The Virulent Chronicles Box Set

by Shelbi Wescott

  Lucy opened the door slowly, just a crack, and waited for the hammering to start to open it wider. “Grant...unlock the journalism lab.”

  “Are you crazy? Spencer’s right up there,” Salem put an arm out as if to stop Lucy. “I want the stuff too...but we should wait.”

  “You’re right. You’re right,” Lucy nodded. Then she turned to Grant, “Unlock the woodshop instead.”

  He nodded and worked fast, sneaking out into the hall, with the hammering above them as a beacon of safety. Grant let Lucy into the workshop and then took off down the hall, running out of sight. Lucy turned on the lights and scanned the shop for what she was looking for: Any block of wood that could cover the small gap between the door and the floor of their hideout. She found a pile of scraps and among them a sawed down two-by-four. She estimated it was four feet long and so she grabbed it, lugging it out into the hallway and back into the closet.

  Salem was sitting on a couch, her knees tucked up, waiting. Her hair was matted on one side. Lucy shut the door and set the board down across the floor. It was a perfect fit and it blocked out their light. Since the door opened outward, this was the board’s only purpose, but it gave Lucy a small bit of relief about keeping their light on during times when Spencer, on patrol, could see it.

  The hammering stopped, but they could still hear Spencer on the roof, his heavy feet walking around the perimeter of the East Wing. Lucy imagined he was exploring for other points of entry. If the stairs in the boiler room were the official roof access point, then Lucy knew that he would take care of that too.

  She had to give Spencer credit, if he wanted his school secure he was doing everything in his power to make that happen.

  When Spencer resumed hammering, Grant singularly recovered their blanket and hand sanitizer, a box of Kleenex, a deck of cards, and an assortment of sweatshirts and pill bottles. He shifted in and out of the journalism room swiftly and undetected.

  Then they sat back.

  “What do we do?” Salem asked.

  “We wait,” Grant answered.

  They pulled out the deck of cards and played a lazy game of Go Fish; Salem had to be told she won and she barely registered the news before dumping her winning collection in the middle of the floor. For an hour they heard the incessant pounding and dragging above them before all went quiet.

  When everything had been silent for a long time and they were certain Spencer wasn’t returning, they darted across the hall to assess the damage. The ladder was still on its side on the ground, the tables tossed over too. Where the room used to glow with the light from the open hole was now dark. The skylight had been covered with long slabs of wood, but not just the hole they had created—Spencer had nailed wood over the entire plastic skylight section, blocking the sun entirely, and preventing them from recreating their escape route on another section.

  This time, there was no announcement—no intercom interludes to give them peace of mind. He had locked the gates, he had closed their escape and he could watch and wait for them to make a mistake and reveal themselves. They had a small gun and limited bullets and a small room with limited resources to sustain them. Eventually they would run out of food and water and they needed to get out and find their families; and that worry nagged at Lucy most of all.

  Darkness fell over their second night.

  They wouldn’t have known it was dark, except their phones broadcasted the time for them. Lucy’s phone had a live background that displayed an open field and a sun moving across the sky throughout the day. The background was now darkened shadows and stars, a crescent moon. Her battery life was now at 5%. The phone hadn’t succumbed to its low-battery or cracked screen. It was a miracle.

  Every once in awhile they thought they heard something outside, but they couldn’t tell if it was inside or outside or from which direction. Their cubby was insulated.

  They devoured another round of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drank bottled water. They discussed the problems of where to pee and decided that the faculty bathroom mere feet away was too risky. So, Grant set up buckets in the woodshop—each of them claiming a canned food drive shirt to use as toilet paper. It was disgusting and inhumane, but it was the reality of their situation.

  “When should we turn out the light?” Lucy asked. “Just to be safe?”

  Nobody responded.

  “Patrick Miller,” Salem said the name slowly as if it had just come to her—as if she had been trying to remember it for ages.

  “What?” Grant asked. He stopped playing basketball with the torn up pieces of poster paper. He had been lobbing them upward and trying to land them in a paper cup on top of the refrigerator. “What about him?”

  Lucy turned on her belly so she could face Salem and propped herself up on her elbows.

  “Patrick Miller was a crush I had sophomore year. Right after I got back from Texas. Just this total goofball. Moved here from somewhere in the South and had this thick Southern accent. Do you remember him at all?” Lucy shook her head. “He played piano and wore a tie to school sometimes for no reason. And he was totally unpopular, but I liked him. I felt like I should maybe go on a date with him anyway, even though I was nervous, didn’t know what people would say. How silly does that sound...but I thought it would be too big a risk to my social standing. So, then he started dating Brittney Phillips and I just got pissed.”

  “The cheerleader?” Grant asked. He resumed his paper-shooting game. Aim. Shoot. The paper bounced off the rim, the cup toppled over and fell to the floor. He looked at it like he wanted to pick it up, but didn’t move.

  “Yeah, that beautiful, perfect little cheerleader. Who—on top of being the only cheerleader who could pull off stunts—was also like super nice? And she took calculus. Super nice calculus taking cheerleader. Ugh. And she really liked him, you know?”

  “I don’t remember her dating anyone,” Lucy said. Just to say something, anything. Just to be a part of the conversation, but she knew better than to question Salem’s recollection of events.

  “Well, it was like a six month thing. Went right into the summer. Then something happened and they broke it off the next school year. That doesn’t matter. Brittney, true to form, never said anything bad about him. And he dropped the ties and started hanging out with the student council kids and joined yearbook. One day I had to go ask him for a yearbook photo for an article I was writing and I just felt all clammy. Like, well, here’s my chance. But I mean...seriously...Brittney Phillips? I convinced myself that my first crush on him was because I felt sorry for him. But that he was gonna be alright, you know? He survived that first year here, got a hot girlfriend, made some friends. And I wanted to be like, you know, I liked you first. I liked you before. Hey, Patrick. Remember when you would sneak into the band room and play Beatles songs on the piano? I stalked you and would listen. And I kinda fell in love with you. And I’m kinda sorry you’re popular now. Because I kinda, actually, want you all to myself.”

  Salem shrugged and picked at lint on her pants.

  “You never told me about him,” Lucy replied.

  “Yeah, well, I thought you might tell me to go for it,” the corners of Salem’s mouth turned up into a soft smile. “And what-might-have-been is always easier than well-that-was-a-disaster.”

  “The dream is better than the reality,” Grant affirmed.

  “Exactly. But it wasn’t entirely just in my head. He was the coolest kid I ever wanted to be with. And I never told him.” Salem looked to all of them. She sniffed. “Here’s the thing though. He was out there today trying to get into the school with me.”

  Grant and Lucy looked down at the floor—Lucy lowered her upper body to the floor and rested her head on her forearms.

  “One minute, he was there. I saw him and I was going to talk to him. The next minute, gone. Just like that. People moved him out of the courtyard and just dumped him on the grass, like he was garbage. Patrick Miller, the boy I still thought well, maybe, in the future. After college eve
n. Or maybe I could just say, I don’t know, just admit that I liked him. And now it’s not even that I’ll never get to say it. It’s not even that. It’s this idea that he’s completely gone. And I want to remember him. I just keep thinking of everyone who will never be remembered. How sad is that? And there won’t be memorials or funerals or...I mean...they don’t even get their own time to be remembered. Just another body.”

  Lucy felt the tears building. She sniffed and let them fall. “Yeah. I thought that too,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—” Salem paused. “It’s just—” her hand went up to her crucifix and she spun it along the chain.

  “I get it,” Grant said. “I understand. They matter.” There was a long pause and then he added, “Amanda. Amanda Starr.”

  “I knew her,” Salem said and closed her eyes.

  “Yeah. She was my first love. For a whole summer she came to my dad’s farm and we swam in the little creek by my house and we’d ride horses. Then in September, the day before school was starting…she came out to me. She was too embarrassed to tell anyone. She said she always knew since she was little, but that her parents told her she just needed to find the right guy. We talked for hours. It was actually a really good moment. I told her I loved her. And she asked me not to tell anyone. She said she wasn’t ready. That we’d take it to our graves.”

  “I didn’t know that. Amanda was gay,” Salem repeated the news slowly and shook her head. “What else didn’t we know about people? People we saw every day.”

  There was a bit of jealousy in her voice; here was a juicy piece of someone’s life that Salem was not privy too. Something she had missed, that someone else knew. She looked at Grant with adoration and begged for him to keep going. “What else? What do you remember? What were you too afraid to tell someone?”

  So Grant cozied up, wrapping the fleece blanket around his legs and leaning his head back. “I don’t know…what do I remember?”

  Slowly, slowly, they brought classmates back to life with humor and anecdotes. The spilling of secrets that no longer mattered.

  Lucy contributed when she could, but mostly she listened, feeling heartsick. She wondered what they’d say about her if she had been one of the fallen.

  It was human to want people to remember you; human to want to feel heard. With her last remaining battery life, Lucy opened up her profile page and her fingers hovered over a status update. She typed, slowly: I’m still alive. Then she poised her finger around the send key and contemplated if it mattered if she sent it, if anyone would see it, or if just saying it out loud made it feel like a victory instead of a loss.

  Then Lucy gasped. Just as she was about to exit out, void the call, her phone buzzed in her hand.

  She had a text message.

  Lucy’s veins ran cold. Her hand was almost too heavy to click on the smiling-face icon. That little emoticon so bright and cheery and so full of hope.

  She looked.

  It was from Ethan.

  Ethan was out there and he was alive. He’d sent her a message mere seconds ago.

  Ethan: Don’t leave Pacific. Stay safe. I’m coming for you.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Five days after The Release

  Ethan’s imminent arrival gave Lucy hope and equipped her with temporary patience. She had tried unsuccessfully to send him a text in reply, but the network kept bouncing it back. Out of anger and frustration she just sent a message that said Waiting! both as a battle cry for her frustration and an exclamation of her excitement.

  Of course, that text slipped away and sent.

  The last message she could get to him was neither revealing nor warm, and she hoped that Ethan would not think her text was implying she had been anxiously expecting him for two days. She was so happy he was alive. That was all that mattered.

  Each of them worried about immediate details. How would Ethan find them? How would he navigate Spencer’s supreme desire for a school absent of all other lifeforms? And then the most dangerous thought of all—maybe the text had been sent days ago and only now found its way through the fickle network. Then their hope and plans would be futile and in vain, entirely rooted in misconception.

  It didn’t help that it had been three days since Lucy began expecting Ethan. Her phone died not long after the text arrived and Salem and Grant’s phones didn’t last much longer. She was vigilant and aware, but losing confidence every hour.

  “Something must’ve happened. It wouldn’t take him this long to get here,” Lucy complained. It was day five. Grant’s baby-face began showing subtle signs of fur as pale blonde whiskers poked up on his chin and under his nose, barely noticeable, but still there.

  It was morning. They assumed. Hours and minutes weren’t important, only daylight and darkness. Spencer periodically marched the halls, which kept them confined to their hideout for extended periods of time. Lucy had ventured to the journalism lab on two occasions to check the Internet and found that sites no longer existed. There was an endless hourglass, in perpetual thinking, never connecting to a world outside. She occasionally ventured to the woodshop to use their makeshift bathrooms, but for the most part, over the past few days, Grant, Lucy, and Salem had stayed hunkered down, feeling restless, crazy, sad.

  “Do you think he got here and Spencer shot him?” Lucy asked. “Possible, right?” Sporadic gunfire was now a normal sound and they regarded it with annoyed eye-rolls and when it interrupted naps or sleep and they growled in frustration. They never assumed Spencer was actually shooting at anything in particular, but they could have been wrong.

  “You’re being paranoid,” Grant said. He clicked a confiscated zippo lighter open and ran his thumb over the flint wheel over and over again.

  “Am I?” Lucy paced. “We’ve been shot at.”

  “We don’t know if he wanted to kill you,” Grant replied. The wick erupted into flame for a brief second and Grant closed the lid tight.

  “It takes an hour to walk to my house.”

  “Lucy—” Grant said her name slowly with an undercurrent of warning. “You’ve been having this conversation for days now. Days.”

  Salem, who had been watching Lucy pace, her head moving left and right like she was in attendance at a slow-moving tennis match, stood up and walked to the mini-fridge. Flipping it open, she grabbed a peanut-butter-sandwich and bottled water and she opened the package with an exaggerated rip, the crinkling of the wrapper was the only sound in the tiny space. Lucy’s stomach soured a bit as she watched Salem eat, the smell of peanut butter filling their small room. At first it was welcome nourishment, but now Lucy could barely choke one down. She was okay with hunger if the alternative was another peanut butter sandwich.

  Salem paused mid-bite and rushed back over to the fridge, sitting on her haunches, legs folded under her. She began to pull out the food with both hands and sort it into three piles. When she was done with the contents of the fridge, she moved to the garbage bags, adding whatever bags of chips or granola bars they had left. She worked with determined efficiency—pull, stack, sort—her jaw still working her breakfast.

  “What are you doing?” Grant asked.

  Salem, mouth full, glanced sidelong at him. “I am seeing,” she answered.

  “Seeing what?” Lucy asked.

  “Food,” was all Salem said. She took the three piles of sandwiches and waters, juices and thawing chicken nuggets, yogurt squeeze tubes, and then counted. She looked to the trio wide-eyed. “If we eat three meals a day and drink 2 bottles of water a day…this will last us…only three more days.”

  She sat back, and then sprang up, reached for Ethan’s backpack and started rummaging through it, tossing out Lucy’s books in distracted ambivalence.

  “Three more days and then we’re out of here. Ethan or no Ethan.”

  “Stop,” Lucy said and when Salem ignored her, she put her hand out, touching her friend on the shoulder. “Stop!”

  Then Salem’s hand landed on what she was looking for�
�a yellow thin-tipped highlighter—she walked back to the food and marked it: L, S, and G. After branding their piles, she stood up and crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Wait, wait, wait. Wait a second,” Grant said. “But you already ate a sandwich this morning and Lucy and I haven’t had anything. So, that isn’t even. And you ate three bags of the popcorn last night when I didn’t have any. So, it’s not like we’ve been equitable until now. Why the sudden concern over fairness?”

  “I’m not concerned with fairness,” Salem replied, her hand still hovering over the sandwiches. “I’m concerned about eating. And making sure we can eat. And here,” she hoisted herself up and walked over to her half-eaten sandwich, broke off two pieces and handed them to Grant and Lucy. “Fine. Now we’re even,” she said.

  Lucy handed her piece to Grant and walked over to the couch and plopped herself down; she grabbed a thick chunk of her hair and began to spin it around her pointer finger. It was oily and slick. She caught a whiff of her own body odor and turned her head away.

  “There’s no more food. Don’t you get it? We’re trapped in here. This is all we have. So, your pile is your pile. You can eat it all at once or ration it out. But your pile is your pile.”

  Lucy looked to her stack of food and then to Salem, wondering what nightmares Salem had encountered in the dark to wake up so changed and rattled. They each had their share of waking up mid-scream. As time passed, they got closer to each other every evening, sleeping in a mass on the floor, pulling each other close for warmth and comfort. The room was suffocating and small, but the people of history had often waited for the world’s atrocities to end while hiding in small attics, basements, and closets.

  They would be fine.

  Ethan was coming.

  They would be fine.

  Lucy wished she could convey the mantra with enthusiasm to her colleagues in waiting. In an act of boredom, she reached into Ethan’s book bag and pulled out the copy of Fahrenheit 451. She read the first line. She read the line over and over fifty or more times before moving on to the next section. The words floated before her—her eyes scanning those six simple words before she moved to the next part. Bradbury had been right, she realized, but he hadn’t taken his dystopia far enough. Eventually someone would burn the whole thing down.