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

grown a backbone. But come to think of it she’d been growing it all along, just like she’d been adding those years to her face.

 

The doctor shook his head at her. He couldn’t yell. It was a southern thing, David saw, for the women to be able to lay you low and leave you with no good response.

 

But even if the doc couldn’t give Becky the what for, he could torture David. Coming over he started in with his stethoscope. He listened to David’s chest and back. He held his two fingers over David’s wrist, counting the pulse and feeling for its strength in a way that always seemed vaguely sexual. He was glad when the doc nodded and said he was good enough to get up.

 

I could have told you that. How many times have you woken from a coma, huh?

 

The snide remarks churned in his head, and probably across his expression, until the doctor started yanking off the EKG attachments, taking tiny patches of hair with them. “Ow!”

 

The smile he got said suck it up.

 

Damn doctor.

 

After he yanked every last sticker, the doctor turned to Jillian, taking stats and jotting things in her chart. Which, of course, he just had tucked under his arm. They were way too technically precise around here. Which was odd, because here and there were really the same place, and he hadn’t seen a single chart on the other side. And he sure had a hell of a lot more to chart over there. The doc scribbled a few things, and David tensed.

 

But the two fingers against Jillian’s wrist didn’t rouse her. Neither did the thumb raising her eyelid to reveal an unfocused lake of blue beneath. David couldn’t hide his shudder as he wondered if the docs had been doing that to him. The doctor smiled and left. And aside from being unhooked, it was like the man had never been there.

 

“I guess you’re cleared for take-off.” Becky’s voice interfered with his thoughts again. Bringing him back to the fact that he had to hide what he was going to do.

 

With his legs wobbling beneath him, she helped him down. He was getting better at it every time. But hopefully this would be the last.

 

A few precariously balanced steps later he shrugged Becky off and said ‘seeya’ to her startled face. But better that she be pissed than suspicious. He wandered into the cafeteria forcing himself to eat something, even though his stomach rebelled at what he was about to do. All he could

 

even pick up was a bag of chips, and he forced himself to munch them slowly, one by one, while he wound his way back out into the cold day. The red glow of sun hit him where it had made it’s final bid to creep over the tops of the mountains while he had been in the cafeteria.

 

He tried - tried - to be normal, knew he was an asshole, and tried to put that into his walk. He tried to find the meds tent. And found it exactly where Jillian had said it would be.

 

David just wasn’t sure how to get potassium chloride out of it without looking furtive. So he headed in, thinking he’d play innocent and act all confused if someone caught him and kicked him out.

 

The light inside was a too-bright fluorescent, and he was glad. He would be able to read the names on the shelves and bottles clearly. His only concern was that he might be casting a shadow on the outside.

 

He wasn’t sure if he’d find it filed under the scientific ‘K’ or English ‘P’.

 

It jumped out at him in the ‘P’ section after he’d checked every ‘K’. Pocketing the bottle he scrounged for a needle. Knowing that if they saw him now he’d have less of a chance of bluffing his way out.

 

He found the needles, and a syringe, and fumbled with thick fingers to plug the two together. He’d contaminated the injection all to hell, and he knew it, but since he was going to kill her with it, did a little bacteria really matter? He bit his lip at the thought of actually, purposefully killing another human being. And not just any human: Jillian.

 

He drew up the solution into the syringe, realizing only after he did it that he’d forgotten to wipe the top with alcohol, and he’d contaminated the whole bottle of clear solution, too.

 

Why hadn’t he watched ER more often?

 

He couldn’t steal the whole vial. They’d count that it was missing, and Jillian’s death might get investigated.

 

Being here wouldn’t mean much if he was in jail. And for a brief moment he thought about Jillian incarcerated on the other side. She might not have figured it out yet, but Jordan would be the one pulling the trigger for her. David knew it.

 

He couldn’t in good conscience put the contaminated bottle back. He’d hurt others.

He squelched the laugh that threatened to bubble up.

 

After a minute of frantic searching for a way to right the problem without stealing the bottle, he squirted the solution out of his needle, wetting the grass at his feet. But it was such a small amount that it disappeared before he could account for it. He drew up more, again squirting it at the ground. After about ten times, he drew up a full syringe, carefully twisting the needle to get the solution out when it was low in the neck of the upside down bottle.

 

A sound outside made his neck snap straight. And for a moment he held rabbit-still, quiet except for the volcanic rush of his breathing, waiting while footsteps passed by outside with voices laughing and chattering.

 

His stale breath let out, the steel in his shoulders dissolving. He had to finish, and quickly. He’d give himself a heart attack and die. Then Jillian wouldn’t. And he’d be dead here. Then they’d kill him on the other side.

 

God what a clusterfuck they were going to have if anything went wrong.

Chapter 26

David replaced the contaminated bottle exactly where he’d found it. It was there to be catalogued, but now too low for anyone to use. Someone would get pissed at whoever had left it, but no one would get hurt.

 

Except him!

 

He re-grabbed the bottle and wiped the fingerprints off it. Stupid, stupid. A clean bottle was a giveaway that someone had been intentional with the meds. He touched the glass to the backs of his fingers, thinking that would leave it not looking wiped, but not leading directly to his door.

 

Surely a DNA test would point to him, but they’d have to be pretty suspicious of him before they dragged out that artillery. Capping the needle and pocketing it, he listened at the tent flap, and, not hearing anything, stepped out into the still morning. With the syringe safely ferreted away, his brain wandered to what would happen after he killed Jillian.

 

His lab in Chicago waited for him.

 

The First had been kind and proud and supportive for twenty-seven hours in a row.

 

His body worked.

 

He could settle in there. Dig into his lab, and run core samples from the local oil wells for the rest of his life. David figured no one was going to come after him for a few rock plugs after the whole apocalypse thing.

 

The morning air bit at him as he walked back to the tent he and Jillian had shared only to find a tech pushing a medication into her IV, while she watched the numbers.

 

David stood quietly, wondering if he’d been beaten to the punch. Especially when Jillian’s heart rate began to race, then slowly leveled and dropped off. The tech shook her pretty blond head, and turned away.

 

“Ack!” Her blues eyes jerked wide open at the sight of him, and her hand jumped up splaying perfectly manicured nails wide across her chest to slow her own racing heart. “I didn’t see you there.” Then the hand came out in a gesture halfway between a handshake and a request to have the back kissed. “Lucy Whitman.”

 

David had to unclench his right hand from around the needle hidden in his jacket pocket and he grasped her fingers, making sure he didn’t reveal anything. Just in case he had squeezed so hard he left an imprint of the syringe on his palm.

 

“What did you do to her?” He pointed at the still prone form, getting paler as she lay amidst the dark ribbons of her hair.

 

“We’ve been injecting potassium chloride into her every half hour.” Lucy missed the shock that registered on his face and kept going. “Trying to raise her heart rate and maybe even jolt her out of it.” The slim shoulders lifted in the shrug that seemed to be the new universal response. No one knew much of anything these days. At least the sun was still coming up regularly.

 

He schooled his voice to remain steady, grateful that he was standing behind Lucy, watching Jillian’s lack of movement from over the tech’s shoulder. “Won’t that stuff kill her?”

 

She laughed, a soft airy sound that shot straight to his groin, as she turned to face him. Her red lips looked like they were good for more than just explaining medications, and David was grateful that he would stay here, where he was clearly functional.

 

“It won’t hurt her in the concentrations we use. It’s very dilute.”

 

He focused on the words and their meanings, absorbing what she’d said and not just how she’d looked. By the time the oxygen was going to his brain again, she’d excused herself and left the tent to report on the patient.

 

David blinked a few times, searching for the way that this would help him. He wished he had Jillian’s brain right now. But that would defeat the whole purpose. He didn’t even realize that he was gravitating toward her until his hip was spiked by the slightly open drawer Miss Blonde must have left. Son of a bitch!

 

He stilled his hand just before he slammed it. Revenge never played well against inanimate objects, and he could see needles lying on a once sterile drape in the bottom of the drawer.

 

Dark marker, in very bad handwriting denoted that there were four KCl syringes and that the solution was very dilute compared to what he’d pulled straight from the bottle. There were also a few in varying concentrations of epinephrine. Although why the docs would want to give Jillian a ‘fight or flight’ response, he couldn’t figure.

 

Pulling his own syringe from his pocket he compared the two. His was fatter and would never pass as one of those if he just laid it in the drawer. Plus it didn’t have the bad handwriting on it. For some reason all the anal retentive people were over here. He might like that in his lab, he thought. But now he got himself back to the problem of making his syringe look like the ones in the drawer - the ready-made injections for Jillian.

 

Becky ducked her head in, and he quickly yanked his hand back behind him, hoping that he could hide the needle and that the second-grade maneuver had actually worked. But it seemed she didn’t notice. “Lucy just came by and told me that it didn’t work. Jillian’s heart rate is