by JL Bryan
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.
Chapter Forty-Three
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.
“So I'll just wait for you here, then?” Darcy asked as Jenny stepped inside. Jenny didn't bother answering. Darcy hadn't answered her question, after all.
Jenny passed through the lobby of the hotel, which was stuffed with hand-carved furniture and lots of paintings and rugs, and she jabbed the button for the elevator. She jabbed it repeatedly, then lost patience and took the carpeted stairs two at a time.
She reached the third floor, which was a short hallway with only a few doors. The brass door numbers were sculpted in some frilly font with a lot of curlicues, so it took her a moment to identify 303.
Jenny figured out how to insert the keycard into the slot next to the door handle. She depressed the handle and pushed open the door.
“Seth?” she asked as she stepped into the room. The door opened onto some kind of sitting room, with a balcony outside. Two doors led off from the sitting room, both of them closed.
Behind one door, she heard Seth's voice cry out, as if he were in agony.
“Seth!” Jenny ran to the door and pushed it open. “Seth, what's wrong?”
The scene inside the room hit her hard.
Seth lay on the bed, naked, all the covers shoved down around his feet. His hands were tucked behind his head, under his pillow, just relaxing and having a great old time.
A girl straddled him, moving up and down on him and panting and sweating. For a second, Jenny could have sworn it was Ashleigh—tall, a head of long blond hair, tan all over. Jenny nearly lost her balance.
For one long, paranoid moment, Jenny thought the last several months had been some extremely elaborate game—Jenny's relationship with Seth, and Jenny killing Ashleigh—all of it faked. If anybody could cook up some deception that elaborate, it was Ashleigh.
“Oh!” the blond girl cried out, and she bounced harder on Seth. “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
It wasn't Ashleigh, Jenny realized now, but some girl who looked a hell of a lot like her. Like Seth had been missing Ashleigh and wanted another taste of what he'd lost. Maybe Jenny's pale scarecrow body wasn't doing it for him anymore.
“Seth, what the hell are you doing?” Jenny shouted.
The blond girl opened her eyes and turned to look at Jenny. Definitely not Ashleigh, now that Jenny got a better look at her face.
“Who...are....you?” the blond girl asked, between thrusts of her hips. She smiled dreamily.
“Seth!” Jenny shouted.
Seth's eyes drifted open and his head drooped to the side in Jenny’s direction. His grin was drunken and lopsided.
“Hey, beautiful,” Seth said. “You came.”
“Fuck you, Seth!” Jenny slammed the door. She ran back through the sitting room and out into the hallway, slamming that door, too. She felt like something had just split her in half, ripping her open right down the middle.
She ran to the stairs, angry and numb at the same time. She wanted to cry, but she’d already used up all her tears tonight.
Jenny ran down the stairs. There was a fire exit on the first floor, but it was marked EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY - ALARM WILL SOUND, so she ran out through the lobby of the hotel. The manager, a slim man with a thin mustache and a white suit, gasped as she darted between an elderly couple and out the front door.
She felt broken into pieces. Seth didn’t even have the decency to wait until he moved away. She'd already developed some doubts about his commitment, but now it was obvious he didn't intend to stick with her over the long term. Of course not. Why would he want to spend his life with some freak like her?
Jenny raced down the walkway and out to the crowded sidewalk, where she collided with a group of
sorority girls in stretchy black pants. She blundered through them and kept walking.
“Oh, excuse me!” one of them shouted after her.
“What an ugly bitch,” another one commented.
Jenny forced herself to slow down and fold in her arms. She couldn't risk infecting people. She had to move slow, even if everything inside her was screaming at her to run.
She wove her way through the clusters of people on the sidewalk. The street was full of people, too, but now a police car was rolling slowly through them, pushing even more people onto the sidewalk around Jenny.
A bright spotlight beam flared inside the police car and swept the crowd. It passed over Jenny, then quickly swung back to her and stayed there. She froze where she was, raised an arm to block the light, and tried to figure out what the cops were doing.
“You,” the cop shouted from the car. “You stay right there. Do not move.”
The largest morgue in Charleston was at the Medical University of South Carolina, conveniently located a dozen or so blocks from the big music festival. Alexander knew they were all there at the festival—the fear-giver and the love-charmer, the plague-bringer and the healer, and finally Alexander’s opposite, the dead-speaker, Esmeralda. That was her name in this lifetime, anyway.
Alexander walked into the morgue at the Department of Pathology wearing blue hospital scrubs and a surgeon’s mask. All autopsies in Charleston County, forensic or medical, happened down in these rooms. Just the place he needed to visit.
He passed an autopsy bay where two morgue assistants were preparing for an autopsy. One laid out clamps and blades, while the other wiped down the pale corpse of a gigantically obese man with a thick beard and many badly stretched tattoos. Alexander eyeballed the ceiling-mounted lamps on adjustable metal arms over the autopsy table. Those lengths of metal could be useful.
“This is nasty,” said the morgue assistant washing the corpse. He was younger, a white guy with short green hair. “They don’t pay me enough.”