Jenny Plague-Bringer(134)
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Juliana gradually awoke to the dim, fuzzy world around her. She felt a light, constant breeze, and then slowly realized she was moving.
She was strapped the gurney, her dress still soaked in blood. She’d only been out for a few minutes. The Nazi doctors had been extremely stingy with the pain medicine.
Now she rolled down a familiar concrete corridor, attended by two nurses, who wore surgical masks, caps, and gloves, and two S.S. officers in gas masks who were more concerned about flirting with the young blond nurses than watching the small, blood-soaked form of Juliana. She was firmly strapped to the gurney, and they clearly believed she was unconscious and badly weakened. They were only half right. Juliana quickly closed her eyes again and remained limp on the gurney.
They rolled on past Juliana’s cell, toward the end of the corridor. They must have been taking her to the showers, Juliana reasoned, to wash off all the blood and gore before depositing her back in the cell for the night.
She heard the squeal of the bathroom door opening, felt the bump as they crossed the threshold to the shower room, which was just another concrete-slab room with a few nozzles in one wall.
Juliana summoned up the demon plague within her, growing boils, cysts, and bloody pustules all over her body. With years of practice in her carnival act, she’d developed great control over how and where the plague appeared on her skin. She made sure that every inch of herself looked as repulsive and malignant as possible, raw swollen skin leaking diseased fluids—except for her face, which she kept pristine.
She heard the four people around her make disgusted sounds. The nurses begged the S.S. men to unstrap Juliana and lay on her on the floor for them, but the men snorted and refused, though they wore thick leather gloves. They made the nurses agree to drink with them later, and then they loosened Juliana’s straps.
Juliana’s eyes opened. The guards stood at the head of the gurney, on either side of her, while the nurses were at her feet. She’d had months to study the gas masks, to imagine the fastest way to grab the strap and loosen it from their necks.
One of the guards saw her eyes open, and he pointed and shouted. Now Juliana let the ugliest, most repugnant combination of dripping boils, festering sores, and leprous ulcers erupt all over her face. A nurse screamed, and everyone made sounds of disgust. While her face distracted them for a few seconds, she reached up with both hands, ripped loose their straps, and touched her plague-filled fingertips to their throats. She imagined a dense, angry cloud of tiny black flies chewing through their skin.
Blood dripped out from their loosened masks, splattered Juliana’s fingers. One guard collapsed, and the other pulled away from her, only to stagger back into a concrete wall and slide down, leaving a streak of dark blood above him.
The nurses screamed and ran. Juliana’s first instinct was to let them go, but then she realized they would only go alert all the guards. She wouldn’t have enough time to escape.
She filled her lungs with the dank air of the prison showers and breathed out a long stream of dark spores toward the nurse’s retreating backs. They made it to the doorway before the plague caught up with them, eating through their hair and scalp and bone. The both stumbled and fell to the floor, their heads bursting open like rotten pumpkins, leaving puddles of infected bones and brains.
Juliana eased her way off the gurney and landed unsteadily on her feet. Her balance was poor, and her body already felt strained to the breaking point...but there was something else rising inside her, dark, ancient, and cold. Something eager for righteous killing. Something that delighted in death.
She knelt by the guards, ignoring the gore that dripped from their bug-eyed masks. One of them had a thick ring of keys, which he’d probably borrowed from the cellblock guards at the desk outside the corridor so they could put Juliana back into her cell. She took the keys, along with the two Luger pistols from the dead guards’ holsters.
Juliana stepped her bare feet over the decaying spill from the nurses’ ruptured heads. She stalked up the corridor, opening the door panels to look into each cell. Most were empty. She felt renewed anger when she saw the fading red stains on Evelina’s floor and wall. The girl had been gentle and quiet, her voice through the vent providing Juliana’s only companionship for weeks of pregnancy. They had simply decided that her race was now too much of an inconvenience, and so they’d killed her. Juliana hoped she would see Alise on the way out, so she could leave her pretty face contorted, swollen, and lifeless.
Sebastian was the only other prisoner remaining on the hall. He took in a sharp breath when she opened his door, wearing her blood-soaked gray dress. He ran to embrace her, and the plague sores on her skin faded slowly.