“Seth, what the hell are you doing?” Jenny shouted.
The blond girl opened her eyes and turned to look at Jenny. Definitely not Ashleigh, now that Jenny got a better look at her face.
“Who...are....you?” the blond girl asked, between thrusts of her hips. She smiled dreamily.
“Seth!” Jenny shouted.
Seth's eyes drifted open and his head drooped to the side in Jenny’s direction. His grin was drunken and lopsided.
“Hey, beautiful,” Seth said. “You came.”
“Fuck you, Seth!” Jenny slammed the door. She ran back through the sitting room and out into the hallway, slamming that door, too. She felt like something had just split her in half, ripping her open right down the middle.
She ran to the stairs, angry and numb at the same time. She wanted to cry, but she’d already used up all her tears tonight.
Jenny ran down the stairs. There was a fire exit on the first floor, but it was marked EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY - ALARM WILL SOUND, so she ran out through the lobby of the hotel. The manager, a slim man with a thin mustache and a white suit, gasped as she darted between an elderly couple and out the front door.
She felt broken into pieces. Seth didn’t even have the decency to wait until he moved away. She'd already developed some doubts about his commitment, but now it was obvious he didn't intend to stick with her over the long term. Of course not. Why would he want to spend his life with some freak like her?
Jenny raced down the walkway and out to the crowded sidewalk, where she collided with a group of sorority girls in stretchy black pants. She blundered through them and kept walking.
“Oh, excuse me!” one of them shouted after her.
“What an ugly bitch,” another one commented.
Jenny forced herself to slow down and fold in her arms. She couldn't risk infecting people. She had to move slow, even if everything inside her was screaming at her to run.
She wove her way through the clusters of people on the sidewalk. The street was full of people, too, but now a police car was rolling slowly through them, pushing even more people onto the sidewalk around Jenny.
A bright spotlight beam flared inside the police car and swept the crowd. It passed over Jenny, then quickly swung back to her and stayed there. She froze where she was, raised an arm to block the light, and tried to figure out what the cops were doing.
“You,” the cop shouted from the car. “You stay right there. Do not move.”
The largest morgue in Charleston was at the Medical University of South Carolina, conveniently located a dozen or so blocks from the big music festival. Alexander knew they were all there at the festival—the fear-giver and the love-charmer, the plague-bringer and the healer, and finally Alexander’s opposite, the dead-speaker, Esmeralda. That was her name in this lifetime, anyway.
Alexander walked into the morgue at the Department of Pathology wearing blue hospital scrubs and a surgeon’s mask. All autopsies in Charleston County, forensic or medical, happened down in these rooms. Just the place he needed to visit.
He passed an autopsy bay where two morgue assistants were preparing for an autopsy. One laid out clamps and blades, while the other wiped down the pale corpse of a gigantically obese man with a thick beard and many badly stretched tattoos. Alexander eyeballed the ceiling-mounted lamps on adjustable metal arms over the autopsy table. Those lengths of metal could be useful.
“This is nasty,” said the morgue assistant washing the corpse. He was younger, a white guy with short green hair. “They don’t pay me enough.”
“That ain’t nothing,” said the other assistant, an older black man. He was clearly the supervisor, since he was laying out blades instead of rinsing out decaying fat folds. “Just before you started, we had this O.D.’d hooker, every venereal disease you can name growing all over the place. Looked like week-old pot roast down there.”
The younger guy made a small heaving sound, and the older one laughed. Then he noticed Alexander approaching the refrigeration unit.
“Hey!” the older morgue assistant yelled at Alexander. “Who the hell are you?”
Alexander didn't stop for questions, but continued on to the wall of little stainless steel doors, each one holding a corpse behind it. It was like one of those Christmas calendars where you were supposed to punch out one cardboard square a day, to find the chocolate treat hidden behind it. He couldn’t wait to see what the morgue had for him. He hoped it was full.
He opened one and slid out the conveyor drawer, which held a body covered in a white sheet. Alexander whipped off the sheet, revealing a fiftyish woman in a pantsuit with a shattered arm and a partly crushed skull. It looked like she'd died in a traffic accident.