Deep Down (Sam Stone Book 1) by Janean Worth Read Free Book Online Page B

calmer, although that could have been due to the fact that Stone’s breathing was now back to normal and one hundred percent wheeze-free.  Or maybe it was because he’d taken her hand in his while her eyes were closed and was now squeezing her fingers reassuringly.
    Inside the calmness, she realized that this pressure in her lungs was different.  It was not an asthmatic reaction, it was simply that the air felt heavier.  Thicker.  Denser somehow. 
    “Do you feel that?” she whispered, looking at Debbie for an answer.
    Debbie nodded slowly.  Yes.
    Alice’s eyes had grown even larger in her pale face. “The air feels strange,” she whispered.
    Jenny was looking at Alice when the girl’s pupils constricted quickly, the black center growing so small as to be barely visible.  Alice began to cough.
    For a moment, Jenny just stared.  Then she leapt from her chair and moved to Alice’s side.  The girl, who was sitting right beside Stone, progressed quickly into gasps for air.  It only took a moment for Jenny to wrench the inhaler from her pocket, remove the cap and shake it, but in that short time, Alice’s face had gone chalk white and her lips had begun to loose natural color.  The girl’s eyes looked odd, almost alien with their nearly absent pupil, as they stared up at Jenny.   She tipped Alice’s head back and administered a shot of the inhaler, hoping that the girl could inhale the atomized medication into her own lungs and would not need assistance as Stone had.
    Alice gasped and wheezed, straining with effort, and Jenny leaned the girl back in her chair so that she didn’t fall to the floor.  Beside her, Stone put a large hand upon Alice’s shoulder to keep her from sliding out of the chair.
    After several tense moments, with Alice wheezing and gurgling and gasping loudly, she was able to gulp in a breath of air.  Seconds later, her pupils expanded back to a more normal size.
    Jenny shared a meaningful look with Stone, knowing that he’d seen the effect too.
    As Alice drew in another deep breath, a man several tables away stood up hastily, knocking his chair back so that it screeched upon the floor. 
    “What in the hell is going on here? Three people at that table have had coughing fits in the last few minutes.  Is there an illness that we should all…“
    The man was interrupted by an eardrum-piercing scream.
    The shout broke off suddenly and then the skinny kid who’d been playing with the bacteria’s protective case earlier stood up from his place several tables over and screamed again.  The boy screamed loud and long this time, his voice undulating and breaking several times with the force of his shout.  Even from her position behind Alice’s chair, Jenny could see the boy’s throat straining as he screamed and screamed.
    Goosebumps blossomed along Jenny’s arms and scrambled over the sensitive skin at her nape as the unnatural sound of the boy’s scream went on and on and on.  The noise echoed through the cavern and out into the tunnels, reverberating back in undulating waves of sound that crashed together, creating a conglomeration of shouts, all reverberating wildly around the enclosed space.
    Jenny felt the hair at the back of her neck stand to attention.  Something was very, very wrong.  The boy seemed to be screaming for no reason at all.  There had been no trigger to his outburst, no inciting incident, yet Jenny knew that no one screamed with such ferocity without a reason.  Did they?
    Seconds later, as the boy still screamed, Gilbert, Debbie, Cheryl and Paul all began to cough violently.  

Chapter Eight
    Jenny still had the inhaler held in hand, so she quickly moved from person to person around their table, administering a shot from the inhaler to each, trying to ignore the chaos that had erupted across the room around the screaming boy.
    The chaos was hard to ignore.  People were leaping to their feet, chairs screeching noisily across the saltcrete, the