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.

She rode the elevator down and stepped out into Meeting Street, where the pedestrians were all streaming in one direction—towards the thundering music festival at the harbor.

Jenny called Darcy.

“Hiya,” Darcy said. “Are you here yet?”

“I just parked,” Jenny said. “Did you find Seth?”

“Um, kind of.”

“Kind of?” Jenny dodged around an artist shilling caricatures on the sidewalk.

“Well, I'm at the hotel, so just come meet me here,” Darcy said. “Go down Meeting Street until you hit Battery, then turn left, and you'll see the front doors of the hotel—”

“You already told me that!” Jenny snapped. “What about Seth? Is he hurt?”

“It's hard to explain on the phone. I'll just see you in a minute, okay? I'll wait on the front porch.” Darcy hung up.

Annoyed, Jenny jogged the rest of the way. When she hit the intersection with Battery, she stopped and drew a deep breath.

Her worst nightmare lay in front of her. It was a dense crowd as far as she could see in either direction, clumping here and there around vendors offering hot dogs and face painting. She would have to thread her way through a bunch of drunk kids without touching any of them.

Jenny folded her arms in tight and scrunched her shoulders to make herself small. Though she was fully dressed in jeans, a long-sleeve blouse and a pair of gloves, she didn't want to take any risks. A little gap of skin could open between her shirt sleeve and her glove, and if that brushed against someone, they'd get infected.

She turned onto Battery Street. The crowd around her was mostly her age, high school and college students. Jenny watched them hugging, and dancing, and just horsing around with each other.

Darcy sat on one of the half-dozen rocking chairs parked on the front porch of The Mandrake House. She stood and waved when she saw Jenny, leaving the chair rocking precariously far behind her.

“Hey, Jenny! Hey, over here!”

“I can see you, Darcy.” Jenny ran up the front walk and onto the porch of the hotel. “What's going on with Seth?”

“Well, um, it's kinda hard to say—”

“Where is he?”

“Up in our room.” Darcy held up a plastic keycard marked 303. “But maybe this isn't a good time for you to go up there.”

“Why not?” Jenny asked.

Darcy shrugged.

“Just give me the card!” Jenny snatched the keycard from Darcy's hand, then stomped toward the front door of the hotel. She knew distantly that she was being a bitch to Darcy, and she'd probably need to apologize later. But right now, with everything crashing down on her, she just needed to get to Seth. She needed to see that he was all right, and she needed him to make her feel sane again. Not to mention healing her dad and making him sane again, too.

“So I'll just wait for you here, then?” Darcy asked as Jenny stepped inside. Jenny didn't bother answering. Darcy hadn't answered her question, after all.

Jenny passed through the lobby of the hotel, which was stuffed with hand-carved furniture and lots of paintings and rugs, and she jabbed the button for the elevator. She jabbed it repeatedly, then lost patience and took the carpeted stairs two at a time.

She reached the third floor, which was a short hallway with only a few doors. The brass door numbers were sculpted in some frilly font with a lot of curlicues, so it took her a moment to identify 303.

Jenny figured out how to insert the keycard into the slot next to the door handle. She depressed the handle and pushed open the door.

“Seth?” she asked as she stepped into the room. The door opened onto some kind of sitting room, with a balcony outside. Two doors led off from the sitting room, both of them closed.

Behind one door, she heard Seth's voice cry out, as if he were in agony.

“Seth!” Jenny ran to the door and pushed it open. “Seth, what's wrong?”

The scene inside the room hit her hard.

Seth lay on the bed, naked, all the covers shoved down around his feet. His hands were tucked behind his head, under his pillow, just relaxing and having a great old time.

A girl straddled him, moving up and down on him and panting and sweating. For a second, Jenny could have sworn it was Ashleigh—tall, a head of long blond hair, tan all over. Jenny nearly lost her balance.

For one long, paranoid moment, Jenny thought the last several months had been some extremely elaborate game—Jenny's relationship with Seth, and Jenny killing Ashleigh—all of it faked. If anybody could cook up some deception that elaborate, it was Ashleigh.

“Oh!” the blond girl cried out, and she bounced harder on Seth. “Oh! Oh! Oh!”

It wasn't Ashleigh, Jenny realized now, but some girl who looked a hell of a lot like her. Like Seth had been missing Ashleigh and wanted another taste of what he'd lost. Maybe Jenny's pale scarecrow body wasn't doing it for him anymore.

“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.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Alexander said. “Want to take a walk?”

He laid a hand on her neck. The dark energy flowed out of him, carrying droplets of Alexander's essence into the dead cells of her corpse.

He opened another drawer, revealing a young man with a bullet wound through the chest, his jersey shirt stiff with dried brown blood. Another drawer held an elderly man who might have died of natural causes. Another held a shrunken boy of eleven or twelve with a shaved head.

“What are you doing?” The older morgue assistant approached him, and his green-haired protégé trailed behind him, looking embarrassed. “Where’s your ID badge?”

“Don't you recognize me?” Alexander tugged down the face mask and gave him a big, crazy smile.

“You a student?” the older man asked.

“No,” Alexander said. In his mind, he made contact with the bits of energy he'd planted within the bodies around him. “You work with me every day, side by side. You must know who I am.”

The green-haired assistant approached, standing beside his supervisor with his arms crossed. He was a short and wiry guy, but he looked ready to fight.

“Stop messing with my bodies,” the older man said. “You tell me who the hell you are and what the hell you’re doing or you get the hell out of my morgue.” He pointed to the door. “In fact, let’s just skip to that last part.”

“I am simply carrying out my business,” Alexander said. “And as for my name, I've had far more than I can remember.”

Alexander held up a hand, and the dozen dead bodies slowly sat up behind him.

“I am the vulture circling above from the moment of your birth. I am the eternal force that eats the souls of men and sends the damned to their final suffering.” The dead bodies slid off their tables and staggered toward the mortuary assistants. “I am Death, destroyer of worlds.”

The dozen reanimated corpses lurched toward the two men, their bare feet shuffling forward one step at a time, their toe tags scraping along the linoleum floor. The corpses raised their arms high above their heads, with their hands hanging limp in the air like they were marionette dolls. All the walking dead dropped their jaws wide open and groaned in unison, shambling closer to the morgue assistants.

Both of the morgue assistants screamed and ran away.

Alexander laughed. He mentally ordered his walking zombies to stop where they were, and they locked up as if playing freeze tag.

He opened more drawers, touched and animated more bodies. Some of them were quite diseased, or a bit gory and mangled, but that didn't matter. He was taking them all. And then he’d be on his way.