Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4) (42 page)

Jenny pressed her lips together and said nothing, but she couldn’t stop her flesh
from turning bleach-white.  Inside, she was in turmoil, sick and angry, full of hate
for Ward and for herself. 

A picture of her mother appeared, the one that had hung on her wall all her life,
and she almost cried out in pain.  She had killed her mother.  She would kill her
baby.

“No mercy.  That’s what I respect about you, Jennifer,” Ward said, as more pictures
of the infected from Fallen Oak took their turns appearing on the screen. “You’ll
kill anyone who gets in your way.  And there’s a place for that, there’s a use for
that, don’t you understand?  That’s all I’m trying to show you.  Just accept what
you are and why you need to work with us.  Stop fighting, Jenny.  We should all be
on the same team.”

Jenny looked from Ward to the grisly images of those she’d killed.

“I don’t do teams, Kranzler,” she said. “I’ve been on too many.”

She expected him to ignore the word Kranzler like he always did, but this time he
pounced on it.

“Kranzler, Kranzler,” he said. “It’s interesting, Jenny, that you call me Kranzler. 
I called a friend in Moscow who has access to a certain deep archive of captured Nazi
documents.  He found a few details about this place.  There was a Nazi general—a
Gruppenführer
, was the S.S. term—in charge of this base when it was originally built.  Can you
guess his name?”

“Do I have to?” Jenny asked.

“Helmut Kranzler.  The name you keep calling me.”

“What else came up in these files?”

“First, explain yourself.  Why call me that name?”

Jenny shrugged. “You already know.  You were Kranzler.  You brought us all here before,
believing we were some kind of highly evolved humans.  It was a Nazi eugenics program.”

“A Nazi?” Ward snorted. “You’re calling me a Nazi?”

“Exactly.  And here we are again, doing it all again.”

“How did it end last time?”

“The only way it could have.” Jenny gave him a thin smile. “Perhaps those old files
will tell you.  They should.  You wrote them yourself.”

Ward looked her over, but he fell silent, and she knew he couldn’t figure out how
to proceed. “Enjoy your entertainment,” he finally said as he walked away.

The lights in the lab turned all the way out, leaving her in darkness except for the
glowing images on the screen.  Ashleigh’s parents, Neesha Bailey, Mayor Winder and
Cassie.  Screams sounded over the intercom, startling her.  They went on and on, like
some kind of sound effects CD for a haunted house, accompanying the scenes of agonizing
death that kept playing in front of her.

She sat down and closed her eyes, but it was impossible to scrub away the pictures,
or to block out the shrill screams.  Ward wasn’t going to break her down this way,
she told herself.  He didn’t know even a fraction of what she’d done—the plagues she’d
inflicted on Athens and other ancient cities, the horrors she’d performed for evil
monarchs in the age of the Black Death...

Strangely, the one to which her mind kept straying was only a single man, lashed to
a hospital gurney, whom she’d killed in cold blood because the love-charmer had told
her to.  It was hard to believe that she’d once been enthralled to Ashleigh, worshiping
her as she’d seen so many sycophants do in so many lives...though the charmer’s name
hadn’t been Ashleigh then, it had been Alise.

* * *

Juliana had been up all morning, practicing for the moment when Alise would walk through
her door.  Her roommate Mia was gone, had been gone all night without warning.  Juliana
didn’t know whether Mia had escaped or something terrible had happened to her.  Alise
would be the person to ask, but if Mia had run away, Juliana wasn’t going to be the
one to point it out. Juliana would want her friend to have plenty of time before anyone
starting searching for her.

Alise finally entered, all smiles as usual, as if she hadn’t just forced Juliana to
murder a man the day before.

“Good morning!” Alise said, her gray eyes full of cheer. “I thought we could go to
breakfast together.  And good news! 
Gruppenführer
Kranzler says he wants me to spend the day with you.  Lots of tests for you to do!”

“No more people,” Juliana said. “No more animals, either.  I’m not killing anyone
else.”

“Juliana.” Alise tsked her tongue. “We’ve already talked about this.  Let’s not start
over.  Here, I know just what you’ll need to feel better.” She took a deep breath.

“No!  Don’t you ever use your power against me.  You’re not going to trick me again,
Alise.”

“It’s not a trick,” Alise said. “It’s something to make you happy, a sign of my deep
love for you...and, I hope, the love you feel for me, too...”

“It’s false love.  That’s your power.”

“How can love be false if it feels true?” Alise began to blow out the pink dandelion-petal
drops of power that would fill Juliana with love and affection for her.

“Stop it!” Juliana backed away from her, but Alise only blew out a thicker cloud,
moving closer with a wicked smile.

“You love me!” Alise insisted.

Juliana fought back the only way she could.  She took a deep breath, then exhaled
the demon plague, as she’d been practicing.  She’d reasoned that if Alise could send
her power across through the air, then she might be able to do the same.

The plague blew out of her like a swarm of tiny black flies, dark spores that spread
out as they traveled, swelling up to fill the room.  They engulfed the pink spores
Alise had blown out, successfully blocking them as she’d intended, but they traveled
on, landing like dark cinders on Alise’s face, neck, and hands.

Alise screamed and staggered back as tiny lesions stippled her flesh, oozing black
and blood.  She slammed the door as she ran out of the room, and she screamed all
the way down the hall.

Juliana panicked—she hadn’t meant to unleash so much, and she was lucky she hadn’t
killed Alise.  The cloud of spores spun in the room around her.  She wondered if she
could take them back in when she was done, so they wouldn’t accidentally harm anyone. 
She took a deep breath, and the entire cloud flowed back inside of her, like thousands
of tiny flies returning to nest in the cells of her body.

Alise returned in less than a minute with a gang of six armed S.S. guards, all of
them wearing gloves, their faces hidden behind bug-eyed gas masks.  They seized Juliana,
bound her hands in front of her, and gagged her before hauling her out of her room. 

As they carried her down the hall, and then through a locked door and down two flights
of steps, Alise stalked behind them, shouting at Juliana in English to make sure she
understood.  Alise’s face was pockmarked with little dark boils where the demon plague
had touched her.

“Do you know what you’ve done?” Alise screamed. “Do you know who I am?  Who my father
is?  Do you know how often I’ve stood in the crowd, helping to fill everyone with
the proper love of the Fuehrer while he spoke?  Do you know how the Party has grown
since my father sent me to Berlin?  Do you know about the private gatherings I had,
inviting Party officials to breed with the finest stock from the League of German
Girls?  They all know who I am.  I am everything here, and you are nothing!”

The guards laid Juliana on the floor of a concrete cell with a narrow cot.  She didn’t
struggle, and they removed her bonds before backing away and slamming the thick wooden
door.  Alise’s hideously infected face looked in at her through the small, barred
window set into the door.

“You will never come near me again,” Alise said. “Consider this your maternity ward. 
Congratulations, whore, you’re pregnant.” She slammed the panel outside the window,
leaving Juliana in darkness. 

Juliana worked the gag out of her mouth and ran to the closed window.

“What?” she shouted. “What did you say?”

She heard the distant sound of Alise cackling as she departed down the hall.

Esmeralda remained silent as the guards led her back to her concrete cell and closed
the door.  She’d gained a few small privileges through her cooperation, such as a
larger cell with a refrigerator, a television set and books to read, but she was still
a prisoner.

They had her studying more and more bodies, most of them from the Middle East or Afghanistan. 
Some were members of violent factions in their own countries, while others seemed
to be cases of mistaken identity or bad information.  All of them had lived lives
full of misery, poverty, and violence, amid bombs and gunfire.  Experiencing so many
brutal lives rattled Esmeralda, wearing her down day after day.

She was truly beginning to believe Ashleigh had been right about something: they reincarnated,
often in groups, drawn to each other life after life, bound by love and hate. She’d
continued having flashes of another life since arriving here, and she was beginning
to accept that it must have happened, they must have all been here before.  If that
weren’t true, then she was losing her mind.

Esmeralda sat on her bed with her legs folded and concentrated.  If she had been here
before, she was going to learn all she could about it.  She was determined to escape,
but so far, she didn’t have any idea how it would be possible.  From the past, she
could at least learn about the layout of the complex, though things might have changed
considerably.  The place had clearly been reconstructed since then.  She might also
learn why they’d been drawn back into the same situation again, and how to stop it
for good.

* * *

“On your feet, you’re moving,” Alise announced as she walked into Evelina’s room. 
The room had two beds, but no one was assigned to bunk with the Slavic girl who claimed
to speak with the spirits of the dead.

“Where?” Evelina asked as she put on her shoes.

“Downstairs.” Alise smirked.  She was wearing an unusually heavy amount of makeup
today, as if covering up acne.

“Again?  What did I do this time?  Why am I being punished?”

“You can probably think of a reason,” Alise said.

Evelina gaped and shook her head. “No, I’ve done everything Kranzler and Wichtmann
have wanted...”

“You’re not being punished,” Niklaus said, in a rare display of his power of speech. 
His voice was surprisingly soft. “Party officials are coming to tour the facility
soon.”

“What does that have to do with me?” Evelina asked.

“Nobody wants to try and explain why there’s a racially inferior Slav mixed in with
our program,” Alise said. “We’re supposed to be at the high end of eugenics, the front
edge of human evolution.  Which means no Slavs.”

“This isn’t fair!”

“If my cousin hadn’t opened his clumsy mouth, you wouldn’t be so upset,” Alise said.
“Now, come along with us.  We have other things to do today.”

Niklaus and Alise escorted her down two long flights of steps and through a thick
door Niklaus had to open with a key and lock again behind them.  He unlocked another
corridor lined with dim concrete cells visible through narrow barred windows in the
doors.  Through one of these, Evelina glimpsed Juliana, the American girl with the
plague touch.  She wondered why they’d moved her down here.  Alise scowled when she
saw Juliana’s window panel open, and she slammed and latched it.

“Here’s your new room.” Alise smiled as Niklaus pulled open the heavy door to one
of the raw concrete cells. 

“If they didn’t want Bosnians, why did they bring me here at all?” Evelina asked.
“I didn’t want to come.  Why couldn’t they just leave me alone?”

“Priorities change,” Alise said. “All we can do is follow orders.  That’s how a civilized
society works.  In you go, or I’ll have my cousin throw you in there and fill your
head with dreadful nightmares.”  She never stopped smiling.

Evelina looked to Niklaus, whose light gray eyes were fixed on her.  For some reason,
he gave her a small, sad-looking smile, which she found creepier than any violent
threat.  He closed the cell door behind her, but kept gazing at her through the barred
window.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Do you need anything?”

“Don’t ask her if she
needs
anything, Niklaus!” Alise snorted. “You’re not the concierge.  Let’s go.”

His eyes lingered on her a moment longer before Alise called him away.  Evelina sat
on the cot, trembling, and listened to them walk away.  None of it made sense.  She’d
done nothing wrong.

“What happened?” an echoing voice asked behind her.  Evelina jumped and turned, but
no one was there.  She whispered a prayer in a low voice. “Can you hear me?” the voice
asked.

“What are you?” Evelina whispered.

“Juliana.  In the next cell.”

Evelina approached the ventilation grate low on the wall. “How long have you been
here?”

“They just put me here.  I don’t think they’re going to let me out.”