by JL Bryan
“Darcy Metcalf,” the girl said.
Heather looked her up on the laptop. Homeland Security had provided a database of all residents and their addresses. Heather and the other medical staff noted each person they examined on the shared database, along with any observations.
She found Darcy’s listing. A nurse had pre-examined her, entering Darcy’s height, weight, and age: eighteen. The file also noted that she had elevated blood pressure. And she was pregnant.
“Okay,” Heather said. She took a tongue depressor from a jar. “Open up and say ‘ah.’” She liked to start with this because it gave people the sense that it was a regular visit to the doctor’s office.
The girl did as she was told, her eyes rolling nervously while Heather looked into her throat. No swelling, no pustules, no symptoms matching those of the outbreak. This girl was pale and sweating, clearly scared.
She asked if Darcy had experienced specific symptoms, and listed the symptoms associated with the bodies on the green, without mentioning the event itself. Darcy shook her head to all symptoms.
“Do you have any special medical conditions?” Heather asked.
“I’m pregnant.”
“How far along?”
“Sixteen weeks.”
“You know,” Heather said, “You’re the fourth pregnant girl I’ve met today, your age and younger. I see a lot of others in line out there. Doesn’t it seem like a lot to you?”
Darcy shrugged. “I don’t know. Yeah.” She looked around, as if expecting somebody else to be watching them.
“Why do you think that is?”
“I…I’m not sure,” Darcy said. “All I know is, I went on a date with Bret Daniels when I should have been studying for finals. And God punished me.”
“Oh, no, sweetie,” Heather said. “It’s not a punishment. It’s natural. It happens. Don’t think of it like that.”
“It shouldn’t happen if you’re not married.”
“The important thing is to take care of yourself now,” Heather said. “Are you seeing an Ob/Gyn?”
Darcy hesitated, then nodded. She kept looking back at the green curtain door.
“Are you all right?” Heather asked.
Darcy bit her lip.
“Is there something you want to tell me?”
“Well,” Darcy whispered. “I don’t know who else to tell. But listen…” Her voice dropped to an even lower whisper. “Jenny Mittens is alive. She is. I saw her riding in Seth’s convertible.”
“Who?”
“Jenny Mittens. Morton. Jenny Morton. Everyone saw her go into the pond at Ashleigh’s house. People were there for like an hour after, and she never came back out. And people were watching, too, to see if her body floated up. But it never did.”
“Jenny…Morton? How do you spell it?”
“Like the salt.”
Heather looked it up. A Jenny Morton, and her father Darrell, were listed at a Fallen Oak address. Neither of them had come in for a screening, according to the database.
“She hasn’t been in,” Heather said, not sure why she was sharing that information.
“She won’t be, I bet,” Darcy said.
“Why not?”
Darcy frowned.
“You say she drowned in a pond?”
“At Ashleigh Goodling’s house.” Darcy nodded. She was actually shaking with fear now. “I should go.”
“Wait!” Heather said. “Please. Just one minute.” She searched for the surname Goodling, and found three people listed at a Fallen Oak address. Father, mother, one child. Ashleigh was the child. None of them had been in for testing, either.
“Are we done?” Darcy asked.
“I still have to take a few little things.” Heather brought out a test tube. “I need to clip a hair sample.”
Darcy sighed.
“Don’t worry, I won’t mess up your style.” Heather clipped samples from the back of Darcy’s head. Then she swabbed the inside of Darcy’s cheek. She dabbed Darcy’s fingertip with alcohol. “This will only hurt for a second,” Heather said, and Darcy hissed as Heather pulled blood from her. Heather applied a small bandage to Darcy’s finger.
“One more question,” Heather said. “Why did you think it was so important to tell me about this Jenny girl?”
“Because she’s at the middle of everything,” Darcy said.
“At the middle of what, specifically?”
“All this!” Darcy pointed at the green curtains around them. “The terrible things happening around here.”
“How is she at the middle of them?”
Darcy gave her a long, scrutinizing look. Then she spoke in a low whisper again: “Because she’s into witchcraft.”
“I can barely hear you. Did you say ‘witchcraft’?”
“Yes!”
“What does that mean?”
“You know.” Darcy made clawing motions in the air with her hands, and gave an exaggerated scowl. “Witchy. Witchy witchcraft. Her boyfriend Seth, too. They’re both in league with Satan. People know. Ashleigh knew.”
“Okay.” Heather smiled a little. “And she casts spells, or what?”
“Oh, sure. Of course.”
“What kind of spells?”
“I don’t know,” Darcy said. “Like all the girls getting pregnant. That was maybe one of Jenny’s black magic spells.”
“You said it was because you went on a date with a boy.”
Darcy hung her head. “And I drank.”
“This happens to a lot of people,” Heather said. “It’s very normal. The thing to do is focus on your future decisions. Nobody controls you with witchcraft, Darcy. You’re in charge of your own life.”
“Don’t tell my dad I drank, okay? He’d get so P.O.’d.”
“I won’t. Everything you tell me is confidential, Darcy. In fact...” Heather gave Darcy one of her cards. She had plenty of them, in case she found chatty townsfolk who might actually help her investigation. “You give me a call if you think of anything else. Or just want to talk. I’ll be in town for a while. I know the phones around here aren’t working too well, but the Homeland Security guys say that should be fixed in a few days.”
“Why aren’t the phones working, anyway?” Darcy asked.
“I’m not sure,” Heather said.
“Whoa,” Darcy said, reading Heather’s card. “‘M.D.’ ‘Epidemiologist.’ That’s awesome. I thought about being a doctor, before I blew my GPA and got pregnant.”
“I’m sorry,” Heather said. “But it looks like you’re in good health. I’m sure things will get better for you. Life does get easier as you get older.”
Darcy slouched as she shuffled out through the curtain.
Heather watched the girl join her father, an obese man in a wheelchair, who looked like he was missing a foot. Maybe it was an injury, but from his inflated size, Heather wouldn’t be surprised if he’d lost it to diabetes.
“Hurry up!” Darcy’s father barked, while Darcy pushed his wheelchair. “Jog that big ass of yours!”
On the database, Heather added an extra notation to Darcy’s listing: “Possible psych. issues related to religion, parents.”
Heather sterilized the area, changed out her disposable rubber gloves for new ones, and greeted the next subject.
Her name was Brenda Purcell, seventeen years old, five months pregnant.
Chapter Ten
Tommy roared along the highway. He had ditched the old lady’s piece-of-crap Chrysler in Alabama, walked three miles to a biker bar, and picked out a machine he liked. He wanted something fast, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off one particular Harley-Davidson with a stylized, devilish red gargoyle painted on the side.
He didn’t know how to hotwire a motorcycle, so he’d waited in the shadows of the abandoned gas station next door. Eventually, the machine’s owner came out, staggering and drunk, a balding man with a long mullet and a long goatee. He was short but very stout. In Tommy’s experience, you had to watch out for the short
guys—they were the most eager to fight, as if they had something to prove.
The man sat on the bike and tried a few times to insert the key into the ignition, but he kept missing. Once he got it in, he seemed to have forgotten how to turn the key.
“Howdy,” Tommy said as he approached the man. Then he pulled out a wad of cash. He still had most of the prison guard’s bank account.
The drunken biker eyed Tommy’s cash wad with great interest. Tommy tucked it back into the pocket of his own jeans, which he’d bought at Kmart. The biker’s eyes followed the money.
Tommy stuck out his hand. “Name’s Freddy,” he said. “And I’d like to make you an offer.”
“How’s it going, Freddy?” The biker shook Tommy’s hand.
Tommy squeezed the man’s hand and pushed fear into him.
The biker’s eyes swelled, and his hand trembled in Tommy’s grasp.
“Why don’t you step off that bike?” Tommy suggested.
The biker reached for the keys.
“Leave those there,” Tommy said. He didn’t let go of the man’s hand, so they ended up holding hands over the Harley-Davidson.
“Aw, look, Beater’s got a girlfriend,” another biker hollered. Two of them had just stumbled out of the bar. The shouter wore a Confederate flag do-rag, and his friend wore a very faded T-shirt featuring the band Poison.
“Hell, prettier than his last one!” the guy in the Poison T-shirt yelled, and the two of them laughed. Both men were big, disheveled, and clearly favored denim.
“I’ve just purchased your friend’s bike,” Tommy said, though he hadn’t given the man any money. He shook Beater’s hand again. “Right, Beater?”
“Yeah,” Beater said. “Yeah, man. You got it.”
Beater’s friends stopped laughing when Tommy got on the man’s bike and started it up.
“Hey, that’s not cool,” Rebel Flag Guy said. “You can’t take that.”
“He sold it to me,” Tommy said. “Isn’t that right? The bike’s mine now, right?”
“Yeah, man.” Beater took several steps back. “Whatever the guy says.”
Rebel Flag and Poison T-shirt stepped up to Tommy.
“I don’t think you made a fair trade,” Rebel Flag said, and he poked Tommy in the chest. “I think my buddy’s drunk, you come over and run your mouth, try to steal his bike. That’s what I think.”
“You don’t want to touch me,” Tommy warned them. He tried not to let them see how bad he was shaking. Rebel Flag put a calloused hand around his neck, and Tommy felt the fear move into him. Maybe Tommy could use that.
“Look out!” Tommy shouted. He seized Rebel Flag’s wrist and pushed the fear as hard as he could. Tommy had always imagined the fear as a kind of low-grade current of black electricity, something that flowed out from him when he touched other people. Now he imagined turning up the voltage. He wanted to make the guy panic, lose his mind. People were much more open to suggestion when they were frightened.
“That guy in the Poison shirt, he’s trying to kill you, man!” Tommy shouted at Rebel Flag. Tommy pointed at the biker in the Poison shirt, who was walking up behind him. “Protect yourself! Fight back!”
“What?” Rebel Flag turned on his friend and punched him in the nose. “You ain’t gonna kill me! You ain’t gonna touch me!”
“I didn’t do nothing!” the Poison T-shirt guy yelled, but Rebel Flag kept punching him, so he started fighting back.
While the two of them struggled, Tommy noticed Beater, proprietor of the red-gargoyle Harley, easing back toward the front door of the bar.
“Wait,” Tommy said to him, and Beater froze. “Stay right there. Stay.”
“Okay.” Beater held up both hands. “I’m not doing nothing to you, okay?”
“Right. So just wait there a while. And forget about me. Forget what I look like. Just remember you sold some guy your bike and blew the money.”
Beater broke into a goofy smile. “Hell, yeah, man. I’m happy to do that.”
Then Tommy took the man’s bike and rode across Georgia, and into South Carolina.
Now Tommy approached the town of Fallen Oak. He missed the turn-off onto Esther Bridge Road, but it was a good thing. He saw some kind of roadblock down that way. Not just police, either. It looked like the Army or something.
Tommy kept going. He couldn’t risk being identified as an escaped convict, especially when he was so close to her.
He couldn’t give up his obsession with Ashleigh Goodling, either. His dreams about her grew more powerful, even addictive, so he couldn’t wait to sleep and dream about her. She would know things about him, he thought. She would have the answer to the insane riddle of his life. His intense dreams had convinced him of that.
There was only a small voice, somewhere in the back of his head, suggesting that he might be crazy for letting his dreams control his waking life. He ignored that voice.
He drove on. Nobody was going to stop him. They might block off the roads, but they couldn’t block off every field, pasture and deer path in a place this rural. He had a flashlight and a stack of Google maps in the bike’s saddlebag. He could find his way to Ashleigh Goodling’s house, even if he had to ditch the bike and do it on foot.
Chapter Eleven
Heather sat crossed-legged on her bed at the Lowcountry Inn, facing two laptop screens, her scribble-filled notepad, and an increasingly uneasy sense of dealing with the unknown.
After three days, laboratory studies had yielded nothing. They couldn’t find anything like a common cause, even though most of the cases had symptoms of extremely damaging infection throughout the skin, muscle tissue, internal organs, and even skeletal structure.
The voluntary phase of the screening had brought no suspected cases, either. They might find more when they pushed out into the community. For now, everyone who exhibited signs of the disease had already died in that singular incident. No source had been identified.
Heather was beginning to suspect a bioweapon. Any wild virus or bacterium with such a powerful effect would have been teeming all over the deceased bodies. Humans, on the other hand, had an incentive to engineer deadly bacteria with a programmed cell suicide clock. Something that could quickly sweep through a population, and then break itself down so that it left no trace, would be a powerful weapon.
That was only speculation, though. The pathogen would have to be programmed, not just to die, but to decay into undetectable components. And that sounded like science fiction. She couldn’t begin to suspect a motive, either. But something had swept through those people and left them in that condition.
Neither Heather nor the other investigators had turned up any clear explanation of what all those people might have been doing there, on the town green, on a Sunday night. It didn’t seem like any planned event, such as an Easter evening church service, had been happening. Nobody, not even the immediate relatives of the deceased, seemed to want to offer any reason why two hundred people had suddenly converged in the middle of town a few nights ago.
Based on their medical records, the two hundred and seventeen deceased had a statistically normal distribution of minor and major illnesses, their ages ranging from teens to the elderly. Only one African-American case had been identified, a teenager named Neesha Bailey. The town itself was forty-five percent African-American. Heather wondered at the discrepancy. Maybe it indicated some geographical division.
The other big anomaly was the teen pregnancy rate, which was far above the statistical norm. With a few exceptions like Darcy, there was a cluster of expected due dates near the end of July, indicating a cluster of conceptions in late October. Heather wondered if there was a single event involved there.
Researching on the internet, she found that the town’s pregnancy epidemic was quite documented. Ashleigh Goodling, the preacher’s daughter, had made an amazing number of press appearances talking about the surge in pregnancies. Heather even found a YouTube video of Ashleigh on Chuck O’Flannery’s blowhard TV s
how.
She watched Ashleigh talk with the most obnoxious man in show business:
“So of course the left has unleashed the crazy hounds,” O’Flannery said. The man was even fatter and uglier than Heather remembered. “I’ve seen awful things about you on the web, Ashleigh. Just hateful bile. Cartoons and Photoshop pictures that aren’t suitable for this program. Even The Onion has attacked you. All this attention must be hard on a kid your age.”
“I think it’s sad the left has to resort to attacking little girls,” Ashleigh said. “But you know what? My daddy’s a preacher, and he always tells me no matter what I suffer, it’s nothing compared to what Jesus and the Disciples suffered. Christians get persecuted, but God takes care of us. I don’t care if everyone hates me. I have my faith.” Ashleigh rubbed the cross pendant at her chest, and just happened to skip her fingers over her breast as she brought her hand down.
“I think you must have incredible strength to cope with all this vitriol,” O’Flannery said.
“All I ever said was teens shouldn’t have sex,” Ashleigh said. “How is that controversial?”
“Never underestimate the sheer hatred of the left,” O’Flannery said. “The truth makes them howl. In fact, I think it’s time to call out the Liberal Moondogs.”
A sound effect of several barking dogs played, and four cartoon dogs paraded across the screen.
“Now let’s look at the victims of this radical atheist principal,” he said. There was a slideshow of black-and-white photos, pregnant girls looking depressed and ashamed, accompanied by slow, sad music. Heather had seen a few of those same girls in the gymnasium over the last couple of days.
Heather paused the video. This Ashleigh person seemed strange to her. Unnaturally self-possessed and in command, she thought, for a high-school girl from a flyspeck town.
On her other laptop, Heather looked up the Goodling family. None of them had checked in for medical screening. None of them were identified among the deceased, either. She might have to put the Goodling household at the top of her community outreach efforts.
Then Heather looked up the other girl again, the one Darcy had accused of witchcraft. When Heather asked the other pregnant girls, a couple of them had reluctantly admitted to seeing Jenny Morton fall into a pond and never return to the surface. They had described Jenny as covered with blisters and sores at the time.
