Free Tommy Nightmare (Jenny Pox #2) by JL Bryan

path in a place this rural. He had a
flashlight and a stack of Google maps in the bike’s saddlebag. He
could find his way to Ashleigh Goodling’s house, even if he had to
ditch the bike and do it on foot.

Chapter Eleven
    Heather sat crossed-legged on her bed at the
Lowcountry Inn, facing two laptop screens, her scribble-filled
notepad, and an increasingly uneasy sense of dealing with the
unknown.
    After three days, laboratory studies had
yielded nothing. They couldn’t find anything like a common cause,
even though most of the cases had symptoms of extremely damaging
infection throughout the skin, muscle tissue, internal organs, and
even skeletal structure.
    The voluntary phase of the screening had
brought no suspected cases, either. They might find more when they
pushed out into the community. For now, everyone who exhibited
signs of the disease had already died in that singular incident. No
source had been identified.
    Heather was beginning to suspect a bioweapon.
Any wild virus or bacterium with such a powerful effect would have
been teeming all over the deceased bodies. Humans, on the other
hand, had an incentive to engineer deadly bacteria with a
programmed cell suicide clock. Something that could quickly sweep
through a population, and then break itself down so that it left no
trace, would be a powerful weapon.
    That was only speculation, though. The
pathogen would have to be programmed, not just to die, but to decay
into undetectable components. And that sounded like science
fiction. She couldn’t begin to suspect a motive, either. But
something had swept through those people and left them in that
condition.
    Neither Heather nor the other investigators
had turned up any clear explanation of what all those people might
have been doing there, on the town green, on a Sunday night. It
didn’t seem like any planned event, such as an Easter evening
church service, had been happening. Nobody, not even the immediate
relatives of the deceased, seemed to want to offer any reason why
two hundred people had suddenly converged in the middle of town a
few nights ago.
    Based on their medical records, the two
hundred and seventeen deceased had a statistically normal
distribution of minor and major illnesses, their ages ranging from
teens to the elderly. Only one African-American case had been
identified, a teenager named Neesha Bailey. The town itself was
forty-five percent African-American. Heather wondered at the
discrepancy. Maybe it indicated some geographical division.
    The other big anomaly was the teen pregnancy
rate, which was far above the statistical norm. With a few
exceptions like Darcy, there was a cluster of expected due dates
near the end of July, indicating a cluster of conceptions in late
October. Heather wondered if there was a single event involved
there.
    Researching on the internet, she found that
the town’s pregnancy epidemic was quite documented. Ashleigh
Goodling, the preacher’s daughter, had made an amazing number of
press appearances talking about the surge in pregnancies. Heather
even found a YouTube video of Ashleigh on Chuck O’Flannery’s
blowhard TV show.
    She watched Ashleigh talk with the most
obnoxious man in show business:
    “So of course the left has unleashed the
crazy hounds,” O’Flannery said. The man was even fatter and uglier
than Heather remembered. “I’ve seen awful things about you on the
web, Ashleigh. Just hateful bile. Cartoons and Photoshop pictures
that aren’t suitable for this program. Even The Onion has attacked
you. All this attention must be hard on a kid your age.”
    “I think it’s sad the left has to resort to attacking
little girls,” Ashleigh said. “But you know what? My daddy’s a
preacher, and he always tells me no matter what I suffer, it’s
nothing compared to what Jesus and the Disciples suffered.
Christians get persecuted, but God takes care of us. I don’t care
if everyone hates me. I have my faith.” Ashleigh rubbed the cross
pendant at