Jenny Undead (The Thirteen: Book One)

by Murray, J. L.

  “Two trunks are missing,” said Trix.

  “How do you know?” said Jenny.

  “Marks in the ground,” said Abel, nodding toward the corner. “Those trunks were heavy. Someone dragged them out.”

  Jenny looked at the ground and saw what he meant.

  “Sully killed all those people in the subway,” she said.

  “I don't know anything about that,” said Abel. “But I feel like a bunch of guns missing from a serial killer's tent is probably a bad thing.”

  “What the hell?” Jenny looked over, still holding the bag of bloody hair. Declan had entered, his hand on the ax shoved into his belt.

  “It's Sully,” said Jenny.

  “What about Sully?” said Declan, eying Trix and Abel. Abel licked his lips.

  “He's the killer,” said Jenny. “I think Casey might be in a lot of trouble.”

  “Why?” said Trix, her head whipping toward Jenny. “Why is Casey in trouble?”

  “Because we took Sully yesterday,” said Jenny. “He's at the museum. With Grayson, Fisher...and Casey. We have to go. Now.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Declan shifted in the passenger seat, casting looks into the backseat. “Was it necessary to bring them?” he said, nodding to Trix and Abel. Abel grinned at him wolfishly.

  “They're just like me,” said Jenny. “And if Sully is who we think he is, something bad is going on.”

  Trix leaned forward. “You know this creepy motherfucker only eats evil pieces of shit, right?”

  “Don't tell people that,” Abel hissed.

  “Why? Are you afraid people will think you're a pussy?”

  “It just ruins things. Makes people think I'm some kind of hero.”

  “Oh,” said Declan, “I don't think you have to worry about that.”

  “Shut up,” said Jenny. “We're almost there. Get ready.”

  “You sure about this?” said Declan.

  “Why wouldn't I be?” said Jenny.

  Declan shrugged. “You always said that was the line. We don't kill the living unless we have no other choice.”

  “I'm not that person anymore, I told you,” said Jenny. “Besides. What choice do I have? He's already killed me once. That I know about. ”

  “I guess you don't really have a choice,” said Declan. “But, maybe, you should think about the source.”

  “What, Abel?” said Jenny. “He works for my mother.”

  “He says.”

  “You think he planted all that torture shit in Sully's tent?” said Jenny.

  “I'm just saying it's possible,” said Declan.

  “Do I get a say in this?” said Abel.

  “We didn't plant shit,” said Trix. She leaned forward until she was close to Declan. “Say it again, meat suit. I'll eat your soft bits first.” Declan's grip tightened on the ax sitting at his feet. “You think you can swing an ax in a car before I can rip your face off?” Trix smiled.

  “Leave him alone,” said Jenny. Trix sat back in her seat, still glaring at Declan. Jenny looked at Abel in the rear-view mirror. He looked surprisingly unworried by Declan's accusation. “It wasn't a coincidence that you were in Sully's tent the first time I found you,” she said.

  Abel met her eyes in the mirror. “Obviously,” he said.

  “What were you doing there?” said Jenny.

  “Following orders,” he said, a smirk surfacing on his face.

  “Orders from who?”

  “Whom,” Trix corrected. “Just because we're dead doesn't mean we can't use correct fucking grammar.”

  “Fuck off,” said Jenny. She looked back at Abel.

  “It came to someone's attention that Sully found you. We didn't know about the murders. My orders were to find you and warn you. If that failed, I was supposed to kill Sully. By the time I found you, you were already dead. So, in a way, you saved his life.”

  “But you didn't warn me,” said Jenny.

  “How the hell was I to know you'd bring the bastard home with you?” said Abel. “Besides, there's safety in numbers. You weren't in any danger as far as I could see.”

  “Someone,” said Jenny. “My mother? She ordered you?”

  “This goes higher than your mother,” said Abel. “All the way to the top.”

  “The top of what?”

  “Everything.”

  “Stop bullshitting me,” said Jenny. “It pisses me off when people bullshit me.”

  “There isn't anything that doesn't piss you off,” said Trix.

  “It'll pass,” said Abel. “It's always the worst in the beginning.”

  “So they keep telling me,” said Jenny. “Who sent you?”

  “Nothing you do to me,” said Abel, “nothing anyone can do to me is worse than what they will do to me if I answer that question. You have no idea what's really going on. And it's better that way. I wish I didn't know.”

  “So you're saying my mom is involved with a bunch of unnamed people who sent a zombie hybrid to save my life.”

  “I didn't say that,” said Abel. “And I'm not a zombie.”

  “Whatever,” said Jenny. “And I'm supposed to trust you?”

  “You're very important,” said Abel. “I don't know why, but those motherfuckers want you safe.”

  “And my mother?” said Jenny.

  Abel hesitated before answering. “Your mother doesn't know I'm here. She was...unavailable when I tried to get a message to her.”

  “So you're a double agent or some shit?” said Jenny. “Working for the suits and the prisoner?”

  “You make it sound so clandestine,” said Abel.

  “Perfect,” said Jenny. “Not only is my life completely fucked, but I'm the center of a conspiracy. And I thought that shit died with the government.”

  “If I were you,” said Abel, “I would be very careful in assuming the world is so very much different than it was before.”

  “And why shouldn't we just kill you?” said Declan.

  “You can,” said Abel. “But I think you're going to need my help before this whole thing is over. And I think Jenny knows why she's not going to kill me. Or even hurt me.”

  Jenny ground her teeth. She felt Declan's eyes on her.

  “Yeah,” said Jenny.

  “Jen?” said Declan. “What's he talking about?”

  “You are some kind of slow,” said Trix. “He knows where to find her bitch mother.”

  “She doesn't exactly have a choice,” said Abel.

  Jenny tightened her grip on the steering wheel until her knuckles were white. “He's right,” she said, her voice a growl. “If I want to find out about this cure, I have to find her. We need Abel to stay alive.”

  “Shame,” said Declan. “I was looking forward to knocking that smarmy look off his face.”

  “You know, that's funny,” said Abel. “You are not the first person to say that.”

  “Let's just get to the museum,” said Jenny. “Hopefully everything's fine and I'm freaking out for nothing. Sully's working in the lab, and everyone's fine.”

  “Right,” said Trix. “Because an obsessed serial killer will use his manners when he's kidnapped by dead kids. Good luck with that, cheerleader.”

  “Just a burst of fucking sunshine, isn't she?” said Abel.

  Jenny drove faster.

  “Jesus fuck,” said Declan. They stared at Fisher. What was left of him anyway.

  “Do you think he was conscious when he did that?” said Trix, her voice uncharacteristically low.

  “No,” said Abel. “There's no way a living would be strong enough. He put the knife in his skull first.”

  Fisher hung on the wall like some kind of off-kilter, macabre piece of art. Black sludge dripped out of a wound under his chin where Sully had shoved a blade into his brain. Probably the same blade that secured him to the plaster just above the collarbone. But Sully had made some adjustments before he put him there. Fisher's hands and feet were gone. And just like the other rotter Jenny had seen, a smile
had been carved on his face.

  “I'm going to eat this bastard for dinner,” said Abel.

  Jenny had to work to unclench her jaw before she spoke. “Find Casey,” she said. No one argued with her. They fanned out, calling Casey's name. Jenny backed away from Fisher's body. She bumped against something. Her mind was foggy, slow. Turning around, she realized she was up against the door to the lab. She turned the doorknob and entered.

  It was clean. The metal and white tile were so bright they hurt her eyes. There was nothing out of place, and it took her a moment to figure out why that was so odd. It looked like nothing had been touched. Not a fingerprint, not a stool out of place. Nothing under the microscope lenses. Jenny walked around, disbelieving. Sully hadn't done anything. He hadn't even tried. She looked down into a small garbage can in the corner. Something was inside. She picked it up and stared. The syringes. All the syringes. Full of all the blood Sully had taken. He had never planned on helping them.

  “Why the fuck did he agree to stay?” Jenny muttered. She pulled the syringes out and looked at them blankly. And realized her mistake. There were only three syringes here, filled with black fluid. One was missing.

  “Oh, fuck,” she said, dropping the trashcan. It clattered, echoing around the empty room. She stared at the blood samples in her hand. The missing syringe had been full of her blood. She remembered the rotter who had bitten her in the train car, and then come back to himself in a rotten brain with a rotten body. “Oh, fuck,” she said again, pressing the heel of her hand against her forehead. She felt dizzy. Her vision was going red around the edges. She could feel something coming closer. Something she could tear apart. She fought the urge, but the red didn't retreat this time. It just got stronger.

  Declan put his head through the door, his eyes seeking her. Seeing her face, he straightened, frowning. “What is it?” he said, stepping toward her.

  “Don't come any closer,” she said, her voice a raw whisper.

  “Jenny...” he was reaching for her, no fear in his eyes. She could just reach out and he would be hers. She felt her lips retract as she bared her teeth. Declan stopped, but it was too late. Jenny grabbed his wrist and pulled him toward her. She grabbed him around the neck, dropping the syringes on the floor, and pulled his face toward hers. She felt a low growl rise in her throat. She imagined how the hot blood would feel running down her throat, the flesh between her teeth so much warmer than her cold body. She opened her mouth, then, with her last vestige of control, she let go and pulled out her knife. The whole world was a deep, dark red. She was going to hurt Declan.

  “Noooo!” she screamed at him, his shock and disbelief seeming to paralyze him. Jenny raised the knife and he finally unfroze, his feet slipping on the clean floor. But the knife wasn't for him. Jenny screamed as she drove the blade into her left arm. Slowly the red in her vision ebbed away, and after a moment it disappeared completely. Bright red blood ran thickly from her arm onto the shining counter, and dripped onto the bright floor. Red on white. She wouldn't meet Declan's eyes. Her arm exploded with pain.

  “I'm sorry,” she said through blurry eyes and gritted teeth. “You have to go.”

  “No,” he said. She looked at him. His face was ashen and when he raised his arm to smooth his hair back, his hand was shaking. He met her eyes. “I'm not leaving you.”

  “If you don't leave me, I'm going to kill you,” Jenny said. “It's just who I am now.”

  “Bullshit,” he said, rising to his full height. “You are who you are. People don't change. Not really.”

  “You don't believe that,” she said. The hunger was still there, sharp and cold and filling up her insides, the pain in her arm helping her ignore it. But it wouldn't be long before she couldn't ignore it any longer.

  “I still love you, Jen. I always will. Even if we can never be together. I'm not leaving.”

  “Fuck you, Declan. You know what I'm trying to do?”

  “Push me away,” he said simply.

  “No!” Jenny said, her voice loud and echoing. She pulled the knife out of her arm and let it drop to her side. It had stopped bleeding, but it was sticky from the blood and throbbed like there was something alive inside of it. “I'm trying to save your life.”

  “Maybe I don't want to be saved,” he said.

  Trix and Abel appeared in the doorway.

  “What the fuck did you do to her?” said Trix, advancing on Declan. “You stupid living piece of shit. I knew you couldn't be trusted.” Declan was backing away from her.

  “Trix,” said Jenny weakly. “I did this. It wasn't him.”

  “You?” she said, looking at Jenny. “Why the fuck would you stab yourself?”

  “Because she didn't want to kill him,” said Abel, meeting Jenny's eyes. For a moment, an expression like sadness crossed his face, but it was gone just as quickly as it came. “You should go eat, Jenny. It'll take the edge off.”

  “Did you find Casey?” said Jenny.

  “No,” said Trix, glowering at Declan. “He's gone. Weird, right? Like he had help or something.”

  Declan frowned. “How could I have helped Sully? I was with you guys the whole time.”

  “You were following Jenny,” said Trix. “Maybe you had some of your asshole friends come and bust him out.” She looked at the blood, seeming to see it for the first time. “Why the fuck is your blood red?”

  “Shut up, Trix,” said Jenny. “And it wasn't Declan.”

  “Then how?” said Trix. “How the fuck does a living come in here, kill one of ours and take the other?”

  “One,” said Jenny, her eyes widening. “Where's Grayson?”

  Trix shook her head. “We didn't find him.”

  “You think he helped Sully?” said Abel.

  “I don't know if we can trust anything we know anymore,” said Jenny.

  “So this Grayson guy was one of you guys?” said Declan.

  “Yeah,” said Jenny. She looked at Trix again. “You feel that?”

  “What?”

  “Ignore Declan and just feel.”

  She looked at Jenny blankly for a moment, then realization hit her. “Fuck!” Trix ran out of the room.

  “Did I miss something?” said Declan.

  “We can sense living things,” said Jenny. “With you here, it sort of skewed our senses a little.”

  “Because I'm food?”

  “Because you're alive,” said Jenny. “It made it so we didn't notice anything else.”

  “Such as?” said Declan. “You feel something else alive around here?”

  “More like something she doesn't feel,” said Abel. “This lot doesn't eat people for whatever fucked up reason. There used to be goats in the basement.”

  “Used to be?” said Declan.

  “I can't feel them anymore,” said Jenny. “They're either dead or missing.”

  “What does that mean exactly?” said Declan.

  “It means, genius-boy,” said Abel, “that our little group is going to have to get creative if Jenny and Trix want to live.”

  Declan looked at Jenny. “You're going to have to eat someone?” he said.

  “No,” she said angrily. “It's not going to happen again.”

  “If you don't eat someone in the next few days,” said Abel, “you're going to die. For real this time.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  “They're all dead,” said Trix, looking across the room with a stricken expression on her face. “Grayson, the goats, all of them.”

  Grayson was face down in a half-eaten goat, which was also now dead. His left cheek was flat against the ripped up hindquarters of the carcass, his eyes looking up at the ceiling, frozen. He had a string of bloody meat hanging out of his mouth. There was a knife protruding from the base of his skull.

  “Shit,” said Jenny.

  “Fucking Grayson,” said Trix. “Fuck!” She walked out of the basement.

  All the goats had their skulls smashed in and had been left right where they had died. Sully hadn
't even taken one for meat. “He could have gotten so much if he traded the meat,” Jenny said. “Why would he leave them?”

  “To show you he could,” said Abel. He walked around Grayson's body and picked a white object up from the floor and held it to the light.

  “What is it?” said Declan.

  Abel looked up at them, and for the first time since Jenny had known him, he looked surprised. “I think it's medicine,” he said. “A syringe. Drugs of some kind?”

  “No way,” said Declan. “All the good drugs dried up in the first year.”

  “What about the stuff you found when I saw you?” said Jenny. “What was in those bottles?”

  “I have no idea,” said Declan. “They all had weird names. Besides, I left before we could find out. I haven't seen Lucy, V, or Beacon since that day.”

  “Maybe he made it himself,” said Jenny. “What do you think it is? Something that works on dead people? Or just something for himself.”

  “We might be dead,” said Abel, “but our brains still work. Could be a sedative or some kind of paralytic. There's still a little left. We could find out.”

  “That's fucking ridiculous,” said Declan. “What if it's poison? Or something toxic? You can't test it on yourselves.”

  “I'll do it.” Trix stood in the doorway, hands on her hips. “Go ahead. We have to know what we're up against if we're going to find Casey again.”

  “Trix,” said Jenny, “it's too dangerous. You could die.”

  Trix walked across the dank room that smelled of old blood, sidestepping goat carcasses. She looked at Jenny, almost nose-to-nose with her. Trix was shorter, but she put a finger on Jenny's chest and pushed.

  “Casey was my friend,” she said. “We've been together since the day some rotter skank bit him. I stayed with him when he got sick, and I was there when he died. And I have fucking been here for that boy every day since. You might be blood, but Casey is my goddamn family. And everyone in my family is dead except for him. So if I have to stick needles into myself to get him back, I'll do it. Casey is not going to die because his stupid bitch of a sister brought a fucking psychopath into our house.”