Tommy Nightmare (Jenny Pox #2) (26 page)

It looked like Jenny Morton might be carrying
something deadly. Heather didn’t want to think about what could
happen if Jenny decided to leave her little house in the woods and
carry the pathogen right into some unsuspecting city.

In her dream, Jenny was Euanthe again.

Cleon had taken her among his retinue of
servants to a grand holiday banquet at the home of Pericles, an
intimidating marble mansion surrounded by gardens. Cleon liked
Euanthe because she never spoke and always hurried to do as he
asked. Euanthe had pretended to learn a few Greek words, like
“wine” and “bread,” so that he could communicate with her. In
reality, of course, she understood everything that was said around
her.

Cleon's wife had stayed home, as women were
not invited.

The great hall of Pericles' house was filled
with nobility, politicians and wealthy merchants, as well as their
servants. They reclined on carved wooden couches thick with
cushions, and they drank wine and ate fruit from bowls carried by
servants. Cleon greeted some of his friends and political allies
and took a couch among them.

Euanthe's job was to stand near Cleon's couch
and fetch him things on demand. In reality, her main purpose—along
with the other servants Cleon had brought with them—was simply to
be there as a statement of Cleon's wealth and status. She wore a
clean white tunic with a blue floral pattern, much nicer than
anything she wore at Cleon's house, and her hair was braided and
pinned up around the crown of her head.

After the guests had arrived, a tall man with
a thick gray beard stood near the giant fireplace, holding up a
golden bowl filled with wine. He had striking blue eyes, and
Euanthe thought he was very handsome.

“Great men of Athens!” he said. “I welcome
you to my home. May wise Athena continue to protect us from the
Spartan scourge.”

Shouts of agreement went up from the
crowd.

So this man was Pericles, Euanthe thought.
The man she'd been sent to kill.

“War is always cause for sorrow,” Pericles
said. “And it is a time for men to stand strong together, shoulders
together as in the phalanx, each man's shield protecting the man to
his side. If one man falters, the phalanx is broken. We have our
quarrels, and we will always quarrel—that is the blessing and curse
of democracy.”

Cleon muttered something to a friend, a
wealthy merchant on the next couch, and the man smiled and
nodded.

“While the Spartans ravage the countryside
outside our walls, we cannot present a weak front line,” Pericles
said. “Therefore, we must set aside our differences until the
Spartans are defeated. Vicious lies have been whispered about us
all—let us cease whispering. You know I am not a man given to
banquets and other extravagances. But I have invited you, the
leadership of every major party and faction in the Assembly, to
offer the branch of an olive tree. While there is war without,
there must be unity within. Let us all find a way to work together
for the good of Athens.”

Pericles looked directly at Cleon.

Cleon regarded Pericles with a stoic face,
his gray eyes cold. All heads in the room gradually turned toward
Cleon.

When he had the room's attention, Cleon
raised his gold-embossed silver cup, and he nodded his head very
slightly.

“Let there be peace,” Cleon said.

The room erupted in cheers and stomping feet.
Pericles and Cleon both drank wine, and all the other men did the
same.

Then musicians played lyres and harps while
the guests busied themselves with eating and drinking, gossip and
debate. A poet standing by the fireplace recounted from memory the
story of Odysseus and his long journey home from Troy.

Euanthe stood quietly, listening and
pretending not to listen, until Cleon instructed her to fetch him a
leg of roasted lamb, his favorite food.

She left the banquet hall and walked into a
large kitchen, where slaves roasted lambs and pigs over huge fires.
At a long wooden table, more slaves hacked the roasted beasts into
smaller pieces and stacked them on serving platters.

Euanthe approached the long table, looking
for the meatiest leg to bring her master.

“You there!” a drunken voice called. Euanthe
turned to see two young men approaching her, both of them in tunics
stitched with gold and silver. Nobles. “Yes, you, girl!”

Euanthe just looked at them, remembering that
she allegedly did not know Greek, being an exotic foreigner.

“She is Cleon's slave,” the second young
noble said to the first.

“Cleon is a filthy dog,” the first noble
said. “Enemy of all that is Athens.”

Euanthe remained silent.

“Nothing to say in his defense?” The first
noble was almost upon her. “Nothing for Cleon? Do you deny he plots
against Pericles?”

“She's only a slave,” the second noble said.
“She is too stupid to know of politics.”

“She is
his
property. Let's defile
her, as a message to him.” The first noble reached for Euanthe's
arm, but she pulled back.

“You should not touch me,” she warned
him.

“Insolent!” the second noble said. He reached
for her, too, and she had to dodge in the opposite direction.

“Leave me to my work,” Euanthe said. She
looked around the kitchen, but no slave would stand up for her
against the noblemen.

“I do not take orders from slaves!” the first
nobleman said. “Least of all, slaves of that lowborn cur
Cleon.”

They had backed her against the long wooden
table now, and both men reached for her.

Euanthe summoned the special pox, the
contagious one she had prepared for the destruction of Pericles and
Athens. She was meant to infect Pericles directly, but launching
the plague in his household would have to be close enough. She was
not going to let these drunken noblemen drag her off and have their
way with her.

She lashed out, filling them both with the
pox. Sores and tumors ruptured open along their arms and spread to
their faces and legs.

The noblemen fell to the ground, howling in
pain and surprise. Now the other slaves paid attention, closing in
from all sides to see what was happening.

Euanthe breathed out a cloud of black spores,
infecting them all. She felt bad for the other slaves as they
writhed on the ground, but they were all doomed to die anyway.
Archidamus, her king, had ordered it.

She pulled the contagious plague back into
herself, as much as she could. As the slaves fell to the floor,
Euanthe found the biggest, juiciest leg of lamb and grabbed it for
Cleon.

Heather strapped on a cleansuit, sealing
herself from head to toe in plastic, with a breathing mask
connected to a bottle of oxygen at her hip. Since the pathogen's
means of transmission remained as unknown as the pathogen itself,
the Fallen Oak specimens were treated as maximally dangerous and
maximally contagious. A high level of security clearance was
necessary to enter the lab dedicated to the investigation.

The entire situation was still tightly
stage-managed by the President's special adviser Nelson Artleby.
The test samples had all been collected here in Atlanta. In a
fairly bizarre move, the White House had ordered all the bodies
stored in a guarded facility outside the city. The warehouse had
been quickly configured for refrigeration in a special contract
given to SyntaCorp, LLC, a giant defense firm where Nelson Artleby
happened to sit on the Board of Directors.

Heather couldn't imagine how gruesome that
place must be. She imagined shelf after shelf of dead bodies, each
one wrapped and sealed in layers of plastic. She wondered how their
families would react if they discovered what had happened to their
missing loved ones.

Heather shook her head to try and clear away
those thoughts. She was here to gather data.

It amazed her to find the lab deserted. It
had run round the clock for weeks while the samples were analyzed,
but it looked like nobody was even assigned here full-time anymore.
Nothing had been discovered by all the testing, which was the
scariest fact of all.

Heather located Jenny's blood sample in a
refrigerator full of them. They were labeled with tracking
codes—each person in Fallen Oak had been assigned one.

She extracted one red drop and dripped it
onto a microscope slide, then laid a clear plastic slide cover on
top of it.

She peered at Jenny's blood cells.

Jenny had the world's rarest blood type, she
knew, AB negative. Jenny's little boyfriend Seth had the opposite,
O positive, the universal giver. Heather had developed a related
interest in Seth, because he was either immune to the pathogen or
he was a handsome teenage boy who didn't mind having a girlfriend
he couldn't touch. Heather wasn't sure which of those possibilities
was more far-fetched.

Heather zoomed in closer. She couldn't see
anything unusual here. Just normal, healthy blood cells, floating
sluggishly because they'd been stored at freezing temperature. She
knew there was nothing unusual about Jenny's white blood cells or
platelet count.

“Okay,” Heather whispered. “Tell me something
new.”

Since she couldn't find anything, and every
standard test had already been run, she decided to try a slightly
crazy experiment.

Heather brought out a clean sample of AB
negative from a different person, a blood donor from somewhere
around Chicago, someone who had almost certainly never been exposed
to Jenny before. She added a couple of drops of the sample to the
slide with Jenny's blood, then returned the slide to the
microscope.

She watched the sample blood mingle with
Jenny's blood. Nothing happened. She'd contaminated the diminishing
specimen of Jenny's blood for nothing, she thought.

Then, some of the blood cells began to
quiver, their outer membranes vibrating like guitar strings.

In front of Heather's eyes, some of the cells
shriveled, others contorted into strange, spiky shapes, and others
burst altogether. Other blood cells—Jenny's, she guessed—remained
perfectly healthy as they floated among the destroyed ones.

“What the hell was that?” Heather stood up
straight and looked around at the empty lab. “Somebody tell me what
the hell I just saw.”

Jenny floated on her back, gazing up at the
billions of blue and white stars. The water around her was very
warm, heated by the June sunlight all day. She knew if she swam
down far enough, she would reach the deep place where the water
held the winter cold year round.

“It's quiet out here,” Seth whispered. He
floated beside her. “Used to be so many people during the
summer.”

They were swimming at the small body of water
a couple of miles outside town, which Seth called “the reservoir”
and everybody else called “Barrett Pond.” It was almost
midnight.

“It's weird, isn't it?” Jenny said. “Never
going back to school. It's like people tell you what to do your
whole life, and then, all of a sudden, nobody's in charge.”

“We're in charge,” he said. “We can do
whatever we want.”

“You can. I still have the Jenny pox, and I
don't know what to do with myself now.”

“Come with me and Darcy this weekend,” Seth
said. “You'll like it. We're staying at a pretty cool hotel, an old
mansion in the middle of downtown. Darcy said she stayed there with
her family once and it's really nice.”

“Cities scare me. All those people I could
infect. I’ve done it to whole cities before, in other lives.” Jenny
had begun to think that Pericles, the man she’d been trying to kill
in her dream, was a past-life incarnation of Seth. But he never
seemed interested in her past-life dreams, so she didn’t see any
point bringing it up.

“Are you really worried about that?” Seth
asked.

“I have to worry about it every second I'm
alive, Seth. It’s what my whole life is about”

“You don't think you might be hiding behind
the Jenny pox a little bit?”

She turned her head in the water to look at
him. “What do you mean?”

“Maybe you're scared of change,” he said. “A
little bit scared of the world beyond this town.”

“That's not it!” she snapped. “You don't
understand.”

“I do, though. I'm kind of scared, too, and
I'm used to being away. But that was boarding at Grayson. This is
different. Nobody in charge anymore, like you said. But it won't be
scary if you're with me, you know? It'll be fun.”

“If I go,” Jenny said, “Can you get a place
outside the city, more in the country? Then you could drive into
Charleston for school, but I won't have to be surrounded by
people.”

“I don't know. My parents might get
suspicious about that.”

“Suspicious?” Jenny flipped down from her
back float and started treading water. “You've been insisting I
come and live with you, and your parents don't even know that's
your plan?”

“Well...”

“You don't think they would figure it
out?”

“They wouldn't allow it if I told them. I'm
just trying to do what will work for us now.”

“And what about the future?”

“Why are you freaking out?”

“Because you act like you have it all settled
for us, but you don't. What am I supposed to do, hide when your
parents visit? Do I just live out of a suitcase the whole time?
What’s your plan?”

“We'll deal with it.”

Jenny finally asked the question that had
been eating at her, ever since her talks with Darcy Metcalf. “Do we
have a future, Seth? If your parents are so against us being
together?”

“I can handle my parents.” Seth took her hand
and towed her close to him. He tried to kiss her, but she dodged
it.

“Oh, yeah.” Jenny swam back from him. “Like
you handled them when they told you what school to go to, and what
to study, and every big decision you've ever made about
anything.”