Jordan still didn’t loosen his hold on her arm. “I’ll get the rest of the papers and you start packing. You have more to pack than I do anyway.”
She resented the underlying sexism in the remark, until she admitted that it might not be biased but simply truthful. Her arm was free and so she didn’t look up but concentrated on the ground in front of her as she headed off.
Her hands and feet worked independently of her head, folding and rolling her clothing and stuffing it back into the duffle bag and she remained silent. Jordan appeared at her side with his own bag and together they went to the front door, encountering Landerly coming up the walk. His gait in the suit gave away his age, and Jillian wondered what it was about this case that got him out and about. Wasn’t that what she and Jordan had been hired to prevent?
“I was just getting ready to see what was holding you two up.”
Jillian opened her mouth to protest that it had been barely fifteen minutes since they had been ordered to clear out, but Jordan’s hand grasped at her wrist. Not that it mattered anyway, Landerly was talking again without paying the slightest bit of attention.
“We’ve got teams checking out the three cases you pulled as evidence - two of them appear to be the real deal. And there’re another two cases in Florida in that nursing home that I authorized you two to visit while I was in Hawaii. You’re going back.”
Jillian’s mouth hung slack, but she managed to keep it from gaping. Her eyes went wide with real fear. None of the ideas she had had about Landerly’s packing them up had to do with the possibility of further outbreaks. She had almost forgotten the Florida cluster. The entire nursing home had been exposed. She shook her hand, loosing it of Jordan’s now tighter grip that had threatened her circulation.
Landerly kept talking as though neither of them could possibly need a second or two to assimilate the damage and possibilities he was laying at their feet. “You’ll pick up Dr. Carter en route. He’s already back at his hotel packing, as he’ll be going with you to check out the area. Dr. Sorenson is staying here and will be working for the CDC obtaining wildlife specimens. We need everything you can gather on the Deltona cluster. See if we can crack this thing. It’s getting ugly.”
He turned away, finished.
Two suits emerged then from the back of the van, and from the looks of the gesturing all of the files had been duplicated. Jordan took her duffle bag from her nearly slack wrist and went to throw it in the back of the Rav4, only to be stopped by a suit. Jillian’s brain was working too fast to think about where she was going. So she set herself behind Jordan and followed like a little duck wherever he went.
The cluster in Florida was growing. That indicated either contagion or . . . continued toxin exposure or . . . or a bizarre vector or . . . or . . . long incubation period. And that was the worst, that would mean far-reaching spread. The way AIDS was all over before anyone knew it even existed. Lentiviruses, or those that remained inactive long after infection, could be serious to society simply because the spread was undetected for so long that tracing the path from victim to victim was nigh unto impossible.
With a start from her morbid thoughts she realized the afternoon sky was a shade of blue you couldn’t see in the city, and the autumn trees were alive in reds and golds she hadn’t seen in a long long while.
“I’m sorry, you’re going to have to fill me in on what the fuck you two are babbling about.” David leaned forward, saying what he wished he’d said an hour ago.
The two of them had sat with their heads tucked together speaking English with enough Latin thrown in to be damned obnoxious. It was giving him a headache, and stress in his shoulders. And worse, it made him feel under-educated.
They looked up at his comment as though only just then realizing that he was on this plush flying den with them. And he almost stood up and walked to the back of the room again. He could just help himself to another scotch. Or he could stand his ground.
“What can we tell him?”
Jordan spoke as though he wasn’t there. That cretin had the hots for Dr. Brookwood, too. But the more David watched the more certain he was that there wasn’t anything actually going on. What he was uncertain of was whether the hot doc returned the feelings.
She shrugged and frowned and pursed her lips, and if they weren’t flying straight into the pits of hell - retirement haven, Florida - he would have been turned on. “I don’t know.” She looked away from Abellard and up at him, causing him to realize that he had in fact stood up.
The CDC had appointed their private Lear jet quite nicely. The seats were pale leather, and cushy as hell. And in the back was a full bar that he had been the only one to avail himself of. For a brief moment he entertained the thought that Jillian wasn’t yet old enough to drink.
“David, what level of security clearance do you have?” Jillian’s voice was sweet but off, a perplexed honey bringing him back to the bizarre reality he was in.
He smiled a smile that spoke of the scotch he’d already had and the one he’d like to have next. “I have no idea. Let me know when you can speak to me.”
It was Jordan who proposed an answer to the dilemma. “He must have some sort of emergency clearance. Landerly sent him with us.” He looked up, not having moved from where he had swiveled his own seat to sit all cozy with Jillian. “Landerly is nothing if not logical. I’ll take the heat for whatever we share with you. He can’t mean for us to keep you in the dark.”
David took the seat next to Dr. Brookwood, willing to give up the scotch in favor of a little maneuvering. He was upset to find that he liked Dr. Abellard, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t steal sweet little Jillian right out from under him. Well, from the looks of things, she hadn’t been under him yet. With effort, he redirected his thoughts and focused on Jordan. “What is it that I need to know?”
“We have a spot of reversed polarity, which is weird as hell, and people in that spot are dying of something we can’t classify. All our tests are coming up negative. If it’s a virus it’s got a protein coat unlike any we’ve ever seen before. All the assays are missing it.”
Jillian’s voice broke in beside him. “We can’t find anything with microscopic analysis either.”
“But you couldn’t have had the best equipment there in McCann, right?”
Jordan nodded, “True, but we’ve been sending samples back and forth. The Atlanta office can’t find anything either and they’ve got the best machinery anywhere.”
David soaked in that for a second. “It sounds like you’ve got your hands full, and I have to say that I have no idea why I’m even here.”
Jillian had stood and was stretching, the only one of the three of them to be able to reach full extension in the plush but midget height fuselage. “You’re convenient?”
“You wound me.”
“Yes, but I’ll bring you another scotch to soften the blow.”
So he asked it. “Are you even old enough to serve scotch?”
Her eyebrows quirked, but Jordan’s voice carried to him, over his shoulder now because David had twisted as Jillian climbed over him and made her way back to the bar. “She’s a physician, you know.”
He twisted back around, “Yeah, but maybe she’s really accelerated. It happens.”
Jillian interrupted them to ask David again if he was going to take her up on that scotch. Right as her hand appeared over his shoulder handing Jordan what looked like a gin and tonic that he hadn’t even asked for. Jordan smiled and said thank you, before meeting David in an eye lock that said he had some idea what the geologist was about.
Whatever.
In a minute he had his scotch and Jillian settled in beside him with a margarita.
“So? Upset stomach? Then coma, then death.” David thought that was way too simple a way for a person to die. No bells, no whistles, no grand symptoms. “Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack.”
“And it’s contagious?”
Jordan shrugged and lift
ed his drink in a long swallow that revealed more about his tension than his words or manner. It was Jillian who stepped up, filling in the holes.
“We can trace transmission from person to person. But with a small town like McCann that really doesn’t mean much. At this point quarantine is mostly to keep tabs on everyone who’s been exposed. We can’t begin to hope to control spread at this point. Jordan and I are headed to Florida to pool the new data with what we have.”
“Are they evacuating McCann?”
“As we speak.” She said it like it was somehow her fault. So he changed the subject.
“What if the Florida site is a hotspot?”
“Then we’ve got some serious problems.” Jillian set the unfinished drink aside and pulled a blanket out from under the seat, as though she had known all along that it was there. Covering herself, she turned away, tucking her feet up under her.
Jordan swiveled sideways and pulled out a sheaf of papers to leaf through, leaving David with his own thoughts. And he didn’t like them very much.
He’d had an upset stomach when he had visited McCann the first time. So had Greer. And it had passed. Did that mean he’d been exposed? Was he now immune? The CDC didn’t seem to be worrying too much about these two docs, although they all had been put on a regimen of medications. Then again, maybe it was just too late to do much more than medicate them and pray. And David didn’t put much stock in prayer. It hadn’t yielded anything of value for him before.
He tapped Jordan’s shoulder, impatient for the millisecond it took the doctor to acknowledge him. “Are there carriers for this disease?”
“We have no idea. We can’t figure out anything except that we’ve never seen it. The symptoms aren’t like anything we know so we can’t even assume it will act like other things of the same family.” He looked back down at his papers, then up again, “Why?”
He almost couldn’t say it. “My friend Greer had an upset stomach. Worse than me, when we were here the first time. He’s gone home to his wife, who’s pregnant. Could he pass it to her?”
“I have no idea. I’m sorry.” Somehow Dr. Abellard managed to look like he actually was sympathetic. Yet within a second he was back to thumbing through his papers and jotting down numbers on a miniature legal pad.
David sank back in his seat, inadvertently swiveling it he let it rock gently back and forth, sustained in an almost harmonic motion by the flight of the plane. His scotch turned wet and slippery in his hands, leaving him no choice but to polish it off before the ice melted and it became even more of a soggy mess. He reclined the chair and, in minutes, sleep rolled over him, taking him to a foggy place with gravitational forces from all sides, and fossils that contained writing instead of bones.
“Mom, I’m good.” Becky shoved a hand through her hair, realizing that she was overdue for a shower. Her mother had started with ‘I’m afraid that you’re going to get sick.’ And like a well written essay, all you needed was the topic sentence. The rest was just the jabberings of a mother well practiced in the art of worry.
Becky listened with only half an ear, waiting for a break in the tone or speed, hoping to get a word in. “I’m eating, Mom. In fact, the CDC is monitoring my diet. Even you aren’t as strict as these guys.” Becky left out the part about the medications they were feeding her and the men in the yellow space suits. “I need to know about the frogs. Are Brandon and Mel taking good care of them?”
“Yes. They went out and caught a few more just yesterday-”
“No! Mom, don’t let them out there!”
“Why is that?”
Becky felt the gloved, yellow hand on her shoulder. They were monitoring the conversation, as Becky was still waiting for an emergency clearance status. The agent listening in was one of the conditions of phone privileges, lest she spill the scary beans.
“Mom, that area mutated the frogs.” She didn’t lie, she just didn’t tell the whole truth. “I don’t want the kids out there without me. And I need Aaron’s new cell number. I tried his place a few times and got no answer.”
She pressed her mother to go just a little faster, without revealing that an agent was standing over her shoulder, or any other little tidbit that would scare the woman even more. Becky spoke about three more words before artfully extricating herself from the conversation, a skill perfected out of necessity.
The space-suited alien didn’t comment, he simply took the portable phone out of her hands and walked out of her tent, locking the ‘door’ behind him. Her bizarre forced vacation was turning into the equivalent of Siberian work detail. She had actually been digging in the hard earth with a pick earlier today. If she had worn metal ankle cuffs with links leading to the next digger she couldn’t have felt more imprisoned.
At least the CDC had even seen fit to send her three little rana along with her. The poor frogs were even more incarcerated than she. Each in its own little terrarium, always facing the heart of McCann. Becky hadn’t learned much from her digging. The underground species seemed unharmed. But the local amphibians were whacked out, the newts and salamanders suffering the same kinds of fates as the local frogs.
The frogs she had pulled here were, in general, four-legged, but not any luckier than her first batch. The majority of these guys were blind, and many were pale in color, making it a wonder that so many existed. Pale wasn’t a good camouflage color, so animals like that were often picked off by predators first thing. And the sheer numbers of these guys that were bordering on white made her wonder if they tasted bad or something.
Good, another thing to do tomorrow. And here she’d been afraid she’d get bored.
Tamping her internal sarcasm back down Becky made the mental effort to realign her thoughts. First she had to call Aaron while it was still early enough that he would answer his cell. She stuck her head out the door and asked for the phone again. The guy looked at her like she was a bother, and Becky had no doubt that she was.
Aaron answered on the first ring. And she explained more than she had to her mother. “Don’t let Mel and Brandon back there. I know they want to play . . . but . . .”
“But what?” Aaron had never settled for the ‘I’m the authority, do as I say’ answer. And he had rubbed one person in town the wrong way with that over and over - their father. But now, Becky wished he’d give her a bye just this once.
But she gave him a little more information instead. “Frogs develop after they’re born. So the environment affects that. Clearly something is wrong there. And Brandon and Melanie are still developing themselves. So please, just keep them out.”
“Sure, sis.” There was a pause, and even over the phone she could hear his brain gearing up to ask a harder question. “Does this have anything to do with the other area you found and your little ‘extended research trip’?”
Becky sucked in a breath. The yellow suit sitting and listening in this time wasn’t the same as a few hours ago. So she risked that they would cut off her phone privileges and just said, “Yes.” And before he could ask anything more, she jumped in again. “I need you to do me a favor.”
“Is this one of those ‘no questions asked’ favors? And when the bodies start piling up, I’m going to get disbarred kinds of things?”
Becky wondered why he’d had to use that reference to bodies. As if he knew more, or could read more from her tone, than he was letting on. So again she just said “Yes.” She tried to put a little laugh in it, but she wasn’t that good of an actress.
The yellow suit man gave her a stare, but she shrugged at him, like what was I supposed to say? And she asked Aaron to go out and recheck the boundaries of the site.
“Becky, are you in trouble? Am I going to regret this?” His voice was a hiss and the irritation and tired humor that had spun through his words even just a few exchanges ago was gone.
“Aaron, I’m okay.” It was the best she could tell him, not knowing if she was sitting around waiting to die. “And you might help a lot of important research with this. Than
k you.”
He said a quick good-bye and hung up.
Looking up with a conjured smile, Becky handed the disconnected phone back to the suit, knowing they’d return with it when Aaron called her back. And she waited.
An hour later the suit came back in with the phone. “Hello?”
“Becky? Why the hell did I have to go through some sort of security check to get to you?” Aaron was clearly worried. And there was nothing she could really do about it.
“Because you did. How’s the site?”
“Nothing.” She could hear the chirping of cicadas in the back ground and the usual woods noises. He was there now.
“So it’s all the same.” She let out a breath, startled by its release.
“No, there’s nothing here. The compass needle doesn’t move at all. I walked the whole boundary twice.”
Her brows pulled down, and her fingernail tried to compete with her words for space between her teeth. “So north is north and the whole site is just a staked out boundary?”
“Looks like it to me . . . wait. No, north is still south according to the compass.” He sounded as perplexed as his words were making her. “But it’s not changing at the boundary line. Not like before. It was real clear, now . . . nothing.”
Her heart raced, throwing a lump up into her throat. She couldn’t even think of the implications of what Aaron was telling her. So she asked the obvious. “Can you find the edge?”
Through the cell phone connection she could hear his boots crunching through the undergrowth. “Already looking for it. . . wait. Got it!”
“Where are you? Where is it?”
“About ten feet out.”
“God. Aaron, just get out of there. Go home.”
9
Jordan woke to the sound of sledgehammers keeping cadence inside his head. It was their third day here, and nothing was new. Oh, except the mysterious Brookwood-Abellard had struck Florida again. One of the coma victims had slunk off into quiet death yesterday morning. And fate was claiming another. Maxie Londers had only had ear pain prior to this. But quickly the vomiting that had begun at four a.m. had changed and Maxie was now on a ventilator, awaiting her turn into the kingdom of whatever god she chose.
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