The fax pages were coming in from all over. Suits were crawling the country, and worse yet, the World Health Organization was starting to collaborate their findings of a ‘new disease’ in India and Africa. David shook his head to himself, things were in the crapper when even the geologist could see what was happening.
The fax beeped, and gurgled, and whirred, and then started spitting out another black and white missive. David grabbed it even before the machine was fully done with it. Which was his plan, as this little portable shitbox had a tendency to hang on to the page once it was finished printing, and then, at a random interval later, release it, sending the paper flying out away from the table and sending three very stellar scientists scrambling like fucking idiots to fetch it.
He turned to Jordan who was standing back, fists perched on his hips, and way over-admiring his thumb-tacking job. “Listen to this.”
Both the docs stopped what they were doing and gave him their attention while he went over the major, if blurry, points on the page. “They have an animal link between the Knoxville site and the McCann site. They think the McCann site may be a few months older. . . .” That was as far as he’d gotten but while he scanned it again, he let his mouth follow his mind. “They checked out the Georgia site. They still don’t know why the birds came early, but the growth rate on that site leads them to believe it might be a full year old –“
Jillian’s sigh interrupted him. “Thank God no one lives out there.”
This time he read word for word, “The animals in McCann are showing unusual, new activity, actually phasing back to- Dammit.”
Jillian looked at Jordan, who was looking back at her. Neither of them spoke, and David did his level best to ignore them. The page had simply run out, and wouldn’t you know it, just as he looked up, the fax machine spit out the next sheet, sending it floating right past his open hands.
“Son of a bitch.”
“Is the ‘dammit’ another metamorphosis phase, like larva or pupa?”
David didn’t even waste an eye roll on Jordan for that one. Straightening the new page, he started in again, “-phasing back to normal. Most recent amphib catches in McCann indicate normal development as best as can be determined by present tests.”
Jillian practically climbed into his lap with excitement. And he sure as hell did nothing to stop her. “Did the site reverse? . . . I mean back to normal polarity?”
He looked the paper up and down. “Doesn’t look like it.”
She looked disappointed, which David took to mean she wasn’t going to crawl into his lap. And letch that he was, he could admit that that fact disappointed him more than the site not returning to normal. He hadn’t expected it to anyway. “We’ve never seen anything indicating that they reverse back. Well, not for about sixty million years anyway.”
Jillian wandered over to admire Abelard’s thumb-tacking job, and the next thing he knew the two of them were spouting off crap about white counts and B-U-Ns, which he figured had nothing to do with burgers, and David made the executive decision that this would be a good time to ignore them. He plucked up the super-teched CDC phone and called Greer.
“David!”
“Buddy.”
He opened his mouth to speak again but Greer beat him to it, already rambling about the McCann egg clutch. “-full fetus in one of them. Unbelievable. I need to tell someone, I have muscle attachment sites that no one has seen before.”
A deep pit formed in David’s heart. He was starting to see himself as Chicken Little. Only he wasn’t an idiot. He was just the only one who saw that the sky actually was falling. He wasn’t sure how much he cared. But there was the distinct possibility that everyone was going to get sick from this. And with the fatality rate at a hundred percent, Greer might wind up having to limit sharing his joyous minutia to his wife.
David was certain that he should be having a crisis right now. Only he wasn’t having it. “Listen Greer. I need to know something, and you can tell that snappy wife of yours, as she is the smarter half. . .” David pinched the bridge of his nose wishing he was elsewhere. Wishing he was siphoning off that trust fund he had broken into to start this whole crapload of a mess. He was ready for some straight-out baking on a beach somewhere, with girls in bikinis and beer and a sedate heart rate. If one of them in the hotel room suddenly spontaneously combusted he wouldn’t be surprised. “Greer, straighten me out on this: did your dinos die from lack of food or what?”
“No real telling. Just a good solid theory. Plants would have wilted in a matter of days given the dust cover-”
David interrupted. He’d been on the receiving end of Greer’s theories before and he could qualify for a Ph.D. in paleontology long before they ended. “Yes, but that depends on the asteroid theory or the volcano theory. Go with this one for a minute and tell me if the evidence matches up: The dinosaurs got sick-”
“Wait, can I put you on speaker phone?” Greer was already doing it, if the clicking and the soft static were any indication.
“Hey,” David turned to Jillian, “Does this thing do speaker phone?”
“Sure.” She didn’t stop her conversation with Jordan, just kept jabbering about qualifying diseases and healthy specimens, but her fingers flew over the secondary numeric keypad. The one she had punched codes into to link up once they had arrived. When she handed it back it was squawking at him at full volume. He told Greer and Leena to hang on a minute and looked over his shoulder. “You two might want to pay attention to this.”
They jerked their heads apart.
“Who are we talking to?” Jordan frowned at him, which was fine, since David was certain that he was breaking several federal laws. But he didn’t let that deter him. “Okay, Greer we’re all here.”
“Who’s we?” Leena’s voice was overeager, clearly way too stifled by her bed-rest.
David introduced everybody then set about swearing the Larsons to secrecy, which he thought was hysterical, but did it anyway. “All right. Here’s the question: is it possible all the dinosaurs got sick at the same time?”
“Yeah right. They all just came down with a deadly virus.” Leena’s voice was sweet, even shooting him down. “It was too global, too quick.”
“You think what’s going around now is what killed my dinos?” Greer hopped in.
Jordan shot David a death glare, but Jillian was already too wrapped up in the science to be concerned about treason, “I think what David’s asking is if it’s possible. Is there any evidence that they could have gotten sick?”
Greer and Leena talked over each other. “No.” “I think it’s more like there’s no evidence against it.” “We just have a sudden lack of fossils and we know they died.” “Why? What does this have to do with that magnetic reversal we found?”
David sighed. Too damn many scientists in the kitchen. “The reversal is making people sick.” There. He said it. Let Jordan call in the CDC police. “But only those in the hotspots. The die-outs seem to correlate to the last reversal. Is it possible that the volcanoes were an aftereffect?”
“Of course it is.” Greer’s voice amplified as though he were talking directly into the speaker box.
Jillian’s face took on a look of horror that David had only seen once on a really bad actress in a schlock film featuring killer clowns. “Does that mean that we could face volcanoes along with the polarity reversal?!”
Leena ignored her. “I think the real question is whether or not the dinosaurs were warm blooded. If they were, then they are more pertinent to your question, and if not then they aren’t. They relate less to humans and we might all react very differently.” She sniffled at the end of the sentence and David felt his heart drop. There was nothing he feared more than a woman and tears. But Jordan voiced the question, and Leena answered. “Of course I’m crying. I’m pregnant. I cry at country music.”
David steered the conversation back where he wanted it. “I know Greer thinks they were cold-blooded, do you agree?”
“Hel
l, no.” And she launched into an explanation he had heard Greer shoot down a number of times, but it sounded a lot more plausible coming from her mouth. “There are too many channels in the bone, indicating a network of vessels. It’s common to warm-blooded creatures. Some of them had necks so long that their heads would have frozen overnight if they didn’t self-heat their blood. Greer’s an idiot on that one.”
Jordan smiled. “Well, I guess every marriage needs its spark.”
“I don’t think it’s a warm-blooded/cold-blooded issue at all.” Jillian had turned her focus from a distant spot on the wall to the speaker phone, as though it was the thing actually carrying on a conversation with her. “We have amphibian species showing effects of the reversals. And they aren’t warm-blooded. We’re all getting affected.”
David heard pillows shuffle and Greer say something to Leena. He wasn’t sure what he said, but by the tone and cadence of Leena’s voice he got shot down. “Then, yes it is possible. No one’s really looked at it, because it doesn’t make sense for a virus to sweep like that. So no one has tried to find evidence for or against it.”
There was a pause, no one wanting to fill in.
But apparently the gears had been turning in Leena’s brain. “It does go with another problem I’ve been sorting thru-”
Greer’s voice walked on top of hers, “She’s on bed-rest, all she does is lay around and think. It’s dangerous, I’m telling you. She’s decided all the dinosaur die-out theories are wrong.”
“Really?” Jordan’s voice jumped in, overlapped by Jillian’s “Why?”
Leena picked her thread back up. “The issue is this: all the major extinction theories rely on the dust cover. There’s argument as to what caused it, but no real argument as to the fact that it happened. And there’s this problematic assumption that the debris cloud stopped photosynthesis in the plants, thus killing the dinosaurs . . . but somehow not the mammals.”
Jordan shrugged. “The mammals were smaller.”
Greer’s voice answered. “No, not really, there were a huge number of dinosaur species that were a lot smaller than what we normally think of. Many of them were as small or much smaller than the average mammal. So it wasn’t a size issue.”
“The mammals were warm-blooded.” Jordan threw out the next piece of evidence.
“No, so were the dinosaurs.” Again Leena’s voice was sweet, even in refusing him his basic beliefs. “And that actually is what gives the theory real trouble-”
It was Jillian who jumped in now, looking excited. The kind of excited David would be if she peeled off her clothes and straddled him. “Warm-blooded means faster metabolic rates. Which means that the mammals, the smallest mammals, should have been the first ones killed by the loss of plant life, not the survivors.”
“Excuse me?” David cut in. Fuckin’ biologists.
“Warm-blooded animals eat a lot more per ounce of bodyweight than their cold-blooded counterparts. They have to: it takes a lot of energy to make that body heat. So the cold-blooded species would have lasted longer without food or even oxygen, and been far more likely than any mammal to survive a month-or-more dust cover.”
“So anyway,” Leena’s soft voice filtered through to them, “the dust cover doesn’t work if the dinos were warm- or cold-blooded and I’ve decided we don’t even have the real killer on our hands. The problem is that the killing factor is sorting who it takes and who it doesn’t by some unknown mechanism. What we understand, or at least what we’ve put together, doesn’t answer that question yet.”
David finally stepped up. “What about the previous extinctions?”
That made Jordan’s head pop up. “There were others?”
Greer answered, “Well, there was one about one hundred and thirty five million years ago. That wiped out a darn lot. And another about sixty million years before that. . . why?”
David sighed. “Just wanted to see if they matched up with the pole reversals.” He sighed again.
“Guess they do.” Jillian was staring at him.
“Son of a bitch.” That was Jordan, followed closely by Greer, having chosen the exact same words.
“I’m sorry.” Leena’s ultrafeminine voice could have been the words of a woman at a cocktail party. “Are you all insinuating that we’re headed for a mass extinction?”
David answered her in kind. “Yes, I believe that is what it sounds like.”
“Do you have any guesses as to when?” She was one of the few women he knew who was capable of holding this conversation, and not screaming, swearing, or breaking down.
“Any time between tomorrow and the next two thousand years.”
11
Head to toe in scrubs, Jillian walked through the prison as starched as she possibly could. For all her training, she had never provided care to inmates, and the way the men were looking at her was going to haunt her for more than a night or two. She would have felt more at home and less exposed walking through the middle of Atlanta in only a thong and red heels, in the dead of winter.
But the gauntlet turned out to only be the first half. Doors clanged. Metal scraped and moaned. Cinderblock only reflected the sounds; it didn’t absorb or diminish them in any way. But when the doors slid closed behind them, Jillian’s apprehension slid away as a deeper unease slipped in. Something was very wrong.
She had the feeling of being in the woods when the animals don’t make noise. When you don’t know what’s coming, but you know that it is.
“He’s down!” The cry was laced with a liberal dose of terror. And Jillian knew then that these inmates knew something was taking them out.
Shoving through the nearly impenetrable wall Jordan and David had provided, she ran flat out until she reached the cell where the wail was coming from.
When he reached a hand through the bars at her, Jillian stepped back. She had compassion for the fear in his voice, “Help me doc!”, but not enough to reach out and touch him.
An officer in shades of khaki green came up beside her and asked what she wanted to do.
“Get this man out of here. But put him on his own. Away from here.”
The voice wailed again. This time the man with the straggling beard pressed himself to the cage bars directly in front of her.
As the warden approached and unlocked the gate, she stepped back, hoping to get out of reach of the prisoner, and smacked into a wall of muscle. She jumped, spinning, only to find that David had come up behind her. He was dressed in a spare pair of green scrubs from the prison infirmary, in hopes that he would blend in with the other doctors. It looked bad enough without having to answer why a geologist needed to be along.
Jillian turned to find Jordan further down the line, his arms laced through the bars, taking vitals from the prisoners who lined up. She saw the sense in what he did. If this cell had a bubble, they should check and see if it stretched down the row.
Looking back into the stall as the man was led away in cuffs, she took in the placement and order. This cell had two stacked beds attached to the wall, one higher, unoccupied, and the lower with the comatose body of the other inmate strewn across it facedown. She stepped over to kneel down and assess the man, but another officer put his hand in front of her, and without touching her, held her back, while he handcuffed each of the man’s hands to the bedframe before letting Jillian near him.
Checking him over, she took his blood pressure and respiratory count, wondering even then why she was doing it. They all knew what he had, and they all knew what would happen.
The men down this row were quiet. They knew they were being stalked, only not in any rational way that any of these men of aggression could deal with. Sanity was slipping here. And Jillian could read it on the faces of the officers, too. How much longer before they realized they weren’t getting paid enough? Before they jumped ship?
The CDC’s ass would be in a sling then. There would be no stopping the news cameras. No way to hold back the wave of panic it would surely generate. So Jillian
set about solving the problem the only way she knew how.
She stepped up to the warden and explained. “This man needs an ICU. He’s comatose, and his ability to breathe on his own may be compromised soon.” Then she turned away and went to the next patient. Taking the charts handed to her by the prison physician and his assistant. Both the doctor and his young apprentice had the sense to not ask questions.
But Jillian asked questions. She asked every one in the book, and a few that weren’t. Inside fifteen minutes time she knew that Landerly had been right to pull them out of Lake James and send them here. It’s where he would have been if his arthritis hadn’t effectively shut him down. The trip to McCann had been more than he could handle. She could tell in the way he walked, in his dry humor that waxed and waned with the amount of medication and rest he got. He would wish he was here, in the thick of it.
And while she was wishing that she wasn’t here, she decided to make the best of it. What would Landerly do? She almost chuckled to herself. Then she decided that Landerly would get a history on every single one of them and start sorting the furthest gone. He would plot the locations, including the sleeping arrangements of the sickest patients.
And in another two hours, when she and Jordan pooled their data, she realized that Landerly would call the CDC mobile team, already stretched to its limit, and have them set up a temporary camp here. She called for quarantine.
Jordan led the three of them out of the head warden’s office about fifteen minutes after they entered it. The man wanted a few minutes alone to call his wife and explain to her that there had been a ‘serious situation’ at work and that he may not be home for a week or more. Joshua Frank had taken some reassurance that they weren’t all simply lining up and waiting to die.
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