Jenny Plague-Bringer

Chapter Forty-Eight



Jenny, Seth, and Esmeralda started towards the fenced motor pool by the front gate, intending to steal transportation, but the trucks there came to life, including an apparently empty armored personnel carrier, and charged toward the front gate, the drivers callously running over anyone who got in the way.

“That’s not going to work,” Jenny said, watching all the available vehicle charge toward the gate, which opened for them. The panicked crowd poured out on either side of the trucks, everyone desperate to leave before the rumored bombs exploded.

“Looks like we’re walking,” Seth said. He rearranged his shirt, pulling the baby sling inside. The tiny girl cooed against his skin, her eyes closed.

“That kid can sleep through anything.” Esmeralda shook her head.

They joined the general exodus of people through the open front gate, Jenny in her hospital gown, Seth and Esmeralda in their stolen scrubs. Nobody paid attention to them, despite the baby bulging from under Seth’s shirt. If any of them did recognize Jenny, they were wise enough to keep their mouths shut. Everyone seemed focused on saving their own necks. Jenny definitely liked it that way. Maybe they wouldn’t need to hurt anyone else tonight.

They jogged down along the steep road with everyone else, and Jenny felt a weight lift from her. They were free, they were alive, the baby was safe.

Then screams sounded from ahead. Pedestrians raced to clear the road as the trucks came back, led by the personnel carriers, which swerved hard toward Jenny, Seth, and Esmeralda and slammed to a halt in front of them. Armored men in biohazard masks poured out of the vehicles, armed with assault rifles. One of them ignited a flamethrower, while two aimed grenade launchers them.

“We got enough firepower to turn you all into grease and smoke,” Ward said. He led the men, dressed in full biohazard armor like the rest, grinning inside his face shield. Jenny recognized his two assistants Buchanan and Avery, who flanked him, carrying assault rifles. “Don’t try a thing. Especially you, Jenny,” Ward instructed.

Jenny felt frozen. The men were all sealed up, protected from her by technology designed specifically to shield them from her power. She looked at Seth, frightened, her mind moving fast, searching the memories of hundreds of lives for anything that might help her.

She remembered what Dr. Heather Reynard of the CDC had found, what Alise and even Kranzler himself had told her. The pox was not biological or chemical. It defied any known laws of physics. It was supernatural, made of the spiritual dark matter of her undying soul.

Who had ever said that gas masks, armor, or the latest biohazard-resistant plastics were any protection against the supernatural? Maybe there was a chance she could summon something aggressive enough to chew right through. Maybe her own beliefs had placed artificial limits on her powers.

“Everybody on your knees,” Ward instructed. Jenny knelt slowly, placing her hands behind her head. Seth and Esmeralda wisely knelt behind her.

She closed her eyes and imagined the pox, which she’d always seen as a swarm of tiny black flies infesting her body, crawling through her stomach and veins, waiting to strike at any living thing. She imagined the flies dividing themselves into smaller flies, which divided themselves again, becoming a much larger swarm of much smaller pox.

She took it as far as she could imagine, seeing them become microscopically small, then smaller than an atom, able to pass through any kind of matter at all. The pox had a strange charge to it, a speed and energy she’d never felt before.

Jenny opened her eyes, locked her gaze on Ward’s mask, and breathed out a black plume that felt like ultra-fine silk as it flowed from her mouth. The river of liquid black punched through the center of Ward’s armor, straight into his heart, then swarmed out along his limbs and up his face, turning momentarily into a teeming black mass with Ward’s features.

Her consciousness was in the pox, just as it had been when she’d died last time. She coursed through him, ripping his flesh to threads and rotting his bones. Ward’s body sagged to the ground, his liquified remains flowing out through the gaping hole in his chest armor, his mask brimming with dark fluid where his head had been.

Ward’s two assistants raised their assault rifles toward Jenny, and she reached the swarm of pox out in each direction, burrowing through their masks and into their skulls, instantly transforming their faces into unrecognizable clumps of ulcerated tumors.

Most of the Hale Security men, seeing that their armor was no protection, broke and ran to save their own lives. A couple of them remained and tried to shoot her, and Jenny ripped through them, leaving them with decayed remnants of flesh clinging to their bones. She had an incredibly precise control over the pox, as though every spore in the swarm responded directly to her mind, something she’d never felt before.

She realized her entire mind had transferred over to the swarm. Her body had fallen to the ground, vacant of any soul, and Seth had run over. He was trying to heal her with his touch, while Esmeralda was repeatedly calling her name.

In her strange state, in the gray area between life and death, she perceived something that, clearly, none of the others saw. From Ward’s body, a great, dark mass boiled upwards like the smoke from a burning city, blotting out the stars above. Within the gigantic shape, she saw wriggling, squirming movement, like hundreds of tentacles covered in large, unblinking eyes, each tentacle tipped with a long, sharp beak for prying and digging. Her ancient enemy, the seer, most recently incarnated as Kranzler and then as Ward.

The seer moved sluggishly, still disoriented from his recent sudden death. If she moved quickly, she thought, she might be able to finish her attack.

She poured her amorphous swarm-shape into him, chewing into him in thousands of places at once, ripping apart the fabric of the exotic dark matter from which he had formed, destroying one of the last fragments of the primordial chaos. She ripped him limb by limb by limb, scattering chunks of him all across the sky, like some ancient god carved to pieces and hurled into the depths above to form a constellation. The torn fragments of him were so dark to her that the night sky beyond it was a bright gloom by contrast.

She ate into the core of him, concentrating herself into a denser swarm and surrounding what remained of him. She felt the turbulence of his pain and surprise, and a final pulse of anger so intense it seemed to burn the sky from horizon to horizon.

Then he was gone, countless little threads of dissolving energy scattered as far as she could see. She had destroyed him down to the root. The seer would not be back for them, in this lifetime or any other.

She gathered herself together and turned her attention back to Seth and Esmeralda, still kneeling over Jenny’s fallen form, Seth still trying to revive her with his power. They were safe now—the baby was safe. Ward was dead, his project erupting in flames behind them. She watched the dark, hot smoke pour from the ventilation shafts inside the walls. The mountain rumbled as the entire yard collapsed, fire and embers shooting out through the vents, as if the endurance of the structure below had somehow been connected to the seer’s soul. Or maybe the burning helicopter fuel had simply weakened some essential structure, leading to the collapse of the underground base, leaving only a smoking, rubble-filled crater behind. She would never know. She only knew that Seth and her baby were safe.

She considered it best to leave her body where it lay. The doctors had determined that the baby, Miriam, had no immunity to the pox at all. None. As long as Jenny lived, she would be the greatest threat to her daughter’s young life. Stepping aside, not returning to her body, staying dead...that was the only way to keep the baby safe from her.

With all of their kind currently dead, except for Seth and Esmeralda, the girl would not need the protection of her mother’s deadly powers...only protection from them. Jenny’s death would be the ultimate act of self-sacrifice for the good of her child.

She pulled herself up and back, letting the world of the living grow dim and distant, as it did when she was between incarnations. She would rest, and she would wait.

There was one problem—it felt like a single, hair-thin thread, but stronger than steel or diamond, holding her to the earthly plane. Miriam, her little girl. She could hear Miriam crying. A part of her refused to leave the baby.

She let herself be drawn back toward the living for a moment. She looked into the baby’s face, currently gazing in awe at Seth’s chin. She looked at her own pale, lifeless body.

An insight arose in her, the result of a few lifetimes of struggling to hurt no one, as well as her intense desire to return to the only child she’d ever had in any of her lives.

Before, when moving into a developing human body still in the womb, she had spread her swarm-like soul through every cell in the body. She began to wonder now whether that was necessary. Perhaps she concentrate herself into a very small shape, hidden deep inside the core of her body until she needed the pox. It would leave her dangerously vulnerable to being attacked by others...but it would also free her to touch other living things without harming them, her deepest wish for several lifetimes now.

The plague-bringer focused herself, drawing herself inward until she was a tiny, extremely dense mass of energy. She floated down toward the unconscious body below, and she landed on Jenny Morton’s heart like a black snowflake. With a thought, she made her heart start beating again.

Jenny opened her eyes and took in a delicious breath of cool mountain air. She smiled up at Seth and the baby, feeling more at peace than she’d ever been.