Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4)

by J. Bryan

  “That’s very Alexander,” Jenny said.

  “I didn’t know my touch would damage his zombies,” Seth said. “You and Alexander eventually hunted me down. You tortured me for months, letting me heal up each time, before you finally killed me. By then, I was begging to die.”

  “I’m sorry, Seth.” She touched his face, but he pulled away and continued on down the row.

  Mariella passed by, absorbed in her own vision. Jenny watched both of them wander ahead, absorbing their long line of past lives.

  Something small and fast shot past Jenny’s eyes like a comet trailing smoke, and she gasped, getting a lungful of cold gas. It ricocheted from the stone beside her and landed in the grass between her feet. She had a quick glimpse of something like a kid’s smoke bomb, and then the gas rolled up over her legs like a fog.

  Jenny ran towards Seth, trying to hold her breath, but she’d already taken a lungful of the stuff. Mariella was lost in her trance, but Seth saw Jenny coming and started toward her.

  “No...not this...not this way...” Jenny said, but she couldn’t speak above a whisper. She felt like she was trying to run in quicksand, her legs dragging, all her muscles shutting down. More of the smoke-bomb devices rained down around her and around Seth. They weren’t actually smoke bombs, because smoke bombs didn’t come loaded with powerful tranquilizer gas.

  A fog rose around Seth, and he staggered and slowed, then fell to one knee.

  “Jennifer Morton,” a stern male voice said. “Don’t bother running. We’ve got you.” Men approached from the shadows of the stones with electric devices crackling in their hands, prepared to zap Jenny if the tranquilizer didn’t take her out.

  Jenny tried to continue on toward Seth, but she lost her balance and toppled to the ground. As she lost consciousness, her last thought was a hope that the gas wouldn’t harm the baby.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Ward walked the observation deck at midnight, alone. The only lights were the dim glow from computer screens, which reflected in the armored glass windows overlooking the concrete bays of the laboratories below. Soon, things would really start to heat up around this old place.

  He felt the sense of satisfaction that came with completing a difficult but necessary task. After he’d killed Senator Mayfield, it had only taken the shortest of talks with Eddie Cordell from Hale Security to make the rest of the arrangements. They’d monitored Jenny and Seth in their Paris apartment, learned of their planned trip to Brittany, and decided an ambush would run much more smoothly and quietly in the village of Carnac than in the center of Paris. Hale’s operatives had even helped in the capture of Seth and Jenny.

  Now Ward had them all here: Tommy, already cooperating. Jenny and Seth, captured. As a bonus, he had a fourth paranormal, Mariella Visconti, who had the power to see a person’s future, according to the conversations Ward had heard in Jenny and Seth’s bugged apartment. It was a sticky bonus, though, because her family was influential in Italian politics. The last thing Ward needed was a complaint about his activities brought before some NATO panel by the Prime Minister of Italy. He would have to keep things quiet and work hard to gain Mariella’s cooperation.

  They’d also captured Esmeralda Rios. Ward had tried on his own to convince her to join Tommy, but she’d refused, so they’d been forced to drug her and covertly transport her to Germany. Six paranormals, including himself, were now together under this roof, and it was time for his real work work to begin.

  ASTRIA was not generally viewed as a desirable command. While the agency’s mission had been considered very serious between its founding in the early 50s and into the 1970s, it had become a dumping ground for dead-end careers by the end of the 1980s, when not even Nancy Reagan’s astrologer was taking the idea of Soviet psychic spies seriously anymore. Ward had no trouble getting himself appointed head of the agency, though it had required the small matter of also getting promoting to a lieutenant general. He could have used his unofficial, blackmail-based influence to gain himself almost any command around the world, but he had chosen the neglected Cold War agency instead.

  Under his command, he’d been able to swell the funding from the Pentagon while giving only the vaguest description of his intentions, enabling him to build the research center of his dreams. Ward had one goal: to study others like him, those with a paranormal touch, in order to gain greater control and understanding of his own power without having to put himself under the scientists’ microscopes and scalpels. Whatever they learned from the other five, he could determine for himself how it might apply to him.

  At the same time, he might succeed in obtaining powerful new weapons. He could imagine sending Tommy into a city to cause a riot...or, better, sending Jenny in to kill everyone in a targeted area. Esmeralda could gather secrets from the dead, including enemy spies and leaders. Seth’s healing power would be extremely useful on dangerous missions, to himself and others in his unit. If Mariella could see the future, that would be extremely valuable for gathering intelligence.

  He could imagine using all of them, but it remained to be seen which of them might cooperate.

  Ward looked through the window at the lab he’d designed just for Jenny. She was down there in the dimness, asleep in a hospital bed, already connected to her monitors—the computer screen in front of the window told him that her heartbeat, blood pressure and breathing were normal, and her EEG showed delta waves, deep sleep. When she awoke, she would find herself trapped like a spider in a bottle. It wasn’t the best way to recruit a person, but after the mass death she’d caused in Fallen Oak, he wasn’t taking any chances with her. Surely, she would come to understand his logic.

  Ward felt suddenly dizzy, and he pressed a hand on the window to steady himself. He felt a strange prickling sensation as goosebumps swelled all over his body and the little hairs on his arms and neck spiked out. He felt a crushing headache, and then a feeling of vertigo, and he thought he might black out. He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw, trying to get hold of himself.

  He felt like he was falling...and then he was walking along the same corridor, the observation deck, but the computers were replaced by file cabinets and typewriters, and there were many more people coming and going in this one room than Ward employed at the entire complex. The walls floor was bare concrete, instead of the white tiles he’d added.

  Everyone wore black, even the typists and secretaries in their slim black skirts and jackets. He also couldn’t help but notice, everywhere, the swastikas—on the arms of men in black military-style uniforms, on lapel pins, on the flags that hung along the hall.

  Ward himself wore a black uniform, coat, and cap. He walked along the corridor slowly, accompanied by a tall, attractive blond girl in a black-skirted uniform with a white shirt and black tie. Her eyes were a strange gray color, like clouds on a rainy day. She touched his hand frequently as she spoke, and each touch sparked an intense feeling of affection and desire inside him. He wanted her to keep touching him.

  She spoke in German, yet he understood her perfectly.

  “Has there been any news with Willem?” she asked. They paused in their walk to look down through a window into a lab. A young man in his early twenties sat on a stool, facing a metal barrel filled with bits of newspaper, wood scraps, and sawdust, a mixture intended to be highly flammable. Three researchers watched him from the side of the lab—a chemist, physicist, and a doctor—and wires were plastered all over Willem’s bare torso, connecting him to loud, clunky monitoring machines around him.

  Willem stared intently at the barrel of tinder and kindling, rubbing the sides of his head with both fingers. After several minutes, nothing happened.

  “I suppose you’ll continue testing him?” asked the gray-eyed girl, whose name was Alise.

  “No,” Ward heard himself say. “He’s a fake. He must have tricked our investigators when they found him. Under controlled conditions, he does nothing.”

  “What shall we do with him, sir?” Alise asked.
/>
  “Get rid of him. I don’t want him eating one more meal at the Reich’s expense. And I don’t want him talking to anyone.”

  “Consider him gone, sir,” Alise said.

  They moved on to look into the next lab, where a small, dark-eyed Slavic girl named Evelina stood over a gray, gunshot corpse, touching it and talking while a young typist took notes. The corpse had recently been a leader of the Communist party in Germany, which had been outlawed but continued underground. Evelina was meant to learn about any secret plots the Communists might be planning.

  “This is an interesting case,” Ward said. “The Slav seems to have a genuine power, but of course she may not be acceptable for breeding. She doesn’t look Aryan at all. I don’t think the Fuehrer would accept her as an example of advanced human evolution.”

  “Then what should we do with her?”

  “Keep her, study her, use her. But we can’t introduce such racial inferiority into our supernormal program. It’s bad enough we have an Italian girl.”

  At the next lab, they looked down on the American girl, Juliana, small and pale with long, dark hair. She was currently stripped to the waist, also hooked into loud, thunking monitoring devices, making sores and blisters appear and disappear on her skin while a biologist in gloves and a gas mask examined her.

  “Her power is clearly real,” Ward said. “But her background...does she look Jewish to you?”

  “Greek,” Alise said.

  “I suppose if we’re taking Italians, we’ll take Greeks,” he said in a resigned voice. “We can always make reference to the empires of antiquity, if pressed by the Party leadership.”

  “Clearly, the Hellenes and the Romans must have had much Aryan in them, to conquer so much and build such a culture,” Alise said.

  “It seems obvious to me that she should be bred with the other American, the healer boy,” he said. “Anyone else who touches her will die, and we should assume the same about their genetic material.”

  “Juliana is already pregnant,” Alise said.

  “She is? Why was I not informed?”

  “Because I told them I wanted to inform you myself.” She gave him a stunning, radiant smile. “I knew it would please you, and you know I like to please.”

  “Is Sebastian the father?”

  “I believe so, based on their intimacy when I met them,” Alise said. “Unless she is a slut, he must be the father. And, as you just said, who else could touch her?”

  “We must find out for certain.”

  “I will speak with her for you. She’s more likely to speak freely about such things to another woman.”

  “And now we must discuss you,” he said.

  “You want to talk about me, Gruppenführer Kranzler? Don’t you know that’s the direct path to any woman’s heart?” Alise giggled, touching his hand, setting off another fiery wave of desire inside him.

  Ward understood that his name was now Kranzler, at least within this strange dream.

  “We must breed you like the others,” he said. “We may have to cross you with Sebastian as well. We have a shortage of males in our stable.”

  “Ugh, after he’s been with that diseased girl?” Alise asked. “I don’t want to catch an infection from her.”

  “He is immune to her. He will not transfer any disease to you.”

  “How can we be sure? I don’t want to be the test subject for that experiment, Herr Kranzler.”

  “You and your cousin Niklaus are clearly the most Aryan of the supernormals we’ve identified, the most racially pure.”

  “Thank you, Herr Kranzler.” She gave him an alluring smile.

  “I proposed breeding the two of you together, but Dr. Wichtmann says there are too many risks, you’re too closely related.”

  “What about you, Gruppenführer Kranzler?” Alise touched his hand again and leaned closer to him.

  “You must be bred with a supernormal. That is our program.” The girl’s touch did stir certain hungry, aggressive feelings inside him, but he tried to resist them.

  “And are you not a supernormal, Herr Kranzler?” She batted her eyelashes, playing at being extra-innocent. “I have seen you draw information from people many times. They don’t even have to say it aloud—you just touch them and know. I have seen you work your magic, Herr Kranzler. I am a careful observer.”

  Kranzler looked around the crowded corridor to see whether anyone appeared to be listening to them, but everyone was busy, and the room was loud with clanging typewriters.

  “We should not discuss this here,” he replied in a low voice.

  “Perhaps in your office, sir?” Alise suggested.

  He took her arm and marched her out of the observation deck, toward a suite of offices in the northeast quadrant of the underground complex. His office was the largest. He closed the door tightly behind them, while Alise crossed to his desk and leaned against it, in a manner clearly intended to make her breasts and hips prominent inside her tight black uniform.

  “I am not mistaken, am I, sir?” Alise asked, with a knowing smile, as if she were quietly laughing to herself.

  “I am not registered as a supernormal, and I do not wish to be,” Kranzler said. “If you repeat what you just said in front of anyone else, I will kill you.”

  “Your secret is safe with me, sir, forever. But it does not matter to me whether you are registered, only that you do possess a power like mine. Imagine our powers combined into a child...a son...he would be the son of a supernormal S.S. officer, a true Aryan of the future. Imagine it!”

  “We could not raise him as our own,” Kranzler reminded her. “He would belong to the Reich.”

  “I know this better than anyone,” Alise said. “I do not wish for a family—the Reich is my family, the Party is my family. I wish to do this as my gift to the Reich, my act of devotion. I want to personally present the Fuehrer with the first child of this project, the first of a generation of German supermen who will conquer the world.” She approached him, taking his hands, her gray eyes locked on his. “Do you not want the same? Do you not want me?”

  Kranzler wanted it all. He wanted a son who could lead armies and destroy every enemy in his path. Though he rarely indulged in fleshly pleasures, he wanted the young, pretty Aryan girl currently offering herself to him. It was difficult to think of anything but his own desire when her hands were on him.

  “You must tell no one,” he whispered.

  She placed her hands on his broad shoulders and rose up to kiss him. Kranzler lifted her up onto his desk, and she lay back on her elbows, smiling at him with a surprised look in her eyes.

  “Here?” she asked.

  “It may take several attempts.” Kranzler, an efficient man, lowered his black trousers just enough to free himself, already erect from her repeated touching. He turned her onto her hands and knees and bent her over the desk, then flipped her long black skirt up over her hips. She wriggled her ass in her white silk panties and laughed, until he reached a wide, muscular hand into the space between her legs.

  “These aren’t regulation undergarments for women,” he said.

  “And how would you know that?” She smiled back at him over her shoulder.

  He grabbed her expensive, inappropriate underwear and ripped it away, leaving her bare. She gave a shocked little gasp as he stripped her, and then another as he pressed his fingertips against her.

  “We should hurry,” he said. “I have a busy schedule.”

  “Go ahead. I’m not here for romance.”

  Ward entered her, and she bared her teeth and shrieked in pain. She was golden, a beautiful daughter of a wealthy nobleman, while he’d grown up as a dirt-poor peasant with calloused hands from tending his father’s sheep, and he was old enough to remember when the difference between peasant and noble truly mattered, before the Great War. It gave him pleasure to make her suffer. He grabbed her long blond hair and pulled hard, getting another scream from her.

  “You’re a good German girl,” he sa
id as he took her again and again. “You should lie in my bed every night.” He slapped her ass, hard enough to leave a blood-colored handprint.

  She snarled at him, baring her teeth, which only aroused him more.

  “I can see your past,” Ward said, squeezing her waist in his large hands. “So many flirtations with fancy little aristocrat boys. Many of them...consummated.”

  “You don’t care about my past,” she whispered. “You love me.”

  “I do,” he said, then he shoved her face down against his desk and pinned it there with his hand, raising her hips higher so he could slide more deeply inside her. He deposited his seed quickly and backed out. She lay on his desk, naked from the waist down, looking battered, a look of disgust in her cloud-gray eyes.

  “Make me a son,” he ordered as he buckled his belt. “Fix yourself up. We have a lot of work today. We can do this again tomorrow.”

  He closed the door as he left the office.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Tommy lay on the bed in his room, smoking cigarettes and watching an A-Team rerun on some satellite channel. Smoking wasn’t allowed inside the base, except for one specially ventilated room, but he didn’t care. He didn’t think they would throw him out for it.

  In the past few days, he’d learned that using his power raised his body temperature by a degree or two and heated the air around him. It caused an explosive spike of activity in a part of his brain called the right temporal lobe. He’d been meaning to look up brain parts to figure out what the hell that meant, but he wasn’t provided internet access. The underground research facility had a small science library, and he could probably find out there, but he hated libraries and kept putting it off.

  He’d also learned that he could scare the hell out of mice and chimpanzees. He assumed human tests were next. That could be fun.