Episode 40.3: Jennifer

A moment after they left Mina’s house, Todd realized that he was sitting in Jennifer’s lap as she drove. He blushed and ducked between her arm and leg, crawling across towards the passenger side. He hesitated to distractedly brush the glass off of the seat, and as he did felt her thighs against his legs. He blushed harder and crawled past.

Jennifer blushed a little too. She had felt three things against her thighs. She was pretty sure that he hadn’t noticed the third one.

Todd had noticed the third one; it had “sprouted” when he was distractedly brushing the glass of his seat; He liked the feel of her thighs against his own. He thought he had moved on quickly enough that she hadn’t noticed, but worrying about it made him blush a little more. He crossed his legs to try to hide it.

They sat in silence for about three minutes. The silence was broken only by the sound of the rain sputtering against the hood and the ancient engine sputtering against motion. It took them three minutes for them to notice that the rain was also sputtering against them. She cleared her throat.

“Why are we driving into it?” Todd asked in response.

“I don’t think Waldo likes me very much,” Jennifer blushed a little, pointing to his car ahead of them.

“I doubt that’s it. He probably just didn’t notice that your windshield was broken.”

“He seems like he notices a lot of things.”

“Now I see why they call it a windshield,” Todd evaded. “They should call it a rainshield too, though.”

“You seem like you notice a lot of things too,” she said quietly. “What did you and Mina talk about?”

Todd hesitated for a moment. He hadn’t thought about what he was going to say to her at this point since just before Mina had told him that she had died. He couldn’t remember what he had been thinking.

“Well?” she prompted.

“We talked about her,” he said. He looked up into her worried face and smiled. “Watch the road,” he said softly, “And let’s talk about you.”

She whimpered, an action that wasn’t familiar to her, as she turned back towards the road. A few drops of rain hit her face sharply. She hoped they would keep coming, because she wasn’t supposed to cry.

“You’re going to hate me,” she whispered.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” he said. “What happened to you?”

She whimpered again and tried not to look at him.

“Eleven years ago,” her eyes became unfocused and looked ahead. “I lived below the poverty line. I went to a high school where, for a while, things made sense.” She gripped the steering wheel, and hoped, almost prayed that Waldo wasn’t going to turn. “Then people started getting killed.

“I had a boyfriend. His name was…” she gulped. “His name was Bernard Rexi. We had been dating for only a week and then he…” She gulped again. “He was the sixth victim. And that wasn’t the worst of it! My best friends, my ONLY two friends, were ninth and tenth. I got mad.

“More people died. I knew some of them-some were theatre kids, like me. Some were jocks. The killer didn’t have a pattern. It just killed people. Different ways every time.” She paused. “By the end of the school year, half the students had been pulled out by their parents. Half the rest had been killed. My parents couldn’t pull me out-they weren’t around. I couldn’t leave, either. I had nowhere to go. I prayed to be the next victim.

“The day after the last day of school, there were a bunch of people who went back to school. They had figured out what it was, that was killing everyone. It wasn’t a person, they said, not exactly. I was going to go with them. To stop it. But when I got there, I hesitated. Joe was there; he didn’t like me then, either, but he said that he needed my help. To stop it all. He tried to get me to go in, and I was about to, when two men in a van…” She hesitated again, and looked around. “In this van. They came out. They told me to come with them, that I had a future with them. I had the feeling that they had been trying to get me all year. I was about to run into the school with Joe, to get away from them, but they hit him over the head with… A thing. I had to run. But they caught me. They threw me into their van, and then… It exploded.”

“You mean the school?” Todd asked.

“Whatever was in the school. I never found out for sure what happened. They knew, but they wouldn’t tell me.” She shut her eyes. “When they took me with them, to… Their headquarters, they told me some of what was going on. The wrong kind of energy had turned up underneath the school. It was killing people, and they couldn’t get rid of it. But someone at the school could; they just didn’t know who. They had to keep it open. They had paid off the principal to keep it open, so that the students would figure out how they could get rid of the energy. All they would tell me about that night was that the energy was gone now.

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go, anyone else to go to, so I joined them. That was ten years ago.” She laughed scoffingly. “Ten years ago, I thought I was joining the right sort of people. They made me stop aging, somehow. They said that it kept recruits healthier, to stop the aging process. I guess that’s why they did it. No one else in the organization aged, except for the really young ones.

“Five years ago, they finally told me who they really were. They were the Illuminati. The real ones. The secret hand that kept the world spinning. I could accept that. They gave me my black cloak, and sent me out to recruit people into the lower levels.” She smiled bitterly. “My first recruit, he was amazing. He shot up and was higher than me within three years. I was so proud of him at the time.

“A year ago, I found out that the Illuminati hadn’t been trying to get rid of the energy at all. They had been feeding it. They had wanted it to keep killing people.” She growled. “Population control, they said. They thought that I was the one with the power to close it. That’s why they had taken me that night. That was the only reason that I had been invited. I became angry. I thought I could hide it from them, but I couldn’t. Because right after, I found out about what they were doing… On July Fourth, 2013.”

“That’s yesterday!” Todd yelled.

“Yeah.”

“You mean, you were in the Illuminati, and they’re the ones who…”

“They called up the zombies. They escaped, to another universe. I objected. They knew they couldn’t handle me anymore. But I knew too much,” she giggled madly, “For them to kill me.

“They locked me up. They barely fed me, just enough to keep me alive. They barely clothed me. They gave me a rusty mattress to sleep on. I couldn’t stand it. Someone had to know.

“Around the time that 2013 started, I escaped. They chased me for a few months, but I managed to lose them. I managed to convince them that I was dead.” She looked nervously over her shoulder. Todd knew that it was towards the strange black box in the back.

“I tried to claim a normal life. I tried to forget what they were going to do yesterday. I tried to convince myself that I had been crazy. I tried to convince myself that no one would leave the world in that much ruin. I guess that my death didn’t change their mind at all. It may even have convinced them that it was even more urgent to get out of here. They went through with it.”

“My god…”

“I’m sorry, Todd. I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you… Anything. I’m sorry that I couldn’t stop them. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that I was thirty. I’m sorry that I lied to you. I’m sorry.”

“Almost thirty,” Todd said, laughing a little. She looked at him, confused.

“Jennifer, you’ve been through hell. You’ve been through, like, three hells.” He smiled at her. “You were right to lie. I probably wouldn’t have believed it. You had to keep yourself safe. You did what you could to stop them-but there wasn’t much you could do, was there? The age thing… I don’t mind. I don’t think the law is going to have anything to say about it. I don’t think the law is going to have anything to say about anything for a while.”

“Todd?” She whimpered.

“You have nothing to apologize for,” he smiled.

“The rain isn’t still coming in, is it?” she coughed.

“No, it’s not. Your face is still getting wet, though.” She smiled, and her body shook with a sob. She unbuckled her seatbelt, and flung herself forward, wrapping her arms around him. She stopped pretending that she wasn’t crying. He squeezed her tightly, shut his eyes, and smiled kindly. “It’s alright, Jennifer… Let it all out.”

She hadn’t sobbed for more than ten years. She hadn’t been held in someone’s arms for even longer. Both felt wonderful.

The convoy had stopped, the van included, almost two minutes ago. Neither of them had noticed on a conscious level. She had been following Waldo’s car unthinkingly, and had gone exactly where he had gone.

Jennifer squeezed Todd tightly, the two being separated now only by their clothes. He squeezed her as tightly as she squeezed him, and the two knew, for sure, that they were in love. They knew because neither felt the third bit “sprout” until she had stopped sobbing so much. When she did, she chuckled gently, took her head up from his shoulder and stared into his eyes. She smiled, her eyes glistening from the tears. He smiled, his eyes telling her that everything was alright.

They kissed.