Tommy Nightmare (Jenny Pox #2) (4 page)

He knew better than to trust the feeling.
He'd never seen Esmeralda again, after all. That sense of falling
for somebody seemed to hint at forever, but it was an illusion. In
real life, you couldn't surrender to those feelings, or they would
just rip you to pieces.

Tommy knew all of this. He thought of all
this. But it was on the back burner of his mind.

On the front burner, red hot and smoking, was
the need to find the girl on the television. And then...do
something. He could imagine a lot of things he might do to her—he'd
been in prison almost a year—but those weren't the main things that
interested him. There was a lot more going on here. A mystery. He
could feel things about that girl.

He tried to shake off the feeling. Stupid. He
was just caged up and horny, and that was all.

“Thanks for having me, Mr. O'Flannery,”
Ashleigh said at the end of the show. Then she smiled, and then she
was gone.

Over the next few weeks, Tommy tried to push
down his thoughts about the girl from the TV. He couldn't win: he
kept catching himself daydreaming about her while he worked in the
prison's cannery. She filled up his dreams, and he awoke hot,
sweaty, and more miserable than he’d ever felt.

Tommy put together his plan. He had to be
careful—he'd learned that the hard way, after he robbed that
convenience store and the cops had taken him down with Tasers.
Fucking shocking you to the ground from ten feet away, out of
reach—that wasn't fair, in his book.

Tommy had found that if he could just get his
hand on a cop for a moment, he could usually intimidate the cop
into letting him go. He'd used that trick more times than he could
remember. But if they were going to stay out of reach and zap him
into a vegetable with electric wires, his special fear-inducing
touch didn't have much room to play.

He made his move after lunch, on the way out
of the cafeteria. Vinner was walking alongside him, jabbering away
about his meth-addicted pregnant sister. As they passed a pair of
guards, Tommy turned and punched Vinner in the face. Vinner went
down, bleeding from his nose and lip.

The two guards grabbed Tommy and hit him a
few times, and Tommy went slack and fell on the floor, pretending
to be semiconscious and groaning in pain.

“Good night, you crazy bastard,” one of the
guards crowed.

“Let’s put this prick in the Hole,” the other
said.

They each took one of Tommy’s wrists and
dragged him away from the cafeteria. He could feel them shivering a
little, as his touch began to work its magic.

When they dragged him into a side corridor,
Tommy seized their wrists.

He didn’t take any chances. Tommy’s touch
always made people afraid, whether he wanted to or not, but
sometimes he could focus and make it really powerful, terrifying
people out of their minds. He imagined pushing it out through his
hands, pumping the guards full of fear.

The guards’ arm hairs stood on end, and one
of them gasped. They released Tommy and he fell to the floor. Tommy
jumped to his feet and seized their hands again, not wanting to
lose his moment. He pushed the fear as hard as he could.

“I’m leaving,” Tommy hissed. “And you two are
helping me.”

“Okay, okay!” One of the guards was nodding
as fast as a bobble-headed doll. “Whatever you want.”

“Don’t hurt me,” the other guard pleaded.
They both wore expressions like terrified little boys, and Tommy
tried not to smile.

“You do what I say from here on,” Tommy said.
“Understand?”

They understood.

Tommy left the prison in the trunk of a
guard’s car. As Tommy instructed, the guard took him all the way to
Baton Rouge. The guard also visited an ATM, emptied his checking
account, and gave the cash to Tommy.

Tommy shook the guard’s hand before the guard
got back in his car. He squeezed tight, and stared the shuddering
man in the eyes.

“You won’t remember anything,” Tommy said.
“You won’t tell anyone where you brought me. You’re going to forget
all about our adventure.”

“Yeah, of course, of course,” the guard said.
He looked on the verge of tears. His voice came out small and
squeaky. “Whatever you want me to do.”

“Go home and forget about me.”

Tommy stood on the side of the boulevard and
watched the prison guard drive away. Part of him couldn’t believe
he’d pulled it off. Another part of him was beginning to feel like
a real idiot for sitting in prison this long.

South Carolina lay several hundred miles to
the east. Tommy started walking.

Dr. Heather Reynard raced down the country
highway at ninety miles an hour, while juggling her cell phone and
a box of Zaxby’s chicken nuggets. After two months of living on
canned beans and U.S. Army MRE’s, she thought the deep-fried
chicken lumps tasted better than caviar.

“So, wait,” her husband, Liam, said on the
phone. “You’re back home?”

“No,” Heather said. “I mean yes, I left
Haiti. No, I’m not on my way home.”

“Then where are you?”

“In America.”

“That narrows it down.”

“I’m not supposed to say where I’m going,
Liam.” Heather hesitated. “It’s somewhere in South Carolina,
though.”

“That’s not far. Thank God you’re finally
back. You’ll never guess what Tricia did to the dining room
wall—”

“I am
not
back, Liam. Officially I’m
still doing cholera in Haiti.”

“And what are you unofficially doing?”

“I don’t know!” Heather swerved around a
slowpoke farm truck loaded with hay. “I’m guessing it’s urgent,
because I just flew from Port-au-Prince to Augusta on a U.S. Postal
Service airplane, and this is my first chance to call.”

“When did all this happen?”

“This morning. Early. Dr. Schwartzman sent
for me. I don’t know why. Nobody’s telling me anything.”

“I’m guessing it’s not another salmonella
outbreak, then.”

“Why did you have to say that? I’m eating
chicken nuggets here.”

“You’re probably safe. Like I was saying,
your daughter is a real artist now.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Heather said.

“She painted a mural in the dining room. In
the medium of ketchup and mustard.”

“Ugh. That’ll be a mess to clean up.”

“Who’s cleaning?” Liam asked. “I’ll just slap
a frame around it and tell people it’s a Jackson Pollock.”

“You’re so unbelievably hilarious,” Heather
said. Following the directions she’d scrawled on her notepad, she
turned off the main highway onto someplace called Esther Bridge
Road, saw the National Guard roadblock, and hit the brakes. “Wow,
this looks big. I have to go.”

“I love—“ she heard Liam say as she clicked
the phone.

A Guardsman, about nineteen years old, walked
towards Heather’s rental car, shaking his head. Heather lowered her
window.

“Road’s closed, ma’am,” he said.

“I’m Dr. Reynard.” Heather showed her ID
badge. “CDC. I’m supposed to be here.”

The Guardsman inspected her ID card closely,
as if he were an expert in distinguishing between real and fake
Centers for Disease Control badges.

“One sec. Wait here.” He walked away and
consulted with an older Guardsman, who consulted with someone else
via walkie-talkie, and then nodded.

Soldiers moved aside the orange cones that
blocked the road, opening a lane for her between two big National
Guard trucks. They’d blocked off the left lane completely with
their trucks, as if more concerned about people getting out than
people getting in. Interesting.

Heather continued along Esther Bridge Road,
which wound sharply through dense woods. She crossed a bridge over
a creek, and then saw an old wooden sign:

WELCOME TO FALLEN OAK, it said. “
THE LORD
HAS BROUGHT FORTH A BOUNTIFUL HARVEST
.”

The little patch of downtown was surrounded
by government workers—more National Guard, black Homeland Security
vehicles, mobile CDC units. South Carolina Highway Patrol seemed to
be lingering around the fringes, too.

Heather parked on the side of the road and
checked in at the next National Guard blockade. As she walked into
the scene, she dialed Schwartzman on her cell phone.

“I’m here,” she said.

“Suit up and come meet me. I’m on my way
there now.”

“Where?”

“You’ll find it.” He hung up.

Heather found the CDC truck with the hazmat
equipment. A young technician sitting inside the open rear door of
the truck jumped to his feet.

“Dr. Reynard?” he asked. He grabbed one of
the yellow hazmat suits from a hanging rack.

“That’s me.”

“You need to suit up,” the technician said.
“Schwartzman’s waiting.”

“What’s going on here?” Heather asked. “I
just flew hundreds of miles and I have no clue why.”

“I’m not supposed to say. I’m just supposed
to help you suit up.” He held open the bulky yellow suit for her to
step inside it. The suit would cover her from head to toe, keeping
her protected from…whatever was going on in Fallen Oak.

“You must have seen something,” Heather said.
“Or heard something?”

“I haven’t seen anything. I can’t get close
enough. Because I’m not wearing a suit.” He gave the suit a shake
and raised his eyebrows.

“But what are people saying?”

“Dr. Schwartzman is saying for you to hurry.
But you can’t do that until you put on this—”

“Okay, okay, give me the suit.”

Heather let the young man help her into the
heavy yellow suit. She fixed the radio speaker into her ear, and
then he pulled the hood over her head. She smiled at him through
the face shield. “How do I look?”

“Like an alien.” He sealed the hood.

Heather followed the bustle of official
activity toward the town square. She rounded an eighteen-wheeler
truck, and then she saw the town green.

It seemed like a once-charming little town
that had fallen on hard times, like thousands of little towns
around the country. A nineteenth-century brick courthouse dominated
the scene, with fat white columns and a sculpted frieze on the
pediment. The sculptured scene depicted the goddess Justice,
blindfolded and wielding scales and a sword.

There was a little white building with a sign
identifying it as Fallen Oak Baptist Church, and there was a
Merchants and Farmers Bank of Fallen Oak. The rest of the downtown
was mostly empty brick buildings, the vacant shop windows
whitewashed.

Immediately, Heather saw why Schwartzman had
flown her up from Haiti in a rush.

The town green was covered in bodies. CDC
workers in yellow suits like hers were sealing them in airtight
plastic cadaver pouches and loading them onto two refrigerated box
trucks. There were still at least a hundred bodies left scattered
in front of the courthouse, the front doors of which were marked
with a big splash of dried red. Heather guessed it wasn’t
ketchup.

She found Schwartzman supervising the
collecting and sealing of bodies.

“What the hell happened here?” she asked
him.

“Heather. Finally.” His voice crackled over
the radio, heavy with static, though he only stood a few feet away.
She could hear other conversations fading in and out of the
channel, from the other CDC workers.

“Yes, me, finally.” Heather looked around at
the carnage. The bodies were badly contorted, rife with huge
blisters, open sores, broken pustules, and dark tumors. She
couldn’t think of any known pathogen that would cause such a broad
range of symptoms. Whatever biological agent had caused this was
extremely nasty and needed to be killed immediately.

“Bioterrorism?” Heather asked.

“Possibly. But this town is about as far from
a valuable national target as you can get.”

“What are the local authorities saying?”

“We haven’t found any,” Schwartzman said. He
nodded at the courthouse. “Mayor’s office is empty. The little
police department’s empty. If I had to guess…” He gestured at all
the dead bodies.

Heather shook her head. “My God.”

“Don’t say that,” Schwartzman snapped. “The
locals are already talking Biblical plague. Don’t encourage.”

“Maybe they’re right.” Heather knelt by one of the
bodies. He was a heavyset man—obese by any measure—in a white dress
shirt polka-dotted with his own blood. His face had peeled away
into wide, curling strips. The muscles underneath were knotted with
tumors. “I’ve never seen anything like this. It looks like leprosy,
bubonic plague and cancer all wrapped together. How many
cases?”

“We’re still counting, but it looks like about two
hundred. All of them right here. No suspected cases so far—just all
these confirmed ones. Nobody alive to talk. Old lady found them
early this morning.” He nodded toward a shop with a big,
hand-painted sign:
Miss Gertie’s Five and Dime
. “She had no
symptoms, but we took blood samples to send to Atlanta for
analysis.”

“So what happened?” Heather asked. “All these people
came down to the courthouse, and they died all at once?”

“We don’t know what happened,” Schwartzman said. “We
don’t know what kind of pathogen we’re facing. But answers are on
the way.”

“They are?”

“Yes,” Schwartzman said. “Because I just pulled my
best epidemiologist out of Haiti to find them.”

Heather sighed and shook her head.

Jenny awoke gradually, with a pounding
headache. She was sore and hurting all over, inside and out. Her
lungs still felt raw from drowning to death in Ashleigh's pond.

She'd thrown herself into the water because
her body was already dying from her wounds and her massive-scale
use of her curse, the Jenny pox. When that memory hit her, Jenny's
eyes flew open.

It was twilight—she wasn't even sure what
day. She was in her room at home, sprawled on her bed. Seth lay
beside her, sleeping like a corpse. They still wore the tattered
remnants of their Easter clothes.