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

and didn’t protest as he pulled her along to his tent, where he popped on the interior light at the end of the table.

 

She blinked a few times, then adjusted. Finally upright, and admitting she was awake, she could feel the exhaustion in her muscles. “So, we’ll just sit up and keep each other company until we finally pass out?”

 

“That’s my guess.” He shrugged, “I don’t want to go back. I’m bashed to hell over there.”

 

She climbed up on the gurney, getting her feet out of the cold that pooled on the floors of the small tents, “But with physical therapy-”

 

He cut her off. “I’ve had three doctors over there tell me that I’m facing at least a year of rehab. And another surgery to re-break both my hip and leg so they can be re-set.”

 

Jillian cringed, but he waved her discomfort and guilt away.

 

“You did an amazing job. All by yourself. But I may never walk without a limp. And that’s after all that therapy. Why do it?”

 

She nodded, understanding straightforward reasoning for a problem that was anything but.

 

“And your Dad’s here.”

 

“Yeah, I don’t know what to make of that.”

 

She felt her head tilt, the outward manifestation of her natural curiosity.

 

“We’ve never gotten along. He never accepted me; I was always inferior …”

 

“But he was nothing but complimentary tonight. You’re the best son in the whole world.”

 

She didn’t mean for it to come out as sarcastic as it did, but David understood. He laughed.

 

“Yeah, that worries me.” She could hear the resignation in his sigh, “We’ve been so far apart for so long that … I don’t know.”

 

“Do you want to patch things up with your Dad?”

 

His shoulders shrugged. His head shook ‘no’. His mouth said “I guess.” And his hands came out, palm up, to question all of it.

 

It was all she could do to stifle the laugh that bubbled low in her. And she was grateful for the lightness of it. It beat the hell out of the fear she’d been trying to sleep with. She was only sorry that her improvement had come at David’s expense. “Oh well. True, your Dad is here, but so are the Jesus freaks. And it’s not like there’s much you can do about it anyway.”

 

His head turned square on to hers, and their gazes locked. “So doctor, tell me what you think is going to happen to us.”

 

Just like that, it was her turn to shrug, to shake her head. “Our vital signs keep dropping lower and lower every time we go under.”

 

“Abellard said something to that effect when he looked in on you right before I popped over here.”

 

Good. She knew where she’d wake up if she came to over there. “I figure we keep passing back and forth until we die on one side, then we’ll be stuck on the other.”

 

David didn’t respond. How could he when she had just placed their mortality squarely in front of them? Her voice was low, in response to the difficulty she was having pushing it out.

 

“With the way our stats have been dropping recently, I don’t figure we’ll go back and forth too much more. Maybe two times. Three or four at the most.”

 

He nodded. “Do you think we’ll feel it? Or we’ll never know, just realize that we keep waking up in the same place over and over?”

 

Again her head shook. It was the only thing she could think of. She couldn’t just shrug a response to every question. But the same ones had been tumbling through her own head all evening.

 

“There’s another possibility.”

 

“Name it.”

 

“It’s worse.” She couldn’t look at him. Instead she studied the neat, even stitching on her once white sneakers, noting how the dirt had clung, clearly outlining the threads as they marched in efficient lines across her toes. “We could get caught between. Die both places.” Again her shoulders went up, and she suppressed the thought that she would get some really buff deltoids from all this shrugging. “We have to acknowledge that we might not survive this at all.”

 

Still she didn’t look at him, just waited through a few well-placed breaths until he spoke.

 

“Any ideas why we got caught between?”

 

She laughed, a short bark of disbelief. “I still can’t figure out why people ended up on one side and not the other. There are a lot of Bible thumpers over here … but …”

 

“I think Becky had a good point that there was a lot of right and wrong over here. The Bible thumpers just seem to fall into that category.”

 

Her brain wrapped around that for a moment, wondering whether there were a lot of shades of gray on Jordan’s side.

 

In that moment, as she drew that breath in, she knew that this wasn’t the place for her. That if she could choose, she’d be there. With her job. With Jordan and Landerly. The way David would chose to be with his family here. But she couldn’t choose, so she ignored the thought, and started herself in another direction in hopes of shaking it. “I figure we got caught in between because of some weird pattern of early exposure. But I can’t figure out why Becky or Jordan or anyone from McCann doesn’t have it, too. Jordan says there are reports from about three other places in the world. Each with one person who keeps going back under.”

 

“Have any of them actually died yet?”

 

She knew he was looking at her, but she wasn’t ready for eye contact. “Not that I know of. But I haven’t seen Jordan in a full day now.” Maybe it would have been easier to stay in her own bed and toss and turn with her own thoughts rather than dealing with David’s.

 

“What if there were another option? What if you could choose?”

 

Her head snapped up, to find his blue gaze boring into hers. For some reason she felt he saw deeper than the surface of her for the first time.

 

He broke the spell by speaking. “It works because we want to stay on opposite sides.”

 

That was all he said, but she could see where he was going with it. “No.” It was just a whisper. She couldn’t do it. “We don’t even know that it will work.” Fear ran through her, icing her limbs, holding her still when what she wanted was to leap from the bed and flee back to the cold gurney waiting in tent 43.

 

“We may die if we do nothing.”

 

“I can’t!” She started to actually move away from him, but his hand shot out, grabbed her arm, jerked at her as her feet hit the ground, preventing her flight from progressing past that first leap.

 

“Then you go back and forth. But do it for me when you wake up over there.”

 

“I can’t.” The anguish in her system burst forth in tears, “I can’t.”

 

He wanted her to … what? … hold a pillow over his face? Squeeze his throat? Medicate him? Any way to end his life. Over there.

 

“Then hire someone.” He hadn’t let go of her arm, and while he wasn’t bruising her, neither was she going to wrench free. “I’ll give you all my banking codes. You can draft yourself a check from my account and pay them.”

 

“David …” She searched for any logical ‘no’. “I’d go to jail.”

 

His gaze was steady, and should have been ice cold for what he was suggesting, but it was warm as the blue center of a hot flame. “I can get the names of some people from my Dad, it won’t be traced. You can just give them the banking codes. Let them get their own money. I’ll be very rich over there because my father has died and I’ll have more than I can spend.”

 

She couldn’t fault his logic. But neither could she agree.

 

Her head still shook back and forth. He slid off the bed, and stood looming over her, holding her upper arms firmly in both hands. Only then did she realize that streams of tears were pouring down her face. She couldn’t do any of it. Not go back and forth anymore, nor could she end it. He looked her square in the eyes and asked again, “Please.”

 

Again she shook her head, and started to refuse again, but he headed her off.

 

“What are you going to do? Go back and forth and maybe die? Wind up wherever you happen to be? Maybe in between, and who knows what the hell that is! I can release you over here, too … and stop this.”

 

She heard the soft ripping of the Velcro on the tent flap behind her. A tech popped his head in, and she saw David’s gaze connect over her shoulder with whoever it was. “I guess you two are both still awake.”

 

David simply nodded and started to look back at her, a certain dismissal of the young tech, but the voice came again, “Are you two okay?”

 

Her nod and David’s curt ‘yes’ must have sufficed, because the tent flap softly closed behind her, and the heat from the small orange-glowing heater at her feet seeped around to envelop her again, shutting out the cold that had reached in and tickled her from the open gap.

 

David’s stare returned to her face. “I don’t want to go back there. I live there on a gurney in a haze of pain and Percocet-”

 

“You’ll get better!”

 

“I am better. Here.” He was restraining himself from shaking her. But it wouldn’t have mattered. She could feel her heart thundering in the empty cavern of her chest. But she forced even breaths, afraid that if she passed out, she’d only shuttle herself back and forth again. Her eyes burned. Her mouth was swollen from where she’d been chewing at her lip, and her vision was glazed with tears.

 

“It’s simple. And it’s what we both want.”

 

She didn’t try to respond. She couldn’t have anyway, his mouth closed over hers, stopping all her protests.

Jillian simply surrendered. She needed this. Needed to feel his hands slip from her biceps to the back of her shoulders and pull her closer. His sweater was softer than she could have believed when her fingers passed over it, feeling the hard muscle beneath. She didn’t even stop and make any quantifiable assessment of him.

 

Just kissed him back.

 

She didn’t protest as his fingers, tough and soft at the same time, pushed the tears away.

 

“David …”

 

He pulled away just long enough to get her to open her eyes. And when she did he shook his head. So she closed them again, and raised her mouth, never once wondering if his would meet hers.

 

Jillian didn’t realize when he had backed them the two steps to the gurney, only that he had followed her shoulder blades down her back, arching her body into contact with his, and finally arriving behind her thighs, where he lifted her astride him into the heat of him, and the unmistakable arousal.

 

He took one sharp look at her eyes. He knew what he was doing, and he wanted to know if she did. His hand snaked out to shut off the desk light that was now glaring in his face. With a blink they were bathed in the soft orange glow of the heater and the deep shadows that filled the spaces.

 

Later she remained there, naked in his arms, untied from her existence, until the pieces started gathering and settling back into place. There were no sweet words. She wouldn’t have believed them anyway. Didn’t have any of her own to speak in return even if he lied and said it. There was just the sound of two bodies, breathing heavily out of rhythm in the blackness of the tent.

 

He pulled the blankets over the both of them. Letting her drift with her own wayward thoughts while he settled in, his arms locked around her.

 

They hadn’t used any sort of protection.

 

But it seeped slowly through her, not causing any real alarm. She wouldn’t likely live long enough to be concerned about that. Her muscles were limp, and