Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4) (51 page)

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.

It was three in the morning when Tommy opened the door to Esmeralda’s concrete cell. 
He left the lights off, though the camera in her ceiling probably had a night mode. 
He shook her by the shoulder. “Wake up.  We’re going.”

“What?” Esmeralda sat up, rubbing her eyes. “Who...what are we doing?”

“I’m helping you escape,” he whispered. “Like you wanted.  We have to go now.  I brought
you these.” He dropped a folded set of surgical scrubs onto her bed. “You don’t want
to be wearing the orange jumpsuit.”

Esmeralda looked at the thin blue shirt and pants.

“We have to go now.  You know they’re watching,” Tommy urged.

She nodded and got out of bed.  He relished a moment of seeing her in the simple cotton
bra and panties they’d issued her, the delicious curves of her warm, brown body...her
long, glossy black hair, her deep, dark eyes.  He’d missed her badly.  He’d made a
few more visits at Ward’s instruction, explaining why she needed to agree to work
with ASTRIA.  He knew her life would be in danger if she didn’t start acting happy
to cooperate.  The flickers of past-life memory he’d experienced since arriving Germany
made that clear.  When Ward, or Kranzler, was done with you, your life became disposable.

“I’m ready,” she whispered.

“They’ll be coming for us.” Tommy led the way out into the cellblock corridor.  He’d
spent more than a week working out his plan, such as it was.  He’d blasted a guard
full of fear and taken his access card, then gone down to the cellblock and terrified
the guards there, breaking their minds.