Resonance - J. B. Everett (best novels to read for students TXT) 📗

though.

 

He wished that just for a moment he could tip his head back and be blissfully unaware, and enjoy the weather and the coming season. But he had worked hard and was still paying good money for the privilege of having his ignorance stripped away. So he simply opened the driver side door and she followed suit. They drove along, neither of them saying a word until they hit the west entrance of Main. The Kingsport D.O.T. roadblock still stood where they had left it, and Jordan looked specifically for horse tracks this time but saw none.

 

Meticulously laying out yards of the tape, Jordan hoped that being this far backwoods they wouldn’t wind up with a bad case of media crawling all over them. He and Jillian were both trained in what to say and how to refuse interviews should the news vans appear like vultures circling the town edges. He also knew how to keep things quiet and pray.

 

He was winding the last piece of red tape around the orange and white barricade, when he heard the gasp.

 

Knowing it didn’t sound right, but having no other explanation, he looked up at Jilly, who was looking straight at him. They both turned to find a redheaded girl wearing jeans and low pigtails with a smattering of freckles just across the bridge of her nose. Jillian’s expression gave away that she was rapidly searching her brain for a hint of recognition. Jordan knew instantly that he had never seen this girl before.

 

“Um?” Even with just that sound, it was clear that she wasn’t the girl he had first thought her to be. After her next sentence it was clear from her accent that she wasn’t a local and she was well educated. “I think you just taped my car in… . I … I have lab specimens in the front seat.”

 

She looked back and forth. “Oh dear God, what’s biohazardous in there?”

 

Jordan’s eyes narrowed, she didn’t sound scared. But excited. Intrigued. And she was carefully trying to cover it. Jillian didn’t catch that. She offered her most soothing tone, a mother to her child after a bad round of nightmares. “Oh, that’s just to keep people out.”

 

As the girl wiped her hand off on her jeans, he watched her stance shift. She knew what she was about and she held the cleaned hand out to him. “Dr. Rebecca Sorenson, UT Biodiversity Laboratories. And you are?”

 

She said it with a lilt - that upward turn at the end af all sentences that females used to play inferior to their male counterparts. And she used it very well. Jordan heard the confidence behind it. She had known she didn’t look the part. And he glanced down at his own sweatshirt and now dirty sneakers just briefly before sticking his own hand out to take hers.

 

He spoke quickly enough to divert the doctor’s eyes from Jilly’s surprised expression. “Dr. Jordan Abellard.

 

CDCP Atlanta.” He motioned to Jillian, who thankfully now had it together.

 

“This is Dr. Jillian Brookwood, my colleague.”

 

“Becky.” Dr. Sorenson corrected as she slipped her grip out of his and transferred the handshake to Jillian.

 

And just as quickly as she gave a good hard quick stare, indicating that she knew the score and she’d play fairly, she spoke again. “I won’t go to the media.”

 

“Thank you.” Jillian’s voice held unknown volumes of relief.

 

“Are people sick?” Becky looked them both in the eyes again. If he didn’t answer her straight he would have to simply say he wouldn’t tell her.

 

So he gave her one word. “Dying.” And ignored Jillian’s combined look of surprise and disapproval, but he saw that disappear even as he looked away and ignored her.

 

Becky turned the conversation toward him. Like Jordan, she knew an ally. “Why aren’t you in full suits?” Then she answered her own question. “We’ve already been exposed.”

 

She didn’t show the emotion he expected.

 

But he nodded, confirming her answer.

 

“It’s contagious.” Her eyes wandered, focusing far away. And in a moment he realized that she was listening. And she frowned. Becky mumbled a word that sounded like ‘warblers’ but he didn’t know what that meant. She looked him in the eyes again. “Wanna share?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Jillian hid her shock better this time.

 

Becky sighed. “I have a series of mutated frogs and other species. You’re standing in a spot that I just realized today when I came in has a reversed magnetic field.”

 

Jillian’s voice finally cut into the conversation. “We know.”

 

Jillian paced the room, finally keyed up enough to ignore her hideous surroundings. The bed still had not been fixed. And she desperately wanted to sit on it, lay back and maybe even cry. But she knew from experience that that would lead to rolling off. Which led to humiliation and frustration. And she couldn’t sit in that horrible little ladder-backed chair for another moment. So she forced her feet to keep going. At least she would sleep at the end of this interminable day.

 

The motion served another purpose, siphoning off energy that she would gladly use to fillet Jordan alive. He had simply opened his fat mouth and spouted off to some girl with no ID a good portion of what the CDC knew, and what they didn’t. And Jillian had no idea what reasoning he had. If any.

 

Not that they had been able to talk. Jordan had brought the girl back with them, and even called James Hann to see if they had a spare room for Miss Becky. Dr. Rebecca Sorenson and her mutated frogs had just left, finally, headed out to the Whippoorwill Inn. And Jordan sat in the wooden chair, re-reading printouts like the case was closed.

 

Jillian bit her tongue. She swallowed repeatedly. She pressed her lips together, as though that might keep it all down. But she knew better and of course it all came out anyway, with all the harsh air she had been holding back. “How the hell did you reason out telling her all that?”

 

Jordan looked up at her, not at all startled by her outburst. “She’s not going to the media. She’s with UT, and Biodiversity could be a big help.”

 

Jillian’s mouth hung slack for a moment before she put it in gear again. “She had no ID on her. You didn’t even call UT to see if someone by that name works there!”

 

“She’s trustworthy.” Jordan remained calm.

 

Which just served to send Jillian rocketing to the other end of the spectrum.

 

“Trustworthy!? How would you know? You just met her!”

 

He clenched his teeth then slung it right back at her. “Would you accept an argument from a blind man about the color of the sky?”

 

“Uh!” She knew she looked and sounded stupid standing there with her mouth open again. And she couldn’t shut it off. The offended part of her brain stepped in to fill the void. “Blind!

Well, I’m so sorry I wasn’t born with your handy trust-o-vision, but you don’t just blurt out classified material like that.”

 

She had done it. She knew it. Jordan snapped, and came up out of the chair at lightning speed. He towered over her, his face close enough to fill her field of vision with the anger and hurt in his eyes, with his chestnut brows drawn tight together, with the clench of his jaw. “If we don’t solve this, it’s going to be named after us. And other people will die. What would you have me do, Jillian? Refuse help?”

 

Her teeth clicked, she brought them together so hard. She turned away out of his space in order to breathe in. And slowly out. It wasn’t enough, and she forced herself to do it a second, then a third time.

 

When she had pulled the pieces of herself together enough she spoke again. But she didn’t look at him. “I may not have that intuition you do, but you should still consult me before you decide to spill secrets.”

 

She felt his sigh even though her back was turned. “There wasn’t enough time.”

 

This time Jillian squared up and looked him directly in the eyes. “Yes, there was. And if you believe there isn’t then you need to find the time.”

 

He took a small concessionary step back as his hand came up to comb his fingers through his already rumpled hair. “You’re right.” His voice washed over her again a heartbeat later. “I’m sorry.”

 

Jillian blinked in surprise as she felt all the support leave her, and she sank back onto the tilted mattress, knowing even as she did it that it was a mistake. She spread her knees, planting her feet firmly to brace herself against near-certain humiliation, and sunk her head into her hands.

 

“What if she screws up the investigation?”

 

She heard the chair scrape up beside her before she felt the heat of his arm around her shoulders. “She won’t.”

 

She sniffed, and even as she did it became mortified.

 

“Hey, don’t cry. We’ll figure this out.”

 

With his acknowledgment it became impossible to hide the tears. “How am I going to figure this out when I can’t even remember not to sit on this stupid bed?”

 

She felt the deep rumble in Jordan’s touch long before she heard the sound of him laughing, and slowly she joined him. Even though her left leg ached from bracing herself upright.

 

Jillian finally gathered herself, the one concession to her tears a brief wipe with her sleeve. And she pushed herself off the bed and away from him before she faced him unable to hold back a final sniff. “I need ice cream.”

 

She rambled into the kitchen with Jordan following and pulled the carton out of the fridge, ignoring the roosters staring at her while she did it. She fixed two bowls and sat down, “We know that it isn’t airborne.

 

The chain of infection just doesn’t make sense.”

 

“If it’s viral or bacterial it doesn’t match with anything known. So it isn’t contagious. And that leaves environmental as the best guess.”

 

She sighed, trying to enjoy the food, and grateful it was created outside the town boundaries.

 

“But … we’ve checked everything. We have no standard radioactivity. No toxic chemicals. We’ve tested the water, the meat Parson’s has been getting, the air, the soil. What the hell else do we test?”

 

“We do have a magnetic anomaly in part of the town.” His spoon scraped the bottom of the bowl.

 

“Yeah, that magnetic reversal. It’s weird, but … let’s face it, an MRI is about a thousand times stronger than the earth’s field. And that’s an entirely enclosed magnetic field. And we put people in those every day, some people repeatedly, and aside from it yanking off your jewelry, there are no harmful effects. Certainly not vomiting and coma.”

 

She let a few bites melt on her tongue, before she started thinking aloud again. “It makes more sense that it’s immunological. Like AIDS was when they first saw it. It attacks people with weak systems.”

 

Jordan stood and politely rinsed out the bowl, which she was relatively certain had a pig staring up from the bottom. “But those people tested positive for everything. Ours test for nothing. Is it the weakened immune system combined with the magnetic field?”

 

Jillian shook her head and waited while she swallowed down the pat of ice cream she had just fed herself. “Immuno-compromised patients go into MRIs at five times the rate of nonimmuno-compromised patients, without these effects.”

 

“How the hell do you know that?” He put his hands up. “Those cancer patients are often nauseated anyway, maybe the MRI compounds it and we just don’t see it.”

 

She shook her head in time to the thoughts churning inside. “It’s chemo that makes the patients nauseated, and there’re tons of immuno-compromised patients that don’t have chemo. But even then those patients still don’t exhibit ear pain, or coma and death. And if that is our culprit, those people ought to be going down fast and furious because they have far weaker systems than Mr. Parson did… What’s actually more than likely is that the magnetic reversal mucked up the machinery or assays and we have something standard but our results