Jenny Plague-Bringer(89)

He’d also learned that he could scare the hell out of mice and chimpanzees. He assumed human tests were next. That could be fun.

Things looked hopeful for him here—General Ward Kilpatrick clearly had big plans for Tommy’s future.

Tommy already ached to see Esmeralda again and felt terrible for leaving her, especially since they’d parted angry at each other. He wanted to think of her waiting for him back home, and imagined himself coming back to her, finally a success and not a loser. He knew that he was no good for her, that he only held her back and sometimes made her miserable, but he still loved her and wanted to be with her. When he came back a better, more successful person, then she would understand why he’d left.

He flipped the gold coin in his hand. It had belonged to old man Tanner—Pap-pap, as Tommy and the other children had been required to call him—and Tommy had stolen it the night he met Esmeralda. He’d given it to her as a present, and she’d kept it all these years.

He’d been a little surprised that Esmeralda hadn’t wanted to come with him and learn how to use her power for the greater good of the world. She seemed content to spend her life arranging funerals and applying makeup to dead people, but Ashleigh had taught Tommy to reach for bigger things in life. It hurt that Esmeralda had turned down the idea so quickly, and she had seemed to care so little when he left.

For a moment, the room seemed to shift around him, as if he’d had a glimpse of other walls hidden behind the ones around him, drab olive instead of white. All of the small hairs on his body stood up, from his legs to the nape of his neck, and he shivered as if a ghost had passed through him.

The sense of déjà vu permeated the place for Tommy, whether he was doing tests in the lab, eating at the cafeteria, or even sitting here in his room, where the feeling seemed at its strongest. It was like being in the most haunted house in the world, every room crowded with ghosts he couldn’t quite see. Sometimes, like now, the feeling filled him with a strange, paranoid terror.

Tommy left the television on as he left his room and walked down the deserted hall. He wondered about the people who’d originally occupied the rooms on this hall. Nazis had lived here, he reminded himself, and he broke out in nervous sweat.

He walked to the common room, where there was a big-screen television, multiple game consoles, surround-sound stereo, a foosball table, and a pool table, along with bookshelves full of military action movies and video games. They seemed to expect more residents in the future. Tommy doubted they’d provided all this stuff just so he could play with himself.

He turned out the light, lay down on the couch, and blasted an “Arena Rock” music station over the television to drown out his thoughts. The bad feelings weren’t so strong here, and he thought he might be able to sleep.

In that halfway region between wake and sleep, still aware of himself lying on the couch and hearing Guns N’ Roses at painful volume, he had a strange waking dream in which he saw himself walking down the same dormitory hall and entering the same room, but the walls were drab olive, and all the entertainment gear had been reduced to a bulky wood-cabinet radio and an old-fashioned phonograph player with a big funnel amplifier.

Tommy wore heavy black boots in his vision, which echoed on the wood-tiled floor of the boys’ hallway and common room. Within the dream, he somehow knew that this was the boys’ dorm, and there were, elsewhere, both a girls’ hall and a conjugal hall for the eugenics portion of the project.

In his vision, the common room had more spartan furnishing, and a Wagner record had replaced the sound of Guns N’ Roses. Tommy reasoned that he must be completely asleep now, because he could only hear the television very distantly.

A boy was in the common room, reading a book on ancient Roman wars—the bookshelf in the room was stocked only with books about Germany and war. Tommy knew the boy was from Holland and his name was Willem, that he was twenty-two years old, while Tommy was only nineteen in this dream, but Tommy had authority over him. Tommy’s authority stemmed from the black uniform jacket he wore, and the black boots.

“Willem,” Tommy said. “It’s Saturday night, we should have some fun.”

“Do you mean it?” Willem adjusted his thick glasses and sat up. He was a squirmy, fidgety, awkward kind of guy. He seemed awed that Tommy would approach him. Niklaus, Tommy thought. To him, I’m Niklaus. “What do you have in mind? Can we leave the base?”

“That’s exactly what I had in mind.” Tommy, or Niklaus, leaned against the door, lit a cigarette, and blew smoke at Willem. “I have an automobile parked just outside the wall. We could drive to a town, drink at a pub, go dancing.”