Chapter Thirty-Five

Heather strapped on a cleansuit, sealing herself from head to toe in plastic, with a breathing mask connected to a bottle of oxygen at her hip. Since the pathogen's means of transmission remained as unknown as the pathogen itself, the Fallen Oak specimens were treated as maximally dangerous and maximally contagious. A high level of security clearance was necessary to enter the lab dedicated to the investigation.

The entire situation was still tightly stage-managed by the President's special adviser Nelson Artleby. The test samples had all been collected here in Atlanta. In a fairly bizarre move, the White House had ordered all the bodies stored in a guarded facility outside the city. The warehouse had been quickly configured for refrigeration in a special contract given to SyntaCorp, LLC, a giant defense firm where Nelson Artleby happened to sit on the Board of Directors.

Heather couldn't imagine how gruesome that place must be. She imagined shelf after shelf of dead bodies, each one wrapped and sealed in layers of plastic. She wondered how their families would react if they discovered what had happened to their missing loved ones.

Heather shook her head to try and clear away those thoughts. She was here to gather data.

It amazed her to find the lab deserted. It had run round the clock for weeks while the samples were analyzed, but it looked like nobody was even assigned here full-time anymore. Nothing had been discovered by all the testing, which was the scariest fact of all.

Heather located Jenny's blood sample in a refrigerator full of them. They were labeled with tracking codes—each person in Fallen Oak had been assigned one.

She extracted one red drop and dripped it onto a microscope slide, then laid a clear plastic slide cover on top of it.

She peered at Jenny's blood cells.

Jenny had the world's rarest blood type, she knew, AB negative. Jenny's little boyfriend Seth had the opposite, O positive, the universal giver. Heather had developed a related interest in Seth, because he was either immune to the pathogen or he was a handsome teenage boy who didn't mind having a girlfriend he couldn't touch. Heather wasn't sure which of those possibilities was more far-fetched.

Heather zoomed in closer. She couldn't see anything unusual here. Just normal, healthy blood cells, floating sluggishly because they'd been stored at freezing temperature. She knew there was nothing unusual about Jenny's white blood cells or platelet count.

“Okay,” Heather whispered. “Tell me something new.”

Since she couldn't find anything, and every standard test had already been run, she decided to try a slightly crazy experiment.

Heather brought out a clean sample of AB negative from a different person, a blood donor from somewhere around Chicago, someone who had almost certainly never been exposed to Jenny before. She added a couple of drops of the sample to the slide with Jenny's blood, then returned the slide to the microscope.

She watched the sample blood mingle with Jenny's blood. Nothing happened. She'd contaminated the diminishing specimen of Jenny's blood for nothing, she thought.

Then, some of the blood cells began to quiver, their outer membranes vibrating like guitar strings.

In front of Heather's eyes, some of the cells shriveled, others contorted into strange, spiky shapes, and others burst altogether. Other blood cells—Jenny's, she guessed—remained perfectly healthy as they floated among the destroyed ones.

“What the hell was that?” Heather stood up straight and looked around at the empty lab. “Somebody tell me what the hell I just saw.”

Jenny floated on her back, gazing up at the billions of blue and white stars. The water around her was very warm, heated by the June sunlight all day. She knew if she swam down far enough, she would reach the deep place where the water held the winter cold year round.

“It's quiet out here,” Seth whispered. He floated beside her. “Used to be so many people during the summer.”

They were swimming at the small body of water a couple of miles outside town, which Seth called “the reservoir” and everybody else called “Barrett Pond.” It was almost midnight.

“It's weird, isn't it?” Jenny said. “Never going back to school. It's like people tell you what to do your whole life, and then, all of a sudden, nobody's in charge.”

“We're in charge,” he said. “We can do whatever we want.”

“You can. I still have the Jenny pox, and I don't know what to do with myself now.”

“Come with me and Darcy this weekend,” Seth said. “You'll like it. We're staying at a pretty cool hotel, an old mansion in the middle of downtown. Darcy said she stayed there with her family once and it's really nice.”

“Cities scare me. All those people I could infect. I’ve done it to whole cities before, in other lives.” Jenny had begun to think that Pericles, the man she’d been trying to kill in her dream, was a past-life incarnation of Seth. But he never seemed interested in her past-life dreams, so she didn’t see any point bringing it up.

“Are you really worried about that?” Seth asked.

“I have to worry about it every second I'm alive, Seth. It’s what my whole life is about”

“You don't think you might be hiding behind the Jenny pox a little bit?”

She turned her head in the water to look at him. “What do you mean?”

“Maybe you're scared of change,” he said. “A little bit scared of the world beyond this town.”

“That's not it!” she snapped. “You don't understand.”

“I do, though. I'm kind of scared, too, and I'm used to being away. But that was boarding at Grayson. This is different. Nobody in charge anymore, like you said. But it won't be scary if you're with me, you know? It'll be fun.”

“If I go,” Jenny said, “Can you get a place outside the city, more in the country? Then you could drive into Charleston for school, but I won't have to be surrounded by people.”

“I don't know. My parents might get suspicious about that.”

“Suspicious?” Jenny flipped down from her back float and started treading water. “You've been insisting I come and live with you, and your parents don't even know that's your plan?”

“Well...”

“You don't think they would figure it out?”

“They wouldn't allow it if I told them. I'm just trying to do what will work for us now.”

“And what about the future?”

“Why are you freaking out?”

“Because you act like you have it all settled for us, but you don't. What am I supposed to do, hide when your parents visit? Do I just live out of a suitcase the whole time? What’s your plan?”

“We'll deal with it.”

Jenny finally asked the question that had been eating at her, ever since her talks with Darcy Metcalf. “Do we have a future, Seth? If your parents are so against us being together?”

“I can handle my parents.” Seth took her hand and towed her close to him. He tried to kiss her, but she dodged it.

“Oh, yeah.” Jenny swam back from him. “Like you handled them when they told you what school to go to, and what to study, and every big decision you've ever made about anything.”

“Come on, Jenny. I love you. I'll take care of everything.”

“I don't think I believe you,” Jenny said. “I'll think you'll do what you're told, eventually. And where does that leave me? You want me to build the rest of my life around you...until it gets inconvenient for you. And you can move on to some girl your parents want you to marry.”

“That's not true!”

“Prove it,” Jenny said.

“I can't show you the future. We're together today. Tomorrow, next year, we'll keep finding ways to be together.”

“That's what you say.”

“What the hell do you want me to say, Jenny? What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing,” Jenny said. “You have fun with Darcy this weekend. And all your little pals from Grayson Academy.”

Jenny swam away from him, toward the rocky shore. The night was growing a little cold.