Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4) (56 page)

The telegram from Berlin didn’t say much, only vaguely stating that the project and
all involved with it had been terminated, with a hint that further inquiries were
not welcome.  Many of Barrett’s long-time correspondents in the eugenics community
were dropping contact as they drew behind the dark veil of Nazi secrecy.  He didn’t
give a holy damn.  For all the money he’d donated, none of those scientists had figured
out a single thing useful to him.  Barrett had concluded that the eugenics folks really
had no idea what the hell they were talking about.

He poured himself another tall glass of bourbon.  He could read between the lines. 
He hadn’t needed the telegram, anyway.  He’d felt it in the spring, like an earthquake
shaking him from the other side of the world.  Juliana was dead.  The telegram, in
its small way, was only a confirmation of what he knew deep inside.

He knew it because he’d begun to feel hopeless.  Knowing she was in the world had
expanded him, making him larger than he was, freeing him to dream bigger than he ever
had before.  He’d left her there out of anger, because she’d chosen the other one,
the pretty blue-eyed boy with the healing touch.  Her rejection had hurt him far more
than he’d let on.  He’d been certain that she shared his feelings, that they were
truly meant for each other.

He’d assumed they would cross paths again, that fate would bring them together, but
he’d been terribly, absolutely wrong.  She was gone, and the world felt like a much
smaller place without her.

From then on, Barrett would age much faster, and he would shrink into a bitter, hollow
man with a heart like broken rock.  His ambition retreated.  He would settle into
being a manager of his past investments, abandoning his run at becoming a global titan.

He wandered out onto his sprawling back porch, looking up at the high brick wall of
the necropolis he’d built for his family, a monumental place to bury himself and his
descendants.  He would rot and die here, watching his wife retreat into opiate addiction
until the day he buried her, watching his son cringe and tremble, never emerging from
his shadow.

His son would manage to marry, though, and have another son of his own, named Jonathan
Seth Barrett III, as Barrett would insist.  In that direction, at least, lay some
hope for his legacy.

JONATHAN SETH BARRETT XVI, read the inscription on the monument.  Seth’s great-grandfather,
the egomaniac he knew more recently by the name Alexander, had planned for at least
sixteen generations to be named after him, one more than the Ptolemy dynasty that
had ruled over the final centuries of ancient Egypt’s decline.

Seth pulled the goggles down over his eyes, fitted the sharp end of the chisel into
the letter
J
, and swung the hammer.  The chisel bit the stone, rendering the letter illegible. 
He only had to chisel out every single letter of his name from the hard, dark granite,
and he only had to do that sixteen times.  It was a hot, humid summer afternoon in
Fallen Oak, the sunlight bleach-white all around him, and he was already sweating.

He struck out the next letter, and the next. It sometimes took a few swings of the
hammer to fully scratch out a single letter.

His great-grandfather had built this necropolis in his backyard out of an obsession
with legacy.  It was an obsession that had led him, five thousand years earlier, to
order the construction of the first large pyramid in Egypt to serve as his tomb, when
he had ruled as the pharaoh Djoser and used his undead minions to conquer the Sinai
Peninsula and mine its minerals.

Seth finished chiseling out the name from the sixteenth row of monuments, then moved
up a row to chisel out JONATHAN SETH BARRETT XV.  It was going to be a long day.

The dead-raiser had transformed the Barrett family into a pharaoh-style death cult,
using threats to make them uphold the memory of their malignant ancestor.  He had
terrified his son and grandson—Seth’s grandfather and father, respectively—by demonstrating
his power to raise the dead, then threatening to haunt them from beyond the grave
if his wishes were not obeyed.

Wish number one: the firstborn son of each generation had to be named after him. 
Seth was the fourth, and he was going to be the last.  If Seth ever had a son, he
would name him anything but “Jonathan Seth.”

Seth chiseled out row after row of names, his muscles starting to ache and his shirt
plastered to him with sweat.  He didn’t know what he would say if the police came
to investigate the hours of banging and chiseling, but he wasn’t entirely sure whether
Fallen Oak even had a police department anymore.  The little downtown was overgrown
already, the town square thick with weeds and wildflowers.  Between the still-unexplained
disappearance and rumored death of so many people, and the closing of Mayor Winder’s
timber plant, the town was drying up fast.

He smirked as he remembered Barrett’s grandiose plans for his model town, proudly
explaining the importance of Fallen Oak’s position on the local roadways and the rail
and telegraph lines, clueless that the interstates, telephone, and eventually the
internet would make every advantage obsolete.  It was sad to see the empty shells
that remained, but he’d fulfilled his promise to Barrett.  The man’s vast, dark Charleston-style
mansion was reduced to a charred stump.  His most recent incarnation, Alexander, had
been killed by Seth’s power.  Seth himself had pretty well ruined the Barrett name
in town, to the point that they’d tried to lynch him along with Jenny.  Seth himself
would eventually inherit Barrett’s entire fortune.

Today, he struck the final blows, punishing the dead-raiser in a way that would matter
to him, erasing his name from history, the same method used by ancient priests to
destroy the ghost of a horrible king.

Seth reached his own name, smiling as he chiseled it away.  He paused to touch his
brother’s name.  CARTER MAYFIELD BARRETT.  He left that one in place.

He moved back a row and chiseled away his father’s name, and his mother’s for good
measure.  There was no reason for them to be buried here in Fallen Oak, he thought. 
They should be buried in Florida, where they’d lived happily with their boat and their
sunlight and rum.

He chiseled out his grandfather’s name, feeling satisfied.  He knew that his grandfather
had suffered from mental problems, from severe paranoia, especially late in life,
obsessed with the idea that Barrett’s ghost was hounding him.  He’d even built a very
modest house on the grounds, far from the main house, and lived there much of his
life. It had fallen into disrepair since his death.

Finally, Seth faced the large central monolith towering above the others, the burial
place of the first Jonathan Seth Barrett.  He placed the chisel in the center of the
dead man’s name.

“I win,” he whispered, and then he swung the hammer.

The hilly woods behind the Morton house in Fallen Oak were soaked in cool, green sunlight
falling from the lush summer canopy overhead.  Jenny walked the overgrown path with
the baby cradled in her arms.  Tiny Miriam gazed around at trees and boulders with
huge, fascinated eyes.

Rocky loped along the trail beside Jenny, swishing his big blue-mottled tail.  In
her absence, Rocky had overcome his skittish ways to become the sort of dog who lay
snoring under the kitchen table most of the day.  He’d been excited to see her, jumping
up to lick her hands and face.  He certainly didn’t live in fear of people anymore.

The baby started crying, for the thousandth time that day, as Jenny pushed through
thick, mossy growth and into a tiny meadow.  She gazed at the cairn of stones that
marked her mother’s grave. Small, bright wildflowers sprouted through the rocks.

“Hi, momma,” Jenny said.  The baby cried louder.  Jenny sat on a low, heavy oak limb
and touched the baby’s face, whispering to her, and the baby settled.  It was strange
to Jenny, touching someone in a way that comforted instead of killed. 

“I thought you’d want to see her,” Jenny said. “I named her after you.  She’s so pretty,
isn’t she?  I think she looks like you.” Jenny bit her lip, listening to a red-winged
blackbird singing in the tree above her.  It was a sound that always made her think
of long, blissfully slow summer afternoons.

“I don’t know if you can hear me,” Jenny said to her mother, “But I think maybe you
can.  If things as wicked as me live on and on, life after life, after all the evil
things I’ve done...I think people must live on, too, somewhere.  I don’t know if you
come back here or not, getting born again.  Maybe you do.  If I keep going after death,
then you must, too.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry for ending your life like I did.  You could have had a
good, long life if it wasn’t for me.  I’m sorry.” Jenny didn’t bother hiding her tears. 
There was no one to see her. “I also want you to know that you’re the last.  I know
how to keep it inside now.  I don’t have to hurt anybody else.”

Above her, another blackbird sang, joining the first.

“Your record collection’s gone,” Jenny said. “All my stuff’s gone, too, my pictures
of you.  Ward took them all, and that whole base collapsed from the fire, so it’s
all burned and buried.  Mariella really wrecked the place.” Jenny shook her head.
“It was good to have a friend for a while, a real friend who understood me.  I wish
you could have met her.  I wish I could have met you.”

Jenny sat for a while, listening to the birds sing and feeling the baby doze in her
arms. 

“I don’t know what we’ll do now,” Jenny said. “I’d be happy to just stay here awhile. 
The town’s gotten spooky with everybody gone, but I always liked ghost towns.  I want
to get a good camera and take pictures of everything falling apart, flowers growing
up through the cracks in the streets.  I think it’s pretty.  Sad, but pretty, too.”

Jenny stood up, startling the blackbirds into flight.  Hundreds of them launched from
the trees around her, as if they’d all been hiding, listening quietly.

“Bye, Momma,” Jenny whispered.  The flapping birds startled the baby awake, and she
began crying.

“It’s okay,” Jenny told her, holding her close as she walked back up the trail. “Everything’s
gonna be okay now.”

* * *

“Oh, let me see that baby!” June squealed.  She set her Miller Lite, snug in its vintage
Jimmy Buffett beer cozy, on the picnic table and reached out her arms.  Jenny handed
little Miriam over to her. “Ain’t you just the most precious thing?” June asked the
baby.

Jenny joined her dad, who was turning the ears of corn roasting on the grill, next
to the ribs he’d been smoking all day.

“Yard looks good,” Jenny said.  Since June had moved in, she and Jenny’s father had
tamed part of the back yard, moving her father’s junked old appliances and pinball
machines closer to the shed and concealing them behind white lattice screens.  The
cleared area had the picnic table, lawn chairs, and grill, plus shrubbery and flower
beds by the house, wind chimes by the back door, a chipped stone birdbath under the
shade of an old maple.

“Probably shoulda had it this way when you were little,” her dad said.

“I liked the dangerous rusty object theme, too.”

“Bet they didn’t have this over there in France.” He brushed a homemade mustard concoction
onto the ribs. “Carolina sauce.”

“They sure didn’t.  And don’t even ask about grits and cornbread.”

He laughed and looked at her.  Jenny put an arm around him, and he automatically stiffened
up, still not used to the idea of her touching anyone.  Then he relaxed and hugged
her around the neck, kissing her head.

“You sure you’re going to be okay?” he asked in a low voice. “Ain’t nobody out there
looking for you?”

“They already sealed and buried the original Homeland Security investigation,” Jenny
said. “The people who captured us this time are...well, we dealt with them.  My friend
Mariella said she thought the general wasn’t telling his superiors what he was really
doing, they thought he was just doing some card-reading experiments or something. 
She would know best, she pretended to work with him for months.” Jenny paused, thinking
about her lost friend, then shook her head. “I looked up ASTRIA on the net.  They
were just a joke Cold War agency, looking for UFOs and Russian psychic spies.  I don’t
think anyone knew what Ward was really doing out there.  And now it’s all destroyed.”
Jenny shrugged. “We could get by for a long time with nobody bothering us, maybe. 
It’s not like we’re on the FBI’s Most Wanted list or anything.”

“If you think you’re okay.” Her dad didn’t sound entirely convinced, but he’d always
worried too much.

“Running and hiding didn’t help,” Jenny said. “We tried that already.  Might as well
be where we want to be.”

“Well, you’re both welcome to stay here as long as you want,” he said. “I don’t guess
Seth’s house is an option, since there ain’t nothing left but a brick or two, and
it’s federally condemned and all.”

“We’d have to bring a tent,” Jenny said.

“Found them!” Seth walked out of the house with plastic cups, which he sat out on
the table and filled with iced tea.  Jenny took a cup.  It was frigid and sweet, just
what she needed after her walk in the woods.