The Virulent Chronicles Box Set

by Shelbi Wescott

  Everything about her grief made Salem angry.

  That girl had no right to fall apart like that when she didn’t know the fate of her family, Salem thought. She watched in horror as the girl put her head on the news table and ran her fingers through her hair—she was wearing a thick diamond on her left hand.

  “Shut up,” Salem said to the TV. “Shutupshutupshutup!” She reached down, grabbed one of her mother’s plastic Mason jar water cups, and tossed it at their television. The impact made a small dent in the screen before it rattled away.

  It wasn’t enough. The damage wasn’t enough. So, Salem crawled across the floor and grabbed a book. She threw that, too. Then the remote and a small stack of coasters. Still, the girl on TV cried on and on.

  And it was the crying that unhinged her—Salem could feel her own anguish slip away and slough off like a snakeskin. Her mother and her father were all she had in the world and she had lost them, but she would not stay idly by and wait to die. She stretched herself out on the floor and stared at the ceiling, the newscaster’s sobs a soundtrack to her resolve.

  “Dear God,” she prayed out loud. “I’m going to die.” She winced involuntarily and tried again. “No… I’m not going to die. I’m going to live. And that’s going to be worse.”

  As the words left her mouth, she realized in horror that they were true. The dead were lucky; it was the living who would suffer. She felt oddly calm. Her entire world had eclipsed—everything bright and good now veiled with dark shadows—but somehow, the tightness in her chest unfurled.

  “I don’t know what to do. Please tell me what to do.”

  The TV screen cut out, and the sobbing woman went silent. In her place was a blue screen and a message accompanied by the low tone of the emergency broadcast system. Salem read the message twice: Stay inside your homes. Do not attempt to leave. If you are out and away from your house, seek shelter at a community disaster location. Schools and churches. Stay inside your homes. Do not attempt to leave.

  But then Salem looked at the body of her father, and behind the kitchen island was the body of her mother, and she knew that there was no way she could stay and wait in the house; she would go crazy to stay in the same room as her dead parents.

  As a Catholic, Salem believed her parents had truly gone on without her to a place of glory and beauty. It comforted her to think of them united with Jesus—and she was jealous of them. “There’s no worry in heaven,” her mother had told her once, and she hoped her mother had been right. She hoped they were not worrying about her. She hoped that somehow, God put a barrier and sheltered His recent arrivals from the state of affairs in the world they had left. It was the only thing that gave her comfort.

  Salem realized she had stopped crying and she worried that her parents deserved more tears, deserved more than she felt capable of giving. Her fear over what would happen next moved swiftly to shove her sadness to the periphery.

  But there were things she still had to do. So, she climbed off the floor. Her legs wobbled beneath her as if her legs received a memo that they too should absorb some of her grief. Her legs grudgingly carried her to the small pantry in the kitchen where her mother kept their dried beans, boxes of macaroni and cheese, and her stash of prayer candles. Salem sat down on the cool tile and pulled out the worn Johnny Walker Red cardboard box; the candles clinked together and created a small chorus of chimes.

  Some were new, others well used, but Salem pulled out each one and set it down next to her: The sacred heart of Jesus, St. Michael the Arch Angel, the mother Mary, St. Jude, and St. Lazarus. Her hand trembled as she held the St. Lazarus candle in her hand. The wick was black and the dried wax, too. Her mother had lit this candle for her friend who was battling cancer, but Salem wished the Lazarus candle had different properties. She set it aside.

  There were twenty prayer candles in all, and Salem placed them strategically around the kitchen and the family room. Then she lit them in turn. It was hard to see the flames with the morning light filling the room, but she didn’t care about that. With each one burning, Salem sat down in the middle of the floor and stared at the mess around her. More than anything, she wanted to hold her father’s hand, kiss his forehead, and tell him that she loved him. Why hadn’t she told him that she loved him?

  With the candles lit, Salem prayed with vigor and intensity. She tried to focus all of her energy toward God so that he could hear her prayer amidst the onslaught of prayers going up to Him.

  “Take my life… or tell me what I’m supposed to do,” Salem said aloud. “Give me the strength to survive this… give me… give me… I don’t even know what to say anymore. I don’t even know what’s happening. This is the end. It’s the end…”

  The blue screen on the TV evaporated, and a national news team replaced the emergency broadcast with a hurried and harried report. Somewhere, somehow, the news went on despite the terror outside.

  “Various countries are accusing others of the bio-warfare. While we don’t know for sure, there were reports of drones and military-like aircraft… Some countries are issuing claims of immediate counterattacks. We will try to stay with you—” the anchor said.

  Another anchor lifted her head and stared at the camera, her jawline tight, her face pale. “Dear Americans,” she started as her voice broke, “Stay strong and fight.”

  Salem lifted herself off the ground, walked over to the TV, and turned it off. There was nothing anyone could tell her that would make her decision easier or more palatable. She stood in the center of the family room and stared at the things she had seen for so long that she no longer noticed them: the icon of Mary above the china cabinet; the picture of her parents on their wedding day; her baby album, dusted weekly, on the side table.

  She was numb, hazy, and even though the TV was off, she could still hear the barking seal cry from the young girl with the ponytail and see the shiny ring. At any moment, Salem expected a paramedic to walk in to her house, examine her parents, and tell her they were going to be okay—it was just a bad virus, but the doctor would be able to fix them. Doctors could fix everything.

  When her brain tried to steer her back toward reality, Salem fought and pushed back; she wished for strength because without it, she would lie down in the middle of her empty house and allow herself to rot away, piece by piece, side by side with her parents.

  And she couldn’t do that. Something inside her was telling her to go, leave, and find survivors. The still, small voice wormed into her thoughts and said, “Go, go, go.” Salem wanted to believe it was God’s voice. God was telling her to go to the high school to try to see if her friends or teachers could help her. The plan seemed rational and logical—the news was telling people to congregate at the schools if they couldn’t get home. And one thing was certain above all else—this was not her home anymore. She would not stay.

  “I love you. Te amo, te amo.” Salem stood by the front door and held a backpack filled with a few essentials: water bottles, food, some pictures of her family, and an extra change of clothes. “I’m so sorry…” she continued, and she closed her eyes. “I have to do this. I have to go… I can’t—”

  She paused and took in a shaky breath. “We’ll see each other soon. And maybe, I’ll be back… maybe…”

  Then, without finishing her thought, Salem opened her front door and stepped outside. The spring air hit her, and she gulped down the cool crispness. She hadn’t realized how stuffy her house had become and how much it already smelled like death. After two quick steps down to the driveway, Salem felt overcome with nausea and she had to stop and throw up in the bushes. Across the street, she saw her neighbor on her porch in a bathrobe scramble back into her house and slam the door. Twenty yards up the street, Salem noticed an abandoned car with its driver side door open and a body on the road beside it. The sky was a strange orange hue, and it reminded Salem of the sky over Central Oregon one summer as she and her parents vacationed alongside roaring forest fires. It was an apocalypse sky: surreal and dream
like.

  Fumbling in her pocket, Salem took her keys and unlocked her car. She threw the backpack on to the passenger seat and backed out of the driveway inch by inch, looking in every direction multiple times to make sure she was safe. With the abandoned car in the middle of the street, she was forced to head to the left, and so she drove at ten miles per hour and scanned the neighborhood for signs of the fates of her neighbors. Some houses were dark, normal. Others were wide open—garages, windows, doors—with people in the yards. Eight houses down, Salem saw a man sitting in his yard cradling a body. She looked away before she could ascertain if the dead was young or old.

  At the intersection, Salem stopped and looked both ways. A fire truck, siren off, lights blinking rapidly in succession, was parked perpendicularly across the street to her right, preventing access. So, she turned left again. However, two blocks up, more abandoned cars littered the roadway, and she was stuck. Backing up, she took a side street and wound her way through more neighborhoods—all eerily similar in scope as though the entire Portland area had a role to play in the outbreak. Seven more U-turns and a failed attempt to sneak through a traffic jam backed up to the main road left Salem spent and frustrated. She was half a mile away from the high school on foot, so she would simply have to walk. Grabbing her backpack and locking her car for good measure, Salem joined the throngs of other people with a similar idea and left her vehicle behind.

  There were dozens of people roaming the streets in various stages of distress and as she worked her way out to the main road, more materialized. Some had been in car accidents and stood bloody from wounds; others ambled aimlessly, trying and failing to call people on their cell phones. One man stood on his lawn dressed in fatigues as he held an M-16 rifle against his body. He watched as Salem passed, nothing moved except his eyes, and he tracked her until she was safely past his house.

  Salem knew a shortcut to the school through a small, wooded area—it was a natural area to support wildlife in urban areas, but it was a common place for some of the Pacific Lake High School kids to sneak into to get high. She stepped over the wooden guardrail and wound her way down to the cement path that ran from one end of the refuge to the other. The tree cover obscured the orange sky and there were still birds chirping, a small collection of geese on a manmade pond. From somewhere off in the swamp, a frog let out a low ribbit of welcome. Salem stopped and swung the backpack off her shoulder, unzipped the front pocket, and pulled out a water bottle. Putting the cool plastic against her forehead, she was about to crack the lid when she heard a low growl and felt sudden pressure on the small of her back. A hand gripped her upper arm and Salem tried to scream, but her voice was caught and muffled.

  “Dangerous day for you to be alone…” the voice whispered, and Salem pulled and struggled.

  “Help!” she whispered. “Help!”

  The voice laughed. “Sweetie… the world is dying right and left. You think your help matters today?”

  Salem sunk her weight and tried to pull the stranger down and away from her, but nothing worked.

  It was then she felt the small prick of something sharp in her side like a bee sting. The man had a knife and he had positioned it against the fleshy sides of her stomach—Salem’s mind raced to anatomy class and wondered if he was about to slice open her kidney or her spleen. She tried to remember which vital organs lay beneath the sharp prick of the knife.

  “Don’t—” Salem choked. “My parents are dead…”

  She didn’t know why she told him that, but she had hoped for sympathy and instead, she received a throaty laugh that turned into a hacking cough. She still could not position herself to see his face, but she could imagine him all the same. His coat would be brown and stained, his hands dirty, and he smelled like salt and cabbage. Unsavory, her mother would have said.

  “Water,” the man demanded. “I need that water. You have more in there?” He batted the hand with the knife toward Salem’s backpack.

  “Take the water,” Salem said, knowing she had more. “I don’t have more in here… but take this one. Take it.” He loosened his grip a touch and Salem spun, but she was too slow to make a break for it. The man, a baseball cap pulled snugly over his forehead, made a grab and yanked her shirt, then he jabbed at her and the knife caught against her skin. She screamed in agony; the blade felt hot against her ribs, and she dropped the backpack and ran.

  Her brain could not even compute what had just occurred. She had been attacked. For her water bottle. She ran through the wooded area, darting around the path and up through the fallen branches and shrubs until she reached the main road. Still concerned that the man would follow her, Salem kept running until she reached a residential street, and then she waited, out of breath.

  She still had her phone. Now it was her only earthly possession, and she checked to see if she had any messages. None. Her phone blinked—no service, no service—and she put it back in her pocket, the tightness in her chest returning. Only then did Salem look down to assess the full damage of her attack. A jagged scratch stretched down her side, and blood dripped down her skin. With an index finger, she caught a bit of blood on the tip. She rubbed it with her thumb as though she was testing the color.

  Salem heard a whoop-whoop of a siren, and she spun toward the noise. A police car rolled down the side street, its lights going.

  “Please stay inside your houses,” a man’s voice called out through a speaker. “Portland police are requesting residents to stay inside their homes at this time.”

  With her hand on her side, Salem took a step forward and turned to watch the car roll by her. Through the rolled-down window, the police officer looked at Salem and then saw her blood-soaked shirt. He put the car into park, the lights still going, and stepped out of the vehicle.

  “Are you injured?” the man asked. Salem sighed and resisted the urge to give him some sarcastic reply. He was young and had pimply skin. It was then she noticed the CADET lettering across his arm, and she took a step forward.

  “Are you a police officer?” she asked.

  The young man nodded. “I am now. Instant upgrade. My name is Nick. I can take a look at that cut…”

  “I need a ride to the high school,” she said.

  The boy named Nick shook his head. “I can’t do that… You have to go back to your home.”

  “My parents are dead.”

  Nick nodded, his faced scrunched with sympathy, and he breathed out through his teeth. “I’m sorry for your loss. Here…” He opened the back, rummaged through a duffle bag, and pulled out a zip-up with a Portland Racquetball logo on the front. “Use this to help stop the bleeding?” The question made it sound like he was pulling solutions out of thin air. She took the sweatshirt and held it to the cut.

  “I’m really just trying to get to the high school,” Salem repeated. “My friends are there—”

  It was a lie. It was a half-truth. She hoped that Nick-the-insta-cop would realize that she wasn’t a threat, she felt fine, and all she needed was a ride less than half a mile, and he had a car with lights that could get here there.

  “The school is in lockout and lockdown—”

  “The news said to go to the school…”

  “There’s a lot the news has gotten wrong today.”

  “I have friends there,” she said again.

  “Right now, you need to go back to your home. The city will work out details for disposal.”

  “Disposal,” Salem repeated. She shivered. “I’m injured,” she whispered. “Just take me—”

  Nick opened his mouth to repeat his canned instructions, but his body jerked once and his face drained of all color. He took a step back away from Salem, and the fear in his eyes made her turn and look behind her. She half-expected to see the crazy, knife-wielding man barreling toward them, but there was nothing, nobody. When she looked back at Nick, he was on his knees in the street. Vomit poured out of him and rolled down the cement. As he was retching, he raised a hand to Salem to stay back, as if s
he needed reminding.

  Hunched over, puking, Nick’s entire body heaved, and Salem knew what would happen next: blood would pour from his nose and his eyes, he’d convulse and collapse, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

  “Thanks for the sweatshirt,” Salem said, her voice hoarse, and then she took off running. She left him. He was just a kid, like her, and he was going to die in the street on his first day of being a real police officer, and the last words any human would say to him were thanks for the sweatshirt. Salem rolled those facts around, but refused to feel guilty about the choices she had made, and she refused to think about what was going to happen next. He had a gun—that kid had a gun—and now that gun could go into anyone’s hands. She picked up her pace and ran harder, even as the images of that guy in the street ran through her head. Her side ached with each step. Deep, thick, throbbing pain stretched from her ribcage to her hip.

  After a hundred yards, she slowed down and rested, her lungs on fire. Salem wasn’t much of a runner. She’d once had her mom write her gym teacher a note saying she was struggling with female issues and couldn’t run the mile. The teacher, a thick, former football player with arms and legs the size of tree trunks, who probably couldn’t run a mile either, skimmed the note and handed it back without a word to her. He merely shrugged and walked away—Salem viewed his indifference as a victory.

  Now, she wished she’d made a small effort to get in shape. She’d only run a fraction of a mile, a sliver of what she’d been expected to do, and her body wouldn’t move another inch. It revolted, exhausted and in pain.

  Still, the school was near.

  So, Salem trudged forward, onward. She clutched the borrowed sweatshirt to her side and kept her eyes and ears open for sounds of distress. There were sirens in the distance and engines revving, screams and crying, and then there were pockets of silence—stretches of nothingness where Salem entertained the nightmarish thought that she was the last person standing. She checked her phone to see if the service had returned and Lucy had texted back, and she became more distressed as each silent minute ticked by.