by Bryan, JL
Behind her, more than two hundred plague-infested bodies littered the square.
***
Jenny limped through the woods. Her left leg, and everything on her left side below the gunshot wound, had turned stiff and hard. She stumbled over a thick tree root and caught herself on a trunk.
Root and branch, she thought. That’s what Dr. Goodling had said. Rip out the evil, root and branch. Jenny had hacked away all the branches. There was still the root to deal with.
Jenny was past tired, past exhausted, into delusional hallucination territory. She’d turned it up and poured it out, and now there was nothing left. Almost nothing. She would push it out one more time, for Seth, even if it killed her.
She urged herself forward. She climbed over a barbed wire fence and found herself in a cow pasture. She stayed very wide of the slumbering herd.
She eventually emerged into Ashleigh’s subdivision. She limped down the middle of the street, passing through the stark white circles under the streetlamps. Sweat, blood and gore matted her hair into clumps and coated her from her face to her feet. Her skin was turning gray. Her ribs were unusually prominent, her stomach sunken, as if she’d burned up all the fat in her body, and some of the muscle, too. She looked like a walking corpse, and she felt like one. It didn’t matter. She didn’t need to last much longer.
There were extra cars parked in front of the Goodling house. Jenny recognized Neesha’s Acura, Darcy Metcalf’s old Honda Civic, Brenda Purcell’s rusty Nissan truck, among others.
Jenny limped up the driveway, up the cobblestone walkway, up the stairs to Ashleigh’s front door. The door was locked, so Jenny made a fist and bashed it through the colored-glass window, oblivious to any new pain. She found the deadbolt knob and turned it. Then she opened the door.
In the foyer, Ashleigh’s Welsh Corgi made a silent barking motion, then ran and hid her head under the couch in the front parlor. Jenny ignored her and headed upstairs. Ashleigh would be up there. Jenny could sense her. She was drawn to Ashleigh’s energy like a homing beacon. She could smell Ashleigh’s skin and jasmine perfume in the air.
In the upstairs hall, three pregnant sophomores stood by an open, lighted door, whispering to each other. They fell silent at the sight of Jenny.
Jenny approached them. Her dark hair was smeared down into her face. Open sores dripped blood and black fluid all over her body. The girls made no move to stop Jenny from walking into the open door beside them, into Ashleigh’s room.
The pregnant girls from school had crammed into Ashleigh’s room, wall to wall, each girl very visibly pregnant as they entered their third trimester. More girls were packed into the little sitting room off Ashleigh’s bedroom, and others had crowded into her bathroom. There was nowhere to walk, just a solid mass of pregnant girls, and the air was stifling and hot.
Ashleigh sat on her bed, on the far side of the room from where Jenny stood. More pregnant girls sat around her, like Darcy Metcalf and senior cheerleaders Alison Newton and Ronella Jones, who’d been part of the original abstinence campaign, and were now the furthest along in their pregnancies. The closet girls would be conducting Ashleigh-energy from her out into the rest of the dense crowd, skin to skin. Jenny could sense that energy rippling outward from the bed.
Ashleigh was still in her slip. Her gray eyes peered at Jenny through the curtain of filthy blond hair that concealed her face. She gave a cold, deep laugh when Jenny stepped into the room, nothing Jenny had ever heard from her before.
“Oh, little Jenny Pox,” Ashleigh said. “I didn’t think you’d make it.”
“I’d walk any distance to find you, Ashleigh.”
Ashleigh laughed again. “You look like a skeleton, Jenny Pox. Except there. There, you look like raw hamburger.” She pointed at the chunk of missing flesh on Jenny’s left side, and some of the girls close to Ashleigh giggled.
Jenny held out an empty hand. New blisters bloomed and popped on her palm and fingertips, seeping sticky black fluid.
“Come on, Ashleigh,” Jenny said. “Come to me. We belong together.”
“Why don’t you come to me?” Ashleigh asked. “Do you want to touch me bad enough to kill these girls? And their babies?”
Jenny looked around the room. There was no way to Ashleigh without touching dozens of girls, and Jenny was hardly wearing any clothes.
“Oh, Jenny,” Ashleigh sighed. “How long can you stand there? It looks to me like you’ll fall down and die just about any time. What a mess. I mean, who would clean it up, right? Who’d want to touch it?”
“I can wait,” Jenny said.
Ashleigh gave her cold laugh. She leaned forward and spoke in a stage whisper, her filthy blond locks puffing out around her mouth.
“Want to know a secret, Jenny Pox?” she asked. “Just between you, me, and the famous sluts of Fallen Oak High?” None of the girls took offense. They were all doped on Ashleigh-love.
“What is it?” Jenny asked.
“Look at me.” Ashleigh tucked her hair behind her ears. Her left cheek looked mangled, and Ashleigh cleaned it off with a Handi-Wipe. Then she brushed her fingers across it. “Do you see that, Jenny Pox? Look close. Look at my scars.”
Jenny looked. She could see four sunken, pockmarked streaks down Ashleigh’s cheek.
“That’s you,” Ashleigh said. “Your fingernails, from first grade. The scars didn’t heal, you bitch. Do you have any idea how early I have to get up, how much concealer I have to wear, just to make my face look decent? Did you know you’re the first thing I think about every morning, little Jenny? Can you see what you’ve done to me? You filled me up with hate. If I seem wicked to you, it’s because you made me that way, Jenny Pox.”
Jenny thought this over for a minute.
“No,” Jenny said. “You were already a bitch in first grade.”
Ashleigh hissed. Then she lifted her head and cocked it a little, hearing something. Jenny listened. Footsteps crossed the foyer to the stairs.
“Who is that?” Ashleigh asked Darcy Metcalf. Darcy shrugged.
“It’s not your parents,” Jenny said. “I killed both of them.”
“You whore!” Ashleigh snapped.
“They tried to kill me first,” Jenny said. “Fair’s fair.”
“Well,” Ashleigh sighed. “At least I won’t have to beg Daddy for his money anymore. So glad I didn’t let them have any more little brats.”
Jenny edged further into the room as the footsteps approached. Cassie burst into the room, then stopped when she saw all the girls blocking her way.
“Ashleigh!” Cassie screamed. “Jenny Mittens is flipping out! We have to get out of town…” Then her gaze fell on Jenny, less than a foot away from her, and she gasped.
Jenny gave her an apologetic smile, while Jenny’s hand darted out and seized Cassie’s bare upper arm. Cassie screamed, but Jenny held the pox back this time, turning it down as far as she could, to a bare trickle. White lesions cropped up on Cassie’s arm on either side of where Jenny gripped it. More appeared slowly, like the footprints of a small invisible tortoise, creeping down toward her elbow, up toward her shoulder. Cassie shouted and tried to break free, but Jenny held on tight.
“Come on, Ashleigh,” Jenny said. “It’s Cassie. Your best friend. Come to me and I’ll let her go. Or stay there and watch her die.”
Ashleigh looked agitated, baring her teeth, but she didn’t move.
“Ashleigh, please!” Cassie begged. White lesions appeared on her neck.
“I’m not very good at holding it back,” Jenny said. “It wants to spread, Ashleigh.”
The lesions appeared faster, popping up on Cassie’s lips and cheeks. One swelled on her eyelid and forced it closed. Cassie’s stomach heaved, and thick spittle bubbled at her lips.
“Look, everyone,” Jenny said. “Ashleigh’s best friend in the world, and Ashleigh won’t help her. Ashleigh won’t protect you, either. She can’t protect you. She can only use you.”
There was whisp
ering around the edge of the room, among the girls furthest from Ashleigh, probably getting the weakest doses of her power.
“Last chance, Ashleigh,” Jenny said. “You can save her. Just come here.”
“Fuck you,” Ashleigh spat back. Her voice was dark and husky. “I can get another one of those.”
“Ashleigh!” Cassie wailed, and Jenny pushed. All the lesions on Cassie’s body ruptured and oozed black fluid. Blood ran from Cassie’s nostril, and her red hair began to slide and fall from her head. Spasms jerked through her body, and Jenny released her just before she crashed into a pregnant freshman girl. The pregnant girl shrieked and backed up a few inches, but couldn’t go any further.
Cassie crumpled to the floor, her nerves whipping her body one way, then the other. She vomited black liquid down her chin, over her dress, and onto Ashleigh’s carpet, and then she died.
“How dare you!” Ashleigh snapped. “She was mine.”
“I warned you,” Jenny said. Her voice was as dark and gritty as Ashleigh’s. “I’m feeling very murderous today. It must be the witch in me. You can ask your father about it when you’re together in hell. Tonight.”
Ashleigh bared her teeth again and growled like a wolf. She seized the arms of the girls closest to her and squeezed. Jenny could feel Ashleigh’s energy pushing out into the crowd, conducting from girl to girl, skin to skin. The room grew even hotter. It was starting to feel like an oven.
“Get her, bitches,” Ashleigh said through gritted teeth. “Tear her to pieces.”
Pregnant girls advanced on Jenny from every side. The three pregnant sophomores in the hall sealed off the doorway.
“No!” Jenny screamed. “You’ll die!”
“We’re not scared of your threats.” Ashleigh smirked.
Jenny ignored Ashleigh. She closed her eyes and imagined the little flies in her gut, only a few left in the hive now. She told them they had one purpose, to eat up Ashleigh’s power. She imagined the golden thread of Ashleigh’s influence woven among the girls in the room. She pictured the black flies eating the thread. And then she pictured them with big dragonfly wings.
Jenny’s mouth and nose swelled, with blisters breaking all over them. She opened her eyes as a dozen girls laid their hands on her bare skin.
She sneezed and coughed all at once as the grainy little spores exploded out of her head. At the same time, her power flowed into and through all the girls grabbing at her, and all the girls behind them trying to get at Jenny, conducting in a giant ripple through the room, draining Jenny’s depleted body.
All around her, faces erupted—eyes watering, yellow liquid drizzling from their noses and ears. They coughed, and some of them puked, spattering the awful-smelling yellow fluid everywhere.
“What?” Ashleigh asked. “What are you doing, Jenny Pox?”
“I’m setting them free.” Jenny threaded her way among the sick girls. Ashleigh’s room smelled like the sick ward at a hospital, with no air conditioning, in the middle of July. The stench of disease and body fluids thickened the air.
Jenny reached the foot of the bed. Ashleigh crawled back to the headboard, while Darcy Metcalf vomited yellow all over Ashleigh’s pink-checkered quilt.
“Now it’s your turn, Ashleigh,” Jenny said in her deepest, darkest voice. “Your time to go free.”
Ashleigh grabbed the window and shoved it all the way up. She threw her bare shoulder against the window screen, and there was a cracking sound as it bent outward. She bounced back from it with red hash marks all over her shoulder.
Jenny stepped up on the bed and over the hiccupping, puking, hiccupping Darcy Metcalf. Jenny approached Ashleigh, leaving dirty, bloody footprints on Ashleigh’s sheets. She held out her hands, bubbling with blisters. She was filled up, with one last big dose of the specially-tailored Jenny pox.
“Leave me alone!” Ashleigh screamed, and her voice was dark and full of gravel. “I’m sick of you hunting me!”
Then Ashleigh threw herself against the screen again, and this time it broke free of the window frame and fell out into the night. Ashleigh tumbled out after it, over the windowsill.
Jenny seized Ashleigh’s foot as it went over. She wrapped both hands around the captured ankle. Ashleigh was heavier than her, so Jenny had to brace herself against the headboard.
Ashleigh dangled upside down above the cobblestone walkway.
“Let me go!” Ashleigh screamed.
“I have something for you,” Jenny said. “I made it to eat your power out of people. I want to see what it will do to you. I call it…Ashleigh pox.” In Jenny’s mind, the last little flies were going to eat the golden thread out of Ashleigh. But Ashleigh was mostly golden thread.
Ashleigh screamed. Fat tumors formed on her legs, in her ankle joints, and inside her toes, bending and twisting her feet. Veins of black rot spread over her calf, through her knee, up her thigh. Where veins of rot crossed each other, great oozing holes opened up in her flesh, down to the bone. It looked like an invisible hand was punching circles with a giant cookie cutter up her stomach and back. The veins of black reached her face, and the skin began to decay.
Ashleigh twisted and jerked, still trying to kick free. Jenny squeezed her fingers through the mush of Ashleigh’s muscle and tendon, and she gripped the wet bones of Ashleigh’s ankle.
Ashleigh screamed and curled up at the waist, swinging her hands wildly toward Jenny. Her fingertips had decayed, revealing points of bone, and now her fingernails loosened and flaked away.
Jenny had a glimpse of her face that she would always remember. Ashleigh looked up at her, screaming her head off, long blond hair fanning out below her. Her eyes and nose were just raw, empty red holes. Her lips were gone. Her remaining teeth dangled loose, attached only by their nerve fibers, and a fragment of her tongue wiggled at the back of her rotting throat.
Then Ashleigh fell back, and she kept struggling, even though it was hopeless. All the soft tissue was now shriveling against her skeleton and turning black and crumbly, as if she had been dead and in the ground for months. The skeletal Ashleigh gasped through her mummified face, and kept jerking against Jenny’s hand.
The Ashleigh pox ate its way through her bone marrow, and the ankle bones in Jenny’s hand turned brittle. She dropped Ashleigh’s remains to the cobblestones below, where they shattered from skull to pelvis with a wet, splintering sound. After a few seconds, Ashleigh’s remains stopped struggling.
Jenny stared at the broken pieces for a minute. She had done it. She had killed Ashleigh Goodling.
She felt the sense of a duty done, a purpose fulfilled. It was a serene feeling, but a cold and bitter one.
Jenny turned back from the window. Most of the girls had left the room, eager to escape the wretched smell and body heat. The few that remained just stared at her. They looked sick, but nowhere close to dying. None of them seemed to be having any trouble with their unborn children, either, at least not right away. Maybe she had been successful, attacking only the Ashleigh infection and nothing else.
Jenny hobbled through the room, keeping away from everyone. She didn’t have the energy or the focus to make only Ashleigh pox right now. Anyone who brushed against her would die of plain old Jenny pox. Losing the dose of energy it would take to transmit that Jenny pox would kill Jenny. She was teetering on the edge.
Fortunately, it was mutual, and nobody wanted to come close to her. She saw herself in Ashleigh’s mirror, which was framed with real seashells. She looked emaciated. Her eyes were sunken, her cheeks sucked in and gaunt. There were gray streaks in her hair. She could see the shape of her teeth through her lips. Where she’d been shot, the loose fat and muscle tissue had all been eaten up to fuel her power, and she could actually see her own ribs. She looked like death. She was death.
Jenny made her way past more girls in the hall. The front steps were crowded, so she went down the back way, through the kitchen, onto the back terrace. Everywhere she went were little knots of pregnant girls, whispering t
o each other, looking for food, looking for the way out, looking for answers.
She passed some more on the terrace, including Darcy Metcalf, who was taking a drag from freshman Veronica Guntley’s cigarette.
“Hey, Jenny,” Darcy said as she passed. Jenny turned her head to look at her but didn’t say anything. She felt nothing but pain, and the desire to crawl somewhere dark and let it end.
“What happened?” Darcy asked. “What happened to us?”
“Ashleigh Goodling put a spell on y’all,” Jenny said. “She was a witch. I killed her.”
Jenny kept walking, off the terrace and into the sweet, cool grass, which soothed her blistered feet.
“Hey,” Darcy called after her. “What are you?”
Jenny stopped walking. She looked back at Darcy.
“I don’t fucking know,” Jenny said. “But I guess I’m fixing to find out.”
Then she walked again, across the Goodling’s manicured lawn, and through an island of daffodils, leaving a trail of dying plants behind her. She felt sad for them. She normally got along pretty well with plants, as long as she wasn’t scared or excited.
She followed the gradual slope down to the centerpiece of the Goodlings’ back yard, the duck pond, which was big enough for a little fishing dock and deep enough to float a rowboat.
Jenny walked out along the dock and looked into the black water, where moonlight framed her death’s head reflection. She didn’t have much time left. She’d eaten herself up to get to Ashleigh.
She jumped into the water.
Dirty black water flowed into her mouth and nose. Her body fought against it, choking and thrashing, but she didn’t have much strength. The water forced its way in. She panicked, ready to change her mind, but it was too late now.
Her flooded body sank like a stone into the darkness. She landed in cold, slimy mud and sharp underwater weeds. And then Jenny died there, at the bottom of the pond.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
She floated in darkness for a long time. The pain was gone, and the cold, and the anger, and every other feeling.
