Resonance

The shift is coming—soon. Dr. David Carter knows it. However, he is a geologist, so “soon” to him means anywhere from tomorrow to one thousand years from now. People are dying. Doctors Jordan Abellard and Jillian Brookwood are standing at the edge o

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Resonance

Copyright © 2007 by Griffyn Ink All rights reserved No part of this document may be used or reproduced in an manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews FIRST EDITION

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ey SHIN TH

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Resonance

by

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For Ek

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Human life is important only to humans — author unknown

Man’s greatest triumphs stand no chance against the whims of nature

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Prologue

Twelve years ago, airline pilots had to recalibrate their compasses This was because the exact location of the magnetic poles had drifted, and it was a first in aviation history Six years ago the poles had drifted even further, causing the need to again reset the compasses They recalibrated

again three years ago, then two, then one, and are currently realigning every three months

Approximately 200 million years ago map north was magnetic south But ten million years later, the poles switched places They’ve traded again approximately every sixty million years, the last of which was sixty-five million years ago

It is theorized that the dinosaurs achieved such great size due to the slightly larger magnetic field of their time Today some living things - like homing pigeons and honeybees - are highly dependent on the earth’s field Even those creatures that don’t seem to notice it are in jeopardy if it changes, since we don’t know how they use their internal magnetics, only that they have them

Like us

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Chapter 1

S tupid paleontologists, he thought to himself Didn’t know how to grid a dig properly Morons What had he been thinking? Sharing a site with the dino boys? And now he had chunks of strata strapped to his waist, each meticulously labeled in the dino boys’ lazy scrawl Each clearly mislabeled for direction or depth of find They had acted like they understood the dip and the horizontal But the markings were clearly honked up Yet, some of the rocks looked right Which was the ultimate insult David couldn’t even count on them to be wrong

Maybe they were fucking with him, he sighed into the deep night, that was a sincere possibility There was nothing like envy laced with continual disagreement to drive a wedge of dislike between two people Those two people being him and anyone else on the dig Your choice, as it was pretty much unanimous

The paleo guys were all out for drinks and a discussion of the day’s successes There was that one big heap of bones, and oh yeah, that other big heap of bones, then there were the bone chips

Using the winch and harness system they had set up, David lowered himself down the incline, tiptoeing and letting out line as he went Not because he couldn’t have scrambled his way down - he could have, the slope was a just walkable 45 degrees - but, in order to go on foot, he would have to dig in with his toes to get purchase and the dig would have been forfeit Couldn’t have that At least he and the dino boys agreed on this one thing

The other thing they had agreed to was not to hang out in the dig alone That, of course, made sense No one wanted to be the one left at the base of the site with a broken leg while everyone else ate lunch, or worse yet stayed out all night drinking And no one wanted to be the one who mucked up the site, with no one around to say what went where

But just because he had agreed fo it didn’t mean that he agreed with it And, well, 1f David was being honest, they had already ruined the site, what with all the mislabeling and everything Therefore the only thing he was risking was his own night out under the big black sky with a few broken bones So he slowly kept letting out the line, getting a little further down the slope each minute He didn’t go too fast, for God’s sake he wasn’t stupid, and the pitch here was a bit on the sharp side

His foot hit the first grid line A thin white string wound round a short post hammered into the ground denoting the edge of the official dig area David swore a few times under his breath, sure that he had scuffed a few loose pieces of rock into the dig And that would earn him nothing but verbal and social hell come tomorrow morning He decided to take it all a little more carefully Besides now he was far enough down the backside of the slope that he wouldn’t be spotted The camp was on the other side of the crest where it wouldn’t interfere with the dig, and no party- poopers making their way back early would see his beam as long as it was a small one And that meant no bright headlamps So he pulled the flashlight free, slipping it from the carabineer on his belt with a flick of his wrist

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Pulling one zipper bag from its carabineer at his waist he tacked his line and used both hands to pull the rock from its baggie Tilting his head, with the small Maglight firmly between his teeth, he read off the coordinates, then picked up the line David let himself down a few more feet and high-step ped to the right about fifteen yards, watching carefully for the meter lines that ran the grid They had originally been only a few inches off the surface, but as this dig had progressed they had altered the smooth plane to extremely uneven, leaving the ground anywhere from just a few inches to just over a foot below the grid lines The perfect heights for getting an ankle tangled and then bashing into the slope of the dig And, oh yeah, breaking said ankle and mucking up said dig while you did it

He moved slowly and carefully, each footstep set methodically into the loose ground, so as not to grind or scour any of the precious soil or bone chips out of place And lifted high with the same care Right foot right, find footing, left foot follow, set down carefully

It seemed to take an eternity to get to the other side of the fifteen yard grid to the labeled home of his rock As he landed, finally, in his square, he tacked the guide line again, allowing his weight to sit back against the taut rope With the light in one hand he held up the baby rock and turned it over

It was sedimentary, full of fossilized organic matter and exactly what anyone would expect of a layer from this location His eyes perused all of this, reading it the way you would read a newspaper, for the whole story and never one letter at a time

This piece had clearly belonged to an ancient streambed From what the dino boys were finding, the water had nourished a whole bunch of critters up until the very last moment What caused that last moment was David’s job

He liked the rocks, and it was natural to assume that he had gotten into this profession

because of his father The layers reminded him of his Dad a lot: cold, hard, and unreadable to all but

the most trained of observers David was an expert reader of both Although, in his estimate, the rock was always easier to get a bead on at first and easier to get along with Also, the rock always gave up the whole story eventually

The streambed and the sediment was ABCs What David was reading as he rotated his chunk of old earth and his flashlight was the tiny shiny chips in his piece Now they were talking And they said that the Paleo boys were retarded

Shaking his head, he used the letter and number code on the tape to line the rock up with the direction and pitch it was supposed to have come from Letting a little more slack into the line, he leaned down and placed the rock into the spot it supposedly called home for eons, until yesterday

David’s head tilted His Maglight circled, and he studied the lay of the strata in the bed and the rock It looked a little too damn good Not to mention the remaining side of the bed from which the piece he held had been chipped The two sides fit together like a puzzle piece

Shrugging, David slipped the rock back into its baggie and pulled the permanent marker from his back pocket He checked the upper right side of the label and clipped it back to his pants just as his stomach let a loud growl His head perked, just as it had when he was a boy afraid of getting caught But no one appeared to have heard Hell, no one appeared to be within fifty miles of the site

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So he pulled the next rock from its zipper pouch and carefully began making his way to

another grid square Lift foot, set foot, lift other foot, set foot

Four hours later he hadn’t tripped at all, which was a miracle since he was silently swearing a blue streak The dino boys hadn’t mislabeled a single rock, which only made him more furious Hell, you couldn’t count on them for anything

And if the rocks were all aligned right, then the rest was all aligned wrong An eddy in the stream could explain one spot, maybe even a few, but not the consistency of the whole dig

A bright light shone into his eyes, blinding him more easily than the dark of night ever had “Hey, pretty boy!” It was Greer David had always figured that ‘pretty boy’ was the best Greer could come up with since he wasn’t one much inclined to the use of the more apt asshole “You done checking out our grid markings? You didn’t break any bones did you?!”

“No, Fuckwad, I didn’t.” David held his hand up in front of his face He was going to catch hell for this He knew it now

“That’s too bad.” Greer directed his five-billion megawatt stadium light at the ground and slowly David’s sight came back He started climbing the slope cautiously and methodically, as Greer taunted him all the way “Well, seems we disappointed you didn’t we? You thought we had mislabeled all your stones.”

“They’re not stones.” David growled as he climbed

“Too bad Now you're going to have to do some real geology work Not just come out and wave your hand like you always do and spout off what’s just so obvious that the rest of us must be blind.” “Congratulations, Greer You are right on so many counts My rocks were in fact labeled correctly-” “How many of them?” Greer taunted “All of them.” “Uh huh.” “And I do in fact have little bit of work to do when I get back to the tent-” He stopped climbing

Greer spotlighted him again It would have blinded him, but he wasn’t looking in front of him, just staring into the space ahead If it meant what he thought it meant well,

“What is it David?”

“T want everyone off the site tomorrow Just you and me I need to check all other possibilities.”

“Everyone off the dig tomorrow!? Jesus, David, do you know what you’re asking? Is your Daddy gonna pay our salaries?”

“No, but the royalties off my paper will Dammit, Greer, clear the site tomorrow.”

If it was what he thought it was well, he might just prove that the David Carter II geology center had been worth its money

God, what was it that made her feel like such a fool? All that school, all that ‘prestige’, and yet she stood there like a moron Eyes wide, ‘yes’ ‘yes’ monosyllabic answers to each question The horrible, lost feeling of being in an unfamiliar institution

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Jillian nodded “Yes.” There it was again The idiocy

The guy beside her - Jared? Jeff? Jacob? - was cool and only raised his eyebrows to the question

Dr Landerly was hunched over his desk and had whitish hair that stuck out in about fifty different directions and looked as though it hadn’t made friends with a brush in a lifetime or so He had male pattern balding and probably arthritis, judging by the way he held his pen Whether he didn’t look at them because of pain or out of sheer rudeness was anybody’s guess “You two turned in all your documentation and fingerprinting crap down in HR?”

Jake ? flicked the new badges hanging from their pristine white jackets, “Yup, hence the ten a.m arrival.”

“Ready for the tour?”

At the sound of yet another one word answer, he finally looked up at them For a moment he simply looked them both up and down, taking their measure Jillian did the first proactive deed of her day and sized him up too Landerly’s face reminded her of a grandfather, not her own, but that old man look, crossed with a little mad scientist With his focus turned on them, she felt the same intensity that the papers he was marking on must have felt just minutes before She was surprised the pages hadn’t burst into flame before she and what’s-his-name walked in and pulled a little of the good doctor’s attention from them

“Well, you must be Jillian Brookwood, and you must be Jordan Abellard.” Jordan! That was it

Landerly tapped his forehead, “Deductive reasoning.” And despite the insanely poor joke, she began to like him

He simply turned and began walking down the hallway, talking as he went and expecting them to keep pace behind them He never checked “This is your office.” He pointed to his left into an open door and what could only be called a large cubby He was already walking away Jillian had to nearly run to catch up with him, already midsentence

“- that whole half of the building is I.D That part you’ll only go in on an ‘as needed’ basis Which basically means never Unless you get promoted, or we decide we don’t need you or don’t like you but can’t think of a better way to get rid of you.”

For the first time Jordan turned to her, his eyebrows raised until she shrugged in return Dr Landerly’s voice trailed off as her focus slipped to the signs on the wall Every etched plate had the tiny inscription on the top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention But Landerly was old- school and still referred to it as the CDC

Not ten minutes later Jillian realized that they had walked a short circle, and Jordan wasn’t missing that fact either “That’s it?”

“Sure.” Landerly fixed them with another stare “If you want to see the Infectious Disease side, you can go get your own tour I told you, you’re peons.”

“T’m a-” Jordan stopped himself “We’re physicians.”

“Yes, and you’re underlings And you’re at the CDC On my team you’ll be spending a lot of time drawing blood and writing reports.”

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