Jenny Plague-Bringer(24)
One of the men shut Heather’s door without saying a word. They would remain outside, but clearly, Heather wouldn’t get far if she tried to leave. Her heart pounded in her ears. She was trapped.
“Dr. Reynard,” he said. “Because of your years of federal service, I’m going to level with you. I’m currently the director of a defense intelligence agency whose name you would not recognize, nor could you find it in any official budget or organization chart. We have been here since the earliest days of the Cold War, watching, studying...Our focus is on identifying threats and opportunities that lie outside the typical military paradigms. Homeland Security? To us, they’re just the courtesy officer tooling around your local mall in a golf cart.”
“They have all the information,” Heather said. She was scared, but she made an effort to look calm. She didn’t want him to see her tremble.
“Why did you resign from the CDC?”
“I was tired of being away from my family all the time.”
“Oh, yes.” Ward took a framed family picture from her desk. “Liam. And little Tricia, five years old. She was dying of leukemia, wasn’t she? Until, one day, she wasn’t.”
“She’s in remission.”
“Oh, no. We’ve reviewed her records. She’s cured. Like she never had it at all.”
“No one’s ever really ‘cured’ from cancer. There’s always the possibility—”
“Nobody except your daughter and several other children on the same ward, at the same time,” he said. “Miraculous, isn’t it?”
“We’re very grateful for her improvement—”
Ward smashed the family picture on the corner of her desk, and Heather jumped as fragments of glass sprayed everywhere. He threw the broken frame on the floor.
“Don’t give me that,” he growled. His green eyes burned bright. “The probability is off the charts. What happened at the hospital that night?”
“It must have been God,” Heather said. “That’s what everybody tells me.”
“God.” Ward smirked at her. “I don’t believe in God, Dr. Reynard. But I believe in the devil. I believe he’s in all of us, that he is us...” He stalked closer to her, and Heather backed up until she bumped against her desk. His voice dropped to a whisper as he leaned in close, his breath hot and sour on her cheek. “Tell me, Heather. What is the source of Fallen Oak syndrome? Why did you want every victim, and every inch of that old mansion, incinerated?”
“The pox,” she said. “It had to be stopped. It could have become an epidemic overnight. Virulent. Contagious. Airborne.”
“No,” he said, stepping even closer, until she could see nothing in the world but his face. “I want the whole story.”
“Get back,” Heather whispered. She eased her hand toward her purse. Three-star general or not, he was going to get eyeballs full of pepper spray if he didn’t step out of her personal space.
He grabbed her head in both hands and stared into her eyes. Heather’s hand dove inside her purse, but then she felt like she was twisting and falling, suddenly lost in her own memories. She could feel him penetrating deep inside her brain, and she had no way of stopping it.
She flashed through her initial epidemiological investigation of Fallen Oak, the interviews with Darcy Metcalf and other locals, the tissue samples....Then she saw the true source of the outbreak, a small, sad-looking girl named Jennifer Morton....Not an immune carrier, as it turned out, because there was no biological vector. Combined with the zombies caught on video in a Charleston morgue, Heather was reluctantly realizing that the situation had to be supernatural, contrary to all her own beliefs....
...and then Seth Barrett, healing Tricia’s leukemia. And then Heather standing by the blazing ruin of Barrett House, promising to help Jenny and Seth, to report them dead and strongly recommend that everything be incinerated...And the next day, Heather watching from a truck as men in biohazard suits loaded corpse after corpse into an incinerator truck. The demolition of the burned-out old mansion, the earth scorched with flamethrowers.
“Jennifer Morton,” Ward said. “And she’s still alive. Where?”
Heather gasped as the man stabbed deep into her brain, scouring it for information that wasn’t there.
“Where?” he shouted again, shaking her. “Where?”
“I don’t know!” Heather screamed.
Ward released her and stepped back as Heather sank to the floor, weeping uncontrollably. Her brain felt like someone had torn through it with a claw hammer. Her head would ring and ache for days.