Jenny Plague-Bringer(18)

The mob shouted and ran towards them.

“Now!” the young man said. “Or they’ll kill us both.”

“Give me that knife!” Juliana didn’t wait, but snatched it from the sheath in his boot. While the mob approached, she sliced the bottom hem of her dress at the front and back, and then she ripped the dress all the way up to her waist.

“Now, what are you doing?” he asked.

“Protecting the horse.” She sheathed the knife, took pins from her hair, and fixed the torn sides of her dress around her legs like breeches. Then, finally, she let him grab her hands and haul her up, and she slid into the saddle behind him.

“Take those reins,” he said, pointing at a horse to her left. She grabbed the horse’s reins, knowing there was no time to ask why.

They rode off, flanked by an extra horse on either side. The preacher’s assistant held the reins of the horse on their right. He yelled at the other horses, trying to get them to follow, and a couple of confused-looking horses actually did trot after them.

She looked back over her shoulder as they rode out of the horse tent. The loose, wandering horses were slowing the crowd’s pursuit.

They turned onto the muddy road, riding north along the Mississippi River, toward St. Louis. The two extra horses they’d captured galloped alongside them, making annoyed sounds at being woken and forced to run in the rain. Two additional horses followed at a distance, not eager to run but apparently not wanting to miss the party, either.

She heard the sounds of engines cranking.

“Maybe we should have taken one of those cars instead!” Juliana shouted to be heard over the pounding rain and the commotion behind them.

“Those can’t go anywhere but roads. We wouldn’t be able to escape. Drop those reins!”

Juliana released her captured horse, and so did he. He shouted “Yah!” at them a few times, and then turned and rode off along what looked like a muddy deer path into the woods. No truck or car could follow them here.

He slowed a little when they were out of sight of the road. “Any luck, they’ll follow those other horses down the road before they figure out they’ve lost us.”

“Where does this trail go?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t know, we’re just passing through town.”

“Where are you from? Do you have a name?”

“I do.” He leaned forward and shouted, “Yah!” The horse picked up speed, galloping away from the trouble behind them.

Juliana held tight to the boy’s waist. Her fingers wanted to trace the shape of the muscle under his shirt, and she let them explore as much as she dared.

As they rode through the rain, under the bright harvest moon, she couldn’t help noticing how she felt bounding against him again and again with each stride of the horse’s leg, with only her rain-soaked underpants separating her from his scratchy woolen trousers.

She snuggled her arms tighter around him and rested her cheek on his strong back. Despite the rain, she hoped the ride would never end.





Chapter Six




Jenny stood in her studio, staring at the mannequin. It was an androgynous, hairless, waist-up model clamped in place by a sawhorse. She’d carved and painted all kinds of symptoms into it, dark sores and dripping wounds. She’d glued ugly plastic black flies here and there all over the body, and cut out magazine pictures of people with horrified expressions and pasted a dense collage of them over the mannequin’s heart.

She could never show it to anyone, for a number of reasons, but she had no desire to share it. It was a confession of her evil, a splattering of all the haunting memories of death and suffering that crawled inside of her. The point was in the making of it, in doing something with the guilt fed by the horror movies that never stopped playing inside her mind. If she didn’t find a way to let them out, they would eat her up. She’d seen her dark side, with Alexander, and she wasn’t going to be that person again.

Jenny touched a hand to her stomach. No heavy bleeding yet. The little starter baby was still swimming around in there like a tiny fish. She felt bad for the doomed creature, but she avoided thinking of it as a person. It wouldn’t live long enough for that.

Seth knocked on her door, and Jenny turned down her stereo. She had to listen to Patsy Cline on a digital music app now. She missed her mother’s record collection, still back home with her dad. She missed her dad every day, too. She’d lived with him for eighteen years, then vanished, and it was almost certain that she would never see him again. She couldn’t risk returning to the United States.

“You busy?” Seth asked, leaning in the door.