

No one was there. Just the school stood silent in front of him, the long staircase off to his right was busy with scientists climbing up and down the four story flight that hugged the hillside. The classrooms had been put to use for containment and as dormitories. The chem lab was probably seeing the best action it had since its inception.

 

The voice called again, this time coming from his right, as his head turned he realized the windows were open down the enclosed stairs. He recognized the figures before the voice.

 

Peppersmith and Becky Sorenson traipsed down the stairs, arms linked, neither of them looking up at him.

 

Until Leon opened his mouth to shout out Jordan’s name again.

 

“Here!” He yelled back.

 

His pace picked up as he realized the two were not in a friendly embrace after all, but that Becky was supported on Leon’s arm. Her right hand snaked up to rub her ear.

 

Shit!

 

He raced back and slammed through the doors just as Peppersmith hit the bottom of the stairs, bellowing as he came. “What’s wrong with her?”

 

Jordan ignored the man, whipping off his stethoscope he unsnapped the front of Becky’s heavy jacket and placed the bell at the top right side of her sternum. Her heart raced. “Becky, what’s wrong?” But he already knew.

 

“My ears hurt. It started after we found this dead cat… . I-” But she didn’t finish. She just rolled a little, curling into a ball while Leon fought to keep her upright.

 

He didn’t ask - didn’t bother to look in her throat or her ears. The answers were in her eyes. She had it, and she knew it.

 

Lacking the will to lift her himself, Jordan looked