Tommy Nightmare (Jenny Pox #2) (27 page)

“Come on, Jenny. I love you. I'll take care
of everything.”

“I don't think I believe you,” Jenny said.
“I'll think you'll do what you're told, eventually. And where does
that leave me? You want me to build the rest of my life around
you...until it gets inconvenient for you. And you can move on to
some girl your parents want you to marry.”

“That's not true!”

“Prove it,” Jenny said.

“I can't show you the future. We're together
today. Tomorrow, next year, we'll keep finding ways to be
together.”

“That's what you say.”

“What the hell do you want me to say, Jenny?
What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing,” Jenny said. “You have fun with
Darcy this weekend. And all your little pals from Grayson
Academy.”

Jenny swam away from him, toward the rocky
shore. The night was growing a little cold.

“Where are you going?” Darcy's mom asked.

Ashleigh was packing Darcy's suitcase. The
clothes all seemed unreasonably big to her, especially the
underwear. But that was the crappy body she inhabited.

“I'm just going on a little weekend trip,”
Ashleigh said.

“A trip? Where?”

“The beach.”

“With who?”

“Just some friends.” Ashleigh zipped up the
suitcase.

“Morris!” Darcy's mom screamed toward the
living room. “Morris!”

“What now?” Darcy's dad yelled back.

“Darcy says she's going to the beach for the
weekend! With
friends
!” Her voice grew shrill.

“Like hell she is!” Darcy's dad wheeled from
the living room to the hall. He glowered at the sight of Darcy's
suitcase. “I didn't give you permission to go nowhere!”

“I'm eighteen years old. I'm a high school
graduate. I can go on a trip if I want.”

“Who the
hell
put that idea in your
head?” Darcy's dad yelled.

“The United States Constitution,” Ashleigh
said. “Look, it's no big deal. I just need a vacation.”

“All you
need
is a job!” Darcy's dad
said. “How the
hell
you gonna pay for a vacation?”

“Yeah, how?” Darcy's mom asked.

“Seth's paying,” Ashleigh said. “For
everybody.”

“Seth?” Darcy's dad asked. “You don't mean
Seth Barrett?”

“That's the one,” Ashleigh said.

“Who else is going?” Darcy's mom asked.

“Um...”

“Not those two you've been running around
with, I hope,” Darcy's mom asked. “I don't trust them.”

“Mom, Tommy is Ashleigh Goodling's cousin.
How bad can he be?”

“But he's always with that Mexican girl,”
Darcy's dad said. “I never thought I'd live to see the day, my
little girl running around with Mexicans.”

“Don't be racist, Dad.” Ashleigh pushed by
them, walking towards the front door. She had no intention of ever
coming back.

“Don't you pull that politically correct
horseshit on me!” Darcy's dad wheeled after her, and Darcy's mom
trailed behind him. “I ain't no racist, but Mexicans are filthy,
weird people! Chuck O' Flannery did a whole show about it! Diseased
welfare-suckers, taking up our jobs and our schools.”

“What job?” Ashleigh snapped. “You don't
work. You live on welfare.”

“You take that back!” Darcy's dad shouted. “I
ain't on welfare, I'm on disability! I can't get no welding job
when I ain’t got no foot!” He jabbed one sausage-shaped finger at
his missing foot, in case she just hadn’t noticed yet.

Ashleigh watched out the window, gripping the
suitcase tight.

“I know what this is about,” Darcy's mom
said. “You're going to the beach so you can have sex with those
boys.”

“Yeah, that's right,” Ashleigh said.
“Gang-banging the fat pregnant chick is every boy's fantasy.”

“Don't use language like that under my roof!”
Darcy's dad said.

Mercifully, Seth's blue Audi convertible
pulled into the driveway.

“Seth's here,” Darcy said. “I'll see y'all
Monday.”

“Don't you go sinning!” Darcy's mom said.

“But I am,” Ashleigh said. “I'm gonna have
sex with Seth, and I'm going to let him stick it in my ass, too.
Because that's where I like it. Right in the butthole.”

Darcy's mom gasped and covered her mouth.

Ashleigh flung open the front door, and
Darcy's dad wheeled out after her. She ran down the front porch
steps two at a time.

“Darcy Hortence Metcalf, you come back here
now!” he screamed. His face was bright crimson.

Ashleigh gave him the finger as she ran to
Seth's car.

“What's going on?” Seth asked from the
driver's seat. “Everything okay?”

She dropped the suitcase into the back seat,
then climbed in beside him.

“My dad's just being a total lame-o,”
Ashleigh said. “I can't leave without him yelling at me.”

“Darcy, you come here!” Darcy's dad screamed
from the porch.

“He just wants to yell at me for getting
pregnant, for the millionth time,” Ashleigh said. “Drive, drive,
drive. Get me the hell out of here.”

“Okay...” Seth backed out of the driveway,
and they left Darcy's parents glaring at them from the front
porch.

“You sure everything's okay?” Seth asked.
“Your parents look pissed.”

“We just had an argument,” Ashleigh said.
“Like we do every day. No big whoop.”

Ashleigh lay back in the passenger seat and
let the wind blow through her hair. It was a gorgeous Friday
evening, with the purple sunset behind them and the night ahead.
Orientation began early on Saturday morning, and Seth wasn't a fan
of getting out of bed before dawn on Saturday to drive two hours to
Charleston, so they were staying in a hotel tonight and tomorrow
night.

Ashleigh had been as insistent as she could,
without breaking character, that they stay at the Mandrake House, a
narrow five-story mansion with a few rooms on each floor. Tommy had
already rented a room on the top floor, and Esmeralda would be
driving Ashleigh's Jeep to Charleston to join them.

Seth and Ashleigh were staying two floors
below Tommy and Esmeralda, which would make things very
convenient.

“I wish Jenny was coming with us,” Seth
said.

“Me, too,” Darcy said. In fact, she had
advised Jenny not to go. She'd suggested that if Jenny didn't go,
Seth would have to imagine life in Charleston without her, and
might decide being with Jenny was more important than making his
parents happy. “I really like hanging out with her.”

“Yeah, Jenny's great.” A smile appeared on
his lips, and a distant look in his eyes.

Ashleigh wanted to slap him, and then rake
her nails back and forth across his face, and then stomp on his
dick a thousand times. He had dropped her practically overnight
once he started hanging out with Jenny. This infuriated Ashleigh,
not just because she'd been tossed out like an old sock, but
because she couldn't stand not being in control.

“Do you ever think about Ashleigh?” she
asked.

“Sometimes.”

“It's weird how she just disappeared like
that,” Darcy said. “Like presto-change-o, huh?”

Seth looked at her from the corner of his
eye, and his forehead wrinkled. He was probably struggling to think
of what to say. “Yeah...A lot of people disappeared.”

“But you were with Ashleigh forever,” Darcy
said. “Don't you miss her at all? I mean, if I was a guy, I'd
totally want to be with her.”

“She wasn't as nice as she acted,” Seth
said.

“Really?”

“She could be mean,” Seth said.
“Manipulative.”

“Manipulative? Ashleigh?”

“I know you miss her, Darcy, but she was
really kind of an evil bitch. She tried to kill me, but she screwed
that up, too.”

Ashleigh snarled, but she fought it until it
was a simple frown. “But everybody loved her.”

“Sometimes everybody’s wrong,” Seth said.

Ashleigh looked into the darkness ahead and
tried not to snap. She couldn’t stand to hear herself talked about
that way.

They turned off Esther Bridge Road onto
Highway 63, the road that would take them all the way to
Charleston.

Ashleigh had always liked riding in Seth's
car, the expensive blue convertible that advertised you were
somebody of value and quality. Too bad this would be the last
time.

Friday afternoon, Heather got a visit at her
office from Chantella Williams, a senior investigator with Homeland
Security. The investigator laid a black file folder on her
desk.

“This is everything you asked for.” Williams
opened the folder. The first page showed a birth certificate for
Maurice Goodling. “Maurice Goodling. Deceased in 2006, cirrhosis of
the liver. Last known address, a Catholic mission in Memphis.” She
turned the page over. The next one showed a snapshot of a withered
homeless man’s corpse.

“That can’t be right,” Heather said.

“Looks like your Maurice Goodling is guilty
of identity fraud,” Williams said.

“Oh!” Heather reached toward her keyboard.
“Then I need to check—”

“Non-residents of Fallen Oak among the
infected deceased,” Williams said. “You’ll find two: Waylon
Humphries and Ruby McGussin. Wanted for six kinds of fraud in three
states.” She turned the page, revealing police mugshots of a
thuggish-looking young man with a mullet and moustache, and then a
young woman with huge hairsprayed bangs and a death’s head moth
tattoo on her shoulder.

If Heather squinted, she could just barely
see them as the smiling, conservative-looking Dr. and Mrs. Goodling
featured on the Fallen Oak Baptist Church website.

“You’ve had their bodies the whole time,”
Williams said.

“What about—”

“No sign of the daughter.”

“You’ve done a lot of my work for me,”
Heather said.

“Are you kidding? After that lab test you
sent up earlier this week, this thing got prioritized. A lot of
people still want to know what happened at Fallen Oak. Now it’s my
turn to hear what you know about it. And what you speculate,
too.”

“What about Jenny Morton?” Heather asked.
“Did we look into her background?”

“Far as we can tell, she’s never been to a
doctor,” Williams said. “No medical records. Home birth. Mother
disappeared soon after.”

“Disappeared?”

“Could be post-partum depression, runs
off…”

“Is it possible she died?” Heather asked.

“No death certificate anywhere. Just
disappeared.”

“What about her father?”

“Local handyman, no steady job. Living on old
family land, old little house. There’s not much to Jenny, either,
judging by her school records. No discipline issues. No
extracurricular activities. Good student, but she only got a
general diploma. Seems like she was pretty invisible. What do you
know about the girl?”

“She might be an immune carrier of the
disease,” Heather said. “She suffers occasional breakouts of the
symptoms, but no long-term damage, as far as anyone knows. Some
people think she can infect others at will, or at least chooses to
do it maliciously.”

“That’s horrible,” Williams said.

“It may be that something triggered a major
flare-up that night,” Heather said. “She infected a lot of people
at once. But I still can’t understand how it works. She catalyzes a
fatal reaction, but she doesn’t leave any biochemical trace.
Nothing viral, nothing bacterial…at this point, it could be little
demons with pitchforks.”

“Sounds like a perfect weapon,” Williams
said. “We have to be careful approaching her.”

“Are we approaching her?” Heather asked.
“How? When?”

“That is under development,” Williams said.
“But you’re going to be part of it.”

“I’ll have to clear it with Schwartzman—”

“Consider it cleared with Schwartzman, and
with anybody you might be tempted to clear it with. We’re moving
into a high threat level area here.”

“Okay,” Heather said. “Let’s have a closer
look at Jenny Morton.”

South Battery, the street in front of the
Mandrake House, was blocked off for the festival, so they had to
park at a garage a few blocks north of it and walk to the
hotel.

“Isn’t this so exciting?” Darcy asked. They
walked down Meeting Street under a canopy of ancient trees. High
stone walls shielded old mansions from the sidewalk, and Seth could
only see their upper balconies and the chimneys.

“I hope we can find the place,” Seth
said.

“Don’t worry, I know just what we need to
do,” Darcy told him.

They walked toward the sound of pulsing music
near the harbor. Parliament-Funkadelic was playing. All around Seth
and Darcy, clumps of young people walked along the sidewalk or
right down the middle of the street, teenagers and college students
drawn like moths towards the flickering lights of the weekend-long
festival.

They reached Battery and turned left. The
crowd was thick here now, and got much thicker across the street at
the public park, which looked out onto the harbor. The band was
playing somewhere inside the park, past the temporary stalls
hawking beer and deep-fried food products, past the cluster of
little old ladies protesting the festival with posterboard
signs.

The Mandrake House hotel looked like some old
Greek temple, with arches and Corinthian columns, and balconies
curving out on every floor. The brick steps leading up the front
porch were as wide as the house itself. Purple wisteria hung from
the gnarled limbs of the old trees surrounding it.

“Oh, it’s just like I remember,” Darcy said.
“I even got us the same room my family stayed in. Two bedrooms,
with a little sitting room and a huge balcony.”

“That’s great,” Seth said. He’d let Darcy
make their reservations, so he wasn’t too sure how much this was
costing him. Darcy was at a rough time in her life, though, being
pregnant and then giving the baby up for adoption so she could go
to college. Seth’s dad might yell at him about the credit card
bill, but so what?