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

few straggling tadpoles. And that, she suddenly realized, was why she was here. Those stragglers would grow in the site as it was today, this week. And they would tell its story now. Probably the same one. But they would give her and John a better idea about long term exposure to the site.

 

Her stomach rolled alarmingly, and she refused to even begin to calculate how long it would take the reversal to reach the edges of her parents’ fenced yard or, god forbid, the house.

 

Again she forced a tight rein on her thoughts to keep them from running away. Counting backwards would indicate that the bubble had been ‘born’ about two months before the first time Becky had encountered their own little ‘Apocolypse Now’.

 

Becky faced the task at hand - spotting the tiny ranas darting among the refractions in the creek and peeking out from under crunched leaves. Within an hour she had populated fifteen lexans. And she lined them up for a good-looking over; which was about as scientific as she could get out here in the woods. Her fingers ached from plunging them in and out of the now cold water, from bumping and grating her fingertips and knuckles across the smooth looking rocks. Her brain ached, too. And she feverishly prayed it was from effort and stress and not the environment.

 

But all her frogs were normal legged. Just two hind jumpers. They were pale, not whitish, but not the healthy greens and browns of the earlier batches. Six were blind.

 

Dear God. They looked more like the batch she had hauled from McCann than the batch from here.

 

Information was pouring in. David had been shocked that it had started so fast; Jillian had barely plugged in the fax machine when it started beeping and spitting out ink strewn papers. All three of them had forgotten to unpack and had sat, silent, in the supremely uncomfortable chairs around the nice cherrywood table in the corner of the hotel room. They had simply read and passed the pages, each of their faces knitting deeper into concern the further along they got.

 

About an hour into it Jordan had stood and stretched. Throwing a handful of worn and smudged papers on the table top, he declared he needed a break, and David had almost hopped up and agreed. Until he saw that Jordan’s idea of a ‘break’ was to stop reading the fax pages and to start reviewing and hanging the hand drawn charts. Personally, he’d been thinking more along the

 

lines of a steak and a hot tub himself. But as he watched the butcher paper go up, revealing its colorful circles with links and lines and notes, he kept his mouth shut.

 

The fax pages were coming in from all over. Suits were crawling the country, and worse yet, the World Health Organization was starting to collaborate their findings of a ‘new disease’ in India and Africa. David shook his head to himself, things were in the crapper when even the geologist could see what was happening.

 

The fax beeped, and gurgled, and whirred, and then started spitting out another black and white missive.

 

David grabbed it even before the machine was fully done with it. Which was his plan, as this little portable shitbox had a tendency to hang on to the page once it was finished printing, and then, at a random interval later, release it, sending the paper flying out away from the table and sending three very stellar scientists scrambling like fucking idiots to fetch it.

 

He turned to Jordan who was standing back, fists perched on his hips, and way overadmiring his thumb-tacking job. “Listen to this.”

 

Both the docs stopped what they were doing and gave him their attention while he went over the major, if blurry, points on the page. “They have an animal link between the Knoxville site and the McCann site. They think the McCann site may be a few months older… .” That was as far as he’d gotten but while he scanned it again, he let his mouth follow his mind. “They checked out the Georgia site. They still don’t know why the birds came early, but the growth rate on that site leads them to believe it might be a full year old –“

 

Jillian’s sigh interrupted him. “Thank God no one lives out there.”

 

This time he read word for word, “The animals in McCann are showing unusual, new activity, actually phasing back to-Dammit.”

 

Jillian looked at Jordan, who was looking back at her. Neither of them spoke, and David did his level best to ignore them. The page had simply run out, and wouldn’t you know it, just as he looked up, the fax machine spit out the next sheet, sending it floating right past his open hands.

 

“Son of a bitch.”

 

“Is the ‘dammit’ another metamorphosis phase, like larva or pupa?”

 

David didn’t even waste an eye roll on Jordan for that one. Straightening the new page, he started in again, “-phasing back to normal. Most recent amphib catches in McCann indicate normal development as best as can be determined by present tests.”

 

Jillian practically climbed into his lap with excitement. And he sure as hell did nothing to stop her. “Did the site reverse? … I mean back to normal polarity?”

 

He looked the paper up and down. “Doesn’t look like it.”

 

She looked disappointed, which David took to mean she wasn’t going to crawl into his lap. And letch that he was, he could admit that that fact disappointed him more than the site not returning to normal. He hadn’t expected it to anyway. “We’ve never seen anything indicating that they reverse back. Well, not for about sixty million years anyway.”

 

Jillian wandered over to admire Abelard’s thumb-tacking job, and the next thing he knew the two of them were spouting off crap about white counts and B-U-Ns, which he figured had nothing to do with burgers, and David made the executive decision that this would be a good time to ignore them. He plucked up the super-teched CDC phone and called Greer.

 

“David!”

 

“Buddy.”

 

He opened his mouth to speak again but Greer beat him to it, already rambling about the McCann egg clutch. “-full fetus in one of them. Unbelievable. I need to tell someone, I have muscle attachment sites that no one has seen before.”

 

A deep pit formed in David’s heart. He was starting to see himself as Chicken Little. Only he wasn’t an idiot. He was just the only one who saw that the sky actually was falling. He wasn’t sure how much he cared. But there was the distinct possibility that everyone was going to get sick from this. And with the fatality rate at a hundred percent, Greer might wind up having to limit sharing his joyous minutia to his wife.

 

David was certain that he should be having a crisis right now. Only he wasn’t having it.

 

“Listen Greer. I need to know something, and you can tell that snappy wife of yours, as she is the smarter half…” David pinched the bridge of his nose wishing he was elsewhere. Wishing he was siphoning off that trust fund he had broken into to start this whole crapload of a mess. He was ready for some straight-out baking on a beach somewhere, with girls in bikinis and beer and a sedate heart rate. If one of them in the hotel room suddenly spontaneously combusted he wouldn’t be surprised. “Greer, straighten me out on this: did your dinos die from lack of food or what?”

 

“No real telling. Just a good solid theory. Plants would have wilted in a matter of days given the dust cover-”

 

David interrupted. He’d been on the receiving end of Greer’s theories before and he could qualify for a Ph.D. in paleontology long before they ended. “Yes, but that depends on the asteroid theory or the volcano theory. Go with this one for a minute and tell me if the evidence matches up: The dinosaurs got sick-”

 

“Wait, can I put you on speaker phone?” Greer was already doing it, if the clicking and the soft static were any indication.

 

“Hey,” David turned to Jillian, “Does this thing do speaker phone?”

 

“Sure.” She didn’t stop her conversation with Jordan, just kept jabbering about qualifying diseases and healthy specimens, but her fingers flew over the secondary numeric keypad. The one she had punched codes into to link up once they had arrived. When she handed it back it was squawking at him at full volume. He told Greer and Leena to hang on a minute and looked over his shoulder. “You two might want to pay attention to this.”

 

They jerked their heads apart.

 

“Who are we talking to?” Jordan frowned at him, which was fine, since David was certain that he was breaking several federal laws. But he didn’t let that deter him. “Okay, Greer we’re all here.”

 

“Who’s we?” Leena’s voice was overeager, clearly way too stifled by her bed-rest.

 

David introduced everybody then set about swearing the Larsons to secrecy, which he thought was hysterical, but did it anyway. “All right. Here’s the question: is it possible all the dinosaurs got sick at the same time?”

 

“Yeah right. They all just came down with a deadly virus.” Leena’s voice was sweet, even shooting him down. “It was too global, too quick.”

 

“You think what’s going around now is what killed my dinos?” Greer hopped in.

 

Jordan shot David a death glare, but Jillian was already too wrapped up in the science to be concerned about treason, “I think what David’s asking is if it’s possible. Is there any evidence that they could have gotten sick?”

 

Greer and Leena talked over each other. “No.” “I think it’s more like there’s no evidence against it.” “We just have a sudden lack of fossils and we know they died.” “Why? What does this have to do with that magnetic reversal we found?”

 

David sighed. Too damn many scientists in the kitchen. “The reversal is making people sick.” There. He said it. Let Jordan call in the CDC police. “But only those in the hotspots. The dieouts seem to correlate to the last reversal. Is it possible that the volcanoes were an aftereffect?”

 

“Of course it is.” Greer’s voice amplified as though he were talking directly into the speaker box.

 

Jillian’s face took on a look of horror that David had only seen once on a really bad actress in a schlock film featuring killer clowns. “Does that mean that we could face volcanoes along with the polarity reversal?!”

 

Leena ignored her. “I think the real question is whether or not the dinosaurs were warm blooded. If they were, then they are more pertinent to your question, and if not then they aren’t. They relate less to humans and we might all react very differently.” She sniffled at the end of the sentence and David felt his heart drop.

 

There was nothing he feared more than a woman and tears. But Jordan voiced the question, and Leena answered. “Of course I’m crying. I’m pregnant. I cry at country music.”

 

David steered the conversation back where he wanted it. “I know Greer thinks they were cold-blooded, do you agree?”

 

“Hell, no.” And she launched into an explanation he had heard Greer shoot down a number of times, but it sounded a lot more plausible coming from her mouth. “There are too many channels in the bone, indicating a network of vessels. It’s common to warm-blooded creatures. Some of them had necks so long that their heads would have frozen overnight if they didn’t self-heat their blood. Greer’s an idiot on that one.”

 

Jordan smiled. “Well, I guess every marriage needs its spark.”

 

“I don’t think it’s a warm-blooded/cold-blooded issue at all.” Jillian had turned her focus from a distant spot on the wall to the speaker phone, as though it was the thing actually carrying on a conversation with her. “We have amphibian species showing effects of the reversals. And they aren’t warm-blooded. We’re all getting affected.”

 

David heard pillows shuffle and Greer say something to Leena. He wasn’t sure what he said, but by the tone and cadence