Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4)

by J. Bryan

  “I only met them a few weeks ago, honestly,” Mariella said. “If you’ve been spying on them, you must know that, don’t you? Whatever terrible crimes they’ve committed, I want you to know that I was not involved, I barely know these people, and I just want to go home.” Mariella’s voice cracked, and she teared up. “I just want to see my family. That’s all.”

  “Oh, no, wait.” He sat up, taken aback by her sudden outpouring. “You don’t need to be afraid as long as you cooperate. You see, this project ultimately affects the entire Western world. We hoped that, given your family’s prominence in Italy, you might be willing to work with us, on the side of law and order.”

  “Work...with you? How?” She looked up at him, wiping her eyes.

  “We’d begin with basic scientific tests, studying and measuring your precognitive ability, and unraveling what makes it tick. Wouldn’t it be nice to understand yourself better?”

  “I suppose it could.” Mariella nodded and gave him a weak smile.

  “In time, you might have assignments. Protecting NATO interests, including Italy. We might send you to read the future of a specific influential person, for example.”

  Mariella thought it over. “So...I would be a spy?”

  “Essentially. But we would need your absolute loyalty.”

  “I’ve always wanted to be a spy. Is that silly?” Mariella gave an embarrassed giggle.

  “Not to me. You would be on our side, the good guys working against the evil in the world. Secret missions, traveling in disguise. Would you like that?”

  “Oh, yes!” Mariella’s eyes lit up, and she tried to sound as naive and impressed as possible. “Do you mean it? You want me for that?”

  “We think you would make an excellent agent,” he continued, really laying it on thick. “Young, intelligent, well-bred, educated...and a very useful power in your hands. Will you work with us?”

  Mariella gaped at him for a long moment.

  “Is that a yes?” he finally asked.

  “Oh, yes, please, of course, sir!” She bounced in her chair as if she couldn’t contain herself. “What’s my first mission?”

  He laughed. “Decorate your room. We’re moving you out of the cellblock and into more comfortable quarters. We have your overnight bag from Carnac waiting for you. Just let us know what else you need.”

  “Egyptian cotton sheets.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “At least twelve hundred thread count, and they must be organic, or it’s just not comfortable,” Mariella said. “I’ll make you a list of everything I need once I see the accommodations.”

  Ward rubbed the side of his head. “Not a problem.”

  “Do I get a secret spy name? Or a code number?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “What kind of spying will I do?”

  “Your first job is to call your parents and let them know you’re safe,” he said. “Tell them you took a semester off to study Alpine folk music, or whatever bullshit you have to tell them, so they aren’t calling every police agency in France searching for you.”

  “Oh, yes, sir! I’ll come up with something. Something very clever.” She winked.

  “Good. The guards will show you to your new room. Any more questions?”

  “Only a million!” Mariella said. “But I can wait, I see you’re busy.” She bounced out of her chair and smiled over her shoulder as she approached the door.

  The guards brought her to the largest room on a dormitory hall that had no other residents. They showed her the common area and bathroom, both of which she had to herself for now. She was certain that she was being monitored with hidden cameras. The general was treating her well, but that didn’t mean he trusted her. She certainly didn’t trust him. He was probably just worried about her family’s influence. If they learned an American agency had kidnapped their daughter, it would only take one phone call from her grandfather to elevate the complaint to NATO...which explained why the general was being so nice to her.

  She sat down on her new bed as the three guards left, snickering to herself for insisting on organic Egyptian sheets. She’d give him a laundry list of luxury items, playing the spoiled rich girl. If he thought she was shallow and empty-headed, he’d probably find her less suspicious.

  Her mind boiled over with strong memories from this same hall. This room had belonged to Alise, not to her. Mariella supposed she was now the hallway fuehrer.

  Mariella had once shared a smaller room down the hall with Jenny, when their names were Mia and Juliana. She smiled to herself at the memory. She could almost hear Duke Ellington’s orchestra echoing softly in her ears, tinged by the scratchy crackle of a phonograph record.

  She smiled as the memory welled up inside her.

  * * *

  “Juliana,” Mia whispered, shaking the sleeping girl’s arm with her gloved hand. It was a Saturday, a few minutes after midnight. “Juliana, you have to wake up!”

  “What’s happening?” Juliana’s eyes opened just a sliver. The room was dim, lit only by a single small lamp in the corner. Without it, the underground chamber was dead black.

  “I have to tell you something,” Mia whispered.

  “What is it? Are you hurt?” Juliana leaned up on elbow to look at Mia, who knelt on the floor by Juliana’s bed.

  “No, but I have to show you something.” Mia crawled over to her bed, reached underneath, and found the paper-wrapped package. She carried it over to Juliana.

  “What is that?”

  “Burgundy!” Mia whispered, unwrapping the bottle.

  “You have wine?” Juliana sat up now, brushing long hairs from her face. “How?”

  “I sweet-talked a kitchen steward. He swiped it from the officers’ wine cellar for me! Can you believe it?”

  “Good job!” Juliana said.

  “I’ve been saving it for tonight. You’ve been so sad ever since the...poor goats...” Mia bit her lip, wishing she hadn’t said it, but the thought had slipped out.

  “The poor goats.” Juliana frowned and looked at the floor.

  “So, I think we must drink. Let’s go the common room. We can play music there.”

  “We’ll wake everyone up.”

  “Not if we play it softly.” Mia took her gloved hand. “Please. It’s so boring here.”

  Juliana laughed.

  They crept down the hall in bare feet, Mia in her nightgown, Juliana wearing the baggy cotton nightshirt that she’d originally bought for Sebastian, but he’d only worn it a few nights on the ship before she stole it. Juliana had blushed as she told Mia about it.

  They eased through the double doors to the common area, and they tiptoed past the bathroom door to the lounge area with the bookshelves and phonograph. Mia played a jazz record, Duke Ellington, and uncorked the bottle. She took a long sip and passed it to Juliana, then watched uneasily as Juliana drank from the bottle’s mouth.

  “I won’t get sick if I drink after you, will I?” Mia asked, and Juliana gave her a sad, hurt look.

  “No, you’re fine,” Juliana whispered as she passed the bottle back.

  “So what do you hate most about this place?” Mia asked.

  “You don’t sound happy to be here.”

  “I know you’re not, either,” Mia said. “I can see it in your face.”

  “I just don’t like killing the animals. I hope they don’t do that again, I don’t think I can handle it. And I miss Sebastian.” Juliana took the bottle back and drank more.

  “You see him at meals,” Mia said.

  “Only at meals. I used to see him all the time. On the ship, we were together all day and night, dancing, or reading stories, or secretly making fun of the other people onboard...” Juliana and Mia both laughed. “What I really miss is the kissing, so much kissing.”

  “Was it just kissing? Or more?”

  Juliana bit her lip, then giggled. “More.”

  “A little more, or a lot more?”

  “A lot,” Juliana said, and
they laughed again. “I miss him so much.”

  “You must. He’s so handsome.”

  “Do you have anyone? Back at home, maybe?”

  “No one who’s going to wait for me,” Mia said. “I don’t even know how long I have to stay here.”

  “Can’t you leave whenever you want?”

  “I wish.” Mia explained how she’d accepted money to be a lab rat for the Nazis, and how her family had pushed her to do it. “There was a boy I liked, during the time when I ran away to Rome...but I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again. He’ll be with someone else. He was never with me, anyway.” She drank more, then put the bottle down on the table and hopped to her feet, holding out her hand. “We can dance. We don’t need boys for that.”

  “Don’t get too close to me,” Juliana warned, but she let Mia pull her to her feet.

  They danced to the fast, heady music, and soon they were trying to outdo each other with silly moves. Mia couldn’t stop laughing. It was the first good time she’d had since leaving Sicily.

  They jumped up on the couch, and Juliana showed off some of her American flapper moves, lifting the hem of her long shirt and kicking to show a lot of bare leg. Mia imitated her, and soon they were trying to out-sexy each other instead. Juliana laughed so hard she lost her balance, and the couch cushion slid out from beneath her. Mia thought nothing of catching her, then holding her hands and dancing with her. She knew Juliana’s touch was death, but she was filled with the combined confidence of wine and youth. Dancing with death made her feel alive.

  A female voice shouted, and the needle was ripped from the record, scratching it terribly.

  “I said, what is happening here?” the voice demanded in German. Mia and Juliana were both learning the language while they were here, but between themselves, they spoke in English, the language of Hollywood movies.

  Alise had entered the room, flanked by her two blond cohorts, Roza and Vilja. They were wrapped in robes or blankets and glared indignantly at the two girls cavorting to jazz in their night clothes.

  “We’re dancing,” Mia said. “Want to join?”

  “No music after ten o’ clock,” Alise said. “The rules are clear!”

  “But it’s Saturday night,” Juliana protested.

  “And unauthorized wine!” Roza said, pointing. “Look, Alise. Nobody else gets to have wine. The scientists forbid it.”

  “Thank you, Roza. Who gave you permission to drink? Where did you get that wine?” Alise demanded.

  “Oh, Alise.” Mia’s words were slurred. “We’re just having fun.”

  “There is plenty of room for fun within the rules,” Alise said.

  “I think someone’s taking their hallway fuehrer job a little seriously,” Juliana said, and Mia laughed.

  “Rules must be followed!” Alise barked so hard that locks of blond fell into her face, and her serious tone only made Mia and Juliana giggle more. “That is not a proper use of the common area seating! Get down now!”

  Mia and Juliana stepped down from the couch, still holding hands and giggling.

  “You are both on administrative restriction,” Alise told them.

  “How could this place get any more restricted?” Mia asked through her drunken giggles.

  Alise narrowed her eyes at Mia and leaned in close to her. “Try me if you want to find out. Back to your rooms immediately. I will be filling out an incident report for Dr. Wichtmann.” She turned on her heel and marched out of the room.

  “Oh, no, an incident report!” Juliana said, and Mia laughed.

  “You’re both in a lot of trouble,” Roza said, crossing her arms. “I hope you know that.”

  “They might kick us out,” Mia said. “How terrible!”

  Juliana and Mia couldn’t stop snickering as the blond girls herded them down the hall and back into their room. The two of them lay on Mia’s bed, whispering and making fun of the other girls, and laughing and shushing each other, until they fell asleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Jenny woke feeling stiff, sick to her stomach, and full of cramps. She lay in a hospital bed under dim lights. Someone had replaced her clothes with a thin hospital gown and pasted small circular sensors all over her arms and chest. She could feel them on her neck and face, too, but when she reached up to touch them, she discovered her hands were chained to the bed. So were her ankles. The steel chains were thin but heavy, and allowed only the smallest movements—she couldn’t even scratch her nose if she needed to do that. Naturally, her nose started itching immediately.

  She was alone in a cube-shaped cell with clear walls, a clear ceiling, and no furniture. The larger room outside her cell was a concrete bay that looked like the hangar for a small airplane. Dark windows looked down on her from high on one wall.

  Jenny recognized it immediately as one of the laboratories at the underground complex in the Harz mountains. For a long, strange minute, she wondered whether she’d somehow traveled back in time...or maybe all her different lives were really happening at once, in some way, and she could move between them.

  Then she saw the bank of digital monitors lined up outside a clear wall of her cell, remotely reading the sensors all over her body, spitting out moving graphs of her heartbeat, breathing, blood pressure, brain waves, and other metrics she couldn’t identify, all her inner biological activities displayed and tracked, and probably recorded. They must have gathered their data remotely from the sensors glued all over her body.

  This definitely was not the 1930’s, but she was back in the same place. They’d all been captured by the unavoidable man Mariella had seen in Seth’s future, whom Jenny believed would turn out to be the Nazi officer Kranzler, the seer who could reach in and find people’s memories, Mariella’s opposite.

  Jenny immediately began to worry about Seth, and about Mariella, too. Where were they?

  She looked up at the clear roof of her cube, where a pair of fan units each connected to a ventilation duct that reached away to the laboratory ceiling high above, keeping Jenny’s air separate from everyone else in the underground complex.

  Between the fan units, which were located on opposite ends of the cube, a small black dome watched her.

  “Hey, I’m up!” Jenny shouted at the camera that had to be inside the dome. “Anybody want to take these chains off?” She waved her hands as much as the restraints allowed.

  She looked out through the transparent wall of her cube, toward the steel doors that led out of the lab. Fifteen or twenty minutes passed before one of them opened.

  The man who entered bore some resemblance to Kranzler—dark red hair tinged with gray, a broad and stocky build, flat nose, feral green eyes. He wore a dark blue military uniform with a starched white shirt and black tie, and he was followed by three guards in biohazard facemasks and body armor. The guards wore black from their helmets to their boots, with no flag or any other decoration.

  This incarnation of Kranzler stepped up to the monitor bank just outside the wall, ignoring her and looking at the machines for a moment. He looked like some kind of Star Wars villain, she thought, with the masked stormtroopers standing in a razor-straight row behind him.

  “Jennifer Morton,” he eventually said, still looking at the EEG machine. “We’ve been looking for you.”

  “Who are you? And where are we?” Jenny asked, although she was certain she knew the answers to both questions.

  “I am the one who finally caught you.” He looked up at her, smiling. “You make for dangerous prey, Jennifer. I hope you’ll forgive our use of tranquilizers.”

  “Where are Seth and Mariella?”

  “Safe. Secure. No need to worry about them.”

  “I want to see Seth. And you can take these chains off me, I’m not going to attack you.”

  “I’m supposed to take your word for that? I’ve studied the Fallen Oak outbreak, Jenny. I’ve seen what you do to those who get in your way. And, you may not believe me, but I respect it, I truly do. Because the world is shap
ed by one thing, Jennifer: force.”

  “The Force?” Jenny asked, still thinking how the guards looked like stormtroopers.

  “Force!” He slammed a large fist into the clear wall. “You have it inside you, but force must be used intelligently. It must have purpose and direction. I can provide that.”

  “I don’t need purpose or direction,” she told him. “I need to scratch my nose.”

  “Nobody’s ever died of an itchy nostril.”

  “How long are you going to keep me in this bed?”

  “As long as we wish. We have to keep our technicians and medical staff safe from you, don’t we?”

  “Why are we here?”

  “To protect the United States against all enemies...foreign and domestic.” He smiled. “You’re a threat to security, Jennifer. We can’t just have someone like you running wild, leaving hundreds of dead people in your wake simply because you don’t like them.”

  “That’s not what happened! I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

  “I’ve seen many photographs that say otherwise.”

  “They were attacking me...and I’ve changed since then.”

  He gave a cold laugh. “Changed how? Found Jesus? Born again? Or maybe those Mormon kids with the bicycles knocked on your door and changed your life? I’d like to hear the tale.”

  “You couldn’t begin to understand it.”

  “I’m sure it’s all very convoluted and dramatic. But I’m not so much interested in what you’ve done, Jennifer, as where you’re going now. You can work with us. I’m prepared to offer you that.”

  “Doing what?” she asked.

  “Serving your country.”

  “Serving you. I know you, Kranzler. You’re a monster. I don’t know how you climbed so high in this lifetime, in this world. I guess cockroaches know how to survive in any environment.”

  She could tell he hadn’t heard anything after the world Kranzler. He looked stunned for a moment, then shook his head as if to clear it.

  “You must work with us,” Ward said. “Let us test you. Let us examine how your ability works. Your power could reach its full potential with my help.”