Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4) (55 page)

Jenny, Seth, and Esmeralda started towards the fenced motor pool by the front gate,
intending to steal transportation, but the trucks there came to life, including an
apparently empty armored personnel carrier, and charged toward the front gate, the
drivers callously running over anyone who got in the way.

“That’s not going to work,” Jenny said, watching all the available vehicle charge
toward the gate, which opened for them.  The panicked crowd poured out on either side
of the trucks, everyone desperate to leave before the rumored bombs exploded.

“Looks like we’re walking,” Seth said.  He rearranged his shirt, pulling the baby
sling inside.  The tiny girl cooed against his skin, her eyes closed.

“That kid can sleep through anything.” Esmeralda shook her head.

They joined the general exodus of people through the open front gate, Jenny in her
hospital gown, Seth and Esmeralda in their stolen scrubs.  Nobody paid attention to
them, despite the baby bulging from under Seth’s shirt.  If any of them did recognize
Jenny, they were wise enough to keep their mouths shut.  Everyone seemed focused on
saving their own necks.  Jenny definitely liked it that way.  Maybe they wouldn’t
need to hurt anyone else tonight.

They jogged down along the steep road with everyone else, and Jenny felt a weight
lift from her.  They were free, they were alive, the baby was safe.

Then screams sounded from ahead.  Pedestrians raced to clear the road as the trucks
came back, led by the personnel carriers, which swerved hard toward Jenny, Seth, and
Esmeralda and slammed to a halt in front of them.  Armored men in biohazard masks
poured out of the vehicles, armed with assault rifles.  One of them ignited a flamethrower,
while two aimed grenade launchers them.

“We got enough firepower to turn you all into grease and smoke,” Ward said.  He led
the men, dressed in full biohazard armor like the rest, grinning inside his face shield. 
Jenny recognized his two assistants Buchanan and Avery, who flanked him, carrying
assault rifles. “Don’t try a thing.  Especially you, Jenny,” Ward instructed.

Jenny felt frozen.  The men were all sealed up, protected from her by technology designed
specifically to shield them from her power.  She looked at Seth, frightened, her mind
moving fast, searching the memories of hundreds of lives for anything that might help
her.

She remembered what Dr. Heather Reynard of the CDC had found, what Alise and even
Kranzler himself had told her.  The pox was not biological or chemical.  It defied
any known laws of physics.  It was supernatural, made of the spiritual dark matter
of her undying soul.

Who had ever said that gas masks, armor, or the latest biohazard-resistant plastics
were any protection against the supernatural?  Maybe there was a chance she could
summon something aggressive enough to chew right through.  Maybe her own beliefs had
placed artificial limits on her powers.

“Everybody on your knees,” Ward instructed.  Jenny knelt slowly, placing her hands
behind her head.  Seth and Esmeralda wisely knelt behind her.

She closed her eyes and imagined the pox, which she’d always seen as a swarm of tiny
black flies infesting her body, crawling through her stomach and veins, waiting to
strike at any living thing.  She imagined the flies dividing themselves into smaller
flies, which divided themselves again, becoming a much larger swarm of much smaller
pox.

She took it as far as she could imagine, seeing them become microscopically small,
then smaller than an atom, able to pass through any kind of matter at all.  The pox
had a strange charge to it, a speed and energy she’d never felt before.

Jenny opened her eyes, locked her gaze on Ward’s mask, and breathed out a black plume
that felt like ultra-fine silk as it flowed from her mouth.  The river of liquid black
punched through the center of Ward’s armor, straight into his heart, then swarmed
out along his limbs and up his face, turning momentarily into a teeming black mass
with Ward’s features.

Her consciousness was in the pox, just as it had been when she’d died last time. 
She coursed through him, ripping his flesh to threads and rotting his bones.  Ward’s
body sagged to the ground, his liquified remains flowing out through the gaping hole
in his chest armor, his mask brimming with dark fluid where his head had been.

Ward’s two assistants raised their assault rifles toward Jenny, and she reached the
swarm of pox out in each direction, burrowing through their masks and into their skulls,
instantly transforming their faces into unrecognizable clumps of ulcerated tumors.

Most of the Hale Security men, seeing that their armor was no protection, broke and
ran to save their own lives.  A couple of them remained and tried to shoot her, and
Jenny ripped through them, leaving them with decayed remnants of flesh clinging to
their bones.  She had an incredibly precise control over the pox, as though every
spore in the swarm responded directly to her mind, something she’d never felt before.

She realized her entire mind had transferred over to the swarm.  Her body had fallen
to the ground, vacant of any soul, and Seth had run over.  He was trying to heal her
with his touch, while Esmeralda was repeatedly calling her name. 

In her strange state, in the gray area between life and death, she perceived something
that, clearly, none of the others saw.  From Ward’s body, a great, dark mass boiled
upwards like the smoke from a burning city, blotting out the stars above.  Within
the gigantic shape, she saw wriggling, squirming movement, like hundreds of tentacles
covered in large, unblinking eyes, each tentacle tipped with a long, sharp beak for
prying and digging.  Her ancient enemy, the seer, most recently incarnated as Kranzler
and then as Ward.

The seer moved sluggishly, still disoriented from his recent sudden death.  If she
moved quickly, she thought, she might be able to finish her attack. 

She poured her amorphous swarm-shape into him, chewing into him in thousands of places
at once, ripping apart the fabric of the exotic dark matter from which he had formed,
destroying one of the last fragments of the primordial chaos.  She ripped him limb
by limb by limb, scattering chunks of him all across the sky, like some ancient god
carved to pieces and hurled into the depths above to form a constellation.  The torn
fragments of him were so dark to her that the night sky beyond it was a bright gloom
by contrast.

She ate into the core of him, concentrating herself into a denser swarm and surrounding
what remained of him.  She felt the turbulence of his pain and surprise, and a final
pulse of anger so intense it seemed to burn the sky from horizon to horizon.

Then he was gone, countless little threads of dissolving energy scattered as far as
she could see.  She had destroyed him down to the root.  The seer would not be back
for them, in this lifetime or any other.

She gathered herself together and turned her attention back to Seth and Esmeralda,
still kneeling over Jenny’s fallen form, Seth still trying to revive her with his
power.  They were safe now—the baby was safe.  Ward was dead, his project erupting
in flames behind them.  She watched the dark, hot smoke pour from the ventilation
shafts inside the walls.  The mountain rumbled as the entire yard collapsed, fire
and embers shooting out through the vents, as if the endurance of the structure below
had somehow been connected to the seer’s soul.  Or maybe the burning helicopter fuel
had simply weakened some essential structure, leading to the collapse of the underground
base, leaving only a smoking, rubble-filled crater behind.  She would never know.
She only knew that Seth and her baby were safe.

She considered it best to leave her body where it lay.  The doctors had determined
that the baby, Miriam, had no immunity to the pox at all.  None.  As long as Jenny
lived, she would be the greatest threat to her daughter’s young life.  Stepping aside,
not returning to her body, staying dead...that was the only way to keep the baby safe
from her. 

With all of their kind currently dead, except for Seth and Esmeralda, the girl would
not need the protection of her mother’s deadly powers...only protection from them. 
Jenny’s death would be the ultimate act of self-sacrifice for the good of her child.

She pulled herself up and back, letting the world of the living grow dim and distant,
as it did when she was between incarnations.  She would rest, and she would wait.

There was one problem—it felt like a single, hair-thin thread, but stronger than steel
or diamond, holding her to the earthly plane.  Miriam, her little girl.  She could
hear Miriam crying.  A part of her refused to leave the baby.

She let herself be drawn back toward the living for a moment.  She looked into the
baby’s face, currently gazing in awe at Seth’s chin.  She looked at her own pale,
lifeless body. 

An insight arose in her, the result of a few lifetimes of struggling to hurt no one,
as well as her intense desire to return to the only child she’d ever had in any of
her lives.

Before, when moving into a developing human body still in the womb, she had spread
her swarm-like soul through every cell in the body.  She began to wonder now whether
that was necessary.  Perhaps she concentrate herself into a very small shape, hidden
deep inside the core of her body until she needed the pox.  It would leave her dangerously
vulnerable to being attacked by others...but it would also free her to touch other
living things without harming them, her deepest wish for several lifetimes now.

The plague-bringer focused herself, drawing herself inward until she was a tiny, extremely
dense mass of energy.  She floated down toward the unconscious body below, and she
landed on Jenny Morton’s heart like a black snowflake.  With a thought, she made her
heart start beating again.

Jenny opened her eyes and took in a delicious breath of cool mountain air.  She smiled
up at Seth and the baby, feeling more at peace than she’d ever been.

In June of 1934, Jonathan Seth Barrett sat in his office in his Fallen Oak house,
surrounded by the heads of of great beasts he’d killed, the African lion, the American
buffalo.  He stared at the telegram on his desk.  Much had changed in the past year,
not least the final death of Prohibition, which was why he now drank bourbon inside
of Appalachian white lightning or whichever bottles of questionable, no-label rum
happened to get smuggled up from the Bahamas.

Outside, the sun was white-hot, hot enough to broil shrimp on the roof.  The high,
narrow windows of his office were open, bringing the searing light into his study. 
His new electric fans churned the air but didn’t do much in the way of actually cooling
the house.  Only a stiff, cool breeze and a little cloud cover would accomplish that.

He struck a match printed with the name of one of his favorite speakeasies in Charleston—not
a speakeasy anymore, he reminded himself, just a plain old nightclub.  The world was
changing, and he felt like all the adventure was draining out of it.  He lit a cigar,
tossing the match into the rhinoceros-foot ashtray he’d bought on his trip to Egypt
years ago.