by Bryan, JL
Jenny stalked toward her, holding out her cold, dripping, uncovered hands, staring at Ashleigh between the dark, wet strands of hair over her eyes.
“Ashleigh, move,” Jenny said. “If you get in my way, I will give you such a deadly case of Jenny pox, you’ll be nothing but a rotten corpse on your daddy’s carpet. I’m taking Seth.”
Jenny never stopped walking. Ashleigh screeched and ran out of her way, and Jenny continued straight ahead to Seth. She lifted Seth’s hands in hers.
“Seth, get up!” she said. “Now!”
“Okay. Just a minute.” He lay with his eyes closed, his fingers opening and closing at random.
“What did you do to him?” Jenny yelled at Ashleigh.
“I just filled him with love,” Ashleigh said. “He’s so in love, he can’t even think right now. Too bad.”
Jenny squeezed Seth’s hands.
“Seth, please. My daddy’s hurt. He’s going to die, Seth.”
With what looked like great effort, Seth managed to push his eyelids halfway open.
“Jenny,” he said. “Are you friends with Ashleigh now?”
“Seth, up!” Jenny said.
“I will. Give me a few minutes.” He closed his eyes.
“I’m calling the police,” Ashleigh said. Then she screamed, “Stop!”
Jenny looked up at Ashleigh’s sudden cry. She followed Ashleigh’s gaze, and discovered Cassie and Neesha sneaking up on her, ready to pounce on Jenny’s bare shoulders and arms. Ashleigh was yelling at them to stop.
“Try it,” Jenny said. “I’ll kill you both.”
“She will,” Ashleigh said. “She can’t touch anyone…” She realized Jenny was gripping both of Seth’s hands. “Why isn’t he getting pox?”
“He’s my opposite,” Jenny said. “I kill and he heals.”
“He heals?” Ashleigh sounded genuinely surprised. “So that’s it. Little bastard can keep a secret.”
Jenny could picture her father, pinned in mud under the tractor, the big machine sinking lower with every second that passed, crushing the life out of him. She needed to focus. She needed Seth awake and functioning.
Ashleigh had tremendous control of her powers. She could give people just a little, enough to entice them and make them her followers, or she could give a lot, like the tidal wave she’d sent through Seth at the Christmas party, so much that it conducted into Jenny and made her a grinning, horny idiot for the next twelve hours. Jenny hadn’t known the powers could conduct through one person into another. If she had, she would have been even more frightened of herself.
But this wasn’t the time for fear. She knew her touch could wake Seth a little from Ashleigh’s trance. Maybe if she intended it, and focused her mind, and pushed her power out instead of trying to hold it in, she really could accomplish something.
Jenny imagined Ashleigh’s power woven through Seth like golden thread, a net that bound him to Ashleigh. Now Jenny imagined a terrible black cloud forming in the pit of her own stomach. It was the way she had always envisioned the pox, swarms of tiny flies that passed through her skin into other living things. Now she focused on them, and told them they had one single purpose: to eat the golden thread laid down by Ashleigh. Jenny couldn’t heal people, and she couldn’t make people love her, but she could by God unleash destruction.
Jenny saw this slithering, buzzing cloud of oily-bodied flies fly up through her chest and concentrate around her mouth. She felt the skin on her lower face bubble and pop as bleeding sores formed on her lips. Pustules cracked open on her face, extruding curls of pus like tiny white worms.
“Gross!” Ashleigh said. “Everybody get back.”
“That is really, really sick,” Neesha said. She was absently clicking pictures with her cell phone.
Inside Jenny’s mouth, her tongue swelled and deformed as sores bloomed all over it. She straddled Seth, pushing her hands down on his. She leaned in toward his face and stuck out her swollen tongue, which dripped blood, and creamy yellow pus, and a thick, clear fluid.
“Do not do that,” Ashleigh said. Her parents were behind her now, watching in shock and disgust from the doorway.
Jenny opened Seth’s mouth and pushed her tongue all the way inside, stretching it as far as she could, infecting him with her fluids. She imagined the cloud of flies swarming out, down into Seth, chewing away at the golden bonds Ashleigh had woven.
“I’m gonna be sick,” Cassie said.
Jenny came up after a minute and looked around her. No one had attacked her while she worked on Seth. She saw fear in all of them now. For the first time, Jenny felt more than dangerous. She felt powerful. She could use what she had, and she could direct it, just like Ashleigh.
Jenny stood up and held out her bare arms. At her wish, boils erupted up and down the length of them, spreading to her hands, where sores cracked open and bled. She looked at Dr. Goodling and decided to blow his mind. She held up both her palms toward him and willed the broken sores to run together into one big, open wound in each palm.
“Behold,” she said to him, and the voice that came out of her was not anything she had heard before. It was her, but more than her. It was Jenny with power, Jenny laughing at those who defied her, Jenny the ancient and terrible spirit. “Behold, priest, the markings of Christ.”
Mrs. Goodling screamed and grabbed his arm. Dr. Goodling looked like he would pee himself.
Jenny laughed, and the laugh was not exactly hers, either. It had a truculence, a deep enjoyment of the man’s fear and suffering. It was even a little Ashleigh-like, but even sharper and colder.
At her feet, Seth rose on all fours, coughing and sucking for air. She put an arm under him and helped him up.
“What did you do?” Ashleigh asked.
“I undid your work,” Jenny told her.
Seth looked around the room, blinking, and still coughing. He looked pale and shaken, like a bad fever had just broken, but his eyes were open and clear.
“Jenny?” he asked. “What’s happening?”
That snapped Jenny’s mind back into her dad’s emergency.
“My dad’s hurt,” Jenny said. “Maybe dying. We have to go.”
“Really?” Seth said. “Let’s go!”
They ran out of the room. Dr. Goodling stepped forward, as if he meant to block their way, but Jenny held out one hand full of open sores towards him.
“Daddy, no!” Ashleigh yelled, but it was unnecessary. Dr. Goodling recoiled from Jenny’s leprous fingers.
They ran down the hall, the front steps, and out the front door. Everyone else came after them, but kept their distance.
“Take my car,” Jenny said. When she was in the driver’s seat, and Seth had the passenger door most of the way closed, Jenny punched the gas. She didn’t want to waste time with straightening out the crooked car and backing up. Instead, she made a sharp turn through the Goodling’s rain-soaked front yard, turfing it deeply. She flattened a flower bed. Sheep and shepherds skipped off her windshield, trailing broken wires. Then she plowed through the wall of the nativity stable, scattering plastic boards and plastic hay everywhere.
She punched through the white picket fence and fishtailed out into the road, scattering broken picket slats all over the street. A plastic manger fell from the Lincoln’s roof, followed by a plastic baby that bounced head over feet down the length of the hood, shedding the white plastic sheets that swaddled it, before landing in the street.
“That is really disturbing,” Seth said.
Jenny fought the car’s fishtailing, straightened it up, and accelerated again.
Behind them, Ashleigh, her two girlfriends, and her parents all piled into the Suburban. The Goodlings pulled out of the driveway to chase Jenny.
Jenny roared through town, the hail thick enough that it cracked her windshield and windows in a few places.
“This weather sucks,” Seth said. “What happened to your dad?”
“A tractor rolled on top of him.”
�
�Oh, Jesus,” Seth said. “Is he okay?”
“No, Seth, why do you think I’m acting like this? Mrs. McNare says he’s dying.” Jenny’s voice hitched a little, and she rubbed tears from her eyes and forced herself not to cry. “You’re going to save him.”
“Okay,” Seth said. “But only if we survive the trip there.”
Jenny didn’t slow down. She swerved and hydroplaned their way out of town, to Hog Willow Road, nearly losing control of the car three times. She shot down the road, past the fields of humped earth and cows huddled together in the sudden rain, her accelerator flat on the floor mat.
Blue lights strobed inside her car, blinding her in the dark weather. A town policeman was on her rear bumper. Behind the cop was the Goodlings’ SUV.
Jenny ignored the cop and sped past Merle Sanderson’s house. They were surrounded by the McNare fields now. Ahead, an ambulance was parked on the side of the road, flashers blinking, both doors open.
“Right there.” Seth pointed to the field closest to the ambulance. In a back corner, on the far side from them, several pick-up trucks had gathered, their headlights providing illumination in the storm.
Jenny turned off the paved road and onto the dirt track, which was choked with weeds and pockmarked with deep, muddy holes. Obviously, Mr. McNare hadn’t cleared this one before his tractor died.
The mud slowed them down and the police car stayed right behind her. Eventually the old Lincoln had slogged as far as it was going in the mud and weeds, and its coated tires wouldn’t turn. Jenny kicked open her door and jumped out. She and Seth ran across the field toward the truck lights. Lightning broke across the sky above them, followed quickly by a loud smack of thunder.
The scene at the overturned tractor was chaotic. Men shouted, threading ropes through the tractor and tying them to their truck bumpers. The paramedics stood uselessly to one side, since they couldn’t reach Jenny’s dad to help him.. Obese, bucktoothed Deputy Guntley, who had left his car to chase them across the field, had momentarily lost interest in pursuing Jenny. He caught his breath while the paramedics filled him in. Janet McNare and her daughter Shannon, usually a happy minion of Ashleigh’s Christian group, stood nearby under an umbrella, their arms around each other, crying.
Jenny found her dad and knelt beside him. She didn’t dare touch him, with her upper body so bare. She planted her knees in the mud and looked down on him.
The tractor had fallen on his legs, abdomen, chest, and the lower half of his right arm. Hail batted his exposed face. He was clearly not going to live, not even when they raised the tractor off him. Jenny couldn’t believe they hadn’t done that already.
“Daddy,” she whispered.
His eyes, which were mostly closed, may have moved toward her, or it could have been splashing rainwater.
“Daddy, you just have to hang on for one minute. I brought Seth.” She took Seth’s hand as he knelt beside her. “He can help. Like I can hurt, he can help. Just don’t go. Please.”
Jenny was crying. Shannon McNare ran toward her, arms wide, clearly wanting to wrap Jenny in a hug.
“Don’t touch me, Shannon!” Jenny snapped. “You’ll get hurt, I’m serious.”
Shannon flinched like she’d been punched and stopped where she was. Jenny looked past her, to Mrs. McNare with her big blue umbrella.
“Bring me that umbrella!” Jenny yelled at Shannon. The girl turned uncertainly to her mother, who gasped and handed it over. Shannon ran to Jenny’s side and held the umbrella over Jenny’s father, keeping the rain and ice from his face.
Finally the men, all of them farmers who’d come when they heard about the trouble, pulled on the ropes and decided they were satisfied. They piled into three different pick-up trucks tied to different parts of the tractor. They threw it in reverse, and tall geysers of mud erupted from their tires. Slowly, they inched back, and the tractor raised up off of Jenny’s dad, and continued to rise.
Jenny cried out when she saw him. It looked like most of her dad had been replaced by shredded meat. Everything was crushed. She wondered if he could even be alive.
Then the tractor crashed down, and the ground shuddered. It landed on its tires, standing upright, shuddering from the impact. Her dad was free. Seth was already at his side, his sleeves rolled up.
“Out of the way!” a paramedic shouted at Seth, as the two EMT workers ran towards Darrell Morton’s pulverized body. “Kid, move!”
“Both of you stop!” Jenny blocked the paramedics, while the remaining farmers and Mrs. McNare yelled at her and Seth to clear off. Jenny held out both her hands towards the paramedics, making them bubble with bleeding sores and strange blisters that wept a dark fluid like tree sap.
“Oh, sick,” one of the paramedics said. “What is wrong with you?”
“I have the plague,” Jenny said. “It’ll kill you. Stay there.”
Seth lay his hands on her father’s crushed body. He pressed down and closed his eyes, and he concentrated. In front of everyone, Darrell Morton’s crushed chest inflated as if filling with air. Then his abdomen, with clicking and clacking sounds as his shattered ribs fit themselves back together. Seth shuddered in the cold rain while his skin turned gray. So did many strands of his hair. His teeth gritted together in pain. He pressed down harder.
The onlookers had stopped yelling at Jenny and begun staring at Seth. The deputy, the paramedics, the farmers, the McNare family, Ashleigh and her parents, and Cassie and Neesha all stared as Darrell Morton’s ruined legs straightened, puffed up, and regained their natural shape inside his muddy jeans. His left foot rotated and locked into place.
Jenny’s dad gave a long, loud groan, and Seth fell over and splashed into the mud. Jenny hurried to Seth and pulled his torso into her lap and supported his head with her hand, since she couldn’t touch her dad at all.
Her dad coughed several times, then he sat up, blinking. Gradually he stood, then stretched, as if his spine had been compacted a little. Then he noticed that everyone was staring at him.
“What happened?” he asked the crowd.
“That was a miracle,” Shannon McNare breathed. “Wasn’t it, Momma? A real miracle from Jesus.”
Most people looked to Dr. Goodling, but the preacher just stared at Jenny’s dad. Slowly, he turned to look at Jenny, who sat in the red mud with Seth’s sickly, unconscious form laid out across her.
“Witchcraft,” Ashleigh hissed, and that drew people’s attention.
“What do you mean, Ashleigh?” Shannon asked.
“Jenny Mittens used witchcraft to save her father. Look, she sucked all the life out of Seth.”
The farmers looked to Dr. Goodling on this, but the preacher hadn’t gathered enough wits to talk. He was just staring at Jenny and Seth, his expression unreadable.
“Would somebody just tell me what’s going on here?” Jenny’s dad asked.
“Seth saved you,” Jenny said. “Now help me pick him up, Daddy. We got to take care of him.”
Nobody moved while Jenny and her dad lifted Seth to his feet. Seth roused a little.
“Sleep,” Seth moaned. “Food.”
“Where’s your truck?” Jenny asked her dad.
“This way,” he said. They carried Seth away across the field, supporting him on both sides. Nobody else moved to help. Nobody offered to give them a ride in one of the trucks. They trudged across the field, through hail and rain and sucking mud, toward the McNare driveway where he’d parked the rusty old Ram that morning. Her fingers and arms itched as the open sores closed themselves and were absorbed back into her skin.
***
At home, Jenny and her dad eased Seth out of the truck. He was barely conscious and couldn’t walk without their help. They trudged through the hail and mud, one step at a time. Rocky yowled at them from the shed doorway. His tail was wagging, but he was not coming outside in this weather.
“Careful!” Jenny’s dad said as they reached the porch steps. “You’re touching him all over!”
“
I can touch him, Daddy.” Jenny helped Seth raise a foot onto the first step. “He’s the only person.”
Her dad just looked exhausted. They got Seth up the steps and into the house. They brought him to Jenny’s room and laid him across her bed. He was drenched and still gray, his eyes closed.
Her dad went to his room and brought a thermal undershirt, flannel pajama pants, a pair of wool socks.
“I can take care of him,” Jenny said. “I left some chili on the stove. Maybe you can save it.”
Her dad’s face looked drawn and tired as he stared at Seth. Finally, he walked towards the kitchen, and Jenny closed the door behind him.
She pulled off Seth’s wet socks and touched his cold, damp feet. She thought of what she was about to do, taking off everything, and she felt a little excited. Then she felt guilty for feeling excited.
She pulled off his sweater and t-shirt, throwing everything onto her closet door to hang dry. She unbuckled his belt, then hesitated a little, feeling her face turn warm, before she unzipped him and pulled off his mud-soaked jeans. His shorts were plastered to his skin. Those had to go, too. She gently took them down, and she couldn’t help but look.
That’s it, she thought. That’s his dick. She smiled.
Jenny found it easy to pull the wool socks down over his feet. It was more of struggle to get the pajama pants on, but she eventually managed that. His skin felt terribly icy to the touch, and his pulse was faint.
Jenny looked at him, then came up with another way to warm him up, the way you actually were supposed to do it when someone was freezing. She made sure the door was closed and turned the lock as quietly as she could. Then she stripped out of her own cold, sopping clothes, until she wasn’t wearing a stitch. Jenny straddled Seth, as she had before giving him the pox-infested kiss. Then she lay down on top of him, her bare chest on his, her face against his neck. She pulled the blanket over her and wrapped it completely around them like a cocoon.
She laid her face against his and started kissing his cheek, then worked her way over to his lips. She didn’t have any thought that the kissing would help him. It was completely selfish. She wanted to touch him, she could touch him, and she had a lifetime of loneliness to make up for.