by JL Bryan
“My vision? So what am I, if she's a scavenger, and you're a builder?”
Alexander grinned. “You're just in it for the adventure.” He urged his horse on, and the stallion galloped fast along the trail. “Try to keep up!”
“Yah!” Jenny yelled, kneeing her horse. The brown and white mare picked up speed, and Jenny lowered her head. She found horseback riding came naturally, as if she'd done it a million times before.
They raced up the narrow rainforest trail, Jenny's heart pounding in her chest. The trail was mostly uphill, except for a few switchbacks along the way.
Jenny lost track of time—it might have been thirty minutes before Alexander slowed down, and Jenny did the same.
They rounded a bend in the trail and came upon a pair of men with rags tied over their faces, hiding everything but their eyes. They pointed AK-47s at the jaguars, who stood side by side on the trail, like statues.
“Hola,” Alexander said, as he and Jenny stopped their horses just behind the jaguars.
“Hola, El Brujo,” one of the men replied, lowering the cloth to reveal his face. The two armed men stood aside, allowing them to pass. The jaguars darted ahead on the trail. Alexander chatted with them, in a mix of Spanish and Mayan, as he and Jenny rode past.
“Why are they wearing masks?” Jenny whispered when they were out of earshot.
“If another cartel finds us, we don't want them going to their villages. Tracking them down, threatening their families.”
“Threatening their families?”
“Papa Calderon has many enemies,” Alexander said. “But if our work here were discovered, he would have many more.”
They reached a sloped clearing, where dense, overlapping rows of coca plants grew in the shadow of ancient rainforest trees. Workers picked the leaves and dropped them into woven baskets. They moved at a painfully slow pace, but there must have been thirty or more of them harvesting the crop. They were men and women and children, their skin decayed, many with an empty eye socket or missing limb.
Jenny caught her breath. She thought she'd been prepared to see this, but it was still a horrifying sight.
“You okay?” Alexander asked her. “You just went a little pale.”
“It's so weird,” Jenny said. “I expect them all to turn around and attack me, like in Army of Darkness.”
“Good movie,” Alexander said.
“Not you, too.”
“What's wrong with the Evil Dead movies?”
“Nothing. It's just my boyfriend...ex-boyfriend got obsessed with them. Towards the end of our relationship.” It stung Jenny's heart to talk about Seth that way, but then she reminded herself of how he'd cheated on her, the first chance he got. Knowing Jenny could never cheat on him, because she would kill any other boy she touched.
A warm, moist wind blew through the trees, and a collective groan went up from the zombie workers as it passed through their rib cages and skulls.
“Do you think they're in pain?” Jenny asked.
“I don't think they feel anything.” Alexander dropped from his horse, then helped Jenny down to the ground.
Among the workers, there were three men with cloth masks over their faces and AK-47s slung over their backs. They each held a long wooden pole. Jenny watched one of them use the pole to herd a zombie woman from one plant to the next. She shuffled sideways, her hands still plucking at the empty air, until she was positioned in front of the next plant and resumed harvesting leaves again.
Alexander walked from row to row, chatting with the three living and masked overseers as he inspected the zombies. Jenny saw a few decaying children among them, tugging the lowest leaves from the plants. She shuddered.
When they reached the highest row of coca plants on the slope, Jenny saw a pair of little monkeys shrieking and chasing each other through the trees overhead.
Alexander put a finger under her chin and turned her head to look back at the zombies. “Pay attention,” he said. “Watch what happens.” His fingers remained on her face, and Jenny felt the pox rush out of her, the way it did on those rare occasions when she intentionally used it against someone.
The zombies accelerated, their hands darting from plant to basket and back again. The overseers had to hustle to keep the zombies moving along the rows, but the zombies were more responsive now—one quick tap from a pole would send a zombie a few steps sideways to work on the next plant, no more need for extensive wrangling and prodding each time.
“You've got them moving,” Alexander said. “They'll finish this patch in a day instead of a week.”
“The Jenny pox,” she said. “It's zombie fuel.”
He grinned and tousled her hair. “Exactly.” His hand moved to the back of her neck, maintaining his contact with her. Jenny felt tingly wherever he touched her.
Jenny reached across the row of plants to touch one of the zombies, who looked like a teenage boy with half his face decayed, leaving only grimy blackened skull. Her finger brushed his arm, and he immediately doubled his speed, stripping the plant in front of him. An overseer reached his pole from two rows away and tapped the boy to the next plant.
“They like me,” Jenny said.
“You're the zombie queen.”
Jenny watched the harvest quietly, feeling her connection to Alexander deepen as he drew the pox from inside her. She found herself reaching an arm across his back, feeling the muscles under his shirt. She leaned against him, her head against his chest, wanting to touch him more, suddenly frustrated by her gloves and her long sleeves. He smelled like sweat and tropical humidity and horse and cotton.
“We have to keep all this a secret,” he said.
“Yeah, I'm sure,” Jenny said. She looked out at the rows and rows of coca. Her father had grown a small patch of bad outdoor pot on some long-foreclosed farmland outside Fallen Oak, but it was nothing on this scale. “This is like the most illegal thing you can do.”
“The Mexican feds are a concern, but not our biggest one. The real danger is the other cartels.”
“Why would they care?”
“The Mexican cartels sell to the United States. They buy from cartels in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia,” Alexander said. “The growers. But Papa Calderon has invested in botany, and his people developed a good strong plant that thrives here, in the extreme south of Mexico. We're not too far from Guatemala. Scattered through these mountains, we have the largest coca crop ever grown in Mexico. We can cut out the South Americans and control our own production and distribution. And that would make everyone angry. The Calderon family would be more profitable than their competitors, and the South Americans would all come down on them for setting a dangerous precedent.”
“And you don't have any problem working for people like that?” Jenny asked. “Drug cartels? Violent gangs?”
“What is a government but a violent gang with a flag?” Alexander asked. “In fact, all of this violence is created by the human governments. They could end it all with a wave of their hands, simply make all the drugs legal. Then the trade would be peaceful, like the buying and selling of any legal product.”
“I guess...”
“But governments feed on violence and discord, conflict, people living in fear,” Alexander said. “People looking to their rulers for protection. Peace and tranquility starve the state. If the world does not offer enough threats, the state must manufacture them. With violent drug gangs in the streets, the state grows more powerful. It is the prohibition itself that slowly destroys the society, and the rulers know this, yet they like the power it grants them.”
“But why are you doing this?” Jenny asked.
“The opportunity arose, and it interested me,” Alexander said. “You see how I use my share of the revenue to help the local people. I listen to their needs and do what I can to meet them. I've told you, I'm a builder.”
“Schools and clinics,” Jenny said.
“Just simple groundwork. There will be greater things in time. And so far as the violence...
Papa Calderon is a man of the old school. He uses violence only where necessary, to defend his business and his people. His competition is the cartel run by Pablo Toscano out of Juarez, which is the largest cartel in Mexico. Toscano is truly insane. Bombing newspapers. Heads on stakes. Entire towns pillaged and burned to make a point. So long as the world is what it is, many people would benefit, many lives would be saved if Calderon took over the market from Toscano. There are many shades of gray between good and evil, Jenny, and the lighter shades are to be preferred, if we cannot have pure white.”
Jenny digested this. She still wasn't sure she agreed with him, but he clearly had a sense of morality about what he was doing, and a vision for helping to making things better for the local people.
“This all sounds pretty dangerous,” Jenny finally said.
“I know. Exciting, isn't it?”
“Doesn't any of it scare you?”
“Jenny, I've suffered every terrible death you can imagine,” Alexander said. “Drawn and quartered. Burned at the stake. Torn apart by tigers in front of a cheering crowd. There's nothing left on this earth that can frighten me.”
She found herself gazing up at him, as if hypnotized by his dark amber eyes. She didn't move when he leaned his face close, or when his lips touched hers.
It was like an electric jolt—Jenny jumped, and had a sudden memory of Alexander in a different body, purple cape lashing around him in fierce wind, walking a battlefield by spotty moonlight. He picked among the fallen, touching one here and one there, and they raised up on their feet, wearing their bloody leather armor and broken helmets, and they hefted their shields and swords, undead warriors ready for another day in the grisly march of conquest.
Jenny opened her eyes and staggered back from him. “Wait,” she said.
“Too much for you?” He smiled.
“I don't feel like myself,” she said. “I feel like I'm losing control.”
“You're not. You're just remembering who you really are.”
Jenny took a deep breath as she looked out on the rows of workers scrambling to harvest every ripe coca leaf. Put a shovel in their hands and they could dig a ditch. Put a sword or a gun in their hands, and they became unstoppable killers.
She felt sick to her stomach, and a little dizzy. Jenny plucked a few of the coca leaves, shoved them in her mouth, and chewed on them. Alexander removed one of her gloves and took her hand in his, watching her. Soon, her head cleared and she began to feel better.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Seth walked through the Pioneer Square neighborhood in Seattle with a picture of Jenny in his pocket. The day was gray and overcast, the cool summer climate a definite change from the broiling humidity back home.
Jenny's father had received a postcard from Jenny, sent from Seattle just a couple of days ago. Her note had been short and shallow—Doing great...Just felt the need to travel a little...Love it here...Hope you're doing well...Not much information at all. And no mention of Seth, either.
The postcard confused Seth's earlier idea that Jenny must have been kidnapped by Ashleigh and the others. He'd immediately booked a flight to Seattle, and now found himself trudging through the arts district, stopping at cafes and at every pottery shop or gallery he saw, asking people if they'd seen Jenny. Nobody recognized her picture, though.
Seth could imagine Jenny enjoying this city, especially here in the arts district—the Victorian mansions built of aging brick, the old-timey streetlamps with their clusters of bulbs, the trees growing through the sidewalk, statues and public art everywhere you looked. He stopped to look at a sixty-foot totem pole, staring at the enormous eyes and hooked beak of some kind of bird.
He wished he was here with Jenny now. She'd always said she didn't like cities and was scared to travel to them, for fear of infecting people with her touch. For her to come here on her own, something must have radically changed her feelings about those things. It didn't make sense that someone terrified of a city as small as Charleston would run to a city of millions like this one.
Another thing that didn't quite fit for Seth: Jenny probably wouldn't have picked the Space Needle postcard that her dad had received. That was the one image everybody knew, from TV or the movies. Jenny would have chosen a more colorful and unexpected image, like a postcard featuring this huge totem pole in front of him. Or the giant stone troll under the George Washington Bridge. Or any of the statues of settlers, firemen, factory workers or Native Americans around town—Jenny, who enjoyed pottery and sculpture herself, would have picked any of these over something as bland as the Space Needle.
On the other hand, the postcard was exactly the sort of touch that Ashleigh would add, if she'd kidnapped Jenny and didn't want people looking for her. If that was the case, then Jenny was certainly not in Seattle, or anywhere close. She would be hundreds or thousands of miles from here.
Still, Seth didn't have any clues except for the postcard. He would continue asking around, and if nothing came up by tonight, he'd get a hotel room and start fresh in the morning. Seattle was a big city, with lots of little places to look.
He could only hope Jenny was safe. If she'd fallen into Ashleigh's hands, she would be in terrible danger. Seth couldn't stop worrying about her.
***
“Jennifer Morton's father received a postcard from her today. Postmarked Seattle,” said Chantella Williams, the investigator who was Heather's contact at Homeland Security.
Heather was currently working out of a borrowed office at the Medical University of South Carolina, keeping tabs on those patients who'd exhibited symptoms of Fallen Oak syndrome after the riot. She leaned back in her chair, listening to Williams on the phone.
“Seth Barrett left on a plane for Seattle this afternoon,” Williams continued.
“He went to join her?”
“We borrowed somebody from the Seattle office to tail him for a couple of hours. He was showing pictures of Jennifer to the locals, asking if they'd seen her.”
“So he really doesn't know where she is,” Heather said.
“Or they're going to a lot of trouble to make it look that way. He just made a hotel reservation from his phone, so it looks like he'll be staying overnight.”
“Any luck on Jenny herself?”
“Nothing there. She has no credit card, just a small checking account at the Fallen Oak Merchants and Farmers Bank, with less than forty dollars. That hasn't been touched. She's traveling with cash or someone's paying her way. We have her car's VIN and tag number flagged, so we'll hear from any police who might encounter it.”
“So that's it? We're just waiting?”
“We'll have our Seattle people check around some more. But until she does something to draw attention to herself...”
Heather sighed. “What about her father? What's he doing?” Neither Jenny nor her father had been home when Heather arrived with the Homeland Security people on Monday, so they had moved on to Seth's house. Later, they'd determined Darrell Morton had been hospitalized with some kind of nervous breakdown on Saturday night, checked in by his daughter Jenny. That was the end of Jenny's paper trail.
“Darrell Morton was released from the county hospital on Monday evening with a recommendation to seek psychiatric care,” Williams said. “Given the state of his insurance, though, I doubt he'll follow up.”
“Has he made any unusual phone calls? Or purchases?”
“If he had, I would be telling you about them, Dr. Reynard. I obviously don't have time to fill you in on everything that didn't happen.”
“Okay, sorry, Jesus,” Heather said. Williams was snappy today.
“Don't swear in my ear.”
“Fine. What else do you have? Any luck with the hospital footage?”
“We ran it through our best image-matching software, but there wasn't much to work with. The security camera was low-resolution, he had sunglasses and hair covering most of his face, no distinguishing marks—”
“Did you find anything or not?” Heather as
ked.
“Nothing so far. They're still trying.”
“So we don't have any idea where to find them.”
“There are still a lot of cracks in the world where people can disappear, Dr. Reynard. Now, Assistant Director Lansing wants me to get an update from your end.”
“The update is that it's over,” Heather said. “All symptoms of Fallen Oak syndrome faded from those rioters in a few days. No infections, no scarring, and of course no pathogen. We're keeping up with them on an outpatient basis. Maybe something will crop up.”
“But there is no remaining evidence that anything unusual happened in Charleston?”
“Just those videos from the hospital. And your people took them into evidence.” Heather sighed. “You can tell Nelson Artleby that there's no threat to the President's poll ratings on national security.”
“I don't report to Nelson Artleby.”
“But he sees your reports on this situation.”
“That's over my pay grade, Dr. Reynard. Do you have any further information for us?”
“Nope, just a complete regression of all symptoms.”
“Okay.” Williams hung up on her.
Heather resumed sifting through the megabytes of data on her laptop, everything she was allowed to know about the events in Fallen Oak and in Charleston. It looked like an endless pile of useless information, but somewhere in there could be a clue that tied together Jenny Morton, the riot in Charleston, and the mysterious young man who could apparently raise the dead.
She had no idea what that clue might look like, though.
About an hour later, her cell phone rang. It was her husband Liam, calling from Atlanta. Heather felt very jittery about answering the call. She'd managed to push her personal fears away while in her professional working mode, but now they came shoving back.
Her daughter, Tricia, had been suffering a fever and swollen glands. Liam took the four-year-old to her pediatrician, who went on to order a CBC, though he'd assured Liam that it was only a precaution.
