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

just long enough to see Becky nod. She continued telling how his shoulder had healed, and how her IV mark was gone.

 

“Wow. You two were immune for a while, and now you super-heal?” Becky’s hands found homes on her hips and she stared at the tent ceiling, making sure the view in her retinas was nothing that would interfere with the cranking of her brain.

 

But Jillian had no qualms about interrupting Becky’s thinking. “No. There’s more.”

 

“What?”

 

“You’re the best.”

 

Becky’s brows raised.

 

With a sigh, Jillian let it slip out. “I held your hand two days ago while you died.”

 

“I’m not dead.”

 

“Thanks.” Her tongue was laced with dry wit, good to know she’d still have that when they locked her up.

 

“I’m a physician, I already diagnosed that.”

 

“I woke up yesterday at four.” Becky shrugged. “I never died.”

 

Jillian felt the old familiar cold steel of a gear click in place in her head. “What day is it?”

 

“Thursday.”

 

She gulped air. It was a day earlier than she had thought. “But that’s it. You died yesterday. At … just before four.”

 

“No, I woke up.”

 

Jillian stood, ready to fight. “I checked your pulse. Jordan declared you dead. I watched them pull the sheet over you.”

 

“But I didn’t die.”

 

Again, click, another gear shifting. “Do you have a twin?”

 

Becky shook her head and looked at Jillian like she would a small child. “Did you dream it?”

 

The cold seeped up Jillian’s socks into her feet, this time going straight from there to her heart. Becky’s voice interrupted her thoughts again, “Because Dr. Abellard died several days ago according to the lists.”

 

Jillian shook her head. “The lists are messed up. Lucy Whitman is listed ‘deceased’ and she’s not. Jordan isn’t either. And David fell down the steps.” She looked to David, beseeching, knowing that if he didn’t corroborate she’d have to check herself in to the loony bin.

 

Becky looked over at him, too. And much to Jillian’s relief, he nodded. “I fell down the last flight of stairs. Broke my hip and leg, dislocated my shoulder, and cracked ribs. I don’t feel any of it now. But I remember Jillian pulling on bedsheets and stuffing my shoulder back into place.”

 

It sure wasn’t how she’d describe it, but he did get the job done. And he smiled showing even white teeth. A smile just for her, that reached to his eyes. He knew she wasn’t nuts. And that was enough, for now.

 

He explained how he didn’t remember getting moved here, or the cast coming off. And Becky took the quandary upon herself, leaving the tent, and asking the people passing by how Dr. Carter had come to be in this tent.

 

Jillian stood and listened just behind the tent flap. Three techs told the same story. They had found David in the room upstairs, and carried him down to this tent. Down all four flights of stairs. He’d been comatose the whole time.

 

Becky came back in and looked from Jillian to David.

 

David sat fully upright for the first time. “So I never broke my leg?”

 

She smiled, while Jillian watched in abject horror, but unable to do anything, as her body virtually refused to listen to any of her commands.

 

David slid off the gurney and stood on wobbly feet. In a few minutes he let go of the gurney and walked on his own. Another fact flying in the face of all her memories. Even David remembered the fall.

 

Had they simply shared a dream?

 

Becky walked back in the tent, even though Jillian didn’t remember her stepping out again. Her face conveying that she had bad news even before she spoke the words. “They said that Jordan is at the mortuary. A few of the bodies were transported waiting for someone to sign off on them.”

 

Jillian shook her head. Jordan was alive yesterday.

 

Because she’d only slept for four hours yesterday if it was Thursday. That meant she’d seen him less than twenty-four hours ago.

 

Becky nodded at her. “We need to go. I’m headed there to get Leon Peppersmith’s belongings. They should go to the CDC or to his family.”

 

Silently Jillian agreed to the trip. Her brain telling her that if Jordan was at the mortuary he would be there working, making decisions or taking samples.

 

Becky waited while Jillian changed her socks and put on shoes. Then told them she already arranged a car to go see about Leon’s things. Softly she asked. “If he’s alive, then where is he?”

 

At the mortuary! But Jillian fought down anger, accompanied with fear and bile pressing at the back of her throat. Without a further word, she followed David and Becky to the car.

 

David walked with an easy swing to his stride. He clearly hadn’t broken the bones. Not four days ago. He chatted with the biologist. Somehow able to make meaningless small talk, even though he said he remembered the same things she did.

 

Sliding into the backseat, she listened quietly while Becky told of the woman rousing the crowd about The Ascension.

 

When they arrived, her feet stepped out onto the gray of the blacktop, the morgue and coroner’s office located under the small police station that served the entire town. A steel door let them inside, where they passed down a long hall and through a walk-in refrigerator door.

 

The air changed texture, to a created, and probably expensive, climate, that was, ironically, nearly the exact temperature as the air outside.

 

Jillian still couldn’t find her tongue when the coroner told Becky that they had Dr. Abellard. The fuzzy noise behind her eyes worsened. There was no way that Jordan was here. She hadn’t dreamed him alive.

 

Yet the coroner pulled open a door and slid out a tray.

 

He peeled back the sheet, revealing Jordan. Sleeping in shades of gray. Lacking the small movements that betrayed life.

 

Still not believing, she reached out, felt his hair. It didn’t feel right. It felt dead. He didn’t respond, as her brain told her he wouldn’t. He looked like someone had cast Jordan in wax, and laid him out here, a la Tussaud’s. But her brain knew it was deceiving itself. Even as she refused to accept, it was her own voice telling her the truth. He was gone.

 

Jillian felt the pressure at the edges of her vision. She saw the sparkles, right before the roaring worsened, and everything went black.

Chapter 20

Jordan stood at the edge of the gurney, just on the other side of the baby rails. Jillian slept. Just caddy corner, David, too, slept the sleep of the dead. There was no eye movement, no motion whatsoever from either of them.

 

He had allowed himself five minutes every hour to come and check in on them. Her - if he was being honest. He had slept here in the chair last night, in case either of them came around. But he had barely roused himself each time the alarm on his watch had gone off. He had forced himself to set it for two hours, thinking that he might get into a much needed deep sleep cycle if he could stay asleep for long enough.

 

But from the way he had creaked this morning, and felt like he was moving through sludge all day, Jordan was sure he hadn’t had any REM.

 

He had talked to his Dad on the phone this morning for an hour.

 

Jackson Abellard had joined up with the work crew, hauling bodies, demolishing houses where people had been left to rot, and getting Lake James up and functioning again. He’d said it was sad what had happened.

 

But that he felt truly alive for the first time since Jordan’s mother had died.

 

Jordan had told about his own woes: that there was no pattern to the deaths, that he was ready to give up, but Landerly felt there had to be something. So they’d been pushing, and analyzing, and finding jack.

 

Jackson had laughed. “It does seem random as hell. We lost the vast majority of our electricians. But for some reason we’ve got lawyers out the yin yang.”

 

Jordan had laughed, too. Wishing Landerly would stop beating the dead horse. Or the billions of dead horses. Wishing Becky Sorenson had lived, to go check out the frogs and report something of use to distract Landerly.

 

His watch beeped at him. Signaling that his brain had wandered and he’d lost track of his five minutes.

Not surprising.

 

He looked down at Jillian again, seeing her hand hanging loose within his own grasp. He told himself that fingers twitched first a lot of the time. That he touched her so he could feel what he might not see, not because he wanted to.

 

Turning to go, he reluctantly let her hand slip free of his, almost missing the finger jerking as it slid from his grasp.

 

Without covering the space between, he was over her bed, hovering, watching.

 

Waiting.

 

And seeing nothing.

 

It must have been nothing.

 

But still he picked up her lifeless hand, holding her fingers sandwiched between his own. Rubbing them. Hoping for a response.

 

And finally his breath hitched, when he felt it again.

 

Just a twitch.

 

His breath gushed out. “Jillian! Jillian!” He chided himself for calling out to her. She would come around as she chose. Not because he said something. Something she probably still couldn’t hear, or even process as her own name. Then he did it again. “Jillian, can you hear me?”

 

Another twitch. This time it was her whole hand, quickly grasping his, before slackening again.

 

He patted the side of her face. Tapped the back of her hand. Listened to her breathing. Counted eighteen breaths per minute.

 

She groaned.

 

“Have you been standing here looking at your girlfriend this whole time!?” Landerly yelled like a man half his age, even if he hobbled along with a cane at his side.

 

Jordan’s jaw clenched and he didn’t turn to address the man yelling at his back. “She’s not my girlfriend. She’s my partner.”

 

“Then why are you standing here making lovesick puppy eyes?”

 

Yup, the old man couldn’t be bothered to notice a person he was speaking directly to, but he seemed to have pegged Jordan without a sideways glance. Son of a bitch. He ground his teeth and focused on the tiny quivers of Jillian’s lips. “She’s coming around.”

 

“Really?”

 

He heard the uneven footsteps. The grass was cold enough to crunch with the punctuation of his cane as Landerly made his way beside Jordan. With quick, agile fingers Landerly took her pulse, watched her eyelids as they began to show REM signs, and pulled out his stethoscope to hear her breath sounds.

 

Jordan spotted the cane hooked over the baby rail, looking for all the world completely unnecessary.

 

Landerly’s feet planted apart, as though the earth might tremble beneath him and he’d need his balance. After a moment, he nodded.

 

Another few minutes later she began to mumble. And Jordan started speaking again.

 

“Jillian. We’re here. Jordan and Dr. Landerly. Open your eyes. Come on-” Baby. He bit off the endearment before it slipped out.

 

In the space his slip provided she mumbled again.

Then again.

 

Jordan leaned over, smiling as her eyes slowly opened and closed. Opened and closed. They rolled, denying her the focus she was trying to achieve. And he remembered forcing back the darkness and crawling out only a few days ago himself.

 

Finally her eyes opened fully and stayed that way, they found him, latched on to his grin, and he watched, smiling, while recognition