Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4)

by J. Bryan

  Sebastian, Niklaus, and another boy approached their table, but Niklaus continued on without acknowledging them and sat at a table with the S.S. men. Sebastian sat by Juliana and hugged her. Alise cleared her throat and shook her head, as if affection shouldn’t be shown here.

  The other boy smiled at the girls, and sat next to Vilja. The ghostly Swedish girl looked uncomfortable at his grin and shifted away from him.

  “Who’s he?” Juliana whispered to Sebastian. “Your roommate?”

  “Why would I need a roommate?” Sebastian asked. “There are only three guys on our hall, and Niklaus has the biggest room to himself because he’s the hallway fuehrer. That means he’s the guy in charge of watching us and enforcing the rules, I think.”

  “I see you talking about me,” the boy told them, in accented but fluent English. “What are you saying?”

  “She was just asking who you were,” Sebastian said. “Juliana, this is Willem. He’s from, uh...”

  “Holland,” Willem said. He had short blond hair and blue eyes, and he gave off a nervous energy, fidgeting in his chair, his fingers restlessly tapping. He kept stealing glances at Vilja,who ignored him. “They must be growing desperate for subjects, if they’re looking as far away as America.”

  “There don’t seem to be many of us here,” Juliana agreed.

  “That’s because we’re only looking for the truly extraordinary,” Alise told them. “The supernormal. We’re selective.”

  “There just aren’t many of us, are there?” Willem asked. “Supernatural gifts are rare.”

  “What is yours?” Juliana asked him.

  “I start fires.” Willem gave her a wicked grin.

  “With your hands?” Juliana asked.

  “With my hands?” He smirked. “Anyone can start a fire with their hands. I start them with my mind.” He touched the side of his head.

  “Your power doesn’t involve touch?” Sebastian asked.

  “He has no power,” said a soft voice at the end of the table. Evelina, the small Slavic girl, speaking for the first time. She didn’t look up from the plate of pickled vegetables in front of her, though she wasn’t eating, just stirring it with a fork.

  “What?” Willem scowled, leaning towards Evelina. “Are you calling me a liar?”

  Alise took Willem’s arm and spoke softly to him in either German or Dutch, Juliana couldn’t tell. Willem gazed longingly into her eyes, like a small boy falling in love for the first time. When she released him, Willem sank back in his seat, wearing the same kind of goofy smile that had appeared on Sebastian’s face when Alise touched him.

  Alise saw Juliana looking at her and gave a big smile. “See? We can all get along peacefully,” Alise told her.

  Juliana looked at Willem, who stared at Alise with his mouth open, starting to drool. Juliana realized that Alise’s “happy” power might be more dangerous than it sounded.

  “You will all be happy to learn that, in honor of our two new friends from America, we have obtained permission to use the screening room tonight,” Alise said, and everyone seemed to brighten at this news. “We’ll watch ‘She Done Him Wrong’ with Mae West and Cary Grant.”

  Juliana and Mia immediately looked at each other and smiled.

  “We have selected this film because Juliana expressed an admiration for the actress,” Alise added, with an extra smile at Juliana. Juliana smiled back. Mia must have mentioned it to Alise, though Juliana wasn’t sure when that might have happened. The American movie would certainly help them feel at home.

  All of the subjects went to the screening room after the meal. Alise quietly made it clear to Juliana that hand-holding and kissing in the darkened room was not allowed. Juliana and Sebastian had to sit with an empty seat between them. Still, Juliana enjoyed the movie.

  Things became much less pleasant the next day.

  Juliana’s morning started with a physical examination in a laboratory. She had to strip down while a couple of German nurses, not much older than her, weighed her, measured her, took her pulse, and drew samples of her blood and cut lengths out of her hair, which they placed into labeled test tubes. They wore surgical masks and gloves and acted wary around her, as if they’d been warned about her touch. Juliana gave them an extra warning, but she wasn’t sure if they understood. She was tense throughout the physical.

  Eventually, the doctor entered, and the two nurses moved to the side of the room, where they stood with their hands folded and backs straight, like soldiers at attention. Juliana, sitting naked on the steel exam table, hurried to cover herself with her arms. She cast a desperate look at the two nurses, wanting to know whether she could put her clothes on again, but they didn’t even look at her.

  The doctor’s nose was buried in a file folder, and he kept reading for a few minutes after he entered, saying nothing at all to Juliana or the nurses. He was a very pudgy man, balding, with a fat, clean-shaven face but a thick neck beard under his chin line, like he was trying hard to look eccentric, or desperately wanted to look like a lion. His eyes flicked back and forth behind his horn-rimmed glasses as he read.

  “Hello?” Juliana finally said to him.

  The man glanced up and eyed her coldly. “Yah?”

  “Can I get dressed?” she asked.

  He grunted and took a pen from the breast pocket of his lab coat. “You are Juliana?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hm. Severe infection caused by physical contact—not the only case of transmission through touch we’ve seen here.” He looked up from the file again. “Background questions. Age?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Any allergies, chronic illnesses, past surgeries, anything at all in your medical background?”

  “No, sir. I’ve almost never been to the doctor, and I’ve never been sick.”

  “Never sick?” He scribbled in his file. “Nothing? No common cold? No minor infections of any kind?”

  “No. Can I get dressed now?”

  “Not until exam is over.”

  “Do you have a name?” she asked.

  “I am Dr. Franz Wichtmann,” he said, sounded impatient. “I am the project director here. Tell me about this deadly touch of yours. How long have you had it?”

  “All my life.”

  “Have you ever harmed a person with it?”

  Juliana hesitated.

  “You can be honest,” Wichtmann said. “All is confidential.”

  “I have, but only when they attacked me first,” Juliana told him.

  “Have you ever killed anyone with your touch?”

  Juliana hesitated again, looking down at her bare feet. Her whole body seemed pale and sick under the harsh surgical lights overhead.

  “We are scientists, not police,” Wichtmann reminded her. “And we are not even in your country. We are here to promote human evolution, and we have no wish to put our test subjects in prison. If we are to study your situation, we must have the facts.”

  “Again...it was only when they attacked me.”

  “Then you have killed human beings with your touch?” His eyebrows were raised, but he seemed more curious than horrified.

  “Dr. Wichtmann, I grew up on the streets, alone,” she told him. “Sometimes, a man would see a vulnerable young girl and attack. I had no choice but to protect myself.”

  “How many?”

  “How many?” she asked back.

  He sighed. “How many men have you killed, Juliana?”

  “I don’t know, I try to block it out...Five? Seven?”

  “Five or seven?”

  “Yes.”

  He noted this down. “Does your power spread only through touch? Can it become airborne?”

  “No, I don’t think so. It’s only happened through my touch.”

  “Hm. And is your touch harmful to nonhumans? Animals, plants?”

  “Animals, definitely. Plants resist it better...but if I stand on a patch of grass too long, it will eventually turn brown and die.”

  “How
long does it take to kill a person or animal?”

  “If I just touch them, they usually get away with an infection that fades in time. If I hold on for a minute, they’ll die.” Juliana squirmed nervously. His questions made her feel even more exposed than she already was. “I try not to kill people, honestly! Sometimes I can just threaten them away.”

  “And people believe your threats? What do you tell them?”

  “I don’t have to say much. I just...” Juliana held out her arm, and dark sores opened from the crook of her elbow all the way to her fingertips. They spread up to her neck, then ruptured open along one side of her face, turning her eye the color of diseased blood. One of the nurses in the corner screamed. “You don’t really have to tell people not to touch you, if you look like this.”

  Dr. Wichtmann gaped, then pulled his surgical mask from his neck up to his face. “Are you certain it isn’t airborne?”

  “I’ve worked at a freak show for years, showing these things off to crowds in a small room at the back of a tent,” she told him. “No one’s ever gotten sick, or I would have stopped doing it.”

  “You can exhibit symptoms at will?” Wichtmann asked. He wrote much faster now, his eyes bugging behind his glasses.

  “Sure.” Infected wounds and blisters opened all over her body, turning her into a mass of disease and gore. Both the nurses gasped at the sudden transformation, as did Dr. Wichtmann, who took an extra couple of steps back from her, even though he’d kept a good distance between them since he’d arrived. He turned his head and barked orders at the nurses in German.

  One of the nurses crossed her arms and shook her head, but the second nurse grabbed the first one’s arm and pulled her along. They reluctantly approached Juliana and took samples of the dark fluid and blood leaking from her sores, the inflamed cluster of pustules on her cheek, the sticky bile that leaked out through the leprous decay of her stomach. They took what seemed like an endless series of photographs.

  “Does it cause pain?” Dr. Wichtmann asked.

  “I guess it’s a little itchy.”

  “Not for you, I mean for others.”

  “Oh. I think so. They usually kind of hiss and pull away, and then they have lesions wherever I touched them.”

  “And you can make them heal at will, too?”

  “I can heal myself.” Juliana’s disease symptoms closed and vanished, leaving traces of blood and other fluids here and there on her skin. “I can’t heal anyone else, though.”

  Dr. Wichtmann scribbled more notes. “I have determined that your supernormality may be genuine. You will have testing this afternoon. Until then, you have two hours lunch and recreation.” He turned away.

  “What kind of testing?” Juliana asked, but he left the room without answering. After he’d been gone a few seconds, the two nurses raced out the door, casting fearful glances at Juliana and whispering as they departed.

  Juliana quickly dressed herself. A guard in an S.S. uniform escorted her to the mess hall, which was still mostly empty because she was early. She sat alone at the usual table in the back. She’d hoped to see Sebastian at lunch, but none of the other test subjects were here, just a group of S.S. men at the center table. Three young nurses arrived, but one of them pointed at Juliana and whispered to the others, and all three immediately turned and left without eating.

  As Juliana was the only female in the room, she drew repeated looks from the S.S. men eating their early lunch. It made her uncomfortable, so she hurried through her beef stew and chunk of bread, then returned to her room.

  In the afternoon, she found herself standing alone in one of the big concrete laboratory rooms, facing a row of six cages, holding six live goats that stared at her with their creepy eyes. A video camera whirred, recording her on fat spools of film. The room had a high ceiling, like an airplane hangar. Dr. Wichtmann and several younger scientists observed her from sealed glass windows far above her.

  “To your right,” Dr. Wichtmann said to Juliana, his voice crackling over an electronic speaker. She looked at the row of cages and approached the one on the far right. She’d had a sick feeling in her stomach since the moment she’d walked into the room and seen the animals in their narrow cages.

  “What do you want me to do?” Juliana asked, though she was afraid she knew. She was just stalling.

  “Touch the first one,” the doctor told her.

  “It will get sick.”

  “That’s what we want.”

  Juliana frowned as she stepped toward the first cage. The goat stepped toward her and made a bleating sound.

  “Go ahead,” Dr. Wichtmann ordered. “We have a tight schedule.”

  Juliana forced herself to move closer to the goat, but she couldn’t bring herself to touch it.

  “Don’t make me do this,” Juliana said, looking up at the fat doctor in the window. “There must be something else we can use...like snakes or lizards. Or spiders, I can kill spiders.”

  “Those are no good for us,” Wichtmann said. “You must do this if you ever want to gain control of your power. Is that not your stated purpose in being here?”

  I’ll just touch it for a second, she told herself. It will heal from that.

  Juliana tried to ignore her feelings as she reached through the cage bars and brushed her fingers lightly across the goat’s back. The animal squealed and twisted away from her as bloody blisters erupted along its spine. The goat turned in circles inside the cage, kicking its hooves against the walls. The other goats began echoing its fearful bleats.

  “Very good.” Dr. Wichtmann was looking through binoculars, as were two other scientists, for a close-up of the goat. She realized that all these men were frightened of her, and that was why none of them were down here with her.

  “The second stall,” Dr. Wichtmann called out. “Now, you are holding onto the goat for ten seconds. I will time.”

  “Ten seconds could kill an animal that small.” Juliana looked at the second goat, who was shaking and trying to escape, alarmed by the cries of the first goat. “Can’t we at least use animals that are already sick or dying?”

  “Other illnesses would only confuse the data,” Dr. Wichtmann insisted. “We must be certain they begin in good health. Now, ten seconds. Now!” All of the faces stared down at her coldly, making her feel she had no choice.

  Juliana forced herself to walk toward the second goat, who squealed and backed away from her, but it didn’t have very far to travel inside the cage. She steeled herself, then reached inside and wrapped her fingers around its hind leg, the farthest she could get from any of the poor animal’s vital organs. That would give it a better chance of surviving, she thought.

  It shrieked as the dark blisters spread up its leg and across its torso. The skin of its face bubbled and burst, blood trickling down across its small, wooly chest. It slammed its head repeatedly into the wooden wall beside it, leaving smears of blood thick with lumps of rotten flesh. Its lower lip rotted away, revealing its lower teeth as they sank into the black, mushy remains of its lower jaw, like stones sinking into a swamp.

  “Time!” Dr. Wichtmann called. Juliana immediately released the goat, and it collapsed on its hindquarters. The leg she’d held had broken apart like a rotten sponge, and now the three-legged goat flailed helplessly on the ground, squealing in agony.

  “I’m sorry!” Juliana whispered to the thrashing goat. “I wish I could take it back. I wish I could...Sebastian!” she screamed up to Dr. Wichtmann. “Sebastian needs to heal this animal. Where is he?”

  “Nein,” Dr. Wichtmann replied.

  “Please!” Juliana called.

  “We must study the disease to understand it,” Dr. Wichtmann told her. “This is necessary.”

  Juliana tried not to cry at the sound of the wailing, plague-ravaged goat. While she’d never been sick from any disease, she now had to fight her desire to throw up in front of everyone. She needed this test to end. She wished she’d never agreed to it.

  “And now the third g
oat,” Dr. Wichtmann said. “This one, thirty seconds.”

  “It won’t live!” Juliana said.

  “Now,” Dr. Wichtmann said. “Thirty seconds.”

  Juliana bit her lip as she eyed the third goat, its eyes rolling in terror at the screams of the other two. She forced herself to reach for it, and this time she grabbed it around the neck, thinking to make the animal’s death as quick and merciful as possible.

  She imagined the demon plague pouring out of her hands like a swarm of poisonous black flies, burrowing straight toward the center of the goat’s brain. It bleated, and blood poured from its eyes, mucus and brain fluid from its mouth. Its head fell apart, and the portion of the neck she held in her fingers rotted away.

  The headless goat fell to the floor of its cage with a sickening splatter sound. A wave of dark sores rippled across its front legs and abdomen, but stopped halfway along its body, because the goat was dead. Its back half still looked perfectly healthy, except for the blood slowly seeping its way through the goat’s fur.

  Juliana stepped back, shaking, with bits of deteriorating skull and brain dripping from her bloody fingers. She looked at Dr. Wichtmann and shook her head. She didn’t want to do it again, and three more goats remained.

  “That is enough,” Dr. Wichtmann said. “The other three goats are controls. You may...”

  Another scientist tapped Dr. Wichtmann’s shoulder and pointed. A small group of S.S. officers appeared in the window beside the scientists, led by a man with poison-green eyes and close-cropped hair the color of burnt copper. His face was all hard slabs, and his colorless lips pressed together, almost too small to see. His black military cap had a small eagle and a skull and crossbones on the front, and he had oak leaves on his lapel, signifying some kind of rank. Two younger men in black uniforms stood a step behind him.