Plague (Gone 4)

Roscoe felt an itching in the middle of his back.

He sat down and cried.

Chapter Twenty

25 HOURS, 37 MINUTES

DIANA FED PENNY a little late. But Penny didn’t complain. She was off in some dream that had her smiling to herself, smiling at her own illusions.

The bathroom reeked of human waste. Penny was sitting on the tile floor, legs twisted in front of her, just sitting on a plastic exercise mat.

“Hey, you want to take a shower?” Diana asked.

Penny didn’t respond, just giggled at something Diana couldn’t see.

Diana bent down and tapped her shoulder. She had to do it several times before Penny’s faraway eyes focused on Diana.

Penny laughed. “Oh, that’s the real you, isn’t it?”

“As real as I get,” Diana answered.

“You come to feed the zoo animal?”

“Here’s your food. But I thought you might want to take a shower or bath. I could help you.”

“Is it because I smell like a sewer? Is that it?”

“Yes,” Diana said bluntly. Without waiting for an answer, she went to the tub, a huge oval affair, all pink marble.

How long the water would last, Diana didn’t know. But for right now there was water and it was even hot. There was an assortment of Bulgari bath beads, salts, and shampoos. She popped a couple of the bath cubes into the water.

Penny wasn’t wearing much, just a dirty yellow tank top and a pair of stained pink shorts. She had two pairs of socks on over her broken ankles.

“How’s the pain?” Diana asked.

“Painful. Feels kind of like someone broke my legs and my ankles and my feet. I’ll show you what it feels like.”

Suddenly a pack of rabid, vicious dogs were there in the room. Their eyes were red, their breath steamed, they snapped at Diana, ready to launch themselves and rip her apart.

Then they were gone.

“Like that,” Penny said, taking malicious pleasure from the way Diana had leaped back, batting wildly at the illusion.

Diana calmed herself. Getting upset would just give Penny more of a sense of power.

“Sorry,” Diana said for lack of anything else to say. “Eat something while the tub fills.”

“You don’t have to stay here. I can haul myself up into the tub.” She scooped some of the spaghetti and meat sauce into her mouth with her hand.

“You could drown.”

“Yeah, that would be terrible, wouldn’t it?”

Diana didn’t answer. There was nothing but pain in Penny’s future. There was no way to fix her legs, not without Lana, and nothing to treat the pain but Tylenol and Motrin. It was like trying to put out a forest fire with a squirt gun.

“It’s good you have your power,” Diana said.

“Yeah. It’s great. Really great. It’s like having my own kind of sucky movie theater. You want to know what I was seeing when you came in?”