She called Jenny back.
“Darcy, thank God,” Jenny said. “Are you okay?”
“Huh? Yeah, I’m peachy. Why?”
“What about Seth?”
“I guess he’s okay. I haven’t seen him in a while.”
“A while?”
“Coupla hours, I guess. He went off with a bunch of his old friends.”
“For a couple of hours?”
“It’s okay,” Ashleigh said. “I’m having a good time anywho, and I get they don’t want some pregnant chick hanging around. And Seth doesn’t want to look uncool in front of his friends, and I know what it’s like when you don’t want to look uncool—”
“Darcy, Seth might be in danger. Are you sure you don’t know where he is?”
“Well, I don’t see him anywhere, but there’s like a bazillion people here,” Ashleigh said. “Did you try calling him?”
“His phone’s not even on.”
Ashleigh smiled. She had pickpocketed Seth’s phone, turned it off, and dropped it in Darcy’s big canvas purse. Though ugly and horribly big, the purse was turning out to be pretty useful.
“Well…I don’t know,” Ashleigh said. “I guess I could go back to the hotel and look for him there.” Through the glass window, she saw the girl sucking Seth’s dick. Ashleigh pounded on the window. When Allegra looked up at her, Ashleigh shook her head and did a cutting motion across her throat. Why wouldn’t that slut slow down? Ashleigh must have overdosed her with love. “How far away are you?”
“I’ll be in Charleston in ten minutes, but I don’t know where to go from there.”
“Meet me at The Mandrake House.” Ashleigh gave her directions, including which parking garage to use and the best way to walk to the hotel. She figured Jenny would use the same route when she later left the hotel, and that was something Ashleigh was interested in controlling. “I’ll just wait in the lobby for you, okay?”
“Yeah. Darcy, everything’s crazy right now. I’m so glad to have you as a friend.”
“I’m glad to have you as a friend, too, Jenny,” Ashleigh said.
“You sure kicked up a big storm,” Schwartzman said. He sat beside Heather, looking out the airplane window into a dark, murky night. “You sure this was a good idea?”
Around them, more CDC investigators were clustered around laptops and talking in low voices, as they caught up on the scarce information.
“There could be a serious event tonight,” Heather said.
“You better hope there is,” Schwartzman said. “The National Guard’s on alert. We have state and local police looking for this girl—”
“That could be dangerous.”
“—with orders to report if they see her, but leave her alone until we can get a biohazard team out there. Homeland Security’s going to be all over that city. This is going to be one hell of a bar tab if you’re wrong, Heather.”
“But you can imagine what she could do in a city, with a big crowd like that.”
“I can imagine things all day,” Schwartzman said. “I can imagine Director Voynich asking why we raised the nation’s threat level an entire color today, if nothing turns up.”
“They still do that color thing?” Heather asked.
“Heather, I’m serious.”
“Me, too. I had no idea they still did that.”
“Heather—”
“What do you want me to say? If there’s a fifty percent—fuck, ten percent, five percent—chance she’s going to repeat what happened in that town, shouldn’t we try to stop it? Shouldn’t we capture her? Quarantine her? Study her?”
Schwartzman tilted his head back and narrowed his eyes, a look that meant he was studying you with possible intent to psychoanalyze.
“That’s what you want, isn’t it?” he asked. “To study her. You think you’ll discover something.”
“Possibly,” Heather said.
“Something extraordinary.”
“We passed extraordinary a while ago, don’t you think?”
“What is it you want to know?”
“I want to understand how she does it. There’s a lot here that doesn’t make any sense.”
“And you’re going to make sense of it.”
“That’s what I do,” Heather said.
Chapter Forty-Three
When she reached Charleston, Jenny parked at the garage where Darcy had directed her. The garage was nearly full, so Jenny had to park on the top floor. She looked over the city as she waited for the elevator, and her stomach tied itself in knots. So many buildings, so many streets, so many lights shining on people everywhere. She'd never been to any kind of city in real life, and the TV really didn't get across the scale of it, what it was like to have so many people in one place.