Instinct by Jason Hough (ebook reader web TXT) 📗

and fluffy dog with its tongue wagging is quite different from how you’d feel when confronted by a frothing, snarling Doberman. Which one you see, no matter what’s actually there, informs your instinctive reaction. A change in our senses results in a change to our most base behaviors. They’re inseparable.”

“You sound like an expert.”

“Hardly. As I said before, this is Human Psych 101 stuff, Mary. No offense.”

I guess I deserve that. “Fair enough. Okay then, what about on a larger scale?”

A pause. “How large are we talking here?”

“Uhh, like, the whole town, pretty much?”

“Is this a hypothetical situation, Mary?”

“Like I said, people are acting weird and I’m just trying to sort it out.”

“Well, as I said, this isn’t my area of expertise. If you’d like I can contact some of my colleagues—”

“What about the cell tower?” I ask.

That stops him short. This pause is the longest yet. Long enough to make me think perhaps I hit the nail on the head. But Doc’s response is not what I hoped.

“That seems highly unlikely to me. But, once again, not my field. I’d suggest you contact the company that installed it—”

“I already spoke to their field tech. He said definitely not.”

“Which only makes you think perhaps you’re onto something.”

I wince. “Guilty. A little bit.”

“Well, I can’t fault you there. Industry is not where you go when you want truthful answers. Academia is what you want. Call someone at the university and ask. Might be you really are onto something there.”

As he speaks my phone has begun to vibrate with an incoming text.

“Thanks, Doc. Good advice. Look, gotta run. Enjoy your conference.”

“Cheerio,” he says.

I tap the screen to view the message. Messages, in fact. It’s a rapid storm of replies from the sheriff.

no mitchell motor bike

assume towed after crash

assume arrived on foot your place

checking wth local tow co’s

more son

*soon

My phone suggests “Thanks very much!” as a reply so I fire that off, the gears in my brain already turning.

No bike. Yet I’d heard one. I guess one possibility is simply that someone else had ridden by, entirely unrelated. But I’d heard it pull up beside my place, and stop. Hadn’t I?

Damn that sleeping pill. My mind had been seriously fogged that night. There is, I have to admit, a strong chance I dreamed that noise.

I drive back to town and stop in at HQ to spend some time reading Wikipedia about cell towers, various broadband and wireless technologies, and on down that big rabbit hole. Before I know it I’m reading about packets and code-division, millimeter-wave spectrum, and a whole slew of other things beyond my comprehension. That’s okay, though. I’m just scanning, looking for anything about effects on human behavior. But all I manage to find is a page about “WiFi sickness,” an imagined malady people attribute to their home network routers. The page has a massive edit history, and I spend a few minutes looking through the changes people have made to the content over the last few years. It’s like a war between the sane and the insane, fought in little skirmishes over verbiage. “Imagined malady,” for example, had been changed several hundred times to “well-documented phenomenon” and then back, as two users of the site tried to assert what they felt was the truth. It’s not hard to see why there are those who would look at such efforts and think someone’s trying to cover something up.

Sitting back in my chair, it occurs to me this is a dead end. Even if that tower has such an effect, why would it only be happening here?

Clara calls. “You, me, lunch at the Diner. Now.”

“Rain check? I’m right in the middle of tracking down a lead.” Not entirely true, but not really a lie, either.

“You need help, remember? We all agreed to lunch. To talk about all this some more.”

“Make it dinner, then. And don’t worry, the message on my hand is helping. I just spoke with Doc and the Granston sheriff. By dinner time I might actually have some new info for us to talk about.”

“Hmmm,” she breathes. “Okay. But at least stop by for your food. I’ll box it up.”

“You rule,” I say.

“I know.”

“Be there in a few.”

It’s a promise I keep, stopping in just long enough to give Clara a hug in exchange for a Styrofoam container that smells like fried-batter heaven. Kyle hasn’t arrived yet, but Clara says she’ll say hello for me. It’ll have to do for now.

From the diner I drive up to Old Mine Road again, shoveling onion rings into my mouth as I go. On the way the pimply young man from StellarComm passes me in his white van, offering a sheepish wave as we zip by each other.

Midafternoon is kind of glorious up here. The sun spends all morning on the eastern side of the slopes, but right around 11:00 a.m. it finally rises above Two-Shits and, for the rest of the day, casts a warm and dappled glow over our side of the mountain. Combine that with the autumn leaves on the ground and the whole world seems to glow with a friendly warmth.

In the parking lot where I found Katherine Pascoe cowering in her car, I take a slow walk and examine everything. Kicking aside rocks and leaves in the hopes of finding some critical clue I missed before, but in the end I discover nothing. So I hike up to the spot where the bear attack occurred.

Approaching the clearing where we found the body, I begin to feel nauseous. Just the memory of that scene is enough to trick my mind into seeing it again. Smelling it. I hesitate at the edge of the space, leaning against a tree as I wait to vomit. It never comes up, though. After a few minutes the sensation passes, and I continue.

The police tape I put around the location has all blown off and wrapped around a nearby boulder, so I kill a quarter-hour replacing it. The deceased’s parents will be arriving