“Aaaaagggh!”
He barely registered that it was his own voice through the haze. Even though he didn’t move it again, his shoulder punished him with a throbbing sear that onset with every heartbeat. He opened his eyes even as he chewed the inside of his lip in an effort to create a controllable pain that would overshadow the uncontrollable one.
Finally his vision settled on the man in front of him. Forcing his eyes to follow the clean lines of the scrubs, he looked up into Jordan Abellard’s too-blue eyes.
He screamed again. And scrambled for the head of the bed, hoping to get away from the face he had seen cold on the slab just that morning. But again his shoulder punished him with a tearing feeling, followed by a sharp burn that permeated the whole area.
David would have let out another yell, but as the doctor leaned closer David pushed with his legs, and was rewarded by the hot certainty that the limb had been sawed off and left open about halfway down his calf. Something stabbed, swordlike, through his hip up into his abdomen.
His left arm held. His left leg didn’t feel like it had been severed, and so he used those to right himself. Holding one hand in front of him, he warded off the dead hands reaching toward him. “Back off, you son of a bitch!”
Finally he was able to feel his throat, and it too was mad at him. Sandpaper rubbed on every exposed surface, creating an intense, raw, seeping pain that clouded his vision further.
“It’s me, Dr. Abellard.” The head tilted, the chocolate hair sliding and falling a little too long, as the eyes focused on his face.
“No shit. Get back.” He held his palm out, as though the sight of the soft side of a hand would keep anything at bay besides a gnat.
But the Jordan-thing did as it was told.
“David?”
It was a kind, soothing voice. But that was all it said.
David started running at the mouth. Although he wasn’t sure why. “You’re dead! I saw you this morning dead- . . cold- . . at the coroner’s.”
“Huh?”
It wasn’t Jordan. Jordan was more eloquent than that. Every bad zombie movie he had ever seen flashed through his brain. Becky was complaining about extinct species. The techs and doctors droned about all the deaths. There was no reason that the walking dead couldn’t be a part of all this.
The Jordan-thing stared back at him; its mouth moved asking something about the morgue. But David ignored it. He was frowning at his arm, and a horror worse than the dead man standing and talking to him poured over him. The pain that had receded to a dull rhythmic ache was in his right arm. At the shoulder. The shoulder that was in a blue standard issue immobility sling. With the Velcro strap around his chest. Just where he had remembered it. “My shoulder was dislocated?”
“Yes.” Jordan nodded.
“When I fell down the last flight of stairs?”
“Yes.” His expression clearly telling that he thought David might have injured his brain in the fall as well.
“But I healed. . . . my leg healed.” Again the words stumbled out of his mouth, along with some weird belief that if he just explained, things would right themselves. “I was walking. Becky took us to the coroner’s. Jillian can show you the x-rays. I-” He wasn’t making any sense and he knew it.
Jordan pulled up a chair and a notebook, before pulling a sleek, expensive pen from the unassuming pocket stitched on the front of his scrubs. “I’m going to ask a few questions and take some notes, okay?”
David gritted his teeth and remembered from two days ago. “Can I have a Percocet?”
Jordan nodded, but his words didn’t quite match. “When we finish, okay?”
Again his teeth ground - one of the few body parts he could work without instantaneous punishment in the form of rending pain.
Jordan dove into the thick of it. “I’m dead?”
“Well, you don’t look very dead.” He could feel the sarcasm flowing through his veins. “You got a twin?”
He shook his head. Looking far too like Jordan for David’s stomach to stop clenching. “Well, there’s a body at the morgue that had your name on the toe-tag, and your name on the ‘deceased’ list. And from the looks of it, I can see why they got you confused. You should check into having a brother you don’t know about.”
Jordan nodded.
“When did you see it?”
“This morning. Maybe eleven a.m.” It felt like an interrogation, but he let the doc go. The sooner this crap was over, the sooner he got his Percocet.
“Who was there with you?”
“Jillian Brookwood, Dr. Rebecca Sorenson, and the coroner, Dr. Whitfield, Whitson, something.” He stated each name clearly for the record, mentally pushing back the feeling of having his hip ripped open.
“Becky’s dead.” Jordan leaned forward trying to see how David would react.
Was this one of those horrid mental studies? “Hey doc, I thought they banned this type of psychological research years ago.”
“What are you talking about?”
David shook his head. “You know, where you tell people their family is dead just to see how they react . . . this ain’t right.”
Jordan breathed deep and shook his head. “I’ll explain it all as soon as I can, but Jillian’s telling us some pretty weird tales, and she says you’ll corroborate them. She ran to get me when she saw you coming around.”
Jillian! She would get him Percocet. “Bring the doc around then.”
“I can’t. Not until we’re finished.”
Anger burst through him, washing past in a hot rush. “I’m in pain here. While you pussyfoot around. And I don’t even know why the hell I’m re-injured. So get the hell on with it.”
“Why don’t you believe Becky Sorenson is dead?”
“Because I was just with her.” He looked at his watch. The time and date matched. “I was in the car. My black Mercedes I bought this afternoon. I fell asleep. About twenty minutes ago maybe.”
“You saw her twenty minutes ago?” Jordan leaned forward, his face a mask of incredulousness.
“That’s what I just said.” He forced his breathing to stay steady. Percocet was coming. Just ignore the pain and the fact that you are at the mercy of this sadistic doctor. He almost admired Jordan for having the balls to hold him hostage in his bed.
“And Jillian was there?”
“No. She passed out when she saw your body at the morgue. Screamed like a banshee and dropped like a stone. She went comatose. Becky and I brought her back. One of the docs had checked her out and said her heart rate was low and her breathing shallow.” He watched while Abellard’s face gave away everything he felt for the pretty little brunette. Whether he admitted it to himself or not, it was there in plain writing for all the rest of the world to read. But David kept talking. “They hooked her up to monitors and watched her. Becky and I went out to gather some data.”
“You left her?”
“I wasn’t going to sit around and watch her not move. Not much I can do to help anyway.” Yup, Abellard was in a bad way.
“You walked?” He motioned with his pretty pen to all the breaks that would clearly prevent any of David’s story. David ate a sigh. None of it made sense. And if Jillian was awake then where was she anyway?
“I healed. No marks on the x-rays that there ever was a break on any of the bones. Hip in the socket, girdle unfractured. I don’t know what this is about,” He gestured to all the casting and bindings he wore, “but it hurts like a mother-fucker.”
Jordan muttered under his breath. David heard the words son of a bitch, but it was hard to believe that phrase had come from Jordan’s mouth. David knew he must have simply heard the words he would have said. Abellard stood and stretched, long lean lines that made David ache with jealousy and wonder where the hell his good health had escaped to.
“I’ll send Jillian in with that Percocet. You can talk to her.”
He straightened where he sat, propped against the pillows, his hip burned, reminding him not to ben
d. His arm twitched, and his leg sent pulses of pain to every part of him. He ignored it. “When did Jillian wake up?”
“As of about noon.”
“But she was still under when Becky and I left this evening, around six.”
Jordan nodded, “She’ll explain. She was awake here.”
Jordan walked calmly from the tent, making certain he was well beyond the flap before he bent over and put his hands on his knees, finally allowing himself the deep gulping breaths that his body had been fighting for. Oxygen seeped into his system like a drug, reassuring him about everything in the world except the fact that Jillian had been right.
Whatever the hell she had seen, truth or not, David corroborated it.
She had seen him start to wake up, and bolted from his tent, fetching Jordan. Telling him to ask all his questions, her eyes gleaming with the promise of vindication.
Well, she had it.
Jordan had checked the EEG readings several times and found the only conclusive thing he could have found. David showed no markers of dreams at all - which meant that the creepy explanation that he and Jillian had shared a dream wasn’t going to fly. Instead they had as conclusive of evidence as they would ever find that the even creepier explanation Jillian had proposed would hold.
The toes of small, very familiar sneakers entered his line of sight, and he fought to stand upright and look less shaken than he felt. Jillian’s voice reached him before his eyes made it to her face. “It all matches.”
She didn’t ask. She didn’t have to. Jordan knew it was obvious from how he was reeling from his interview with David. But he forced himself to stand erect and look her in the eyes. “He needs Percocet. Then come back and talk to me, please.” He heard the begging quality in his tone. Recognized that it was in response to the instant her eyes had fled elsewhere worrying about David.
“He doesn’t even know why he’s in casts; why he isn’t healed.” It was a statement, in a faraway voice, deep concern about the only patient he hadn’t seen Jillian treat as a scientific subject. He told himself the rolling in his gut was from the fact that David’s story had smacked him around and upended his world.
Jillian scampered off, fetching meds for David and disappearing into the tent.
She had woken up on the other side, wherever the hell that was. And so had David. He had talked to Becky, less than an hour ago. He had chatted with Lucy Whitman’s dad long after the man had died.
Jordan started. For a moment he didn’t care about Jillian and David. Was his mother there? Eddie? Was it just the land of the dead? Had it always existed and Jillian and David had simply been thrown there by the reversal? His breathing picked up pace again and he sprinted into the tent, to ask her.
But he pulled up short when he saw her standing beside the bed. Talking. Telling David about the two parts, how they were passing back and forth. Jordan held himself in tight check waiting for a spot to interrupt, until Jillian shifted revealing her hand held softly in David’s. His voice found itself, putting the setting to rights. He had no claim, and wondered where the hell all this was popping out from. He had sat across a desk from her, finding her cold and impersonal. And now . . . well, intense attraction was a normal outcome to a shared traumatic stress.
Armed with this explanation, his brain worked again, and he pushed out the words. “Was it just a place that has always existed? Were other people there? Grandparents who died a long time ago?”
He shook his head in frustration, wondering how to explain what he meant. But Jillian gave him a sympathetic ‘no’, needing no further background, knowing instantly what he was trying to ask. “There were still a whole slew of people who actually died in the reversal. Remember, Leon isn’t anywhere. I didn’t find any evidence of anyone’s long departed ancestors, and no one seemed to think they were in heaven, which I’m sure would have come to mind if suddenly all your dead relatives were around.”
Jordan nodded. And admitted to himself what he had only briefly hoped: his mother wasn’t there.
Until that moment, he had simply accepted her loss. That a long round with cancer slowly ate her. That it had destroyed his father as well, even though it didn’t kill him. Only in the glimmer of chance did he realize how much he missed her. But he re-packaged it into its small neat box and shoved it back into the recesses of his brain.
Jordan stepped out of the tent, knowing Jillian would follow, soon. And steeling himself to the reality of it all: that Jillian had wandered across unbreachable barriers and hadn’t even known it.
With far more force than necessary, startling Landerly from his now almost permanent spot in the straight chair, he shoved his way into the records tent. Jordan made a note to get a recliner. He thought he’d seen one in the faculty lounge. Landerly’s brows went up, silently asking what Jordan knew was coming.
He nodded. “It all matches. I-” He shrugged. “I guess it’s all correct. Hers is now the only theory that makes sense.”
“What about all the dead? People deceased from a long time ago?”
That creeped him out - the fact that it was now his brain working like Landerly’s. “I already asked. And no.”
Jillian came into the tent behind him, her sneakers so soft on the now worn grass that she didn’t make a sound, but he felt the cool night air follow her, and he smelled her. “So, you two believe me now.”
Both men turned to face her and nodded. Jordan knew what was coming next.
“There’s not much option is there?”
The two men simply stared at her.
Jillian knew.
They wanted to believe she was crazy. That she simply believed it was true.
But it was.
“I’m right aren’t I?” For some feminine reason, it wasn’t enough to feel vindicated. They would actually have to say the words. Their acceptance meant everything.
Jordan looked at her through suddenly narrowed eyes. “Until we come up with a better explanation.”
She felt her mouth form into a shocked ‘o’. He would just keep looking until he found a way to discredit her. “What better explanation is there?”
“Well, maybe this one: you and David share a psychosis, nothing more.”
“Psychosis!?” She could have thrown something at him, and wished she had something solid and heavy at hand. Something better than the stethoscope she had casually tossed around her neck upon standing upright. If her boss hadn’t been watching, she just might have slugged him, then slugged him again for being right.
It was possible. The world didn’t turn on her wishes.
She sniffed in and tried to put the pieces of a calm expression back into place. To let her clenched lips relax. It was much harder than it ought to be.
“Children?” Landerly’s condescension made it happen much faster than her will did.
She looked over and saw that Jordan, too, had been distracted from their fight.
Dr. Landerly held up his cell phone, “I have a Doctor Melanie Sorenson on the line. . .”
Jillian felt her brows pull together. But it was Jordan who filled in the blanks. “That’s Becky’s sister’s name, but I thought she was a child . . .”
Landerly smiled. “That explains a lot.” He turned back to the conversation he had muted with a well placed thumb. “Yes, Dr. Sorenson, what do you have for us?”
While they stood there, hovering, he had a conversation with the small girl. Jillian could make out a high-pitched but well-modulated voice because Landerly had his volume up so loud. “notebooks, huh? . . . Becky’s field notes. . . . Thank you. We’ll come and get them.”
In a few more sentences he signed off and looked at the two of them. “You guys get a fetch job. I want those notebooks.”
Jillian didn’t object, but she was curious, “How did she get your cell number? No one has that.”
Landerly grinned. “I think she talked her way through.”
“She’s seven!” Jordan looked incredulous.
Landerly laughed. �
��We’ll have to keep her in the CDC’s sights. . . . Now go get a map and get out to Dr. Sorenson’s house.”
Jillian turned to go, her jacket still around her even in the warm tent, she really just hadn’t thought to take it off. Jordan’s hand on her shoulder stilled her, but it was Landerly he spoke to. “Jillian’s not going.”
Anger exploded through her in a wash. “Excuse me!?”
Still he didn’t face her, simply made his case to the man sitting and watching with a bemused expression. “What if she slides back under?”
“I won’t!”
When his eyes found hers, dark lights burned in his gaze. “You don’t seem to have any control over it.”
“I’m up and around!”
“Yeah, and we thought that last time, too!” His fingers gripped her arm, in that one sure way letting her know she wasn’t calling the shots here.
“Well, you could slip back under at any time, too, you know.”
“No! I’ve been out here doing research. There doesn’t seem to be anyone else in the world that slipped back under. No other fantastical tales of the ‘other side’. Just you and David.”
“Fantastical!” He was still trying to undermine her. Bastard.
“She can go.” Landerly’s cool calm rode over them, radiated out from his seated position, where he clearly still commanded the respect he was due.
“But-”
Jillian resisted the urge to stick out her tongue when he cut Jordan off. “You’ll be with her. She’ll be fine even if she does go back under.” With that said, he turned his attention away.
Jillian knew where her bread was buttered, and she started off toward the operations tent.
Jordan didn’t follow her, just seemed inclined to stay behind and stew, so she let him. Five minutes later she emerged from the tent with the keys and quick printed map, thinking she’d just go by herself, until Jordan turned the corner and smacked into her. “Ready?”
His voice was tight and clipped, and he yanked the keys from her fingers even as he asked. “I don’t trust you to drive. You might slip away and kill us both.”
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