Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4) (35 page)

They jumped up on the couch, and Juliana showed off some of her American flapper moves,
lifting the hem of her long shirt and kicking to show a lot of bare leg.  Mia imitated
her, and soon they were trying to out-sexy each other instead.  Juliana laughed so
hard she lost her balance, and the couch cushion slid out from beneath her.  Mia thought
nothing of catching her, then holding her hands and dancing with her.  She knew Juliana’s
touch was death, but she was filled with the combined confidence of wine and youth. 
Dancing with death made her feel alive.

A female voice shouted, and the needle was ripped from the record, scratching it terribly. 

“I said, what is happening here?” the voice demanded in German.  Mia and Juliana were
both learning the language while they were here, but between themselves, they spoke
in English, the language of Hollywood movies.

Alise had entered the room, flanked by her two blond cohorts, Roza and Vilja.  They
were wrapped in robes or blankets and glared indignantly at the two girls cavorting
to jazz in their night clothes.

“We’re dancing,” Mia said. “Want to join?”

“No music after ten o’ clock,” Alise said. “The rules are clear!”

“But it’s Saturday night,” Juliana protested.

“And unauthorized wine!” Roza said, pointing. “Look, Alise.  Nobody else gets to have
wine.  The scientists forbid it.”

“Thank you, Roza.  Who gave you permission to drink?  Where did you get that wine?”
Alise demanded.

“Oh, Alise.” Mia’s words were slurred. “We’re just having fun.”

“There is plenty of room for fun within the rules,” Alise said.

“I think someone’s taking their hallway
fuehrer
job a little seriously,” Juliana said, and Mia laughed.

“Rules must be followed!” Alise barked so hard that locks of blond fell into her face,
and her serious tone only made Mia and Juliana giggle more. “That is not a proper
use of the common area seating!  Get down now!”

Mia and Juliana stepped down from the couch, still holding hands and giggling.

“You are both on administrative restriction,” Alise told them.

“How could this place get any more restricted?” Mia asked through her drunken giggles.

Alise narrowed her eyes at Mia and leaned in close to her. “Try me if you want to
find out.  Back to your rooms immediately.  I will be filling out an incident report
for Dr. Wichtmann.”  She turned on her heel and marched out of the room.

“Oh, no, an incident report!” Juliana said, and Mia laughed. 

“You’re both in a lot of trouble,” Roza said, crossing her arms. “I hope you know
that.”

“They might kick us out,” Mia said. “How terrible!”

Juliana and Mia couldn’t stop snickering as the blond girls herded them down the hall
and back into their room.  The two of them lay on Mia’s bed, whispering and making
fun of the other girls, and laughing and shushing each other, until they fell asleep.

Jenny woke feeling stiff, sick to her stomach, and full of cramps.  She lay in a hospital
bed under dim lights.  Someone had replaced her clothes with a thin hospital gown
and pasted small circular sensors all over her arms and chest.  She could feel them
on her neck and face, too, but when she reached up to touch them, she discovered her
hands were chained to the bed.  So were her ankles.  The steel chains were thin but
heavy, and allowed only the smallest movements—she couldn’t even scratch her nose
if she needed to do that.  Naturally, her nose started itching immediately.

She was alone in a cube-shaped cell with clear walls, a clear ceiling, and no furniture. 
The larger room outside her cell was a concrete bay that looked like the hangar for
a small airplane.  Dark windows looked down on her from high on one wall.

Jenny recognized it immediately as one of the laboratories at the underground complex
in the Harz mountains.  For a long, strange minute, she wondered whether she’d somehow
traveled back in time...or maybe all her different lives were really happening at
once, in some way, and she could move  between them.

Then she saw the bank of digital monitors lined up outside a clear wall of her cell,
remotely reading the sensors all over her body, spitting out moving graphs of her
heartbeat, breathing, blood pressure, brain waves, and other metrics she couldn’t
identify, all her inner biological activities displayed and tracked, and probably
recorded.  They must have gathered their data remotely from the sensors glued all
over her body.

This definitely was not the 1930’s, but she was back in the same place.  They’d all
been captured by the unavoidable man Mariella had seen in Seth’s future, whom Jenny
believed would turn out to be the Nazi officer Kranzler, the seer who could reach
in and find people’s memories, Mariella’s opposite. 

Jenny immediately began to worry about Seth, and about Mariella, too.  Where were
they?

She looked up at the clear roof of her cube, where a pair of fan units each connected
to a ventilation duct that reached away to the laboratory ceiling high above, keeping
Jenny’s air separate from everyone else in the underground complex.

Between the fan units, which were located on opposite ends of the cube, a small black
dome watched her. 

“Hey, I’m up!” Jenny shouted at the camera that had to be inside the dome. “Anybody
want to take these chains off?” She waved her hands as much as the restraints allowed.

She looked out through the transparent wall of her cube, toward the steel doors that
led out of the lab.  Fifteen or twenty minutes passed before one of them opened.

The man who entered bore some resemblance to Kranzler—dark red hair tinged with gray,
a broad and stocky build, flat nose, feral green eyes.  He wore a dark blue military
uniform with a starched white shirt and black tie, and he was followed by three guards
in biohazard facemasks and body armor.  The guards wore black from their helmets to
their boots, with no flag or any other decoration.

This incarnation of Kranzler stepped up to the monitor bank just outside the wall,
ignoring her and looking at the machines for a moment.  He looked like some kind of
Star Wars
villain, she thought, with the masked stormtroopers standing in a razor-straight
row behind him.

“Jennifer Morton,” he eventually said, still looking at the EEG machine. “We’ve been
looking for you.”

“Who are you?  And where are we?” Jenny asked, although she was certain she knew the
answers to both questions. 

“I am the one who finally caught you.” He looked up at her, smiling. “You make for
dangerous prey, Jennifer.  I hope you’ll forgive our use of tranquilizers.”

“Where are Seth and Mariella?”

“Safe.  Secure.  No need to worry about them.”

“I want to see Seth.  And you can take these chains off me, I’m not going to attack
you.”

“I’m supposed to take your word for that?  I’ve studied the Fallen Oak outbreak, Jenny. 
I’ve seen what you do to those who get in your way.  And, you may not believe me,
but I respect it, I truly do.  Because the world is shaped by one thing, Jennifer:
force.”

“The Force?” Jenny asked, still thinking how the guards looked like stormtroopers.

“Force!” He slammed a large fist into the clear wall. “You have it inside you, but
force must be used intelligently.  It must have purpose and direction.  I can provide
that.”

“I don’t need purpose or direction,” she told him. “I
need
to scratch my nose.”

“Nobody’s ever died of an itchy nostril.”

“How long are you going to keep me in this bed?”

“As long as we wish.  We have to keep our technicians and medical staff safe from
you, don’t we?”

“Why are we here?”

“To protect the United States against all enemies...foreign and domestic.” He smiled.
“You’re a threat to security, Jennifer.  We can’t just have someone like you running
wild, leaving hundreds of dead people in your wake simply because you don’t like them.”

“That’s not what happened!  I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

“I’ve seen many photographs that say otherwise.”

“They were attacking me...and I’ve changed since then.”

He gave a cold laugh. “Changed how?  Found Jesus?  Born again?  Or maybe those Mormon
kids with the bicycles knocked on your door and changed your life?  I’d like to hear
the tale.”

“You couldn’t begin to understand it.”

“I’m sure it’s all very convoluted and dramatic.  But I’m not so much interested in
what you’ve done, Jennifer, as where you’re going now.  You can work with us.  I’m
prepared to offer you that.”

“Doing what?” she asked.

“Serving your country.”

“Serving
you
.  I know you, Kranzler.  You’re a monster.  I don’t know how you climbed so high
in this lifetime, in this world.  I guess cockroaches know how to survive in any environment.”

She could tell he hadn’t heard anything after the world
Kranzler
.  He looked stunned for a moment, then shook his head as if to clear it.

“You must work with us,” Ward said. “Let us test you.  Let us examine how your ability
works.  Your power could reach its full potential with my help.”

“I don’t
want
to reach my full potential.  I don’t want to use the pox ever again.”

“Your choice is to accept your place and work with us, or to stay locked up in this
cell for the rest of your life.  All we want now is to test and learn.  We’ll table
any discussion of national defense applications until you’re comfortable talking about
that.  Do we have a deal?” He folded his arms and watched her face.

“I can’t do any testing now, anyway,” Jenny said. “With all these whirli-gizmos attached
to me, I’m sure you’ve noticed I’m slightly pregnant.  I can’t use the pox, it’s not
safe for the baby.”

“You’re only half-term.  We can’t wait months to begin testing.”

“Then I suggest you don’t go around kidnapping pregnant women.”

“Everything I do is for the greater good,” Ward told her. “When you see that, you
will join us.”

“Whose idea of the greater good?  Yours?”

“You will cooperate with us, Jennifer.” His eyes seemed to grow dark as he stared
at her. “You will submit to testing when I order it.”

“I’m sorry, General, but like I said, my hands are tied.” Jenny raised her cuffed
hands.

He glared at her, then shook his head as he turned away.  The guards followed him
out and slammed the steel door behind them.

Jenny looked around the concrete lab.  They hadn’t bothered to provide her with anything
to read or a TV, but she had plenty of past-life memories to watch.  This place crawled
with them.  She wondered if she was in the exact same lab where they’d tested her
so many times.  She looked around at the concrete floor, but she didn’t see any bloodstains.

* * *

Juliana felt a wave of relief as she stepped into the lab.  No animals today, just
more beige machines full of dials and knobs.  They hadn’t made her touch any more
animals since the goats, and she hoped they’d decided not to do that anymore, after
seeing how much it upset her.  She didn’t mind letting them monitor her and swab samples
from the gory lesions she summoned to the surface of her body, and photograph her
naked as Dr. Wichtmann kept insisting, but she had resolved not to kill any more animals
no matter how much they pressured her.  They would have to adjust their testing to
that.  Maybe they already had.

She stood near the exam table and looked up at the windows high above.  They’d dimmed
the lighting on the observation deck, so the windows looked like black mirrors.  She
had no idea whether anyone was watching her.

A few minutes passed, and she grew more and more uneasy.  By now, the biologists and
doctors should have been here in their gas masks and elbow-length rubber gloves, poking
and prodding at her.  The room felt unusually cold today, too, and she shivered in
her light dress and folded her arms in around herself.

A steel door opened, and two uniformed S.S. men in black gas masks entered, rolling
a surgical gurney.  A man was strapped to it with wide leather belts, his mouth bound
with a cloth gag.  He lunged his shoulders and hips uselessly, grunting and screaming
against his gag.  It was hard to tell his age, because his face and head had been
carelessly shaved with a straight razor, leaving them cross-hatched with cuts and
scrapes.  He was stripped to his stained underwear, and deep lash marks were carved
all over his body.  It was clear he’d been tortured, and starved as well, his ribs
jutting out through his skin.

The S.S. men rolled him to the center of the room, then turned and marched toward
the door without a word to her.

“Wait!  What’s happening?” Juliana asked.

They ignored her and hurried out, locking the door behind them, leaving her alone
with the tortured man squirming on the gurney.  His head flopped toward her, his eyes
wide, and he made some desperate pleading sounds against his gag.