Jenny Plague-Bringer

Chapter Forty-Four



Jenny lay in the hospital bed in her cube with her hands cuffed to the bed rails, with the entire lower half of her body missing, as far as she could feel. The epidural had kicked in, and she felt a little panicked, knowing she wouldn’t be much good if she had to run or fight. A nurse in a hazardous material suit rigged up a green surgical curtain to shield most of her lower body from her sight.

“Don’t bother,” Jenny whispered. “Whatever you’re gonna do, I’ve seen worse.”

They put up the curtain anyway, ignoring her. Jenny looked out through the clear wall. Ward stood just outside, smoking a cigar, accompanied by several researchers.

“Seth,” Jenny whispered to Dr. Parker. “He’s supposed to be here...I told you.”

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Parker said, her voice fuzzy and mechanical through the tiny speaker on her hazmat suit. “They decided it was too much of a security risk.”

Jenny looked at Ward again. “Seth needs to be here.”

“I’m sure Dr. Parker can manage just fine without him,” Ward replied, blowing smoke.

“We had a deal,” Jenny said.

“To be honest, Seth isn’t that interested in you anymore,” Ward told her. “He’s been shacked up with your pal Mariella for a few months now. They’ve been having a good old time together.” He winked.

Jenny didn’t believe him. She pushed back any memories of Sebastian and Mia’s relationship in their last life. She was already surrounded by enemies at this most vulnerable moment in her entire life. She had plenty to worry about without letting Ward get under her skin.

Nobody spoke much while they made their preparations. Jenny could feel the thick tension weighing down the room. The doctor and the two nurses were clearly afraid of coming into contact with her flesh and blood, even in their hazmat suits. The two guards flanking the airlock door kept their hands on their stunners, as if Jenny were going to lash out while her womb was cut open in the middle of a cesarean delivery.

The room became very quiet.

“Jenny, we’re making the first incision,” Dr. Parker said.

“Okay,” Jenny whispered. Everything in the world fell away except her absolute terror at what was about to happen. She looked toward the wall of her cube again, some part of her half-expecting to see Seth, but there was only Ward and his hateful sneer, flanked by guards, scientists, and a nurse watching the row of monitors.

Jenny watched the women working on her, barely able to see their faces behind their biohazard masks, clear shields that reflected the bright lights above. She couldn’t help thinking of alien abduction stories from the History Channel, people waking up under bright lights to find strange extraterrestrials performing unknown operations on them. That experience, hallucinated or not, was probably about as emotionally cold and inhuman as this surgery.

She had no way of seeing what the doctor was doing beyond the screen, and she didn’t dare speak or ask questions that could distract them. The medical staff didn’t speak to her at all. Jenny might as well have been a farm animal getting a veterinary visit. A cow, maybe, because her body felt so swollen and heavy.

She waited and waited, listening to the electronic beeps echoing her pounding heart.

“Uh-oh,” the doctor whispered.

“Uh-oh? What’s uh-oh?” Jenny asked, imagining the scalpel stabbing the little baby through the foot, or the arm, or the head.

“Please be quiet,” the nurse closest to Jenny said, scowling at her.

“Clamp,” Dr. Parker said, ignoring Jenny altogether.

Jenny heard her heart beep even faster. She was sweating, barely able to think, her head swirling with nightmares and the memories of countless bloody miscarriages and heart-ripping stillbirths.

An eternity seemed to pass, then another, then another.

“Breech,” Dr. Parker said quietly.

Jenny didn’t dare ask another question of the semi-hostile medical staff, but she remembered that a breech meant the baby was positioned backwards, and it was considered not good. Her sweat felt like ice, and her heart beat even faster.

She had no idea what was happening beyond the green sheet of plastic. She could distantly feel movement and pressure, but couldn’t tell what any of it meant, and the doctor and nurses weren’t talking.

After another thousand eternities, Dr. Parker stepped back, holding what Jenny first saw as a strange, dark sea creature, wet and dripping in the doctor’s gloves. It took a moment to resolve into the shape of a baby. A gray, unmoving baby.

She felt a grieved sob building inside her chest. It had happened again, just like all the other times, despite their precautions and the help of modern science. Seth should have been there. If Seth were there, he could have helped. Maybe he could still help.

“Seth!” Jenny shouted. “Get Seth! Now!”

“Afraid not.” Ward chuckled over his cigar.

Jenny shot him a look of pure hate. She was going to kill him, she realized. She would hunt him down in every incarnation, killing him again and again, maybe for all of eternity. She would never forgive, never stop wanting to punish him.

The doctor massaged the baby, and as if by magic, the baby’s gray skin gradually grew pink and warm. The baby’s mouth opened, and she let out a powerful scream. Hello, world.

Jenny gasped, then whispered, “Hi, baby girl.” Tears filled up her eyes. Her arms tried to reach for the tiny girl, but of course Jenny’s wrists were still handcuffed.

I can never touch her, Jenny reminded herself. Never. The word “never” seemed painfully cold and heavy enough to crush her. Never.

Jenny gaped as they clamped and cut the cord and cleaned the baby, then weighed and measured her. The baby was tiny, as Jenny must have been when she was born, her eyes clenched shut as she howled and cried. Jenny winced as they stuck her foot for a blood sample.

“It’s okay, baby,” Jenny said. “You’re okay.”

Hearing Jenny speak up, the baby stopped crying for a moment and opened her tiny, crystal-blue newborn eyes. She looked in Jenny’s direction, and Jenny’s heart both melted and fell to pieces. This was her, the little one who’d been stirring in her stomach for so many months. A complete little person with little ears and feet.

“You’ll be okay,” Jenny said again, hoping that was true. She looked around to see if anyone else felt the same awe she did, but the medical staff seemed in a hurry to finish up and get out. The doctor was already stitching her up.

“Name?” asked the nurse who stood by the monitors outside her cube, who now held a digital tablet.

“Name?” Jenny asked, confused.

“The child’s name,” the nurse said, impatient. “For the records.”

“Oh.” Jenny’s mind was a blank. This was the kind of thing she should have spent months thinking about and talking over with Seth. Instead, she’d spent her entire pregnancy worrying whether the baby would live, and whether Jenny and the baby would ever escape this place, and whether she would ever see Seth again.

“What will you call her?” Ward asked. “I’m curious myself.”

Jenny scowled at him. “Miriam,” she said. It had been her mother’s name.

“Last name?” the nurse asked. “Morton?”

Jenny thought about it. “Barrett.”

“Middle name?”

She was at a loss. “Use Morton, I guess.” Jenny watched them lay the baby in an incubator, which looked like a scaled-down version of Jenny’s own cubic cell. “Can I...see her?” Jenny asked the nurse.

“You can’t get too close,” Dr. Parker said. “We don’t know whether she has any immunity to your touch. From what you’ve told us, it’s doubtful. Do you understand what that means?”

“How can we find out?” Jenny asked. “I don’t want to test it by touching her...”

“I’ll see how your blood samples interact, and we’ll go from there.” Dr. Parker nodded at the nurse, who wheeled the incubator toward the airlock door. The tiny baby, now named Miriam, squalled and reached a little hand back toward her mother.

“Where are you taking her?” Jenny asked, trying to sit up, even though the doctor was still stitching her. “Don’t take her away!”

“It’s for her own safety,” Dr. Parker said. “You should know that better than anyone.”

“But so soon?”

“They’re very vulnerable to disease at this stage. Their immune system hasn’t developed.”

Jenny nodded—she might hate everyone around her, but she knew Dr. Parker was right about that. “You’ll be okay,” Jenny said, feeling her throat close up. She said it again and again, as if repeating it would make it true, while the nurse wheeled the incubator away to the steel door set in the concrete wall of the laboratory. Jenny could hear the baby cry all the way out the door.

“When do I see her again?” Jenny asked.

“We’ll see,” Dr. Parker replied, not looking at her.

“Can they please bring her back? Just for a minute?” Jenny asked, but the doctor only shook her head. Jenny pulled at her restraints again. The lower half of her body was still numb and had just been through surgery, and everyone around her wore biohazard gear. She didn’t have a chance of fighting her way out.

Any remaining strength vanished from Jenny’s body. Her head flopped back on the bed, and she closed her eyes and let herself cry and cry, ignoring the final flurry of activity around her, ignoring whatever taunting words Ward said over the intercom. Eventually, everyone was finally gone, all the surgical equipment removed from her cell, and the lights were mercifully dimmed. Jenny lay in the dark, sobbing and aching and already missing the baby with all her soul, until the combination of painkillers and exhaustion finally overwhelmed her and dragged her down into darkness. She felt like she was drowning.


Juliana gradually awoke to the dim, fuzzy world around her. She felt a light, constant breeze, and then slowly realized she was moving.

She was strapped the gurney, her dress still soaked in blood. She’d only been out for a few minutes. The Nazi doctors had been extremely stingy with the pain medicine.

Now she rolled down a familiar concrete corridor, attended by two nurses, who wore surgical masks, caps, and gloves, and two S.S. officers in gas masks who were more concerned about flirting with the young blond nurses than watching the small, blood-soaked form of Juliana. She was firmly strapped to the gurney, and they clearly believed she was unconscious and badly weakened. They were only half right. Juliana quickly closed her eyes again and remained limp on the gurney.

They rolled on past Juliana’s cell, toward the end of the corridor. They must have been taking her to the showers, Juliana reasoned, to wash off all the blood and gore before depositing her back in the cell for the night.

She heard the squeal of the bathroom door opening, felt the bump as they crossed the threshold to the shower room, which was just another concrete-slab room with a few nozzles in one wall.

Juliana summoned up the demon plague within her, growing boils, cysts, and bloody pustules all over her body. With years of practice in her carnival act, she’d developed great control over how and where the plague appeared on her skin. She made sure that every inch of herself looked as repulsive and malignant as possible, raw swollen skin leaking diseased fluids—except for her face, which she kept pristine.

She heard the four people around her make disgusted sounds. The nurses begged the S.S. men to unstrap Juliana and lay on her on the floor for them, but the men snorted and refused, though they wore thick leather gloves. They made the nurses agree to drink with them later, and then they loosened Juliana’s straps.

Juliana’s eyes opened. The guards stood at the head of the gurney, on either side of her, while the nurses were at her feet. She’d had months to study the gas masks, to imagine the fastest way to grab the strap and loosen it from their necks.

One of the guards saw her eyes open, and he pointed and shouted. Now Juliana let the ugliest, most repugnant combination of dripping boils, festering sores, and leprous ulcers erupt all over her face. A nurse screamed, and everyone made sounds of disgust. While her face distracted them for a few seconds, she reached up with both hands, ripped loose their straps, and touched her plague-filled fingertips to their throats. She imagined a dense, angry cloud of tiny black flies chewing through their skin.

Blood dripped out from their loosened masks, splattered Juliana’s fingers. One guard collapsed, and the other pulled away from her, only to stagger back into a concrete wall and slide down, leaving a streak of dark blood above him.

The nurses screamed and ran. Juliana’s first instinct was to let them go, but then she realized they would only go alert all the guards. She wouldn’t have enough time to escape.

She filled her lungs with the dank air of the prison showers and breathed out a long stream of dark spores toward the nurse’s retreating backs. They made it to the doorway before the plague caught up with them, eating through their hair and scalp and bone. The both stumbled and fell to the floor, their heads bursting open like rotten pumpkins, leaving puddles of infected bones and brains.

Juliana eased her way off the gurney and landed unsteadily on her feet. Her balance was poor, and her body already felt strained to the breaking point...but there was something else rising inside her, dark, ancient, and cold. Something eager for righteous killing. Something that delighted in death.

She knelt by the guards, ignoring the gore that dripped from their bug-eyed masks. One of them had a thick ring of keys, which he’d probably borrowed from the cellblock guards at the desk outside the corridor so they could put Juliana back into her cell. She took the keys, along with the two Luger pistols from the dead guards’ holsters.

Juliana stepped her bare feet over the decaying spill from the nurses’ ruptured heads. She stalked up the corridor, opening the door panels to look into each cell. Most were empty. She felt renewed anger when she saw the fading red stains on Evelina’s floor and wall. The girl had been gentle and quiet, her voice through the vent providing Juliana’s only companionship for weeks of pregnancy. They had simply decided that her race was now too much of an inconvenience, and so they’d killed her. Juliana hoped she would see Alise on the way out, so she could leave her pretty face contorted, swollen, and lifeless.

Sebastian was the only other prisoner remaining on the hall. He took in a sharp breath when she opened his door, wearing her blood-soaked gray dress. He ran to embrace her, and the plague sores on her skin faded slowly.

“Juliana! What happened? Are you hurt?” Sebastian asked.

“The baby’s gone,” Juliana said. Her voice was flat, without a spark of emotion. All that remained inside her was a cold, endless darkness. “Our baby. Now we’re leaving. You take these, I don’t need them.” She held out the two pistols.

“Our baby?” Sebastian held her tight, his voice full of grief. She felt nothing. “Oh, God, no...Alise only told me a few weeks ago.”

“There are at least two guards at the desk outside,” Juliana said. “If they’re wearing their gas masks, you shoot them. If not, I’ll kill them. It’ll be quieter.”

“We’re leaving right now?”

“Anyone who gets in our way dies.”

He gave her a look of shock, tinged with a little fear. She stepped out of his cell and began walking up the corridor towards the heavy door at the end, keys in her hand.

Sebastian caught up with her. “We...should get Mia out. She’s pregnant, too.”

“With your baby.” Juliana’s voice remained flat and cold.

“Yes...but...only because of Alise, I promise! She can cast a spell on you—”

“I’ve been under her spell before,” Juliana told him. “I killed a man, and I was sad about it. Tonight, I’ll kill a lot of them, and I won’t care. It’s funny how things turn.”

“Okay...but listen, honestly, I had no desire to be with her, as soon as Alise stopped doping me I got into a fight with Niklaus about seeing you, that’s how I ended up down here.”

“At least we were on the same floor.”

“I’m really, really sorry. You don’t know how terrible I feel, how much I wish—”

“Stop talking.” Juliana inserted the key into the door and pushed it open.

The two guards at the desk turned with sly smiles on their faces, expecting to see the nurses and their fellow S.S. men. They stood and shouted when he saw the prisoners in gray clothes—Juliana’s hands and dress dripping blood, Sebastian pointing two pistols at them.

One guard reached for his gas mask on the desk in front of him, while the other reached for the pistol at his belt. Both of them were too slow. Juliana exhaled another writhing swarm of plague spores into their faces, eating away their flesh. Their eyelids, noses, and lips rotted away, and dark hives erupted on their eyeballs and facial tendons. They howled in agony, but they died quickly and toppled over behind the desk.

Juliana unlocked the door to the outer corridor, then ran to unlock the stairwell door.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Sebastian whispered as they ran up the concrete stairs, their footfalls echoing up and down the stairwell.

“Alise taught me,” Juliana said. “Sometimes being under her spell has its benefits, am I right, Sebastian?”

Sebastian opened his mouth to answer, then left it hanging open, as if he’d realized there was no good reply.

The door to the dormitory level opened, and Juliana recognized the doctor who’d examined her during the miscarriage, along with the head of research Dr. Wichtmann, and a pair of younger biologists who worked in the labs.

“Juliana!” Dr. Wichtmann gasped, looking her over. “You should...you should be resting! We were coming to check on your condition.”

“He has a gun!” One of the biologists pointed at Sebastian.

“In all honesty, I have two,” Sebastian replied, raising both of them.

“Herr Doktor,” Juliana said to Wichtmann, “Allow me to return the kindness you’ve shown me as your guest.”

She seized his hand and opened her jaws, unleashing death and pain on all of them. They fell to the concrete, their limbs twisting and jerking, their bodies writhing like bugs in poison. Wichtmann himself rolled down the stairs, leaving dark splashes of his decaying, plague-infested flesh and blood behind him like footprints. His balding head cracked against the concrete landing.

“She’s one floor up.” Sebastian ran up the next flight. Juliana glanced over the dying, bleeding, groaning men, then followed him.

The door to the maternity level opened onto a spacious area with the guard station at the far side from the stairwell, next to the door to the maternity rooms. The three guards leaped to their feet the moment they saw the blood-spattered prisoners emerge.

Juliana breathed another cloud of plague spores at them, which thinned and spread out as it drifted across the room. They had plenty of time to draw their weapons, so Sebastian charged at them and opened fire with both pistols, waving the guns back and forth to try and hit all three of them.

One S.S. guard caught a bullet to the chest, and another was shot in the arm while reaching for his pistol, then in the leg. The third guard, apparently smarter than his co-workers, had ducked behind the desk, gas mask in hand. Scattered plague spores landed on the wounded guard’s face and neck, conjuring bloody lesions, as he dropped out of sight behind the desk.

Sebastian and Juliana continued running toward the desk, then ducked and squatted in front of it.

“This is your last chance!” Seth shouted in German. “Come out or die!” He winked at Juliana, then stood and pointed his pistols over the desk. Nothing happened, so he jumped up on the desk and walked across it.

Bullets fired up at him, and one caught him through the leg. Sebastian toppled to the desk, pulling the triggers on both his pistols, but they were empty.

Juliana stood in time to see Seth growl and leap on the Nazi guard in the gas mask, who waved a smoking pistol of his own. Juliana ducked as he fired it wildly. She crawled around the desk, and found Seth had pinned the Nazi with his legs and stripped off his gas mask, and was now beating the guard’s head with the butt of an empty pistol, drawing blood from his nose and jaw.

Juliana touched the guard’s head, killing him fast. She looked toward the guard who’d only been wounded, but he was curled up in convulsions. She killed him, too. Seth dropped his empty gun and took two more pistols from the dead S.S. guards.

“Everyone must have heard that,” Sebastian said. “It’s probably still echoing in Kranzler’s office. They’re all coming for us.”

“Then let’s prepare to kill all of them.” Juliana opened the door to the maternity hall. They found Mia in one of the spacious bedrooms, sprawled on a quilted bedspread on a queen-sized bed, next to an empty bassinet with a teddy bear dressed like a German soldier. Her stomach had grown much larger. Her eyelids barely lifted as she saw them, and she gave a drowsy smile.

“My friends,” Mia said in a drugged voice, half-heartedly waving one hand without raising it from the bed. “I love you both so much.”

“We’re leaving,” Juliana said. “Get moving.”

“Leaving? No...Why?”

“We have to escape,” Sebastian said. “Can you get up?”

“Hmm, yeah.” Mia’s eyes closed. She was deep in Alise-induced ecstasy.

“We have to go now!” Juliana took her by the shoulders. Mia’s dress had shifted, leaving one shoulder bare, and Juliana accidentally burned her with her touch. Blisters welled up on Mia’s shoulder and neck, and she hissed and pulled away. She sat up, rubbing the infected area and scowling at Juliana, as if the pain had woken her. Then a flash of recognition crossed her eyes.

“Juliana!” Mia looked from her to Sebastian, then touched her swollen stomach. “Oh, God. What have I done? Oh, God, Juliana, I’m sorry...I....” She started to weep, covering her eyes. “I’m an awful person.”

A shrill, clanging alarm echoed through the entire base at a deafening volume.

“They’re coming for us,” Juliana said. “We have to go. They could be here any second.” The barracks and armory were in the southeast quadrant of the base, while the cellblock and dormitories were on the southwest quadrant, not far away.

Mia nodded and pushed herself to her feet, ignoring Sebastian’s offered hand. “I’m ready.”

They hurried out along the corridor, Juliana and Sebastian side by side, Mia protected behind them.

“They could already be waiting for us outside that door,” Juliana said.

“Let’s go out shooting, then,” Seth said.

“Wait, I can look.” Mia grabbed Sebastian’s arm and closed her eyes. “Not yet, there won’t be anyone out there. But a lot of them are coming, we’re going to have trouble.”

Juliana opened the door and led the way out.

“The stairs to the exit are just one level up,” Sebastian said, angling toward the stairwell.

“But there are probably more guards on that exit than any other,” Juliana said. “In case we try to escape. I think we should cut across to the administrative area and use that exit. It’ll be less protected against us escaping.”

“But the stairs are right there!” Sebastian argued.

“No, I think she is being smart,” Mia said. “They would expect us to try and leave the same way we entered.”

“I’m going up the stairs!” Sebastian insisted, tucking one pistol in the back of his pants. He grabbed Mia’s hand, startling her.

“You’ll die up there,” she said quickly.

“Just checking.” He let go of her hand. “So we go right through the center of the base, through the labs, towards the offices and apartments of the people in charge. Is that actually our plan?”

“Yes.” Juliana began to run. He hurried just behind her, trying to catch up.

Mia took Sebastian hand’s as they ran.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Keeping us alive.” Mia gripped him tighter as they approached the door to the central corridor. “Two guards coming through there in a second! Juliana, watch out!” She ducked, pulling Sebastian to the floor with her.

Juliana turned against the wall by the door, tucking herself out of sight as the door opened and two S.S. guards bolted through it, their pistols drawn. Juliana stepped out behind them and exhaled a cloud of her plague, and it ate into the backs of their heads.

On the floor, Sebastian raised his pistols in case he needed to shoot them anyway, but the two S.S. men crashed to the floor with the back halves of their skulls eaten away.

Sebastian stood, and Mia stood behind him and embraced him. She lifted his shirt and pressed her hands against his stomach.

“Stop cuddling!” Juliana shouted.

“I’m healing,” Mia said. “Some of your...whatever that was hit me. How did you do that?”

“I just imagine that I’d like to see everyone in the room dead,” Juliana replied. She looked closer and saw the small, dark sores fading from Mia’s hands and arms.

She turned and ran through the door, momentarily indifferent to whether they followed her or not, feeling a flash of hate for both of them. Even though Alise had entranced them, Juliana couldn’t help how she felt.

At the moment, all she wanted to do was kill. She ran up the central corridor of the base, hoping to see Kranzler or Alise, the plague boiling and blistering all over her.

“There is a guard station ahead!” Mia warned, clasping hands with Sebastian as they ran, trying to catch up with Juliana. “Juliana, be careful!”

Juliana realized she’d miscalculated. She was accustomed to moving one level below where they were, and she’d expected to reach the wide corridor between the big concrete laboratory rooms. Instead, on this level, they were approaching the observation deck from which Kranzler and Wichtmann had watched the experiments.

She stopped and turned. With the alarm clanging and echoing, there was no point in whispering. “Mia, how many of them? Where?”

Mia closed her eyes and explained the layout of the guard station next to the large double doors to the observation deck, and predicted where each guard would be sitting. “I keep seeing us getting killed here,” Mia added.

They spoke quickly to work out their attack. Juliana went first, blowing out the thickest, darkest cloud she could muster, taking out the guards who hadn’t put on their gas masks. She fell flat on the floor and rolled aside, making herself as small and difficult a target as possible. The cold darkness inside, the thing driving her forward despite her pain and exhaustion, seemed to know all about fighting, as if she carried the experience of many battles inside her.

Two of the guards had already strapped on their masks, so Sebastian had to shoot them. He rounded the corner after Juliana, knowing exactly where to point his pistols, killing the guards before they had time to see him and register that he was there. Mia followed, touching Sebastian’s neck.

“We’re safe for a minute,” Mia announced. “Then the guards from the barracks are going to come up behind us, with gas masks and machine guns.”

“Then we’re going to charge through these doors onto the observation deck,” Juliana told her.

Mia squeezed Sebastian’s hand again. “Nobody there is wearing gas masks.”

“Good.” Juliana smiled, then approached the double doors and flung them open.

The observation deck was in a panic, people shouting questions at each other, talking on phones, trying to find out what was happening. Heads turned at the sight of Juliana in her bloody dress—scientists, typing pool ladies, and a cluster of S.S. officers at the center of the room. Frightened whispers spread as it became clear that the guards outside had been defeated.

Juliana spotted Kranzler standing behind his desk, smoking a cigar and glaring at her, flanked by more S.S. officers.

“What do you want?” Kranzler growled, not appearing particularly shocked that she’d managed to escape the cellblock.

“I want to go home,” Juliana said. “But you’ll come after me if I leave. Won’t you?”

“You’re free to leave,” Kranzler told her. “No one will stop you. I’ll give the order.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s the truth.” Kranzler sat down at a desk in front of a pile of paperwork. “Go ahead.”

Juliana looked at the frightened faces in the room. The S.S. men had their hands on their pistols, waiting for Kranzler’s order.

She walked deeper into the room, watching people shuffle back from her on either side, bumping against the windows overlooking the labs. Kranzler’s Nazi officers stood where they were, watching her closely.

Juliana was badly tempted to look back over her shoulder and see what Sebastian and Mia might be doing, but she didn’t want to spoil the impression that she was alone.

“Why did you do this, Kranzler?” Juliana asked. “All of this?”

“You must know by now.” Kranzler indulged in his cigar, smiled as he exhaled. “To identify surpernormal humans, those far ahead on the evolutionary curve. To study them. To breed them. To improve the human race.”

“Is that what you’re trying to do?” Juliana slowed her approach, expecting the S.S. officer to start firing at any moment. “And what did you learn about me?”

“The same as the others who have true powers,” Kranzler said. “Sebastian, Mia...It transfers through touch. It is not biological or chemical in nature. It defies all known physics.” He looked her over. “You and I might have more in common than you know. We should be on the same side. We should work together for the advancement of the human race. The Reich will raise up humanity, purify our race of all impurities, and push us forward into the future. You could be a powerful tool in the Fuehrer’s arsenal, Juliana. The other supernormals are amusing, sometimes useful. But you...yes, you are like a goddess of death. Your power shows great potential.”

Juliana stopped in place, chewing her lips, as if considering it. “Do you mean this? Even though I’ve killed some of your guards?”

“Your remarkable ability to kill is precisely what I admire. You would be lavishly rewarded. No more prison cells or dormitories for you. Your value is far beyond that.”

“I do have a question, Gruppenführer,” she said. “Alise used her power on me, though she cannot touch me.” Juliana wished Alise were in the room, but there was no sign of her or Niklaus. “She was able to form strange pink spores and blow them through the air. Do you think I could do that? Would you know?”

“That’s exactly what I believe.” He stood, approaching her now, a broad-shouldered man who towered over her, with a swastika on his black sleeve. “With time...with help and training from me...you could be far more powerful. You could destroy armies. Let me guide you. Let me be your teacher. I have a great knowledge about it, drawn from my own personal experience.” He stared at her carefully. “As I said, we are more similar than you think. Like you, I have a supernormal touch.”

Juliana watched him raise his hand and open it. She decided it wasn’t worth the risk of waiting to find out what it might be, if he was telling the truth. If he did have a supernatural power, she would deny him the chance to use it against her.

She exhaled the dense plague she’d been building up inside her. After using it so often, she was developing better control over the airborne plague. She imagined one of the endless flocks of blackbirds she’d seen as she traveled the South with the carnival, a river of cawing black shapes that flowed from horizon to horizon. The first time she’d seen one, she’d stood mesmerized as countless thousands of them crossed the sky. The flock had taken almost an hour to pass.

She directed her plague like the river of blackbirds, swirling around the heads of Kranzler and the other officers, attacking their eyes first. They drew their pistols automatically, screaming in pain, and a few fired blindly in her direction.

The Nazi officers howled and covered their red, rotting faces with swollen, ulcerous hands. The plague flowed thicker around them, streams of it burrowing bloody tunnels into their faces and chest. Kranzler and the other officers fell dead, their faces eaten open all the way to their throats.

Juliana looked around at all the remaining people in the room while the plague spores floated in a swirling cloud above Kranzler’s festering corpse. They stared back at her.

Juliana exhaled again, and the cloud of spores expanded rapidly, beyond her control now. The airborne plague filled the room, and dozens of people collapsed to the floor, coughing up blood. Their scalps and skin sloughed off as they clawed over each other, desperate to escape through one door or the other, shrieking and groaning.

She finally looked back. Sebastian was proceeding cautiously into the room, a pistol in each hand, but nobody was interested in challenging him now. Mia clung close to his back, hands under his shirt again, using his touch to protect her from the cloud of plague eating away at the slowly dying crowd of Nazis.

Those closest to Juliana were already dead, while those farthest away, by the windows, were slowly sinking to the floor, moaning as their flesh crumbled, crackled, and peeled from their bones. The demon plague had spared no one.

“More guards will be here soon!” Mia shouted. “Gas masks, machine guns...”

Sebastian closed the doors through which they’d entered and latched a security bar in place.

“That won’t hold them long.”

“Let’s find their exit,” Juliana said. She turned and led the way again, through the double doors. To her left was the clinic and pharmacy area for the base. To her right, the suite of offices from which Kranzler and his cohorts had ruled the base, and she went that way.

They passed the offices and reached an intersection of corridors.

“If it’s laid out like our section, the exit should be somewhere...” Sebastian pointed to their left.

“You’re right,” Mia said, still holding onto him. “But the guards are waiting for trouble, and they have machine guns. We don’t make it out alive, that’s what I see.”

“We can’t go back!” Sebastian said.

“No, they’re coming from that direction, too. We’ll die fast,” Mia agreed.

“Where can we go and survive? Hide in the offices? Can we try that?”

Mia concentrated. “You’ll die. We have to move from here!”

They ran down a side corridor, towards the network of supply and maintenance tunnels. Sebastian kept pointing to different doors, asking Mariella what she saw.

“Where do we go?” he kept asking. “That storage room? That maintenance closet?”

“That...yes! We live longer if we go in there.” Mia smiled, pointing to the door marked MAINTENANCE.

“Are you kidding?” Juliana asked.

Sebastian pulled on the door. “It’s locked!”

“Here!” Juliana threw him the keyring she’d lifted from the guard. “Maybe one will work.”

“Which one?” Sebastian started testing them, one key after another.

“It ends up being that one.” Mia picked out a key, and Sebastian skipped to it.

“Yes! Thanks!” He opened the door, and cool, dank air whirled out. “It’s a...cave.”

“The S.S. are going to gun us down in about ten seconds!” Mia told them, letting go of Sebastian and running into the open door. “Unless we go this way now!”

“I’m convinced,” Sebastian said, following Juliana into the door and closing it behind them.

They moved into a rocky cave space where the air was stale and thick. It was dimly lit by scattered electrical bulbs, and it echoed with the familiar rattling sound they’d heard every night from the ventilation panels in their rooms, only a hundred times louder. They faced a piece of machinery as big as a small house, with wide ventilation ducts running horizontally over their heads, feeding fresh air all over the administrative quadrant. The lower levels beneath the offices, she knew, were the residence and recreation areas for the officers, the scientists, the medical staff, and the administrative personnel.

A single enormous vertical duct extended from the top of the machine and vanished into the rock ceiling overhead. It would reach all the way to the surface, sucking in air from above. Juliana now fully understood why they would need such an elaborate ventilation—the air in this cave area tasted like death, with no plants anywhere to refresh it.

Sebastian opened the access panel to the machine, which was the size of a small door, and he stepped inside. Juliana leaned in for a look.

He stood in a steel-walled cavity the size of Juliana’s room down in the cellblock. A constant blast of fresh, cold air hammered down from the giant shaft to the world above, creating a windstorm that blew Sebastian’s hair back and forth across his face. A coal-powered furnace heated the air, its exhaust whisked away by a narrow duct—even in spring, the mountain air in Germany was chilly. An array of large fans all around him sucked the heated fresh air away along a tangle of aluminum ducts to feed the rooms inside the base.

“Look!” he shouted to be heard over the clanging machinery and whooshing air. He jumped up, reaching into the wide vertical duct, and then he hung there, swinging in midair, one hand out of sight. He waved with the other. “Rungs.” He dropped to the floor, his nose crinkling. “Smells like somebody cleans this duct with some nasty chemicals, too. Don’t breathe too deep in there.”

“Do the rungs go all the way up?” Juliana asked.

“It looks like it. Will we live if we go this way?” Sebastian asked, taking Mia’s hand so she could look into his future. Juliana couldn’t help resenting it.

“Maybe...it’s all confused, I can’t see...” Mia’s forehead crinkled.

“What if we stay right here?”

“They’ll hunt us down.”

“‘Confused’ sounds better to me than getting hunted down. Ladies should go first.” Sebastian held out a hand to Juliana.

“Pregnant ladies go first.” Juliana folded her arms over her bloodstained dress. She watched Sebastian boost Mia up into the duct.

“I can’t!” Mia swayed in his arms, unbalanced as she held onto the metal rung in the wall.

“You’re doing fine.” Sebastian smiled up at her, and she smiled back, soothed by him. Juliana could have killed them both.

Mia reached up for the next rung, and the next, and he lifted her until he could place her feet on the bottom rung.

“There.” Sebastian reached for Juliana. “Now it’s your turn.”

“You go first,” Juliana told him. She could hear the sound of approaching boots.

“I can’t. Then you won’t be able to reach,” he said.

“I’m a better jumper than you think,” she told him. “I need to be last in case someone climbs up after us. And you need to be with Mia so you can play your looking-into-the-future game.”

“It’s helped us a lot,” Sebastian said. “We’d be dead without it.”

“We’ll be dead right now if you don’t get up there and out of my way. Climb fast.”

“If you really think—”

“Go!”

Sebastian jumped up and grabbed the rung with one hand. He began climbing hand over hand, pulling himself up toward the giant steel fan and the night sky above.

Juliana looked at the armored steel plate mounted on one side of the shaft. It could swing down and around to seal off the vertical air duct in case of chemical attack. She would just barely be able to jump up and grab the lever that set it in motion.

“I’m not coming,” Juliana said. “They’ll just hunt us down, and they’ll keep doing horrible things to more people, won’t they? I have to put an end to it.”

“You can’t stay here!” Sebastian said.

“We won’t make it if I don’t take the guards out while I can,” Juliana said. “We had our chance, Sebastian. We lost it. Just make sure Mia and her baby get out alive. That’s what matters.”

“Juliana, please don’t do this,” Mia begged.

“You should hurry,” Juliana said. “Look into the future if you don’t believe me.” She backed up for a running start, then jumped and pulled the lever. The armored plate swung down from the side of the duct on a hinge, then back up the other way to seal it. She heard Sebastian shout her name a final time, and Mia pleaded with her to stop. She never saw them again.

Juliana turned to face the sound of approaching boots and shouting German voices. With the vertical intake duct sealed, the array of powerful ventilation fans created a vacuum as they sucked the air out of the cavity where she stood. It felt as if the fans were trying to pull the hair from her head and the skin from her face.

The maintenance door opened, and an S.S. guard in a gas mask looked in, spotted her, and dodged aside. A column of them entered, all in gas masks and carrying machine guns.

Juliana summoned up the demon plague a final time, drawing on the last of her energy. As she breathed out, she imagined her entire body unraveling, all the way down to her heart and bones, every bit of flesh translated into deadly spores.

She breathed out a dense, dark cloud, feeling the mass of her body beginning to dissolve, as though she were hollowing herself out. The ventilation fans sucked the spores away, channeling them throughout the base.

The guards raised their machine guns, and she spread out her arms.

“Go ahead,” she told them, breathing out another dense clouds, feeling her bones weaken.

Four of them opened fire, hammering her with round after round. She staggered back, light as a ballerina, as the bullets tore her apart.

Then she floated, watching her ruined body fall to the floor like an old costume worn to rags. With her body dead, her mind followed the streams of plague flowing through the air vents, spinning through underground rooms and hallways, her consciousness suddenly formless and whirling free like a dust storm.

She had no control of the swarming spores. She could only watch distantly as they flowed through hallways and apartments, killing Nazi officers and nurses alike, then spreading through the complex, killing off the kitchen staff as well as the guards, scores of people falling dead. Even the guards in gas masks were not safe, because her final cloud of spores, filled with all her anger and hate for her captors, was so virulent and aggressive that it ate right through their greyish-green wool uniforms and burrowed deep into their flesh. If there were any innocent souls among those in the underground base, God would have to pick them out from the plague-ridden mass of bodies Himself, if God cared about such things.

She watched them die and die, all of them at once, every plague spore providing her a vantage point, as if she were thousands of different places at the same moment, looking out from thousands of viewpoints. She felt like a sandstorm, sweeping through the bodies of everyone, leaving no one behind.

In time, she drifted back to gaze at her own bullet-shattered corpse, with no more emotion for it than a cast-off piece of clothing on the floor. She’d already begun to see that her life as Juliana was only the most recent chapter in a story that stretched back a hundred thousand years, all of her lives as a human being. She recalled that she was an outsider on this plane, in this world, not a human soul at all. If human beings had an afterlife, that was not for her to experience. She could only wait for the opportunity to be born again. Until then, she was isolated. Between lives, her kind could only communicate through formless feelings and sensations. True communication and contact required a human shape.

She was dead, beyond pain, beyond suffering, beyond desire, beyond hope. In the native formless condition of her soul, she could only watch, wait, and listen.