Tommy Nightmare (Jenny Pox #2)

by JL Bryan

  “You don’t understand,” Darcy said. “I have pictures. I have to email them to you.”

  “What kind of pictures?”

  “Of Jenny. Only she’s all infected and gunk. Just like the people who died in the square.”

  “Did you see what happened in the square, Darcy?” Heather asked.

  “No. But everybody kinda knows. It was Jenny, she flared up with her disease and infected people. They die fast once they get it. That’s why everyone’s scared to talk. Everyone’s scared of her.”

  “Well, send me the pictures, Darcy—”

  “I already did. Can you look at ‘em now? Please?”

  Heather sighed. She opened her Outlook and saw the email from Darcy. She opened the attachment.

  A photo of Jenny Morton filled her screen. The girl leaned close to a blond-haired boy, who looked drowsy or asleep, and she had pried his mouth open with her fingers. Her chin and lips were full of leaking blisters and broken pustules. Her tongue was fully extended, reaching down towards his mouth, dripping pus, blood, and clear fluid onto the boy’s lips and face.

  Heather sat up in her chair. The girl had the symptoms of “Fallen Oak syndrome,” the mystery killer that they couldn’t identify. She was the first live suspected case.

  “Darcy,” Heather said. “When was this picture taken?”

  “That’s from, like, months ago,” Darcy said. “Somebody took it during Christmas break, I think.”

  “This isn’t recent?”

  “No. Like I said, she brings it out, then she threatens people with it, then she sucks it back in. Or, you know. Kills people. She says she can get away with it because it’s not murder, it’s disease. And she laughs. She terrorizes people with it. The whole town’s like in fear of her.”

  “Darcy, listen to me very carefully,” Heather said. “Is what you’re telling me true? All of it? Or is there any part you might be exaggerating, or not explaining clearly?”

  “It’s true,” Darcy said. “And I prayed on it, and then I started thinking maybe it’s not witchcraft, maybe it’s science. Like that immune carrier thingy you were talking about.”

  “But you’re saying she can express her symptoms at will?” Heather said.

  “Yeah. Or maybe she can’t really control it—like when I get hives on my butt after I eat cheese—it breaks out, and then she just acts mean when it breaks out. I dunno. I’ve been thinking about it too much.”

  “So you’re saying she has occasional breakouts, but then they go away?” Heather asked.

  “Right,” Darcy said. “But you don’t want to touch her because she’s contagious. That’s why she wears gloves all the time. Jenny Mittens, that’s something else people call her. She’s kind of a freako.”

  Heather remembered her visit to Jenny’s house. The girl had been wearing a pair of blue cloth gloves—that stuck out because it had been a hot, sticky day, no reason for her to wear them. The gloves were too clean and lightweight for gardening. Also, Heather thought it was odd that the girl never took them off, even when Heather was examining her, until Heather asked to take her blood.

  And Heather remembered one more thing—the girl had sighed in relief when Heather strapped on the disposable rubber gloves. She remembered that because nobody felt relief at the sight of a doctor slipping on gloves. Taking them off, maybe.

  “Dr. Reynard?” Darcy asked.

  “Yes. Hold on a moment.” Heather’s mind was racing. There were three possibilities. One, the photo was a fake of some kind. Two, the girl Jenny had previously been infected with the x-pathogen, but showed no signs when Heather examined her. Three, the picture was newer than Darcy said, and Jenny had become infected after Heather examined.

  Options two and three each indicated a separate outbreak from the single incident they knew about. Either possibility required immediate action.

  “Okay, Darcy?” Heather said.

  “Yeah?”

  “What else can you tell me about this?”

  “Uh…that’s about it, I guess.”

  “How certain are you about when this picture was taken?”

  “Kids were passing it around school in January. That’s all I really know.”

  “Okay. If you think of anything else, you call me. In fact, here’s my cell number.” Heather gave it to her. “Have you seen Jenny lately?”

  “Just around town,” Darcy said. “She’s usually riding with Seth Barrett. He’s the boy in the picture. He never gets sick, though.”

  “You’ve seen her since you saw this picture?”

  “Oh, yeah. That picture’s from a while ago. I kept it ‘cause it was so weird.”

  “Does she look sick to you?”

  “No, she looks fine,” Darcy said. “Like I said, that disease thing comes and goes with her.”

  “Okay. Thank you so much, Darcy. I’ll call you back if I have any questions.”

  “Um, better text my cell phone,” Darcy said. “My dad’s kind of a lame-o. He gets mad if the phone rings too much.”

  “Okay, I’ll text you. Bye, Darcy.”

  Heather looked up Jenny Morton’s lab results on the investigation database. If there was anything unusual, it was the girl’s completely perfect health.

  She wasn’t satisfied. Never mind the lab reports—she wanted to go look at the specimens herself.

  But first, she would stop by Schwartzman’s office. He would know somebody discreet at Homeland Security, somebody who could get her every available piece of information on Jenny Morton. And on the Goodlings, while they were at it.

  It looked like Jenny Morton might be carrying something deadly. Heather didn’t want to think about what could happen if Jenny decided to leave her little house in the woods and carry the pathogen right into some unsuspecting city.

  In her dream, Jenny was Euanthe again.

  Cleon had taken her among his retinue of servants to a grand holiday banquet at the home of Pericles, an intimidating marble mansion surrounded by gardens. Cleon liked Euanthe because she never spoke and always hurried to do as he asked. Euanthe had pretended to learn a few Greek words, like “wine” and “bread,” so that he could communicate with her. In reality, of course, she understood everything that was said around her.

  Cleon's wife had stayed home, as women were not invited.

  The great hall of Pericles' house was filled with nobility, politicians and wealthy merchants, as well as their servants. They reclined on carved wooden couches thick with cushions, and they drank wine and ate fruit from bowls carried by servants. Cleon greeted some of his friends and political allies and took a couch among them.

  Euanthe's job was to stand near Cleon's couch and fetch him things on demand. In reality, her main purpose—along with the other servants Cleon had brought with them—was simply to be there as a statement of Cleon's wealth and status. She wore a clean white tunic with a blue floral pattern, much nicer than anything she wore at Cleon's house, and her hair was braided and pinned up around the crown of her head.

  After the guests had arrived, a tall man with a thick gray beard stood near the giant fireplace, holding up a golden bowl filled with wine. He had striking blue eyes, and Euanthe thought he was very handsome.

  “Great men of Athens!” he said. “I welcome you to my home. May wise Athena continue to protect us from the Spartan scourge.”

  Shouts of agreement went up from the crowd.

  So this man was Pericles, Euanthe thought. The man she'd been sent to kill.

  “War is always cause for sorrow,” Pericles said. “And it is a time for men to stand strong together, shoulders together as in the phalanx, each man's shield protecting the man to his side. If one man falters, the phalanx is broken. We have our quarrels, and we will always quarrel—that is the blessing and curse of democracy.”

  Cleon muttered something to a friend, a wealthy merchant on the next couch, and the man smiled and nodded.

  “While the Spartans ravage the countryside outside our walls, we cannot prese
nt a weak front line,” Pericles said. “Therefore, we must set aside our differences until the Spartans are defeated. Vicious lies have been whispered about us all—let us cease whispering. You know I am not a man given to banquets and other extravagances. But I have invited you, the leadership of every major party and faction in the Assembly, to offer the branch of an olive tree. While there is war without, there must be unity within. Let us all find a way to work together for the good of Athens.”

  Pericles looked directly at Cleon.

  Cleon regarded Pericles with a stoic face, his gray eyes cold. All heads in the room gradually turned toward Cleon.

  When he had the room's attention, Cleon raised his gold-embossed silver cup, and he nodded his head very slightly.

  “Let there be peace,” Cleon said.

  The room erupted in cheers and stomping feet. Pericles and Cleon both drank wine, and all the other men did the same.

  Then musicians played lyres and harps while the guests busied themselves with eating and drinking, gossip and debate. A poet standing by the fireplace recounted from memory the story of Odysseus and his long journey home from Troy.

  Euanthe stood quietly, listening and pretending not to listen, until Cleon instructed her to fetch him a leg of roasted lamb, his favorite food.

  She left the banquet hall and walked into a large kitchen, where slaves roasted lambs and pigs over huge fires. At a long wooden table, more slaves hacked the roasted beasts into smaller pieces and stacked them on serving platters.

  Euanthe approached the long table, looking for the meatiest leg to bring her master.

  “You there!” a drunken voice called. Euanthe turned to see two young men approaching her, both of them in tunics stitched with gold and silver. Nobles. “Yes, you, girl!”

  Euanthe just looked at them, remembering that she allegedly did not know Greek, being an exotic foreigner.

  “She is Cleon's slave,” the second young noble said to the first.

  “Cleon is a filthy dog,” the first noble said. “Enemy of all that is Athens.”

  Euanthe remained silent.

  “Nothing to say in his defense?” The first noble was almost upon her. “Nothing for Cleon? Do you deny he plots against Pericles?”

  “She's only a slave,” the second noble said. “She is too stupid to know of politics.”

  “She is his property. Let's defile her, as a message to him.” The first noble reached for Euanthe's arm, but she pulled back.

  “You should not touch me,” she warned him.

  “Insolent!” the second noble said. He reached for her, too, and she had to dodge in the opposite direction.

  “Leave me to my work,” Euanthe said. She looked around the kitchen, but no slave would stand up for her against the noblemen.

  “I do not take orders from slaves!” the first nobleman said. “Least of all, slaves of that lowborn cur Cleon.”

  They had backed her against the long wooden table now, and both men reached for her.

  Euanthe summoned the special pox, the contagious one she had prepared for the destruction of Pericles and Athens. She was meant to infect Pericles directly, but launching the plague in his household would have to be close enough. She was not going to let these drunken noblemen drag her off and have their way with her.

  She lashed out, filling them both with the pox. Sores and tumors ruptured open along their arms and spread to their faces and legs.

  The noblemen fell to the ground, howling in pain and surprise. Now the other slaves paid attention, closing in from all sides to see what was happening.

  Euanthe breathed out a cloud of black spores, infecting them all. She felt bad for the other slaves as they writhed on the ground, but they were all doomed to die anyway. Archidamus, her king, had ordered it.

  She pulled the contagious plague back into herself, as much as she could. As the slaves fell to the floor, Euanthe found the biggest, juiciest leg of lamb and grabbed it for Cleon.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Heather strapped on a cleansuit, sealing herself from head to toe in plastic, with a breathing mask connected to a bottle of oxygen at her hip. Since the pathogen's means of transmission remained as unknown as the pathogen itself, the Fallen Oak specimens were treated as maximally dangerous and maximally contagious. A high level of security clearance was necessary to enter the lab dedicated to the investigation.

  The entire situation was still tightly stage-managed by the President's special adviser Nelson Artleby. The test samples had all been collected here in Atlanta. In a fairly bizarre move, the White House had ordered all the bodies stored in a guarded facility outside the city. The warehouse had been quickly configured for refrigeration in a special contract given to SyntaCorp, LLC, a giant defense firm where Nelson Artleby happened to sit on the Board of Directors.

  Heather couldn't imagine how gruesome that place must be. She imagined shelf after shelf of dead bodies, each one wrapped and sealed in layers of plastic. She wondered how their families would react if they discovered what had happened to their missing loved ones.

  Heather shook her head to try and clear away those thoughts. She was here to gather data.

  It amazed her to find the lab deserted. It had run round the clock for weeks while the samples were analyzed, but it looked like nobody was even assigned here full-time anymore. Nothing had been discovered by all the testing, which was the scariest fact of all.

  Heather located Jenny's blood sample in a refrigerator full of them. They were labeled with tracking codes—each person in Fallen Oak had been assigned one.

  She extracted one red drop and dripped it onto a microscope slide, then laid a clear plastic slide cover on top of it.

  She peered at Jenny's blood cells.

  Jenny had the world's rarest blood type, she knew, AB negative. Jenny's little boyfriend Seth had the opposite, O positive, the universal giver. Heather had developed a related interest in Seth, because he was either immune to the pathogen or he was a handsome teenage boy who didn't mind having a girlfriend he couldn't touch. Heather wasn't sure which of those possibilities was more far-fetched.

  Heather zoomed in closer. She couldn't see anything unusual here. Just normal, healthy blood cells, floating sluggishly because they'd been stored at freezing temperature. She knew there was nothing unusual about Jenny's white blood cells or platelet count.

  “Okay,” Heather whispered. “Tell me something new.”

  Since she couldn't find anything, and every standard test had already been run, she decided to try a slightly crazy experiment.

  Heather brought out a clean sample of AB negative from a different person, a blood donor from somewhere around Chicago, someone who had almost certainly never been exposed to Jenny before. She added a couple of drops of the sample to the slide with Jenny's blood, then returned the slide to the microscope.

  She watched the sample blood mingle with Jenny's blood. Nothing happened. She'd contaminated the diminishing specimen of Jenny's blood for nothing, she thought.

  Then, some of the blood cells began to quiver, their outer membranes vibrating like guitar strings.

  In front of Heather's eyes, some of the cells shriveled, others contorted into strange, spiky shapes, and others burst altogether. Other blood cells—Jenny's, she guessed—remained perfectly healthy as they floated among the destroyed ones.

  “What the hell was that?” Heather stood up straight and looked around at the empty lab. “Somebody tell me what the hell I just saw.”

  Jenny floated on her back, gazing up at the billions of blue and white stars. The water around her was very warm, heated by the June sunlight all day. She knew if she swam down far enough, she would reach the deep place where the water held the winter cold year round.

  “It's quiet out here,” Seth whispered. He floated beside her. “Used to be so many people during the summer.”

  They were swimming at the small body of water a couple of miles outside town, which Seth called “the reservoir” and everybody
else called “Barrett Pond.” It was almost midnight.

  “It's weird, isn't it?” Jenny said. “Never going back to school. It's like people tell you what to do your whole life, and then, all of a sudden, nobody's in charge.”

  “We're in charge,” he said. “We can do whatever we want.”

  “You can. I still have the Jenny pox, and I don't know what to do with myself now.”

  “Come with me and Darcy this weekend,” Seth said. “You'll like it. We're staying at a pretty cool hotel, an old mansion in the middle of downtown. Darcy said she stayed there with her family once and it's really nice.”

  “Cities scare me. All those people I could infect. I’ve done it to whole cities before, in other lives.” Jenny had begun to think that Pericles, the man she’d been trying to kill in her dream, was a past-life incarnation of Seth. But he never seemed interested in her past-life dreams, so she didn’t see any point bringing it up.

  “Are you really worried about that?” Seth asked.

  “I have to worry about it every second I'm alive, Seth. It’s what my whole life is about”

  “You don't think you might be hiding behind the Jenny pox a little bit?”

  She turned her head in the water to look at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe you're scared of change,” he said. “A little bit scared of the world beyond this town.”

  “That's not it!” she snapped. “You don't understand.”

  “I do, though. I'm kind of scared, too, and I'm used to being away. But that was boarding at Grayson. This is different. Nobody in charge anymore, like you said. But it won't be scary if you're with me, you know? It'll be fun.”

  “If I go,” Jenny said, “Can you get a place outside the city, more in the country? Then you could drive into Charleston for school, but I won't have to be surrounded by people.”

  “I don't know. My parents might get suspicious about that.”

  “Suspicious?” Jenny flipped down from her back float and started treading water. “You've been insisting I come and live with you, and your parents don't even know that's your plan?”