“I’m sorry.”
The words took the remaining starch from him, and he collapsed, doll-like, laid out on the bed. For a moment she sat and watched the even movements of his chest, listening as the air passed through his mouth, in a far too perfect rhythm to be anything but forced.
The minutes stretched, and the room was quiet enough to reveal the creaks and ticks of an older building as it shifted. All the sounds normally masked by human conversation and motion, none of which existed in this room. Finally, knowing it was the right thing to do, she stood and walked the five steps to the edge of the bed. His eyes stared at the ceiling and leaked tears from the corners. Though she looked him up and down, he never made eye contact with her, effectively shutting her out.
The aching bones turned to ice. Jordan was in a space she couldn’t get into. Her own family was safe. She slid and crawled onto the bed next to him, sitting against the headboard, waiting. It was all of a second before he rotated to her, her arms automatically opening in a maternal gesture she didn’t realize she knew.
Still without making any eye contact he curled into her embrace like a hurt child. Her arms closed on smooth skin as his head sank to her shoulder. She felt his hair against her cheek, not realizing that she had cocooned around him until she found herself there. “I’m so sorry.” The raw whispering sound of her voice started her own eyes watering. But she couldn’t distinguish if she was crying for him or for herself or simply from the abrasions her eyes had taken from seven days of desert air.
It started in soft confessional tones with his unmistakable timbre, “I left them all behind for school.”
She wanted to say that she understood, that she too had left her family, had left their ideals to pursue her dreams. But she didn’t think she really did understand. And in a moment he explained. “No one else there went off to college. My Dad worked in the factory. My mother ran a daycare when she was alive. Eddie was the most successful, starting his own construction business. But I was educated and no one knew what to make of me. No one knew what to say or how to speak to me, so no one really did.”
His breath sucked in, and as he shifted she felt the wetness that soaked so easily through the shoulder of her scrubs. It dawned that the awkwardness she felt was due to the fact that she herself had cried to no one since she was small and no one had come crying to her.
“Eddie was my best friend growing up. . . and we got so far apart. I feel like I’m trained to be the hero here and I’m failing.” A soft intake of air was all that revealed the depth of his regret, the pain as he saw his family falling away from him. “I left so I could save people, and I can’t save them.”
As he turned his face back into her shoulder, she could feel the muscles of his cheeks and mouth, biting his lip or such, and her hands slowly moved down the hot expanse of his back. Wrapping themselves around her waist, his arms stood out in muscled, bronze relief against the green of her scrubs, but the fabric blended from fold to fold making their legs virtually indistinguishable where they were tangled on the covers.
She felt and heard the two deep breaths at the same time, the only harbinger before he stood and turned quickly away, hiding the streaks that marked his face. But he didn’t bring his hands up to wipe them away. Jillian saw one more deep breath before he announced that he would be on the next flight to Minneapolis.
Her legs curled under her of their own will, perhaps her body unconsciously seeking a more protected position before she told him what she knew. “You didn’t read the whole thing.”
Jordan slowly turned to face her, no longer ashamed of the tracks on his face, his hands on his hips and his eyes steady.
“Landerly forbade you to go back. He wants you to stay here.” She felt the cringe before she realized she was doing it.
But he didn’t flinch at the news at all. And she knew before she heard it what his decision was. “Then I quit. I’m going back.” He calmly walked into the bathroom where she heard the water running for a few moments before it shut off and was replaced by the sounds of zippers and the small clunks of things thrown into bags.
That galvanized her and she sprang from the bed, to find him in the bathroom doing exactly what she had expected. “Wait!”
That stopped him. Cold as stone he turned to her, “Do you want me to not go?”
“No. That’s not what I’m saying.” Jillian felt the desperation rising inside her in a tidal panic she hadn’t felt before this. “You should go. Let me make the arrangements through the CDC-”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me. I’m quitting.”
With a ferocity she hadn’t applied in way too long, she stood up to both Jordan and the encroaching hysteria. “No you’re not. I’m getting on the phone and talking Landerly into this. He’ll pay for it out of his own pocket by the time I’m through. Keep packing.”
She didn’t wait for an answer because she didn’t want to hear it. Too afraid he would disagree, she fled to the phone and began pushing buttons, unsure what she was going to say to change Landerly’s mind and send them to Lake James. Her fingers dialed of their own accord, her brain having long ago memorized all five of Landerly’s numbers, and while she got her thoughts together Landerly answered. “Hello, Dr. Brookwood.”
It would have been nice, to have such a distinguished colleague address her so formally, if he hadn’t followed the first phrase with “I figured it would be you to call. So did you talk Abellard out of quitting or are you talking me into sending you both to Lake James?”
Surprised, she choked on the words, “The latter, sir.”
“Well, this had better be a good argument.” He sounded a trifle annoyed, and she would have shot something rude back, except that she was about to launch into an argument that had ‘better be good’ and she had no idea what that argument was.
“It is, sir.”
Ten minutes later she hung up, and finally turned to face Jordan who had moved from the bathroom into the main room and was gathering his shoes, stuffing them into the bottom of the barely serviceable duffle he always carried. “Anne will call in less than fifteen minutes with your arrangements.”
“My arrangements?”
“Yeah, just you.” She smiled the turned-in grin that confessed she was at the end of her rope, too.
He crossed the six feet of space between them, relief showing on every plane of his face, and embraced her, breathing out in one long sigh, that let her know he was glad he didn’t have to quit. Her face was inextricably buried in the white t-shirt he had thrown on, and the fake-fresh smell of laundry detergent assailed her, as did the fear of going it alone.
12
Lake James wasn’t what she expected. In the coffee shop the waitress had answered her question with a ‘ya’ then laughed hysterically at ‘y’all’. Becky was used to feeling backwoods, but this made her feel like a big city girl. And that was just uncomfortable.
The people looked like they stepped from a book she had read. And it reminded her too much of McCann: small stores, no chains, and everyone knew everyone else’s business. And just like in McCann, they greeted her and John with a “you guys aren’t from round here.” In their weird clipped, partially swallowed accent. It was never a question, just a statement of fact.
Unable to speak in public about their work, she and John quietly sipped coffee that came only in regular and decaf, at a table with blue vinyl seats ripped in a handful of places, stuffing slowly escaping where it could. They both refused the breakfast menus, and drank in a noisy silence as the diner swirled around them.
John got a call halfway through the awkward breakfast, and the entire diner turned as one to see who was answering a cell phone in the middle of their pastiche. He ignored the looks, and snapped the phone shut. “Dr. Abellard is on his way, he’s already in the air.”
Becky only nodded and drained the last slightly darker bits from the bottom of her cup. She already knew that Jordan’s cousin Lindsay had slipped into a coma yesterday. From the fax John had pulled from the machine
before they left this morning, they knew that her mother Kelly had slipped under just hours ago - a fact even Dr. Abellard was unaware of as he flew in from Vegas.
“Are you two ready? We are.” Leon Peppersmith approached them from the booth behind where she and John sat in clear distinction between the animal handlers and the PhDs.
Becky and John both nodded and got up together, in tandem reaching for their wallets and dropping a few bills on the table. Silently Becky tucked herself at the end of the line behind the four animal wranglers. Leon had his team: his brother as large and lean as himself; his sister, midsized but everything about her said she was determined to keep up with the big boys, including her brown ponytail; and a good friend of theirs who had worked for the first Peppersmith, when he had started in the animal wrangling business.
They were after medium-to-big sized game, and while the Peppersmith operation did a lot of for-hire work, they were contracted with the CDCP as needed. And John wanted good sized mammals. He wanted to see what was happening in other populations they hadn’t happened to stumble across yet.
Though the coffee was warming her from the inside out, Becky turned up the neck on her jacket against the chill in the air. There were rumors that blizzards sometimes happened this early in the season up here. With a small shiver, Becky became a believer. She reached up to grab the handle at the back of the truck bed, but Leon stretched down to clasp her wrist and lift her in as though she was no more than a housecat.
He didn’t speak, but motioned her to sit next to John, and moving his index finger in a circle in the air signaled Linda in the driver’s seat to start up. Two smaller pickups with wide, tricked-out flatbeds followed close behind, and Becky wondered if it was legal to be sitting in the back of a truck like this. They were strapped into small seats that had been bolted in, her and John. But Leon was free within the confines of the bouncing bed of the quadcab, and he moved like the panthers he was known to catch. He ran a brief lesson, showing them modern lassoes and tranquilizer guns and cages while they rumbled along. When he asked if they knew how to shoot a rifle, he barely suppressed his surprise that it was Becky who said yes. It was the only emotion that had flitted across his face in the whole five hours she had known him.
His dark blond hair was pulled back in a low ponytail that looked to be held by a classic red office rubberband, and his ball cap, emblazoned with the letters “P.A.W.”, was well worn and molded to him, as did the PAW coveralls he wore. He quickly went through his efficient explanations and demonstrations, and before Becky realized it they had pulled off the back road they had wandered onto.
They passed a road block that looked like anything the city might erect, even with the city name painted across the scrapboard barricades. It was a trick Becky had learned recently that the CDC did when they really didn’t want anyone to know of their presence. They made it look like they weren’t even there, not until you were well within the borders, and by then you’d have had to pass some sort of security check. It all seemed very ‘Area 51’ to her, but she was becoming accustomed to it, a fact that scared her more than just a little.
They stopped in a small clearing next to a wide expanse of trees, and like back home, the trees seemed to go on forever. Mountains loomed up beyond the vast forest, and who knew what lived back there where homes and people hadn’t encroached and destroyed?
Fish and fowl. Amphibs by the thousands. Insects she was sure she had never seen before. But John had set them here for bigger catches. Cougar. Wolves. Bears.
And Peppersmith Animal Wrangling had a cage for anything they caught, trucks whose beds unfolded to act as trailers to carry it all back. With disturbing efficiency and a disconcerting lack of language, each of them was outfitted with a food pack and water bottle, a thinsulate blanket, and flare gun, and Becky was handed a rifle on a plain brown strap and several boxes of ammo - tranquilizers of many shapes and sizes. Becky slung the rifle over her shoulder in the lithe motion of someone who had done this a hundred times before, but unease gripped her that they expected her to size up and mentally weigh her prey before loading and taking it out. She was certain that if things went down she would shoot first, and second, and third, before stopping to check dosages and weights.
The yellow suits had been here before, leaving droppings of little Day-Glo flags, indicating areas where they had found reversals. These animals had been exposed, and they would all be, too. But they wouldn’t be able to stalk game in hazmat suits. Becky didn’t even know if the Peppersmith operation had been informed of what they were walking into.
Their quiet became infinitely reasonable as she was engulfed by the deep stillness of the forest broken only by the obnoxiously human sounds of her and John’s boots crunching through the undergrowth. The Peppersmiths moved like the animals they hunted: quietly, stealthily, in a pack.
They kept their rifles firmly in hand, and so Becky decided that she would follow their lead and, as silently as she could, unslung the firearm from her shoulder. They had walked for half an hour, John and her bringing up the rear, when the line abruptly stopped. Leon’s left hand was held up in a fist and he turned to look at John. With his two fingers in a V, he motioned for John to look beyond his left shoulder.
Looking back at all of them was a female cougar, showing her grace and stability across a fallen tree.
With hushed tones that didn’t seem to disturb the cat anywhere near as much as John staring at her, the wranglers divvied themselves up. Lincoln and Linda taking John off to try to follow the cougar hopefully to her cubs. Becky was motioned to trail behind Leon and his friend, whose embroidery read ‘Jess’.
They hooked wide around the cat and hiked further, leaving Becky to spend her time gazing around her, and making feeble attempts to categorize the birdcalls she heard. What a crazy place to think of the overzealous Marshall Harfield, but what a help he would be right now.
They asked her about three white-tailed deer, all of whom she refused to have captured. Even though it made the Peppersmiths shake their heads like kids told to clean their rooms. But the deer were juveniles. And Becky wasn’t going to take them, not while she was making the decisions.
Her eyes spotted several species of frogs and lizards. And why were all the deer juveniles? Had something happened to the adults?
The frogs looked fairly normal. But she stopped and went to get a closer look, twice plunging her hand into water that made the icy creek back home feel like a hot spring. The cold was enough that it altered her physiology, keeping her fingers from grasping at their normal speed, letting these ice-adapted frogs get away from her. Knowing what was happening to the neural connections and muscular responses in her hands only bothered her, it sure didn’t stop her from trying again and again until she finally came up with a salamander.
She counted all its toes and checked its eyes, before popping it into a plastic container she pulled from her backpack. She was pulling the pack back on when she spotted the two men staring at her.
It was Leon who opened his mouth and demanded a response. “What was that?”
“Salamander.” She looked at them through narrowed eyes. She was the doctor, she was supposed to be making the decisions about what to catch and they were looking at her like she had a cracked head.
“Well, I hope you learn a damn lot from that guy.” Jess had a southern drawl as long as the day, and a scowl to match.
Leon had his pack off and was pulling random things out of it, a spare pair of socks, a roll of thick blue tape. A wicked looking pair of scissors came from their own sheath on his leg.
He pointed them at her, scaring the wits out of her for a brief moment. Her mind flooded with horror movie scenes and she momentarily considered fleeing, back through the woods she didn’t know, chased by a madman with his scissors and an uncanny awareness of the wilderness.
“Your sleeve’s wet.”
She jerked her arm back. “You going to cut it off?”
“I should, but I suspect you like t
hat jacket.” He pulled one long tube sock, emblazoned with the letter P, and snipped the toe end off. He unceremoniously yanked her sleeve up, allowing her to feel for the first time the frigid water that had seeped in even though she had been certain she had pushed it far enough back. Yanking the dry sleeve of her turtleneck down, he pulled his glove off in one smooth motion with his teeth, and ran his hand over her arm in a reverent and nearly sexual way. She wanted her skin back. She wanted the crazy guy with the scissors and tranq gun to step beck. But she didn’t quite have it in her to look him in the eyes and say so.
He pulled the sock over her arm, over her sleeve, and began wrapping the tape around and around. Allowing only the letter P to peek out near her elbow. “What is this? Some kind of scarlet letter?” As soon as the words were out she regretted the reference, wondering if two men who’d spent their lives ‘rassling ‘gators’ would have heard of Hester Prynne.
“No,” He cocked a look that was almost a smile. “This is a P, not an A. Your arm is now waterproof and will not freeze from where you dipped your sleeve in the pond. And maybe your jacket will dry out.” He pulled the sleeve down over the tape, where it could no longer chill her wrist, nor soak into any of her other clothing. She turned her hand over, thinking it looked a bit odd, but was fairly ingenious.
“Thank you.” It was the least she could say to a man she had considered a possible serial killer just a few moments before.
Without a word, he slipped the items back into their various sheaths and pockets, and pulled his pack on even as he started walking away. Becky followed, flexing her hand to re-warm the muscles, grateful that the sleeve wasn’t wet against her wrist. Cataloging everything she saw, she wished that she had Melanie’s memory, and wished Mel could be here now to see these things.
It was then that she noticed Leon and Jess looking at each other and making faces even as she felt the odd odor trickle past her senses. She knew it was familiar, but not like this. Consciously keeping her voice low she asked without slowing her pace, “What is that?”
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