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

knew that it was against policy.”

 

His stance relaxed. “So what do you like on your pizza?”

 

“Canadian bacon and pineapple-”

 

His face immediately told her that he didn’t feel the same way about toppings.

 

So she continued. “But I’ll eat pepperoni, or sausage or olives, or peppers.”

 

He paced while he was on hold and she thumbed through the huge file; it would take hours just to see what was in there, but it wasn’t like she had a busy social life demanding her time. After a few minutes she had found nothing unusual and Jordan was ordering. A few phrases broke through while she was reading. “ … two-liter coke … large pizza … half Canadian-bacon and pineapple the other half …”

 

She smiled. By the time he was sitting next to her at the old coffee table she had made a once over. “It looks normal - for a leukemia patient - up until that last stomach flu. So fill me in on the rest.”

 

“You got the basics from the file. There were a few scares, but he kept pulling through. He was in remission since this time last year.” Jordan shoved his fingers through his hair. “It was the longest remission he had maintained over the five year course of the disease. His white count was normal up until the end. It was fine when he was brought in. It sounded like flu, but everything sounds like flu.”

 

Her heart ached for him. It wasn’t just a medical mystery he was trying to solve. Jillian couldn’t remember him ever mentioning his cousin, but clearly Eddie’s death had shaken him up.

 

“You know, there may not be an answer.”

 

“I know. It’s just so odd. If it’s a disease that took advantage of his weak immune system. I work for a company that has the foremost technology to prevent these kinds of things from happening.” He shrugged.

 

Jillian began dismantling the large folder into sections by visit and series. She handed one chunk back to Jordan. “Tell me about him.”

 

He shook his head. “Twenty-nine year old, Caucasian male, mild smoker, mild drinker-”

 

She cut him off. “No, really tell me. Where did he live? What is his place like? His family?”

 

Two hours later, she was exhausted.

 

Jordan probably would have been asleep except that he was pacing tracks into the carpet.

 

“What do I do, Jilly?”

 

“Let’s sleep now, and at noon, when we get in, we take it to Landerly.”

 

David pushed his hair back off his face. In the wet wool of the thick air it clung like spiderwebs, giving him willies as he imagined the one thing he was really afraid of.

 

Greer laughed at him, his usual low chuckle when David’s harsh personality amused him.

 

“What are you laughing at? You’re okay because your people are from here, you darkie!”

 

“Dude, you are way messed up. My people are from Africa. Trust me, we aren’t built for this kind of humidity.” Greer never stopped his careful chipping at the rock beneath him.

 

“At least your hair sticks up and out of the way.”

 

“Yup. Which is the reason my race is superior and yours felt the need to better yourselves by enslaving us.”

 

David also never took his eyes off the ground layer beneath them. There was no good comeback, and so he avoided one all together, the conversation trickling off to nothing while they worked.

 

There was water making constant background static nearby, and a damned obnoxious bird that had a call that just never quit. God had been laughing when he put the lungs on that thing. Just as soon as it shut up another one would answer it.

 

Evidence of deer had been all over the first few days, and it had taken nearly a week to push back what time and the East Tennessee climate had done to the abandoned site.

 

It was slow going in the back woods, with the rustles of forest and the slope of the Appalachians beneath them. The only sound that broke the peace was the two men calling each other names and the high ‘ching’ of the tiny picks striking rock. Neither of them had the easy swing of a student, so the calls of the birds were periodically interrupted by the sharp screech of metal glancing off rock followed by a colorful string of swear words. Then, after a brief pause, nature would resume its noise, hiding the fact that they were there from the cities and homes not that far away.

 

“Greer, this one’s for you.” Carter brushed off his knees, and stood, not cursing out loud this time. The pain in his joints that told of age was not anything he wished to acknowledge to the world.

 

“What is it?”

 

“Fuck if I know. It’s a bone, maybe it’s a damn trilobite. If you’re lucky it’s one of your lizards.”

 

He heard the edge in David’s voice. “Dinosaurs aren’t lizards. You know it, I’ve told you that.”

 

“Ah.” David stood and stretched his hands over his head, taking in the thick mass of tall trees and virtually untouched wilderness that enclosed them. “That would imply that I listen to you.”

 

He tried not to let his legs give him away as he moved to a new spot that had looked interesting. But, even from where he was bent over his dig, Greer saw it. “Well listen to this, my honky friend: I’m bigger than you, and stronger than you, and -” he pointed his pick at David’s knees, “not nearly as arthritic as you. So don’t call my dinos lizards. It’s insulting.”

 

“Hey Greer, you do know that all your dinos died, right? That means that you’re studying an animal that is gone, gone, gone, and won’t ever come back. You have a totally useless profession.”

 

Greer snorted. “Dude, you think the limestone you hold is going to reveal anything other than what happened a zillion years ago?”

 

David held up one chunk that he had extracted, and smiled. “This baby can tell the future.”

 

“Well, you just tell me what your Magic Eight Ball there says.”

 

“We’re headed for another polarity shift.” David smiled. There he’d said it, out loud, even if it was only to Greer.

 

But Greer snorted again. “Yeah, in another million years.” He pushed himself to his feet and dusted off. “Be sure to let me know how that pans out for you.”

 

David started carefully picking his way through the grid lines. “Just go play with your petrified lizard.”

 

But Greer was already standing over it looking down, trying to figure what the piece that David’s pick had revealed might be. He turned his head one way then another, before sliding the instrument into the hammer-loop of his carpenter jeans and pulling out a smaller, lighter one from a deep pocket somewhere. His voice was no longer the one that insulted David, but a little more thoughtful. “There’s a good chance this dig will help us solidify the dinosaur-therapsid link.”

 

“Us? I don’t need a link.”

 

“Us paleontologists.” Greer knelt down and spoke to the small whitish smooth piece buried within the packed limestone, “Come to Papa.” He took a few small swings at the peripheries before speaking to David.

 

“Actually, you do need a dino-therapsid link. The therapsids were dinosaurlike pre-mammals and warm-blooded to boot. Which means they are absolutely pertinent to you, Mr. Mammal.”

 

“Like I care about the distinction between dinos and lizards and theradons-”

 

“Therapsids.”

 

“Exactly, I don’t care. My kind survived. Me and my mammal friends.”

 

David could see the edges of Greer’s smile even though he was bent over, softly chipping at the rock.

 

“Come to think, I’m not so sure that you are a mammal. Mammals are warm-blooded.”

 

“Ohhhhhh.” David drolled out the monotone. “That was low, Greer.” Then he smiled.

 

“Congratulations, I didn’t think you had it in you. I thought maybe ‘honky’ was the best you could do.”

 

“At least I don’t have to carry limestone in my pockets. Seems to me that’s the only rocks swinging in your pants.”

 

David turned to look at his friend, but Greer was on his hands and knees, and all he could see was an eyeful of upturned ass. So he looked away. “You’re sooo funny.”

 

But Greer didn’t seem to hear him. At least, he didn’t respond. So, bending over, David went back to reading the tags hanging off the intersecting lines in the grid he and Greer had painstakingly mapped. They had tried to match it to the original site that Wharton had laid out, and they’d gotten damned close as best as they could tell.

 

He turned to find the specimens that matched this location and came back with a few zipper baggies heavy in his hands. Wharton would kill if he knew that Carter was at this site. More specifically he would kill David. And bring shame upon his father. Ah, well. Wharton could go to hell. He was the one who had missed the geologic hotspot here. More the fool he.

 

Turning the baggies over in his hands, David read the markings through the clear plastic. The KT boundary here was much closer to the surface, much of geological evidence of the past washed away by wind and time.

 

The Appalachians were much older than the Rockies, the fault lines here all but inactive, and so they had been worn smooth and low, exposing things to the surface, or hiding them just barely underneath. For him and Greer to come and pick at.

 

“Sweet!” The exclamation came from the spot he had abandoned to Greer moments before.

 

“This was worth leaving my pregnant wife at home.”

 

“That ain’t saying much.” Carter could hear the drawl developing in his voice, not that they spoke to much of anyone around here. But like the humidity, the accents were so thick in this part of the state that you couldn’t help but absorb it. Like some communicable disease. “What’d you find? Petrified turd?”

 

“Dude, you have no sense at all. It’s an egg, maybe a whole nest, so back off.” The steady sound of the light pick striking stone picked up again as Greer tried to unearth his find.

 

For the briefest of moments David wished for a team, where he and Greer could lead like they usually did, and have other people do the labor, the intensive and time-consuming picking and brushing and getting things out. But then he remembered why they were here alone; they had to be.

 

Another baggie with another set of markings was telling the same story. The polarity here was reversed.

 

This specimen from just at the KT boundary had a clear magnetic direction. But when it was lined up with the site, north was south and south was north. Wharton had fucked up. And David was more than certain that he had dug up another hotspot. He tried to keep his breathing regular even as he felt his stomach roll over.

 

Greer let up a cheer as he unearthed something that would interest only him, so David just pressed his hand to his middle hoping to quell the churning there and did his best to ignore all of it. Damned birds started up again, and to add insult to injury a woodpecker started in on a nearby tree. He was only familiar with the Woody Woodpecker variety, so with a great sigh of misery, David lifted his head to see if he could see the thing. Sure enough it was racking its head at jackhammer speed against a trunk, but luckily no obnoxious laughter emerged.

 

At this point the Deep South was so disturbing to him that he wouldn’t have been surprised if Injuns had popped out from behind the tall oaks with feathers in their hair, and looking for scalps. Or maybe the deer could just come out and do a tap dance.

 

He had his hotspot, he knew it. Soon he’d be able to leave the land that time forgot. He just needed to unearth enough evidence so that there could be no argument. If Greer found a tie between the hotspots and the dieout times, well … there was no telling where it might go. Except that they would get themselves immortalized in every high school science textbook.

 

Carter needed more