Tommy Nightmare (Jenny Pox #2) (8 page)

The man sat on the bike and tried a few times
to insert the key into the ignition, but he kept missing. Once he
got it in, he seemed to have forgotten how to turn the key.

“Howdy,” Tommy said as he approached the man.
Then he pulled out a wad of cash. He still had most of the prison
guard’s bank account.

The drunken biker eyed Tommy’s cash wad with
great interest. Tommy tucked it back into the pocket of his own
jeans, which he’d bought at Kmart. The biker’s eyes followed the
money.

Tommy stuck out his hand. “Name’s Freddy,” he
said. “And I’d like to make you an offer.”

“How’s it going, Freddy?” The biker shook
Tommy’s hand.

Tommy squeezed the man’s hand and pushed fear
into him.

The biker’s eyes swelled, and his hand
trembled in Tommy’s grasp.

“Why don’t you step off that bike?” Tommy
suggested.

The biker reached for the keys.

“Leave those there,” Tommy said. He didn’t
let go of the man’s hand, so they ended up holding hands over the
Harley-Davidson.

“Aw, look, Beater’s got a girlfriend,”
another biker hollered. Two of them had just stumbled out of the
bar. The shouter wore a Confederate flag do-rag, and his friend
wore a very faded T-shirt featuring the band Poison.

“Hell, prettier than his last one!” the guy
in the Poison T-shirt yelled, and the two of them laughed. Both men
were big, disheveled, and clearly favored denim.

“I’ve just purchased your friend’s bike,”
Tommy said, though he hadn’t given the man any money. He shook
Beater’s hand again. “Right, Beater?”

“Yeah,” Beater said. “Yeah, man. You got
it.”

Beater’s friends stopped laughing when Tommy
got on the man’s bike and started it up.

“Hey, that’s not cool,” Rebel Flag Guy said.
“You can’t take that.”

“He sold it to me,” Tommy said. “Isn’t that
right? The bike’s mine now, right?”

“Yeah, man.” Beater took several steps back.
“Whatever the guy says.”

Rebel Flag and Poison T-shirt stepped up to
Tommy.

“I don’t think you made a fair trade,” Rebel
Flag said, and he poked Tommy in the chest. “I think my buddy’s
drunk, you come over and run your mouth, try to steal his bike.
That’s what I think.”

“You don’t want to touch me,” Tommy warned
them. He tried not to let them see how bad he was shaking. Rebel
Flag put a calloused hand around his neck, and Tommy felt the fear
move into him. Maybe Tommy could use that.

“Look out!” Tommy shouted. He seized Rebel
Flag’s wrist and pushed the fear as hard as he could. Tommy had
always imagined the fear as a kind of low-grade current of black
electricity, something that flowed out from him when he touched
other people. Now he imagined turning up the voltage. He wanted to
make the guy panic, lose his mind. People were much more open to
suggestion when they were frightened.

“That guy in the Poison shirt, he’s trying to
kill you, man!” Tommy shouted at Rebel Flag. Tommy pointed at the
biker in the Poison shirt, who was walking up behind him. “Protect
yourself! Fight back!”

“What?” Rebel Flag turned on his friend and
punched him in the nose. “You ain’t gonna kill me! You ain’t gonna
touch me!”

“I didn’t do nothing!” the Poison T-shirt guy
yelled, but Rebel Flag kept punching him, so he started fighting
back.

While the two of them struggled, Tommy
noticed Beater, proprietor of the red-gargoyle Harley, easing back
toward the front door of the bar.

“Wait,” Tommy said to him, and Beater froze.
“Stay right there. Stay.”

“Okay.” Beater held up both hands. “I’m not
doing nothing to you, okay?”

“Right. So just wait there a while. And
forget about me. Forget what I look like. Just remember you sold
some guy your bike and blew the money.”

Beater broke into a goofy smile. “Hell, yeah,
man. I’m happy to do that.”

Then Tommy took the man’s bike and rode
across Georgia, and into South Carolina.

Now Tommy approached the town of Fallen Oak.
He missed the turn-off onto Esther Bridge Road, but it was a good
thing. He saw some kind of roadblock down that way. Not just
police, either. It looked like the Army or something.

Tommy kept going. He couldn’t risk being
identified as an escaped convict, especially when he was so close
to her.

He couldn’t give up his obsession with
Ashleigh Goodling, either. His dreams about her grew more powerful,
even addictive, so he couldn’t wait to sleep and dream about her.
She would know things about him, he thought. She would have the
answer to the insane riddle of his life. His intense dreams had
convinced him of that.

There was only a small voice, somewhere in
the back of his head, suggesting that he might be crazy for letting
his dreams control his waking life. He ignored that voice.

He drove on. Nobody was going to stop him.
They might block off the roads, but they couldn’t block off every
field, pasture and deer path in a place this rural. He had a
flashlight and a stack of Google maps in the bike’s saddlebag. He
could find his way to Ashleigh Goodling’s house, even if he had to
ditch the bike and do it on foot.

Heather sat crossed-legged on her bed at the
Lowcountry Inn, facing two laptop screens, her scribble-filled
notepad, and an increasingly uneasy sense of dealing with the
unknown.

After three days, laboratory studies had
yielded nothing. They couldn’t find anything like a common cause,
even though most of the cases had symptoms of extremely damaging
infection throughout the skin, muscle tissue, internal organs, and
even skeletal structure.

The voluntary phase of the screening had
brought no suspected cases, either. They might find more when they
pushed out into the community. For now, everyone who exhibited
signs of the disease had already died in that singular incident. No
source had been identified.

Heather was beginning to suspect a bioweapon.
Any wild virus or bacterium with such a powerful effect would have
been teeming all over the deceased bodies. Humans, on the other
hand, had an incentive to engineer deadly bacteria with a
programmed cell suicide clock. Something that could quickly sweep
through a population, and then break itself down so that it left no
trace, would be a powerful weapon.

That was only speculation, though. The
pathogen would have to be programmed, not just to die, but to decay
into undetectable components. And that sounded like science
fiction. She couldn’t begin to suspect a motive, either. But
something had swept through those people and left them in that
condition.

Neither Heather nor the other investigators
had turned up any clear explanation of what all those people might
have been doing there, on the town green, on a Sunday night. It
didn’t seem like any planned event, such as an Easter evening
church service, had been happening. Nobody, not even the immediate
relatives of the deceased, seemed to want to offer any reason why
two hundred people had suddenly converged in the middle of town a
few nights ago.

Based on their medical records, the two
hundred and seventeen deceased had a statistically normal
distribution of minor and major illnesses, their ages ranging from
teens to the elderly. Only one African-American case had been
identified, a teenager named Neesha Bailey. The town itself was
forty-five percent African-American. Heather wondered at the
discrepancy. Maybe it indicated some geographical division.

The other big anomaly was the teen pregnancy
rate, which was far above the statistical norm. With a few
exceptions like Darcy, there was a cluster of expected due dates
near the end of July, indicating a cluster of conceptions in late
October. Heather wondered if there was a single event involved
there.

Researching on the internet, she found that
the town’s pregnancy epidemic was quite documented. Ashleigh
Goodling, the preacher’s daughter, had made an amazing number of
press appearances talking about the surge in pregnancies. Heather
even found a YouTube video of Ashleigh on Chuck O’Flannery’s
blowhard TV show.

She watched Ashleigh talk with the most
obnoxious man in show business:

“So of course the left has unleashed the
crazy hounds,” O’Flannery said. The man was even fatter and uglier
than Heather remembered. “I’ve seen awful things about you on the
web, Ashleigh. Just hateful bile. Cartoons and Photoshop pictures
that aren’t suitable for this program. Even The Onion has attacked
you. All this attention must be hard on a kid your age.”

“I think it’s sad the left has to resort to attacking
little girls,” Ashleigh said. “But you know what? My daddy’s a
preacher, and he always tells me no matter what I suffer, it’s
nothing compared to what Jesus and the Disciples suffered.
Christians get persecuted, but God takes care of us. I don’t care
if everyone hates me. I have my faith.” Ashleigh rubbed the cross
pendant at her chest, and just happened to skip her fingers over
her breast as she brought her hand down.

“I think you must have incredible strength to cope
with all this vitriol,” O’Flannery said.

“All I ever said was teens shouldn’t have sex,”
Ashleigh said. “How is that controversial?”

“Never underestimate the sheer hatred of the left,”
O’Flannery said. “The truth makes them howl. In fact, I think it’s
time to call out the Liberal Moondogs.”

A sound effect of several barking dogs played, and
four cartoon dogs paraded across the screen.

“Now let’s look at the victims of this radical
atheist principal,” he said. There was a slideshow of
black-and-white photos, pregnant girls looking depressed and
ashamed, accompanied by slow, sad music. Heather had seen a few of
those same girls in the gymnasium over the last couple of days.

Heather paused the video. This Ashleigh
person seemed strange to her. Unnaturally self-possessed and in
command, she thought, for a high-school girl from a flyspeck
town.

On her other laptop, Heather looked up the
Goodling family. None of them had checked in for medical screening.
None of them were identified among the deceased, either. She might
have to put the Goodling household at the top of her community
outreach efforts.

Then Heather looked up the other girl again,
the one Darcy had accused of witchcraft. When Heather asked the
other pregnant girls, a couple of them had reluctantly admitted to
seeing Jenny Morton fall into a pond and never return to the
surface. They had described Jenny as covered with blisters and
sores at the time.

So Jenny Morton was Heather’s first suspected
case. But it might mean dredging the pond at the Goodling house to
see if it held an infected body, whether the body was Jenny Morton
or somebody else. Of course, that sort of thing was what all the
Homeland Security money was for.

Unless Jenny had slipped unnoticed out of the
pond and was still alive, as Darcy had said. A visit to the Morton
house would also be high on her priority list.

She had so little to go on, she might as well
investigate these anomalies.

The bodies were slowly being identified and
their listings marked DECEASED in the database. When that process
was complete, she might have more useful information.

For now, all she had was Darcy Metcalf and
her odd talk of witchcraft.

Late in the afternoon, Darcy brought some
fresh-cut daisies and pansies from her mother’s garden to lay them
on the walkway in front of Ashleigh’s house. Her flowers from two
days ago had withered, of course, but her note was still there.

She frowned as she stepped closer. The little
envelope had been torn open. Darcy lay the bouquet down and picked
up the envelope.

The hand-written note, where she’d poured out
to Ashleigh how much she missed her, was gone.

Darcy frowned.

“Hi there,” a voice said, and she jumped

The boy who approached looked her own age, or
a little older. He had scruffy patches of early beard growth,
midnight black hair, and cloud-gray eyes that immediately reminded
her of Ashleigh. And he was incredibly cute.

“Oh!” Darcy said. “Hi.”

“You’re the one who’s been leaving flowers
for Ashleigh,” he said.

“Um. Yeah. I’m Darcy Metcalf.” She held out
her hand, tentatively, but he didn’t shake it.

“I’m Tommy.” He folded his arms.

“Are you Ashleigh’s…cousin, or
something?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yep. Her cousin. Tommy
Goodling.”

“Wow. I didn’t know…I mean, I…”

“They don’t talk about us much. They probably
wouldn’t want anybody to know I’m in town. We’re sort of the bad
branch of the Goodlings.” Tommy winked.

Darcy giggled.

“So, I’ve been waiting here for hours,” Tommy
said. “Where is everybody? Where’s Ashleigh?”

“Oh.” Darcy felt sad for him. “You don’t
know.”

“Don’t know what?”

“Um, maybe Dr. Goodling or Mrs. Goodling will
be home soon.” Darcy didn’t know how to tell him the bad news. It
should probably come from family, she thought. Dr. Goodling would
know just what to do. “I mean, they’re kind of missing. A lot of
people are missing right now. The authorities are straightening
everything out, though.”

“I don’t understand,” Tommy said.

“Um…oh!” Darcy pulled her key ring from her
purse. “I have a spare key to the Goodlings’ house. I feed Maybelle
when they’re out of town.”

“Maybelle?”

“She’s de-barked, so she’s creepy.” Darcy led
him to the front door and unlocked it. “I was going to feed her and
take her out. Want to help?”

Darcy led him into the house. A Welsh Corgi
jogged up to them, then opened its mouth and rasped at Tommy.

“She’s really sweet, actually.” Darcy rubbed
the dog’s head. Maybelle gave a few more soundless barks at Tommy,
then followed Darcy deeper into the house. In the laundry room,
Darcy filled Maybelle’s bowl with food.