Tommy Nightmare (Jenny Pox #2) (33 page)

“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, ex
cuse
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.”

“That ain’t nothing,” said the other
assistant, an older black man. He was clearly the supervisor, since
he was laying out blades instead of rinsing out decaying fat folds.
“Just before you started, we had this O.D.’d hooker, every venereal
disease you can name growing all over the place. Looked like
week-old pot roast down there.”

The younger guy made a small heaving sound,
and the older one laughed. Then he noticed Alexander approaching
the refrigeration unit.

“Hey!” the older morgue assistant yelled at
Alexander. “Who the hell are you?”

Alexander didn't stop for questions, but
continued on to the wall of little stainless steel doors, each one
holding a corpse behind it. It was like one of those Christmas
calendars where you were supposed to punch out one cardboard square
a day, to find the chocolate treat hidden behind it. He couldn’t
wait to see what the morgue had for him. He hoped it was full.

He opened one and slid out the conveyor
drawer, which held a body covered in a white sheet. Alexander
whipped off the sheet, revealing a fiftyish woman in a pantsuit
with a shattered arm and a partly crushed skull. It looked like
she'd died in a traffic accident.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Alexander said. “Want to
take a walk?”

He laid a hand on her neck. The dark energy
flowed out of him, carrying droplets of Alexander's essence into
the dead cells of her corpse.

He opened another drawer, revealing a young
man with a bullet wound through the chest, his jersey shirt stiff
with dried brown blood. Another drawer held an elderly man who
might have died of natural causes. Another held a shrunken boy of
eleven or twelve with a shaved head.

“What are you doing?” The older morgue
assistant approached him, and his green-haired protégé trailed
behind him, looking embarrassed. “Where’s your ID badge?”

“Don't you recognize me?” Alexander tugged
down the face mask and gave him a big, crazy smile.

“You a student?” the older man asked.

“No,” Alexander said. In his mind, he made
contact with the bits of energy he'd planted within the bodies
around him. “You work with me every day, side by side. You must
know who I am.”

The green-haired assistant approached,
standing beside his supervisor with his arms crossed. He was a
short and wiry guy, but he looked ready to fight.

“Stop messing with my bodies,” the older man
said. “You tell me who the hell you are and what the hell you’re
doing or you get the hell out of my morgue.” He pointed to the
door. “In fact, let’s just skip to that last part.”

“I am simply carrying out my business,”
Alexander said. “And as for my name, I've had far more than I can
remember.”

Alexander held up a hand, and the dozen dead
bodies slowly sat up behind him.

“I am the vulture circling above from the
moment of your birth. I am the eternal force that eats the souls of
men and sends the damned to their final suffering.” The dead bodies
slid off their tables and staggered toward the mortuary assistants.
“I am Death, destroyer of worlds.”

The dozen reanimated corpses lurched toward
the two men, their bare feet shuffling forward one step at a time,
their toe tags scraping along the linoleum floor. The corpses
raised their arms high above their heads, with their hands hanging
limp in the air like they were marionette dolls. All the walking
dead dropped their jaws wide open and groaned in unison, shambling
closer to the morgue assistants.

Both of the morgue assistants screamed and
ran away.

Alexander laughed. He mentally ordered his
walking zombies to stop where they were, and they locked up as if
playing freeze tag.

He opened more drawers, touched and animated
more bodies. Some of them were quite diseased, or a bit gory and
mangled, but that didn't matter. He was taking them all. And then
he’d be on his way.

Seth pulled at the rope with his right hand,
which pulled his left hand back against the headboard. Then he
pulled with his left hand, and his right snapped back.

“What the hell?” Seth said to the naked blond
girl on top of him. “Help me get out of this!”

“But I like it,” Allegra frowned.

“I have to go!” Seth said. “That was Jenny!
My girlfriend!”

“I don’t think she’s your girlfriend
anymore.” Allegra giggled. “You’re funny.”

“I’m serious here.” Seth looked up at his
bound hands. He couldn’t see them very well when they were close
together, so he pulled his right wrist to his face. They were tied
with a dense clump of small knots. “Can you cut me loose or
something? Look for a knife.”

“You want to leave me?” Allegra asked.

“Yeah, look, I don’t know what happened here,
but this was not a good—”

“I’ll tell you what happened.” Allegra laid
down on top of him and kissed him. “First, we met.” She kissed him
again. “And then we came here.” She kissed him again, and she
reached between his legs and took him in her hand. “And then…”

“Stop it.” Seth shivered. The girl had some
weird hold over him. It almost reminded him of Ashleigh.

In fact, he realized,
she
almost
reminded him of Ashleigh.

“You have to help me out.” Seth used the
fingers of his right hand to pick at the hard little knots binding
his left. He couldn’t pull anything loose. The girl was some kind
of knot-tying genius.

“Please,” Seth said.

“Please what?” She kissed him again. “Tell me
how to please you.”

“Let me go,” Seth said. “That would please
me.”

“No, I’m never going to let
you
go.”
She kept kissing him. “Never, never, never…”

Ashleigh stood between Tommy and Esmeralda on
the balcony of their fifth-floor room at the Mandrake House. Below,
the street was thick with festival-goers, but the police presence
had swelled from an occasional blue uniform to several squad cars,
each of them trundling slowly through different parts of the crowd,
occasionally shining a spotlight into the park.

“I don’t like this,” Tommy said.

“Oh, the cops aren’t looking for you, Tommy,”
Ashleigh said. “Stop being so self-centered.” She rubbed the back
of his neck. “Now, get ready, because Jenny’s going to come busting
out in about a minute. You can draw power from me. I’m like a
battery for you.”

“If you say so.” Tommy scrunched up his
forehead and squeezed his closed eyes, like he was concentrating
hard. Staying focused had never exactly been his strong point,
Ashleigh remembered.

Far below, Jenny ran down the front porch
steps of the hotel and onto the sidewalk, bumping carelessly into
everyone in her path. She was covering her eyes with one gloved
hand, and her mouth was trembling hard.

“There she is, Tommy,” Ashleigh said. “She’s
outside, bawling her ass off, poor thing. Are you ready?”

“Just a second…” Tommy raised a finger, his
eyes still closed.

“We don’t have any time left! She’s already
out!” Ashleigh glared at the small, pathetic figure of Jenny,
trying to get through the crowd.

A police car pulled alongside Jenny, moving
very slowly. It blasted Jenny with the spotlight, and she turned
toward it, looking confused, blocking the light with her arm.

“Oh, what the hell?” Ashleigh said. “Not yet.
We need to have the big show first. Tommy, do it now! The cops are
on her!”

Tommy opened his eyes. Ashleigh felt most of
her strength drain out of her, and she slumped against the railing
and struggled to stay on her feet, practically fainting like some
stupid lady in an old black-and-white movie. Esmeralda hurried to
support her.

Tommy leaned out over the railing, looking
down on the crowd below. He opened his mouth, and out flowed what
looked like a stream of very dark blood. It corkscrewed over the
heads of the crowd like a ribbon curling in the wind, and then it
burst into a cloud of tiny, blood-red spores, drifting out over the
festival like gruesome confetti.