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

of Leena’s voice he got shot down. “Then, yes it is possible. No one’s really looked at it, because it doesn’t make sense for a virus to sweep like that. So no one has tried to find evidence for or against it.”

 

There was a pause, no one wanting to fill in.

 

But apparently the gears had been turning in Leena’s brain. “It does go with another problem I’ve been sorting thru-”

 

Greer’s voice walked on top of hers, “She’s on bed-rest, all she does is lay around and think. It’s dangerous, I’m telling you. She’s decided all the dinosaur die-out theories are wrong.”

 

“Really?” Jordan’s voice jumped in, overlapped by Jillian’s “Why?”

 

Leena picked her thread back up. “The issue is this: all the major extinction theories rely on the dust cover.

 

There’s argument as to what caused it, but no real argument as to the fact that it happened. And there’s this problematic assumption that the debris cloud stopped photosynthesis in the plants, thus killing the dinosaurs … but somehow not the mammals.”

 

Jordan shrugged. “The mammals were smaller.”

 

Greer’s voice answered. “No, not really, there were a huge number of dinosaur species that were a lot smaller than what we normally think of. Many of them were as small or much smaller than the average mammal.

 

So it wasn’t a size issue.”

 

“The mammals were warm-blooded.” Jordan threw out the next piece of evidence.

 

“No, so were the dinosaurs.” Again Leena’s voice was sweet, even in refusing him his basic beliefs. “And that actually is what gives the theory real trouble-”

 

It was Jillian who jumped in now, looking excited. The kind of excited David would be if she peeled off her clothes and straddled him. “Warm-blooded means faster metabolic rates. Which means that the mammals, the smallest mammals, should have been the first ones killed by the loss of plant life, not the survivors.”

 

“Excuse me?” David cut in. Fuckin’ biologists.

 

“Warm-blooded animals eat a lot more per ounce of bodyweight than their cold-blooded counterparts. They have to: it takes a lot of energy to make that body heat. So the cold-blooded species would have last longer without food or even oxygen, and been far more likely than any mammal to survive a month-or-more dust cover.”

 

“So anyway,” Leena’s soft voice filtered through to them, “the dust cover doesn’t work if the dinos were warm-or cold-blooded and I’ve decided we don’t even have the real killer on our hands. The problem is that the killing factor is sorting who it takes and who it doesn’t by some unknown mechanism. What we understand, or at least what we’ve put together, doesn’t answer that question yet.”

 

David finally stepped up. “What about the previous extinctions?”

 

That made Jordan’s head pop up. “There were others?”

 

Greer answered, “Well, there was one about one hundred and thirty five million years ago. That wiped out a darn lot. And another about sixty million years before that… why?”

 

David sighed. “Just wanted to see if they matched up with the pole reversals.” He sighed again.

 

“Guess they do.” Jillian was staring at him.

 

“Son of a bitch.” That was Jordan, followed closely by Greer, having chosen the exact same words.

 

“I’m sorry.” Leena’s ultrafeminine voice could have been the words of a woman at a cocktail party. “Are you all insinuating that we’re headed for a mass extinction?”

 

David answered her in kind. “Yes, I believe that is what it sounds like.”

 

“Do you have any guesses as to when?” She was one of the few women he knew who was capable of holding this conversation, and not screaming, swearing, or breaking down.

 

“Any time between tomorrow and the next two thousand years.”

Chapter 11

Head to toe in scrubs, Jillian walked through the prison as starched as she possibly could. For all her training, she had never provided care to inmates, and the way the men were looking at her was going to haunt her for more than a night or two. She would have felt more at home and less exposed walking through the middle of Atlanta in only a thong and red heels, in the dead of winter.

 

But the gauntlet turned out to only be the first half. Doors clanged. Metal scraped and moaned.

 

Cinderblock only reflected the sounds; it didn’t absorb or diminish them in any way. But when the doors slid closed behind them, Jillian’s apprehension slid away as a deeper unease slipped in. Something was very wrong.

 

She had the feeling of being in the woods when the animals don’t make noise. When you don’t know what’s coming, but you know that it is.

 

“He’s down!” The cry was laced with a liberal dose of terror. And Jillian knew then that these inmates knew something was taking them out.

 

Shoving through the nearly impenetrable wall Jordan and David had provided, she ran flat out until she reached the cell where the wail was coming from.

 

When he reached a hand through the bars at her, Jillian stepped back. She had compassion for the fear in his voice, “Help me doc!”, but not enough to reach out and touch him.

 

An officer in shades of khaki green came up beside her and asked what she wanted to do.

 

“Get this man out of here. But put him on his own. Away from here.”

 

The voice wailed again. This time the man with the straggling beard pressed himself to the cage bars directly in front of her.

 

As the warden approached and unlocked the gate, she stepped back, hoping to get out of reach of the prisoner, and smacked into a wall of muscle. She jumped, spinning, only to find that David had come up behind her. He was dressed in a spare pair of green scrubs from the prison infirmary, in hopes that he would blend in with the other doctors. It looked bad enough without having to answer why a geologist needed to be along.

 

Jillian turned to find Jordan further down the line, his arms laced through the bars, taking vitals from the prisoners who lined up. She saw the sense in what he did. If this cell had a bubble, they should check and see if it stretched down the row.

 

Looking back into the stall as the man was led away in cuffs, she took in the placement and order. This cell had two stacked beds attached to the wall, one higher, unoccupied, and the lower with the comatose body of the other inmate strewn across it facedown. She stepped over to kneel down and assess the man, but another officer put his hand in front of her, and without touching her, held her back, while he handcuffed each of the man’s hands to the bedframe before letting Jillian near him.

 

Checking him over, she took his blood pressure and respiratory count, wondering even then why she was doing it. They all knew what he had, and they all knew what would happen.

 

The men down this row were quiet. They knew they were being stalked, only not in any rational way that any of these men of aggression could deal with. Sanity was slipping here. And Jillian could read it on the faces of the officers, too. How much longer before they realized they weren’t getting paid enough? Before they jumped ship?

 

The CDC’s ass would be in a sling then. There would be no stopping the news cameras. No way to hold back the wave of panic it would surely generate. So Jillian set about solving the problem the only way she knew how.

 

She stepped up to the warden and explained. “This man needs an ICU. He’s comatose, and his ability to breathe on his own may be compromised soon.” Then she turned away and went to the next patient. Taking the charts handed to her by the prison physician and his assistant. Both the doctor and his young apprentice had the sense to not ask questions.

 

But Jillian asked questions. She asked every one in the book, and a few that weren’t. Inside fifteen minutes time she knew that Landerly had been right to pull them out of Lake James and send them here. It’s where he would have been if his arthritis hadn’t effectively shut him down. The trip to McCann had been more than he could handle. She could tell in the way he walked, in his dry humor that waxed and waned with the amount of medication and rest he got. He would wish he was here, in the thick of it.

 

And while she was wishing that she wasn’t here, she decided to make the best of it. What would Landerly do? She almost chuckled to herself. Then she decided that Landerly would get a history on every single one of them and start sorting the furthest gone. He would plot the locations, including the sleeping arrangements of the sickest patients.

 

And in another two hours, when she and Jordan pooled their data, she realized that Landerly would call the CDC mobile team, already stretched to its limit, and have them set up a temporary camp here. She called for quarantine.

 

Jordan led the three of them out of the head warden’s office about fifteen minutes after they entered it.

 

The man wanted a few minutes alone to call his wife and explain to her that there had been a ‘serious situation’ at work and that he may not be home for a week or more. Joshua Frank had taken some reassurance that they weren’t all simply lining up and waiting to die.

 

David seemed to know where he was headed, and he strode down the hall in front of both of them, this time with a purpose. The inmates were supposed to have been moved from all the cells where anyone had gotten sick, and David was already rummaging through his briefcase looking for his fancy compasses. He was ready to weigh and measure, and Jordan could see now that he had been from the moment they had set foot in this place.

 

So he followed behind and took the opportunity to sneak a look at Jilly - she practically glowed. That was just damned annoying. She should be haggard; she hadn’t slept enough; she was in the middle of a high pressure situation. And she glowed.

 

Calling the CDC in front of the inmates and the cops had been a truly stupid move, and even now Jordan couldn’t figure out why Jillian hadn’t thought just a little further ahead on that one. But he had glared at her, twice, mouthed the words to her to either shut-up or leave the room, and she either hadn’t seen him at all or was putting in an Oscar-worthy performance of ignoring him. Since he was certain she wasn’t that caliber of an actress he truly believed she hadn’t seen him. And here he was dealing with the flak, while she glowed. Bitch.

 

David was inside one of the cells, crawling around on his hands and knees and no longer looking anything like the physician he was dressed up as. His scrubs were blackened in long smears down the top, one knee was actually sporting a small tear, and both were ground deep with … well, Jordan couldn’t identify the source of the dark stains and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He decided to catch up with Jillian and see if she had seen anything worthwhile yet.

 

She smiled a brilliant smile, out