Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4) (32 page)

Ward himself wore a black uniform, coat, and cap.  He walked along the corridor slowly,
accompanied by a tall, attractive blond girl in a black-skirted uniform with a white
shirt and black tie.  Her eyes were a strange gray color, like clouds on a rainy day. 
She touched his hand frequently as she spoke, and each touch sparked an intense feeling
of affection and desire inside him.  He wanted her to keep touching him.

She spoke in German, yet he understood her perfectly.

“Has there been any news with Willem?” she asked.  They paused in their walk to look
down through a window into a lab.  A young man in his early twenties sat on a stool,
facing a metal barrel filled with bits of newspaper, wood scraps, and sawdust, a mixture
intended to be highly flammable.  Three researchers watched him from the side of the
lab—a chemist, physicist, and a doctor—and wires were plastered all over Willem’s
bare torso, connecting him to loud, clunky monitoring machines around him. 

Willem stared intently at the barrel of tinder and kindling, rubbing the sides of
his head with both fingers.  After several minutes, nothing happened.

“I suppose you’ll continue testing him?” asked the gray-eyed girl, whose name was
Alise
.

“No,” Ward heard himself say. “He’s a fake.  He must have tricked our investigators
when they found him.  Under controlled conditions, he does nothing.”

“What shall we do with him, sir?” Alise asked.

“Get rid of him.  I don’t want him eating one more meal at the Reich’s expense.  And
I don’t want him talking to anyone.”

“Consider him gone, sir,” Alise said.

They moved on to look into the next lab, where a small, dark-eyed Slavic girl named
Evelina stood over a gray, gunshot corpse, touching it and talking while a young typist
took notes.  The corpse had recently been a leader of the Communist party in Germany,
which had been outlawed but continued underground.  Evelina was meant to learn about
any secret plots the Communists might be planning.

“This is an interesting case,” Ward said. “The Slav seems to have a genuine power,
but of course she may not be acceptable for breeding.  She doesn’t look Aryan at all. 
I don’t think the Fuehrer would accept her as an example of advanced human evolution.”

“Then what should we do with her?”

“Keep her, study her, use her.  But we can’t introduce such racial inferiority into
our supernormal program.  It’s bad enough we have an Italian girl.”

At the next lab, they looked down on the American girl, Juliana, small and pale with
long, dark hair.  She was currently stripped to the waist, also hooked into loud,
thunking monitoring devices, making sores and blisters appear and disappear on her
skin while a biologist in gloves and a gas mask examined her.

“Her power is clearly real,” Ward said. “But her background...does she look Jewish
to you?”

“Greek,” Alise said.

“I suppose if we’re taking Italians, we’ll take Greeks,” he said in a resigned voice.
“We can always make reference to the empires of antiquity, if pressed by the Party
leadership.”

“Clearly, the Hellenes and the Romans must have had much Aryan in them, to conquer
so much and build such a culture,” Alise said.

“It seems obvious to me that she should be bred with the other American, the healer
boy,” he said. “Anyone else who touches her will die, and we should assume the same
about their genetic material.”

“Juliana is already pregnant,” Alise said.

“She is?  Why was I not informed?”

“Because I told them I wanted to inform you myself.” She gave him a stunning, radiant
smile. “I knew it would please you, and you know I like to please.”

“Is Sebastian the father?”

“I believe so, based on their intimacy when I met them,” Alise said. “Unless she is
a slut, he must be the father.  And, as you just said, who else could touch her?”

“We must find out for certain.”

“I will speak with her for you.  She’s more likely to speak freely about such things
to another woman.”

“And now we must discuss you,” he said.

“You want to talk about me,
Gruppenführer
Kranzler?  Don’t you
know that’s the direct path to any woman’s heart?” Alise giggled, touching his hand,
setting off another fiery wave of desire inside him.

Ward understood that his name was now Kranzler, at least within this strange dream.

“We must breed you like the others,” he said. “We may have to cross you with Sebastian
as well.  We have a shortage of males in our stable.”

“Ugh, after he’s been with that diseased girl?” Alise asked. “I don’t want to catch
an infection from her.”

“He is immune to her.  He will not transfer any disease to you.”

“How can we be sure?  I don’t want to be the test subject for
that
experiment, Herr Kranzler.”

“You and your cousin Niklaus are clearly the most Aryan of the supernormals we’ve
identified, the most racially pure.”

“Thank you, Herr Kranzler.” She gave him an alluring smile.

“I proposed breeding the two of you together, but Dr. Wichtmann says there are too
many risks, you’re too closely related.”

“What about you,
Gruppenführer
Kranzler?” Alise touched his hand again and leaned closer to him.

“You must be bred with a supernormal.  That is our program.”  The girl’s touch did
stir certain hungry, aggressive feelings inside him, but he tried to resist them.

“And are you not a supernormal, Herr Kranzler?” She batted her eyelashes, playing
at being extra-innocent. “I have seen you draw information from people many times. 
They don’t even have to say it aloud—you just touch them and
know
.  I have seen you work your magic, Herr Kranzler. I am a careful observer.”

Kranzler looked around the crowded corridor to see whether anyone appeared to be listening
to them, but everyone was busy, and the room was loud with clanging typewriters.

“We should not discuss this here,” he replied in a low voice.

“Perhaps in your office, sir?” Alise suggested.

He took her arm and marched her out of the observation deck, toward a suite of offices
in the northeast quadrant of the underground complex.  His office was the largest. 
He closed the door tightly behind them, while Alise crossed to his desk and leaned
against it, in a manner clearly intended to make her breasts and hips prominent inside
her tight black uniform.

“I am not mistaken, am I, sir?” Alise asked, with a knowing smile, as if she were
quietly laughing to herself.

“I am not registered as a supernormal, and I do not wish to be,” Kranzler said. “If
you repeat what you just said in front of anyone else, I will kill you.”

“Your secret is safe with me, sir, forever.  But it does not matter to me whether
you are registered, only that you do possess a power like mine.  Imagine our powers
combined into a child...a son...he would be the son of a supernormal S.S. officer,
a true Aryan of the future.  Imagine it!”

“We could not raise him as our own,” Kranzler reminded her. “He would belong to the
Reich.”

“I know this better than anyone,” Alise said. “I do not wish for a family—the Reich
is my family, the Party is my family.  I wish to do this as my gift to the Reich,
my act of devotion.  I want to personally present the Fuehrer with the first child
of this project, the first of a generation of German supermen who will conquer the
world.”  She approached him, taking his hands, her gray eyes locked on his. “Do you
not want the same?  Do you not want me?”

Kranzler wanted it all.  He wanted a son who could lead armies and destroy every enemy
in his path.  Though he rarely indulged in fleshly pleasures, he wanted the young,
pretty Aryan girl currently offering herself to him.  It was difficult to think of
anything but his own desire when her hands were on him.

“You must tell no one,” he whispered.

She placed her hands on his broad shoulders and rose up to kiss him.  Kranzler lifted
her up onto his desk, and she lay back on her elbows, smiling at him with a surprised
look in her eyes.

“Here?” she asked.

“It may take several attempts.” Kranzler, an efficient man, lowered his black trousers
just enough to free himself, already erect from her repeated touching.  He turned
her onto her hands and knees and bent her over the desk, then flipped her long black
skirt up over her hips.  She wriggled her ass in her white silk panties and laughed,
until he reached a wide, muscular hand into the space between her legs.

“These aren’t regulation undergarments for women,” he said. 

“And how would you know that?”  She smiled back at him over her shoulder.

He grabbed her expensive, inappropriate underwear and ripped it away, leaving her
bare.  She gave a shocked little gasp as he stripped her, and then another as he pressed
his fingertips against her.

“We should hurry,” he said. “I have a busy schedule.”

“Go ahead.  I’m not here for romance.”

Ward entered her, and she bared her teeth and shrieked in pain.  She was golden, a
beautiful daughter of a wealthy nobleman, while he’d grown up as a dirt-poor peasant
with calloused hands from tending his father’s sheep, and he was old enough to remember
when the difference between peasant and noble truly mattered, before the Great War. 
It gave him pleasure to make her suffer.  He grabbed her long blond hair and pulled
hard, getting another scream from her. 

“You’re a good German girl,” he said as he took her again and again. “You should lie
in my bed every night.” He slapped her ass, hard enough to leave a blood-colored handprint.

She snarled at him, baring her teeth, which only aroused him more.

“I can see your past,” Ward said, squeezing her waist in his large hands. “So many
flirtations with fancy little aristocrat boys.  Many of them...consummated.”

“You don’t care about my past,” she whispered. “You love me.”

“I do,” he said, then he shoved her face down against his desk and pinned it there
with his hand, raising her hips higher so he could slide more deeply inside her. 
He deposited his seed quickly and backed out.  She lay on his desk, naked from the
waist down, looking battered, a look of disgust in her cloud-gray eyes.

“Make me a son,” he ordered as he buckled his belt. “Fix yourself up.  We have a lot
of work today.  We can do this again tomorrow.”

He closed the door as he left the office.

Tommy lay on the bed in his room, smoking cigarettes and watching an
A-Team
rerun on some satellite channel.  Smoking wasn’t allowed inside the base, except
for one specially ventilated room, but he didn’t care.  He didn’t think they would
throw him out for it.

In the past few days, he’d learned that using his power raised his body temperature
by a degree or two and heated the air around him.  It caused an explosive spike of
activity in a part of his brain called the right temporal lobe.  He’d been meaning
to look up brain parts to figure out what the hell that meant, but he wasn’t provided
internet access.  The underground research facility had a small science library, and
he could probably find out there, but he hated libraries and kept putting it off.

He’d also learned that he could scare the hell out of mice and chimpanzees.  He assumed
human tests were next.  That could be fun.

Things looked hopeful for him here—General Ward Kilpatrick clearly had big plans for
Tommy’s future. 

Tommy already ached to see Esmeralda again and felt terrible for leaving her, especially
since they’d parted angry at each other.  He wanted to think of her waiting for him
back home, and imagined himself coming back to her, finally a success and not a loser. 
He knew that he was no good for her, that he only held her back and sometimes made
her miserable, but he still loved her and wanted to be with her.  When he came back
a better, more successful person, then she would understand why he’d left. 

He flipped the gold coin in his hand.  It had belonged to old man Tanner—
Pap-pap
, as Tommy and the other children had been required to call him—and Tommy had stolen
it the night he met Esmeralda.  He’d given it to her as a present, and she’d kept
it all these years.

He’d been a little surprised that Esmeralda hadn’t wanted to come with him and learn
how to use her power for the greater good of the world.  She seemed content to spend
her life arranging funerals and applying makeup to dead people, but Ashleigh had taught
Tommy to reach for bigger things in life.  It hurt that Esmeralda had turned down
the idea so quickly, and she had seemed to care so little when he left.

For a moment, the room seemed to shift around him, as if he’d had a glimpse of other
walls hidden behind the ones around him, drab olive instead of white.  All of the
small hairs on his body stood up, from his legs to the nape of his neck, and he shivered
as if a ghost had passed through him.