Tommy Nightmare (Jenny Pox #2) (32 page)

“The three of us, Tommy. Nobody left
out.”

Tommy looked out at the crowd of smiling,
dancing, drinking, kissing people, and he thought about the horror
he had to unleash on them.

Jenny sped down the highway towards
Charleston as the night grew dark around her. She’d called Seth and
Darcy several times as she drove, and left each of them panicked
voicemails, but nobody had called back.

A mile marker told her she was thirty miles
from Charleston. The further she drove, the slower she seemed to
travel, though she kept the needle between eighty and ninety in the
countryside. She slowed as she passed through the little towns,
where police might be lying in wait for a quick buck.

Doubt gnawed on her guts. She felt horrible
for leaving her dad in that condition, when he was acting so
confused and lost. Maybe she’d made the wrong choice. Seth had
brought himself back from the dead before. Even if Ashleigh’s
opposite really did kill him, Seth might be able to bring himself
back, as long as his body wasn’t too destroyed.

And somebody was waiting up ahead for Jenny,
using Seth as bait, expecting stupid little Jenny Mittens to take
the hook in her mouth. Jenny was doing exactly what Ashleigh’s
opposite wanted.

She thought about turning back. It was stupid
to walk into an ambush, and she needed to go take care of her
dad.

Then her phone rang. Darcy, finally calling
her back.

Ashleigh sat in the antique French arm chair
in Seth’s room at the Mandrake House. The chair was 19
^th
century, the back and arms carved with images of a woman and
gargoyles. It felt like a throne to her. She ate from silver
room-service trays: shrimp and grits, sliced heirloom tomatoes, a
cheeseburger, a waffle, pecan pie, orange juice and sweet tea. The
pregnancy made her crave everything. Besides, she needed to load up
on calories to charge up her power, because she’d zapped her latest
two victims pretty hard.

Seth and the random girl Ashleigh had picked
for him rolled around on the big four-poster bed a few feet away.
The girl—what was her name? Alondra?—was already down to her
underwear, and she’d stripped off his shirt and started kissing his
abdominal muscles.

The girl really was incredibly hot, Ashleigh
thought. She was almost as pretty as Ashleigh’s last body had been,
and nicely tanned, too. Ashleigh was more than sick of thumping
around in Darcy’s pregnant hippo body. Why couldn’t she take this
girl’s form instead?

Darcy’s cell phone, with its stupid
cartoon-kitten stickers, sang out a chime. New voice mail from
Jenny. Though Ashleigh hadn’t answered the calls, she had eagerly
listened to each voice mail as they came in. Jenny was even helpful
enough to tell how far she was from Charleston in each voice mail,
so there had been no reason for Ashleigh to call her back.

“Darcy, Jenny again,” the recording said.
“I’m about forty miles from there. I really, really need you to
call back and tell me where to meet you, or what hotel you’re at,
or something. Please. Thanks.”

Ashleigh decided to let Jenny stew a little
longer.

On the bed, the blond girl—Alissa?—was
eagerly grappling with Seth’s belt. She pulled it off him and
ripped open his jeans. Seth unhooked her bra.

“Slow down, guys,” Ashleigh said. “You don’t
want to blow your wad.”

The girl paused long enough to fling her bra
aside, and it hooked over a lamp. She whipped Seth’s jeans off and
threw them to the carpet.

“I said slow down, damn it!” Ashleigh
shouted.

She heaved herself to her feet, got a head
rush, struggled with her balance. The baby woke up and kicked in an
annoying way against the wall of her womb, three times, then a
fourth, then a fifth. “Stop it!” Ashleigh made a fist and punched
the baby as hard as she could, and the little bastard quit
kicking.

Ashleigh staggered toward the bed. Seth flung
the girl onto her back, and she laughed and wrapped her legs around
his hips.

“Wait!” Ashleigh put her hands on both of
them, taking control of the situation. “Stop. Cool down.”

“But I don’t want to stop,” the girl whined.
She clutched Seth tighter between her thighs.

“This is going too fast,” Ashleigh said.
“Look. We should play a game. I know the perfect thing.”

“That sounds fun,” Seth said. “Would that
make you happy, Allegra?”

“But I want to fuck,” Allegra whined.

“Check this out.” Ashleigh reached under the
bed and pulled out a length of rope with a noose at each end.
Ashleigh had tied them herself, upstairs in Tommy and Esmeralda’s
room on the fifth floor, while Seth was out with his Grayson
friends the previous night. Ashleigh Goodling had been a highly
decorated Girl Scout in her time, and had brought in a small
fortune for her troop pushing those Thin Mints and Tagalongs, even
though she overcharged for the cookies and took a cut off the top
for herself.

“What are we doing?” Seth asked.

“Just watch,” Ashleigh said. She looped one
rope around the base of a headboard poster, and then handed both
ends of it to Allegra.

“What do I do?” Allegra asked.

Ashleigh put a hand on the back of Allegra’s
neck. “You want to tie him up. It’s always been your fantasy.”

“Yeah, I guess it has. Give me your hands,
Seth.”

“I don’t know.” Seth looked a little puzzled.
Ashleigh quickly took his arm.

“You love this idea,” Ashleigh said.

“I love this idea.” A giddy smile broke
across Seth’s face. “I really, really love this idea.”

“Anything to make you happy, Seth.” Allegra
slipped the nooses over Seth’s wrists and pulled them tight.

She’d spent more than an hour on those knots.
They were masterpieces, little bunches of knots coiled within
knots. Once they pulled tight and small, it would be nearly
impossible for Seth to untie them. Seth was no Boy Scout.

Ashleigh grabbed some of the bed’s excessive
supply of pillows. She placed them over and around Seth’s roped
hands.

Ashleigh walked to the door of the room and
turned back to look, as if she’d just stepped in on them. There was
no visible sign that Seth was restrained at all. Perfect.

The girl began to tug Seth’s boxer shorts
down.

“Honey, no, wait,” Ashleigh said. She placed
a hand on the back of the girl’s neck. “Slow down. Once you get him
going, you’ve only got a couple minutes. Go real slow, like I told
you.”

The girl sighed. She lay down on top of Seth
and kissed him slowly, all over the face.

Ashleigh walked out on the balcony and closed
the doors behind her. The last thing she needed was Seth’s voice in
the background. Out here, there were the sounds of music and lots
of people, exactly what she needed.

She called Jenny back.

“Darcy, thank God,” Jenny said. “Are you
okay?”

“Huh? Yeah, I’m peachy. Why?”

“What about Seth?”

“I guess he’s okay. I haven’t seen him in a
while.”

“A while?”

“Coupla hours, I guess. He went off with a
bunch of his old friends.”

“For a couple of hours?”

“It’s okay,” Ashleigh said. “I’m having a
good time anywho, and I get they don’t want some pregnant chick
hanging around. And Seth doesn’t want to look uncool in front of
his friends, and I know what it’s like when you don’t want to look
uncool—”

“Darcy, Seth might be in danger. Are you sure
you don’t know where he is?”

“Well, I don’t see him anywhere, but there’s
like a bazillion people here,” Ashleigh said. “Did you try calling
him?”

“His phone’s not even on.”

Ashleigh smiled. She had pickpocketed Seth’s
phone, turned it off, and dropped it in Darcy’s big canvas purse.
Though ugly and horribly big, the purse was turning out to be
pretty useful.

“Well…I don’t know,” Ashleigh said. “I guess
I could go back to the hotel and look for him there.” Through the
glass window, she saw the girl sucking Seth’s dick. Ashleigh
pounded on the window. When Allegra looked up at her, Ashleigh
shook her head and did a cutting motion across her throat. Why
wouldn’t that slut slow down? Ashleigh must have overdosed her with
love. “How far away are you?”

“I’ll be in Charleston in ten minutes, but I
don’t know where to go from there.”

“Meet me at The Mandrake House.” Ashleigh
gave her directions, including which parking garage to use and the
best way to walk to the hotel. She figured Jenny would use the same
route when she later left the hotel, and that was something
Ashleigh was interested in controlling. “I’ll just wait in the
lobby for you, okay?”

“Yeah. Darcy, everything’s crazy right now.
I’m so glad to have you as a friend.”

“I’m glad to have you as a friend, too,
Jenny,” Ashleigh said.

“You sure kicked up a big storm,” Schwartzman
said. He sat beside Heather, looking out the airplane window into a
dark, murky night. “You sure this was a good idea?”

Around them, more CDC investigators were
clustered around laptops and talking in low voices, as they caught
up on the scarce information.

“There could be a serious event tonight,”
Heather said.

“You better hope there is,” Schwartzman said.
“The National Guard’s on alert. We have state and local police
looking for this girl—”

“That could be dangerous.”

“—with orders to report if they see her, but
leave her alone until we can get a biohazard team out there.
Homeland Security’s going to be all over that city. This is going
to be one hell of a bar tab if you’re wrong, Heather.”

“But you can imagine what she could do in a
city, with a big crowd like that.”

“I can imagine things all day,” Schwartzman
said. “I can imagine Director Voynich asking why we raised the
nation’s threat level an entire color today, if nothing turns
up.”

“They still do that color thing?” Heather
asked.

“Heather, I’m serious.”

“Me, too. I had no idea they still did
that.”

“Heather—”

“What do you want me to say? If there’s a
fifty percent—fuck, ten percent, five percent—chance she’s going to
repeat what happened in that town, shouldn’t we try to stop it?
Shouldn’t we capture her? Quarantine her? Study her?”

Schwartzman tilted his head back and narrowed
his eyes, a look that meant he was studying you with possible
intent to psychoanalyze.

“That’s what you want, isn’t it?” he asked.
“To study her. You think you’ll discover something.”

“Possibly,” Heather said.

“Something extraordinary.”

“We passed extraordinary a while ago, don’t
you think?”

“What is it you want to know?”

“I want to understand how she does it.
There’s a lot here that doesn’t make any sense.”

“And you’re going to make sense of it.”

“That’s what I do,” Heather said.

When she reached Charleston, Jenny parked at
the garage where Darcy had directed her. The garage was nearly
full, so Jenny had to park on the top floor. She looked over the
city as she waited for the elevator, and her stomach tied itself in
knots. So many buildings, so many streets, so many lights shining
on people everywhere. She'd never been to any kind of city in real
life, and the TV really didn't get across the scale of it, what it
was like to have so many people in one place.

She rode the elevator down and stepped out
into Meeting Street, where the pedestrians were all streaming in
one direction—towards the thundering music festival at the
harbor.

Jenny called Darcy.

“Hiya,” Darcy said. “Are you here yet?”

“I just parked,” Jenny said. “Did you find
Seth?”

“Um, kind of.”

“Kind of?” Jenny dodged around an artist
shilling caricatures on the sidewalk.

“Well, I'm at the hotel, so just come meet me
here,” Darcy said. “Go down Meeting Street until you hit Battery,
then turn left, and you'll see the front doors of the hotel—”

“You already told me that!” Jenny snapped.
“What about Seth? Is he hurt?”

“It's hard to explain on the phone. I'll just
see you in a minute, okay? I'll wait on the front porch.” Darcy
hung up.

Annoyed, Jenny jogged the rest of the way.
When she hit the intersection with Battery, she stopped and drew a
deep breath.

Her worst nightmare lay in front of her. It
was a dense crowd as far as she could see in either direction,
clumping here and there around vendors offering hot dogs and face
painting. She would have to thread her way through a bunch of drunk
kids without touching any of them.

Jenny folded her arms in tight and scrunched
her shoulders to make herself small. Though she was fully dressed
in jeans, a long-sleeve blouse and a pair of gloves, she didn't
want to take any risks. A little gap of skin could open between her
shirt sleeve and her glove, and if that brushed against someone,
they'd get infected.

She turned onto Battery Street. The crowd
around her was mostly her age, high school and college students.
Jenny watched them hugging, and dancing, and just horsing around
with each other.

Darcy sat on one of the half-dozen rocking
chairs parked on the front porch of The Mandrake House. She stood
and waved when she saw Jenny, leaving the chair rocking
precariously far behind her.

“Hey, Jenny! Hey, over here!”

“I can see you, Darcy.” Jenny ran up the
front walk and onto the porch of the hotel. “What's going on with
Seth?”

“Well, um, it's kinda hard to say—”

“Where is he?”

“Up in our room.” Darcy held up a plastic
keycard marked 303. “But maybe this isn't a good time for you to go
up there.”

“Why not?” Jenny asked.

Darcy shrugged.

“Just give me the card!” Jenny snatched the
keycard from Darcy's hand, then stomped toward the front door of
the hotel. She knew distantly that she was being a bitch to Darcy,
and she'd probably need to apologize later. But right now, with
everything crashing down on her, she just needed to get to Seth.
She needed to see that he was all right, and she needed him to make
her feel sane again. Not to mention healing her dad and making him
sane again, too.