by JL Bryan
“Oh…I don’t…” She continued gaping at the money.
Tommy grabbed her arm and shook her. “Do what I say!”
“Yes!” She crammed the money into her beaded purse and zipped it shut. “Sorry. Don’t hurt me please.”
“I wouldn’t hurt you,” he said. He could feel her trembling, but he didn’t want to let go of her arm. She was warm. She almost seemed to glow.
“What are you?” she whispered.
“What are you?” he asked. “You can speak with the dead?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “Mostly I listen. But you are like a…a….”
“A nightmare,” he whispered. Tommy needed to run, but he couldn’t quite let her go yet. She was different, in the same way that he was different. He felt like if he touched her long enough, he would understand.
Then he thought of Mrs. Tanner, on her way back any second.
And he did something that he later wouldn’t believe he had the courage to do. He kissed Esmeralda, the mysterious Latin girl with the supernatural power, right on the lips. Then slipped the gold Indian-head coin into her hand.
She stared at it.
“That’s for you,” he whispered. “I love you.”
Then he ran out of the barn and away across the pasture, towards the distant, flat horizon. He planned to never see the Tanners, or any other foster family, ever again.
He looked back over his shoulder and saw the girl gaping after him. He waved at her, then lowered his head and ran faster.
Chapter Four
The television in Bent River sat behind a shield of durable plastic in case of riots. Located in a crook of the Mississippi River, just before the State of Louisiana turned into the State of Mississippi, Bent River housed a mix of medium and high security prisoners. Tommy lived in a cellblock in the East Yard, along with a few hundred other violent offenders like himself.
Tommy sat on the hard bench at rec time, watching the TV. Next to him sat Doyle Vinner, one count of arson and two of homicide. Vinner had robbed and murdered an elderly couple and burned their house to the ground. He'd taken a shine to Tommy soon after Tommy arrived. Though Vinner was in his forties, probably a quarter-century older than Tommy, he followed Tommy like a duckling in awe of its mother.
The TV flipped from a baseball game to a 24-hour news channel.
“Teen pregnancy!” a fat, balding man shouted on the screen. “A shocking story about how the libs are wrecking our morals. Again. I’m Chuck O’Flannery, and this is the O' Flannery Overview Hour. Tonight’s top story of teen girls and sex will turn your stomach! Keep watching the Overview.” The promo ended, and cut to a commercial for Axe body spray.
Boos sounded from all the black prisoners.
“Shut your booing,” yelled a big redneck named Patrick Headon, better known as Possum. A swastika was tattooed on the side of his shaved head. He sat with his hefty white-power cohorts.
Over in the guard station, behind another clear wall, the two guards smirked.
On TV, the commercials ended, and the O’Flannery Overview Hour continued.
“Welcome back to The O’Flannery Overview Hour,” he said. “My special guest is Ashleigh Goodling of Fallen Oak, South Carolina, population nine thousand. Thanks for coming today, Ashleigh.”
“Thank you for having me, sir.”
A wider camera angle revealed a very pretty girl with blond hair and hypnotic gray eyes. Tommy sat up. Her eyes looked just like his, a rare trait. For a moment, Tommy wondered if they were related—he knew nothing about his birth parents.
“I don't wanna watch this,” Vinner grumbled.
“Then get back to your room,” Tommy said. Vinner stayed.
“We hope you enjoy your visit,” Chuck O’Flannery said to the girl. “Now, for the Overviewers at home, give us a little background on this teen abstinence story.”
“Gosh,” the girl said. “Well, teen pregnancy is such a major problem, even in little towns like mine. Our group decided to promote the only moral choice, abstinence, at our school...”
Tommy wasn't listening. He was reading one of the many flickering sidebars on the screen, which told him all about the girl:
ASHLEIGH GOODLING, it said. FALLEN OAK, SC. Her name and town stayed fixed, but the line underneath it changed every five seconds:
SENIOR CLASS PRESIDENT
PRESIDENT, CHRISTIANS ACT! SCHOOL CLUB
CAPTAIN, VARSITY CHEERLEADING SQUAD
“…I’m not perfect,” the girl said. “I get tempted all the time. Your body wants it. That’s why you have to rely on your mind, and on prayer. When adults set the example, and they say abstinence is bad, it just tells us to go ahead and give in to our urges.” She was squirming in her chair as if agitated, and her tongue flicked across her lips.
“Ashleigh Goodling,” Tommy whispered.
“Looks like a sweet slice of tail, don't she?” Vinner snickered, and Tommy slapped the lascivious grin from his face. Vinner fell quiet, but he didn't complain. He seemed to like a little abuse now and then, a little dose of Tommy’s fear. Some people did, and such people took to following Tommy around in a very annoying fashion.
“...Christians get persecuted, but God takes care of us. I don’t care if everyone hates me. I have my faith.” The girl named Ashleigh touched the cross pendant around her neck.
Fallen Oak, South Carolina, Tommy repeated inside his head. Fallen Oak, South Carolina.
He watched the girl talk, entranced. A lifetime of violence and small-time robbery had given him a stony outer crust, but he felt something move inside him. Something big. Like those massive plates under the earth, the ones that made earthquakes and volcanoes.
He'd had plenty of women, in his way—it was easy enough when you had Tommy's special thing, the nightmare that lived inside him. His touch filled people with fear. He could make them hand over wallets, car keys, the contents of a cash register.
This was a different feeling, though. He didn't just want to rip this girl’s panties off. There was something else, a hint of something he hadn't felt in a long time. Not since he was a kid, and that had only been a glimpse.
He knew better than to trust the feeling. He'd never seen Esmeralda again, after all. That sense of falling for somebody seemed to hint at forever, but it was an illusion. In real life, you couldn't surrender to those feelings, or they would just rip you to pieces.
Tommy knew all of this. He thought of all this. But it was on the back burner of his mind.
On the front burner, red hot and smoking, was the need to find the girl on the television. And then...do something. He could imagine a lot of things he might do to her—he'd been in prison almost a year—but those weren't the main things that interested him. There was a lot more going on here. A mystery. He could feel things about that girl.
He tried to shake off the feeling. Stupid. He was just caged up and horny, and that was all.
“Thanks for having me, Mr. O'Flannery,” Ashleigh said at the end of the show. Then she smiled, and then she was gone.
Over the next few weeks, Tommy tried to push down his thoughts about the girl from the TV. He couldn't win: he kept catching himself daydreaming about her while he worked in the prison's cannery. She filled up his dreams, and he awoke hot, sweaty, and more miserable than he’d ever felt.
Tommy put together his plan. He had to be careful—he'd learned that the hard way, after he robbed that convenience store and the cops had taken him down with Tasers. Fucking shocking you to the ground from ten feet away, out of reach—that wasn't fair, in his book.
Tommy had found that if he could just get his hand on a cop for a moment, he could usually intimidate the cop into letting him go. He'd used that trick more times than he could remember. But if they were going to stay out of reach and zap him into a vegetable with electric wires, his special fear-inducing touch didn't have much room to play.
He made his move after lunch, on the way out of the cafeteria. Vinner was walking alongside him, jabbering
away about his meth-addicted pregnant sister. As they passed a pair of guards, Tommy turned and punched Vinner in the face. Vinner went down, bleeding from his nose and lip.
The two guards grabbed Tommy and hit him a few times, and Tommy went slack and fell on the floor, pretending to be semiconscious and groaning in pain.
“Good night, you crazy bastard,” one of the guards crowed.
“Let’s put this prick in the Hole,” the other said.
They each took one of Tommy’s wrists and dragged him away from the cafeteria. He could feel them shivering a little, as his touch began to work its magic.
When they dragged him into a side corridor, Tommy seized their wrists.
He didn’t take any chances. Tommy’s touch always made people afraid, whether he wanted to or not, but sometimes he could focus and make it really powerful, terrifying people out of their minds. He imagined pushing it out through his hands, pumping the guards full of fear.
The guards’ arm hairs stood on end, and one of them gasped. They released Tommy and he fell to the floor. Tommy jumped to his feet and seized their hands again, not wanting to lose his moment. He pushed the fear as hard as he could.
“I’m leaving,” Tommy hissed. “And you two are helping me.”
“Okay, okay!” One of the guards was nodding as fast as a bobble-headed doll. “Whatever you want.”
“Don’t hurt me,” the other guard pleaded. They both wore expressions like terrified little boys, and Tommy tried not to smile.
“You do what I say from here on,” Tommy said. “Understand?”
They understood.
Tommy left the prison in the trunk of a guard’s car. As Tommy instructed, the guard took him all the way to Baton Rouge. The guard also visited an ATM, emptied his checking account, and gave the cash to Tommy.
Tommy shook the guard’s hand before the guard got back in his car. He squeezed tight, and stared the shuddering man in the eyes.
“You won’t remember anything,” Tommy said. “You won’t tell anyone where you brought me. You’re going to forget all about our adventure.”
“Yeah, of course, of course,” the guard said. He looked on the verge of tears. His voice came out small and squeaky. “Whatever you want me to do.”
“Go home and forget about me.”
Tommy stood on the side of the boulevard and watched the prison guard drive away. Part of him couldn’t believe he’d pulled it off. Another part of him was beginning to feel like a real idiot for sitting in prison this long.
South Carolina lay several hundred miles to the east. Tommy started walking.
Chapter Five
Dr. Heather Reynard raced down the country highway at ninety miles an hour, while juggling her cell phone and a box of Zaxby’s chicken nuggets. After two months of living on canned beans and U.S. Army MRE’s, she thought the deep-fried chicken lumps tasted better than caviar.
“So, wait,” her husband, Liam, said on the phone. “You’re back home?”
“No,” Heather said. “I mean yes, I left Haiti. No, I’m not on my way home.”
“Then where are you?”
“In America.”
“That narrows it down.”
“I’m not supposed to say where I’m going, Liam.” Heather hesitated. “It’s somewhere in South Carolina, though.”
“That’s not far. Thank God you’re finally back. You’ll never guess what Tricia did to the dining room wall—”
“I am not back, Liam. Officially I’m still doing cholera in Haiti.”
“And what are you unofficially doing?”
“I don’t know!” Heather swerved around a slowpoke farm truck loaded with hay. “I’m guessing it’s urgent, because I just flew from Port-au-Prince to Augusta on a U.S. Postal Service airplane, and this is my first chance to call.”
“When did all this happen?”
“This morning. Early. Dr. Schwartzman sent for me. I don’t know why. Nobody’s telling me anything.”
“I’m guessing it’s not another salmonella outbreak, then.”
“Why did you have to say that? I’m eating chicken nuggets here.”
“You’re probably safe. Like I was saying, your daughter is a real artist now.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” Heather said.
“She painted a mural in the dining room. In the medium of ketchup and mustard.”
“Ugh. That’ll be a mess to clean up.”
“Who’s cleaning?” Liam asked. “I’ll just slap a frame around it and tell people it’s a Jackson Pollock.”
“You’re so unbelievably hilarious,” Heather said. Following the directions she’d scrawled on her notepad, she turned off the main highway onto someplace called Esther Bridge Road, saw the National Guard roadblock, and hit the brakes. “Wow, this looks big. I have to go.”
“I love—“ she heard Liam say as she clicked the phone.
A Guardsman, about nineteen years old, walked towards Heather’s rental car, shaking his head. Heather lowered her window.
“Road’s closed, ma’am,” he said.
“I’m Dr. Reynard.” Heather showed her ID badge. “CDC. I’m supposed to be here.”
The Guardsman inspected her ID card closely, as if he were an expert in distinguishing between real and fake Centers for Disease Control badges.
“One sec. Wait here.” He walked away and consulted with an older Guardsman, who consulted with someone else via walkie-talkie, and then nodded.
Soldiers moved aside the orange cones that blocked the road, opening a lane for her between two big National Guard trucks. They’d blocked off the left lane completely with their trucks, as if more concerned about people getting out than people getting in. Interesting.
Heather continued along Esther Bridge Road, which wound sharply through dense woods. She crossed a bridge over a creek, and then saw an old wooden sign:
WELCOME TO FALLEN OAK, it said. “THE LORD HAS BROUGHT FORTH A BOUNTIFUL HARVEST.”
The little patch of downtown was surrounded by government workers—more National Guard, black Homeland Security vehicles, mobile CDC units. South Carolina Highway Patrol seemed to be lingering around the fringes, too.
Heather parked on the side of the road and checked in at the next National Guard blockade. As she walked into the scene, she dialed Schwartzman on her cell phone.
“I’m here,” she said.
“Suit up and come meet me. I’m on my way there now.”
“Where?”
“You’ll find it.” He hung up.
Heather found the CDC truck with the hazmat equipment. A young technician sitting inside the open rear door of the truck jumped to his feet.
“Dr. Reynard?” he asked. He grabbed one of the yellow hazmat suits from a hanging rack.
“That’s me.”
“You need to suit up,” the technician said. “Schwartzman’s waiting.”
“What’s going on here?” Heather asked. “I just flew hundreds of miles and I have no clue why.”
“I’m not supposed to say. I’m just supposed to help you suit up.” He held open the bulky yellow suit for her to step inside it. The suit would cover her from head to toe, keeping her protected from…whatever was going on in Fallen Oak.
“You must have seen something,” Heather said. “Or heard something?”
“I haven’t seen anything. I can’t get close enough. Because I’m not wearing a suit.” He gave the suit a shake and raised his eyebrows.
“But what are people saying?”
“Dr. Schwartzman is saying for you to hurry. But you can’t do that until you put on this—”
“Okay, okay, give me the suit.”
Heather let the young man help her into the heavy yellow suit. She fixed the radio speaker into her ear, and then he pulled the hood over her head. She smiled at him through the face shield. “How do I look?”
“Like an alien.” He sealed the hood.
Heather followed the bustle of official activity toward the t
own square. She rounded an eighteen-wheeler truck, and then she saw the town green.
It seemed like a once-charming little town that had fallen on hard times, like thousands of little towns around the country. A nineteenth-century brick courthouse dominated the scene, with fat white columns and a sculpted frieze on the pediment. The sculptured scene depicted the goddess Justice, blindfolded and wielding scales and a sword.
There was a little white building with a sign identifying it as Fallen Oak Baptist Church, and there was a Merchants and Farmers Bank of Fallen Oak. The rest of the downtown was mostly empty brick buildings, the vacant shop windows whitewashed.
Immediately, Heather saw why Schwartzman had flown her up from Haiti in a rush.
The town green was covered in bodies. CDC workers in yellow suits like hers were sealing them in airtight plastic cadaver pouches and loading them onto two refrigerated box trucks. There were still at least a hundred bodies left scattered in front of the courthouse, the front doors of which were marked with a big splash of dried red. Heather guessed it wasn’t ketchup.
She found Schwartzman supervising the collecting and sealing of bodies.
“What the hell happened here?” she asked him.
“Heather. Finally.” His voice crackled over the radio, heavy with static, though he only stood a few feet away. She could hear other conversations fading in and out of the channel, from the other CDC workers.
“Yes, me, finally.” Heather looked around at the carnage. The bodies were badly contorted, rife with huge blisters, open sores, broken pustules, and dark tumors. She couldn’t think of any known pathogen that would cause such a broad range of symptoms. Whatever biological agent had caused this was extremely nasty and needed to be killed immediately.
“Bioterrorism?” Heather asked.
“Possibly. But this town is about as far from a valuable national target as you can get.”
“What are the local authorities saying?”
“We haven’t found any,” Schwartzman said. He nodded at the courthouse. “Mayor’s office is empty. The little police department’s empty. If I had to guess…” He gestured at all the dead bodies.
