Tommy Nightmare (Jenny Pox #2) (34 page)

The cops had gotten out of the car to chase
Jenny on foot, but Jenny didn’t yet notice them behind her.

Tommy made a choking sound and stumbled back
onto the balcony, and then he fell on his ass, bleached and sweaty
and shivering.

Below, the churning of the crowd slowed as
Tommy’s fear took hold of them.

Jenny’s power, when applied to a crowd,
created an epidemic.

Ashleigh’s power, applied to a crowd, had
been known to cause orgies.

When you applied Tommy’s fear to a crowd, you
got a panic. Maybe even a riot.

Every mob needed a booster, so Ashleigh had
brought an electronic megaphone, which featured the jaunty Fallen
Oak High mascot Sonny the Porcupine on the side.

“It’s the girl wearing the gloves!” Ashleigh
shouted through the megaphone. She pointed at Jenny. “See her?
She’s the one! You have to get her! You have to stop her! You have
to kill her!”

Five stories below, Jenny gaped up at the
unexpected voice. Ashleigh wondered if Jenny could recognize her
pal Darcy at this distance, shouting for a crowd of people to kill
her.

A hippie girl with dreadlocks and a nose ring
screamed and punched Jenny in the mouth. “Corporatist pig!” the
hippie girl screamed.

“That’s right, the girl with gloves!”
Ashleigh shouted. “Get her! Get her now! She’s the one you want.
She’s the one behind all your problems!”

More people attacked Jenny, punching her in
the head and back and stomach, kicking at her legs. The cops
arrived as Jenny doubled over, and one of them bashed Jenny in the
face with his knee. The panic had hold of everyone, and the crowd
crushed in around Jenny, frenzied and eager to attack. Somebody
smashed a beer bottle across her head.

“Now we have to get the fuck out of here,”
Ashleigh said. “You don’t want to be here when Jenny does her
thing. We could all die.” Ashleigh smiled. “But this time they’ll
catch Jenny. Way too many witnesses, too many cops. They’re going
to lock her up tight after she mutilates all these people.”

“Or they’ll kill her,” Tommy said.

“That’s not so bad for a second-best.”
Ashleigh turned to Esmeralda. “Are you ready?”

“Oh, yes, I’ve been waiting.” Esmeralda gave
Ashleigh a big smile.

Ashleigh cupped Esmeralda’s face in her
hands. Then she leaned in and kissed Esmeralda hard on the
mouth.

“I thought we were in a hurry,” Tommy
said.

Ashleigh ignored him. She concentrated on
disentangling her mind and spirit from Darcy’s body. After a
minute, she was loose, just a discarnate spirit, and dangerously
close to drifting away from these human bodies altogether. Maybe
back to the deep and hellish void from which they’d come. She felt
a moment of panic.

Then she flowed into Esmeralda. She’d
invested a lot of time and energy wrapping Esmeralda tight in the
golden threads of her love, like a bug in a spider web. Ashleigh,
the great golden spider, moved in to claim her prey.

Ashleigh looked out through Esmeralda’s eyes.
Darcy was backing away, gaping at her, with a sheen of spit on her
chin.

“Oh…” Darcy said. “Oh…GRODY! Why were we
doing that?”

“Ashleigh’s task on Earth is done,” Ashleigh
said. “She’s back with the angels now, Darcy.”

“But…but where are we?” Darcy looked out at
Charleston, and down at the rioting mob below, where people were
overturning the temporary vendors’ booths and punching each other
at random. “What’s happening? Why, I mean, where—”

Ashleigh put a hand on Darcy’s arm, soothing
her a little with her loving energy, though Ashleigh didn’t have
much energy left to spare. She was starving. She needed
calories.

Below them, the crowd roared, and they
smashed windows up and down the street.

“Come on, Darcy,” Ashleigh whispered. “Let’s
go inside.”

“Darcy?” Tommy asked. “Why did you call her
Darcy?”

“That’s my name, Mr. Angel, sir,” Darcy
said.

“You relax, too,” Ashleigh said to Tommy. She
led Darcy inside and shot Tommy a warning glance back over her
shoulder. “Darcy, you look so troubled.”

“Will someone just tell me where we are?”

“We’re in a safe place. Sit down on this nice
bed and relax.” Ashleigh guided her to the bed. “Good. Now just lie
back and close your eyes.” She pushed a little more love into the
girl.

“But…” Darcy said.

“Sh,” Ashleigh said. “You just stay right
there. When you feel a little better, we’ll explain everything.
Remember, we’re angels. We’ll watch over you. Just close those
pretty eyes and relax now.”

“Okay.” Darcy closed her eyes.

Ashleigh picked up Esmeralda’s purse—she
would need the girl’s driver’s license and the rest of her
identity. Then she glanced at Darcy’s big canvas purse. Her
two-hundred-thousand-dollar PayPal card was in there, and assorted
other things she might want. She dropped Esmeralda’s purse inside
it, then slung the big purse over her shoulder.

“Okay,” Ashleigh said. “Let’s go, Tommy.”

“What’s happening here?” Tommy leaned in
close, looking into her eyes. “Ashleigh?”

“We decided to leave poor Darcy to her own
life,” Ashleigh said. “Esmeralda agreed I could share her body, for
now.”

“I don’t know if she would agree to that,”
Tommy said.

“Tommy! Esmeralda loves me.”

“Making people feel love is your power.”

“That really hurts,” Ashleigh said. “You know
how hard it is going through life, not sure whether somebody loves
you for you, or just because your stupid magic touch makes them
feel that way?”

“I never thought of that.”

“The three of us belong together, Tommy,”
Ashleigh said. “I know she loves me because we all love each other.
It’s not a trick. It’s a thousand lifetimes together. You’ll
understand. I’ll tell you all about it. But right now we have to
get the fuck out of Dodge before Jenny Mittens turns it all the way
up and kills the whole city with us still inside it. Okay?”

Tommy looked at Darcy lolling on the bed, and
then he looked carefully at Ashleigh.

“I guess I don’t have a choice,” he said.

“That’s right. Come on. It’s time for Jenny
to show the whole world what a horrible thing she is.”

Ashleigh led the way into the hall, and Tommy
closed the door behind them.

As Jenny stared into bright spotlight from
the police car, a sudden, profound fear came over her. It was dread
and paranoia and confusion all mixed together. The crowd around her
suddenly reminded her of the lynch mob in Fallen Oak, the wave of
mounting tension just before the explosion, when they’d killed Seth
and tried to kill Jenny.

Her heart pounded in her chest, and she
panicked and ran away from the police.

“It’s the girl wearing the gloves!” a voice
boomed high above her. Jenny looked up toward the voice, which
actually seemed to come from the roof of the Mandrake House, or
maybe one of the darkened balconies. “See her? She’s the one! You
have to get her! You have to stop her! You have to kill her!”

All around Jenny, the unfriendly faces of the
crowd turned toward her, like they were compass needles and Jenny
was magnetic north. They pointed at Jenny.

“That’s her!” somebody shouted. “The girl
with gloves!”

“Oh, shit,” Jenny whispered. Her whole body
was trembling and she couldn’t breathe very well. She needed to do
something, but she couldn’t think straight. Her mind was blinded by
fear.

The crowd closed in around Jenny. A
dreadlocked hippie girl threw the first punch, right into Jenny's
mouth.

“Corporatist pig!” the hippie girl screamed,
and then she spit on Jenny. The girl didn't seem to notice the
bloody pustules rising across her knuckles, where she'd made
contact with Jenny’s lips and teeth.

“That’s right, the girl with gloves!” the
voice from above shouted. “Get her! Get her now! She’s the one you
want. She’s the one behind all your problems!”

Jenny wondered what the hell that meant.

But those words seemed to open the
floodgates—everybody attacked her. Fists pounded her head and her
back. Somebody punched her in the stomach and she doubled over.
Jenny saw a couple of police jogging toward her and she reached out
one hand, hoping maybe they would help her.

Instead, the first cop slammed a knee into
her face. Jenny felt her nose crack and a hot gout of blood rush
down across her lips. Somebody smashed a bottle over her head.

Jenny fell to the sidewalk and curled into a
fetal position, covering the back of her head with her hands. Shoes
and sandals and boots kicked and stomped all over her, bruising her
ribs, her hips, her legs and arms, the crown of her head. God only
knew why everyone had listened to the crazy lady with the megaphone
and started attacking her, but Jenny was terrified and didn’t know
what to do.

There was one thing she wasn't going to do,
she decided. She wasn't going to flare up with the Jenny pox and
fight her way out of this crowd. Already the pox was rising in her,
fueled by her growing fear. With all these people pushing in around
her, pulling her hair and pounding on her body, it would be easy to
flood them all with infection, even kill them if necessary, and
make her escape.

She wouldn't do that again. She couldn't live
with one more death on her hands. So she would lie here and let the
mob do its worst, even if they killed her. That, Jenny thought,
would be justice for what she’d done to all those people in Fallen
Oak.

When she'd made that choice, her whole body
relaxed. The blows continued raining down on her, but by now she
was in so much pain that things couldn't possibly get any worse.
She had died before, and it wasn’t so bad.

Seth gave his right hand another hard pull,
and it finally slid free of the noose. All the skin was rubbed off
at the base of his hand and his wrist, leaving only raw pink
tissue, and the end of the rope was wet with his blood, but he was
free. It had taken a horribly long amount of time, and it hadn't
helped that Allegra wouldn't get off of him, or stop slathering his
face and neck with kisses.

Seth rolled over so that she was underneath
him.

“Oh!” Allegra laughed. “Want to go
old-fashioned, huh?”

“I have to go.” Seth jumped to his feet,
dragging the rope behind him, since it was still noosed tight
around his left hand. He pulled on his jeans and shoes, grabbed his
shirt, and ran for the door.

“Wait!” Allegra screamed after him, sitting
up on the bed. “Come back! I need you, Seth!”

Seth dashed through the sitting room and into
the hall, and then the hotel's fire alarm began to scream. When he
reached the railing, he glimpsed the backs of two people, a young
man and a young woman, rushing out the fire door all the way down
on the first floor, despite the EMERGENCY ONLY sign warning about
the alarm. They slammed it behind them.

Seth started down the stairs, but then
something snapped his left arm and hauled him backward, right off
his feet, and he sprawled out across the deep-piled rug. He looked
up to see Allegra standing over him, stark naked, holding the other
end of the rope that was still tied to his left wrist. The rope
smeared his blood all over her hands, but she didn’t seem to
notice.

She wagged a wet, red finger. “Don't you run
away from me.”

“I have to go!” Seth stood up and tugged at
the rope. “Come on, this is crazy.”

“Oh, Seth, I love you so much.” She tried to
kiss him, but Seth turned his head. “Let's get married and have
babies. We can go sailing with my parents every summer. Oh, and you
can go to the dog shows with my mom! We have a champion Sheltie,
Lady Tinkerbelle’s Lace.”

“Well, all that sounds like it sucks,” Seth
said. “But I’m in a big hurry here, and you really need to… let
go!” He jerked the rope as hard as he could, meaning to wrench it
free from her hands, but instead she held tight and stumbled up
against him.

“Oh, Seth!” Allegra said. “You could play
golf with my dad at the country club. He’d like that. You’re a good
golfer, right?”

“No,” Seth said. “Not even on the Wii.”

“You’ll learn.” She nibbled at his chin.
“Sethy-seth. Sethykins.”

“Okay,” Seth said. “I give up. Let’s go back
to the room and make out.”

“Really?” she chirped. “Yeah, let’s go!” And
then ran back to the room, dropping the rope in the process.

Seth flung the rope out over the railing, out
of her reach, and ran down the stairs.

“I’m waiting!” she cooed behind him. Seth put
on speed, paused at the bottom of the steps to pull his pants all
the way on, and then ran out the front door of the hotel.

He rushed outside and found himself in the
middle of a huge riot. People were punching and kicking each other
all over the street, parked cars were overturned, shrubbery was on
fire.

He struggled to press through the dense
crowd, toward Meeting Street, where Jenny must have parked. It was
the only direction he knew to go.

Random strangers punched at his face, and one
of the old ladies who’d been protesting the music festival bit
Seth’s hand.

“What the hell?” Seth backed away from her.
The crowd surged like a tidal wave and pushed him back in the
opposite direction, past the hotel, and crushed against the side of
an empty taxicab. Beside him, a girl of twelve or thirteen got her
face slammed against the hood of the taxi’s window by an angry fat
man. She came up screaming, with a bloody nose.

“Hey, don’t do that!” Seth shouted at the guy
assaulting the girl. Seth put a hand on the screaming girl’s head
and quickly healed her face.

The big guy came after Seth, but instead of
fighting back, Seth took a chance, seized his arm and pushed his
healing power into the guy.

The big guy paused with his fist in midair,
looking confused. “Hey, what’s going on?”