Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4) (10 page)

“We’re very grateful for her improvement—”

Ward smashed the family picture on the corner of her desk, and Heather jumped as fragments
of glass sprayed everywhere.  He threw the broken frame on the floor.

“Don’t give me that,” he growled.  His green eyes burned bright. “The probability
is off the charts.  What happened at the hospital that night?”

“It must have been God,” Heather said. “That’s what everybody tells me.”

“God.” Ward smirked at her. “I don’t believe in God, Dr. Reynard.  But I believe in
the devil.  I believe he’s in all of us, that he
is
us...” He stalked closer to her, and Heather backed up until she bumped against her
desk.  His voice dropped to a whisper as he leaned in close, his breath hot and sour
on her cheek. “Tell me, Heather.  What is the source of Fallen Oak syndrome?  Why
did you want every victim, and every inch of that old mansion, incinerated?”

“The pox,” she said. “It had to be stopped.  It could have become an epidemic overnight. 
Virulent.  Contagious.  Airborne.”

“No,” he said, stepping even closer, until she could see nothing in the world but
his face. “I want the whole story.”

“Get back,” Heather whispered.  She eased her hand toward her purse.  Three-star general
or not, he was going to get eyeballs full of pepper spray if he didn’t step out of
her personal space.

He grabbed her head in both hands and stared into her eyes.  Heather’s hand dove inside
her purse, but then she felt like she was twisting and falling, suddenly lost in her
own memories.  She could feel him penetrating deep inside her brain, and she had no
way of stopping it.

She flashed through her initial epidemiological investigation of Fallen Oak, the interviews
with Darcy Metcalf and other locals, the tissue samples....Then she saw the true source
of the outbreak, a small, sad-looking girl named Jennifer Morton....Not an immune
carrier, as it turned out, because there
was
no biological vector.  Combined with the zombies caught on video in a Charleston
morgue, Heather was reluctantly realizing that the situation had to be supernatural,
contrary to all her own beliefs....

...and then Seth Barrett, healing Tricia’s leukemia.  And then Heather standing by
the blazing ruin of Barrett House, promising to help Jenny and Seth, to report them
dead and strongly recommend that everything be incinerated...And the next day, Heather
watching from a truck as men in biohazard suits loaded corpse after corpse into an
incinerator truck.  The demolition of the burned-out old mansion, the earth scorched
with flamethrowers.

“Jennifer Morton,” Ward said. “And she’s still alive.  Where?”

Heather gasped as the man stabbed deep into her brain, scouring it for information
that wasn’t there.

“Where?” he shouted again, shaking her. “Where?”

“I don’t know!” Heather screamed.

Ward released her and stepped back as Heather sank to the floor, weeping uncontrollably. 
Her brain felt like someone had torn through it with a claw hammer.  Her head would
ring and ache for days.

“Thank you, Dr. Reynard,” he said, adjusting his tie. “I suppose that was as helpful
as you could be.  Should you get the urge to tell anyone about my small, unimportant
visit, I’ll remind you that you falsified your reports on this matter and helped a
mass murderer escape.  We’ll be monitoring your communications to ensure you remember
to keep quiet.  A little added service from me.” He winked as he opened the door.
“Have a pleasant evening, Dr. Reynard.”

Heather remained sitting on the floor while she watched him leave, her skin crawling
with horror.  She barely understood what had just happened, but she felt painfully
violated.

When he walked out into the hall, Heather crawled across the carpet, slammed the door,
and turned the lock.  She leaned against the door and tried to get herself together. 
It was a long time before she felt safe leaving her office and walking to the parking
deck.

In Fallen Oak, the front gate to the Barrett House property was secured by lengths
of chain and padlocks.  Ward’s assistants, Buchanan and Avery, made short work of
them with bolt-cutters, and then pushed open the heavy steel gate doors, which were
flanked by very old stone lions.

Ward walked along the brick driveway, followed by the two younger men.  Beyond a few
ancient, mossy oaks near the front of the drive, the place looked like a wasteland. 
A huge amount of earth had been scorched black, any trees or grass long gone.  In
the year since Homeland Security had razed the place, spindly purple and pink                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
flowers had colonized the vast burn scar.

The house itself was nothing but rubble, but from the few blackened hunks of brick
wall that remained, Ward could see it had been an impressive structure at one time. 

“They worked it over pretty good,” Ward said, kicking a cracked piece of the driveway.
“Didn’t leave much for us to find, did they?”

“Sir,” Avery said, “As far as we can tell, the boy’s parents are at their house in
Saint Augustine.”

“I know,” Ward told him. “The bad news is that his mother’s name is Iris Mayfield
Barrett, the niece of Senator Junius Mayfield, who sits on the Armed Services Committee. 
That could get tricky.  Good news is the senator just recently had a stroke and he’s
in critical condition.  If the old bastard would hurry up and die, we’d have less
to worry about.”

“Should I put in a call?” Avery asked.

“Avery...” Ward sighed and shook his head.  Buchanan had half a brain, but Ward just
regarded Avery as extra muscle. “I will never tell you to make a call like that about
a person like that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’re going to focus on softer targets for now,” Ward told them. “The Morton girl’s
father, and any other witnesses who might have something useful.  I don’t think we’ll
find much here...” Ward looked at a distant brick structure on a low hill, back behind
where the house had stood. “What is that?”

“Looks like a walled garden, sir,” Buchanan said, squinting his eyes.

“It’s the only thing standing.  Might as well check it out.  We’re not going to find
anything in this rubble.” Ward led the way around the foundation of the house and
on through the torched remains of what might have been an orchard or a stand of decorative
trees.  Large slabs of dark gray granite led up the hill to a tall wrought-iron gate,
which stood wide open.  They had to step high, as if the stairs were meant for larger
beings than humans.  They reminded Ward of old megalithic structures he’d seen on
the History Channel, where some moron was always claiming Stonehenge was built by
aliens. 

If extraterrestrials were visiting the planet, Ward’s agency would have known about
it.  The Anomalous Strategic Threat Research and Intelligence Agency (ASTRIA) was
not known to the public.  Their mission, dating back to the Eisenhower administration,
had generally been to focus on “unknown unknowns,” in the words of a more recent Secretary
of Defense.  Originally founded in response to reports that the Soviet Union was investigating
the use of psychics for intelligence-gathering and other strategic purposes, ASTRIA
had looked into matters ranging from the supernatural to the extraterrestrial...almost
never finding anything of importance to national security.  Almost.

They walked through the open gate.  Inside, there tall blocks of dark granite, arranged
in rows, many of them inscribed with names but not dates.  Each row had a generation
of people named JONATHAN SETH BARRETT, followed by a Roman numeral.  The most recent
date that had been carved belong to the boy for whom they were searching: JONATHAN
SETH BARRETT IV.  It had a birth year, but no death year.  Next to it was CARTER MAYFIELD
BARRETT, born a few years before Seth, dead at the age of fourteen.

“What is this place?” Ward muttered.

“Looks like a graveyard, sir,” Avery replied.

“I can see that.  Looks like a graveyard for generations of people who haven’t been
born yet.  Fucking rich weirdos,” Ward muttered.

The earth in front of Carter’s grave was churned up like something had dug its way
in or out.  As Ward continued walking, he saw all of the graves with death dates were
like that.

“What the hell happened here?” Ward asked. “Don’t see why Homeland Security would
dig up all these graves.”

“Maybe they didn’t, sir,” Buchanan said. “It could be like the security video from
the morgue in Charleston.  The walking dead, sir.”

“The walking dead.” Ward frowned.  They even had the “zombie master” on video, for
what it was worth.  A grainy image of a tall guy in dark sunglasses with longish hair.
“How many paranormals are we talking about now?  The little diseased girl, the healing
rich kid, and some zombie master guy?  I believe we have stepped into some shit here,
gentlemen.”  One of the dark granite slabs near the back was labeled JONATHAN SETH
BARRETT. “This must have been a hell of a guy, this first Jonathan Seth Barrett. 
They planned to name unborn generations after him.  What kind of freaks are we dealing
with?”

Buchanan wore a thoughtful look.  Avery blew his nose into a handkerchief.

“Getting a cold, Avery?” Ward asked.

“Must be allergies, sir.” Avery wiped his eyes.

“Get it together, Avery,” Ward said. He looked around the churned-up graveyard one
more time. “There’s nothing for us here.  Let’s move on to the next objective.”

They returned to their black Chrysler 300C sedan, which was modified with armored
plates inside the body panels and bulletproof glass for the windows.  It was faster
and quieter than when it had arrived from the factory, and loaded with heavily encrypted
communications equipment that was a bit more advanced than what was available on the
open market.  Despite all this, it looked like a perfectly normal car, at least to
the casual observer.

They crossed through the decaying, boarded-up town.  The largest remaining employer
in the area, Winder Timber Processing, had shut down a year earlier.  It had belonged
to the mayor of Fallen Oak, who had died along with his wife and daughter the day
little Jenny decided to kill a crowd of people.  The records showed Mayor Winder’s
relatives had inherited the business, taken one look at the books, and closed it down
and sold off the machinery.  Fallen Oak’s population was shrinking rapidly now.  Ward
doubted if anyone would still live here in ten years, except maybe a handful of elderly
types with Social Security checks and nowhere to go.

The sedan’s information system had a few features that OnStar didn’t, including instant
access to anyone’s financial, medical, criminal, and military records.  It guided
them to the red-dirt driveway of a rickety old house half-hidden in the woods outside
town.  A rusty dodge Ram squatted in the driveway.  Darrell Morton was home.

“So this is where our little monster grew up,” Ward said from where he sat in the
back seat.  Avery and Buchanan were up front. “What a pathetic hellhole.”

Avery hurried to open Ward’s door.  Ward led the way to the sagging boards of the
front steps, automatically glancing in every direction, including up at the roof,
watching for any sign of danger, anyone who might be hiding among the dense autumn
leaves of the branches overhead.  This was second nature to him.  The leaves crunched
under their shoes—otherwise, it was a quiet afternoon.

Inside the house, a man in a ragged t-shirt approached the screen door and looked
out.  The front door had already been open, indicating a possible lack of any centralized
climate control.  Ward knew this man could barely afford to get by month to month. 
He wondered how growing up in such an environment might have shaped Jennifer Morton’s
mind.

“Darrell Morton,” Ward said as he climbed the creaky steps, followed by the two other
men.

“Yeah?” The unshaven man in the dusty jeans looked out at them suspiciously.  He was
in his forties, but looked older.

“I’m Special Agent Ward Adams.  Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Ward held up the
Department of Justice badge, which was only half-fake.  Anyone who called up the FBI
to ask would be told he was a real agent, though almost nobody bothered to check once
they saw the badge. “We just need to ask you a couple of quick questions, and then
we’ll get out of your way.”

The man froze where he stood.  He obviously knew exactly why the FBI would be visiting.

“What’s the trouble?” Darrell Morton asked in a shaky voice.

“We’re looking into some events that happened here in town last Easter,” Ward said.
“Chemical leak from an old factory.  Lots of people dead.”

“Um...” Darrell looked confused. “I don’t know much about that.”

“We understand your daughter was involved,” Darrell said. “She was among the deceased,
is that right?”

“Yeah. I mean, no.  I mean, yeah, she died, but it was in a fire at the old Barrett
house.  About a year ago.”  He was looking away and avoiding eye contact.  Lying,
and not very good at it.