Shay tapped his microphone and drew everybody’s attention to his screen. “What happened, Huck? We are hopeful your answer is reasonable. Our people will demand it.”
“You are in charge of what your people know about, Shay,” Huck said, annoyed.
“Are you implying I should find someone with more discretion for your post?”
“We shouldn’t discuss this remotely. I petition for an in-person Board meeting,” Morowa demanded.
Huck sighed. “This is the way it has to be. We will no longer humor the entitlement. The Brikham family is one of many who felt that their money bought them the right to make requests and the right to break the rules. They thought they were better, and for no reason. And, as you know, we are not in the position to change course. Our Islands are perfect. They will be run with precision under my direct leadership. Had I anticipated their poor behavior, I would have rid our Systems of them before now. But we were busy implementing Release Day...getting people to our bunkers was enough of a hassle. Then we were supposed to add a second operation? No. It made sense to wait.”
“These are the variables you wished to discuss with us?” Roman asked, his mouth open. “Huck—” he could not find the words to continue.
“They are scum.” Huck spat the word with venomous power. “Scum. Fit only to be used for a time...but not qualified to benefit from our labor.”
“You want to murder men, women, and children...who have already earned their safety?” Mueez continued. “And you wish to make that decision without consulting your Board?”
Gordy leaned close to the camera. “Mueez and Shay. Are you saying you wish to continue to the Islands and live among men like Mr. Brikham?”
“You know that from the start we have been on board with your ideals,” Shay answered. “When you first approached us, we understood immediately the beauty of a world depopulated and then filled with peace. You promised us peace. Calmness. Love. You said we would end war and live among each other in harmony. We were drawn to that message because we have lived through war.” Shay’s voice rose and trembled.
Huck opened his mouth to reply, but the Israeli man continued.
“We share a story. We have lost our daughters—”
“Don’t,” Huck interrupted, his words stern. “Don’t.”
Shay put up a hand in apology.
Mueez took over. “Our System cannot partake in more slaughter. We will work together with those in our System who are unsavory, entitled, and unruly, and we will educate them.”
Gordy looked to the ceiling and rubbed his chin with his hand. “Gentlemen, you are lacking self-awareness right now, and it would be humorous if it weren’t so dangerous.”
He paused and waited. Each Elektos member waited. Their faces were a mixture of concern, fear, curiosity, and complacency. Yuri from Russia even appeared to nod off, his head bobbing up and down, his eyes fluttering. His Elektos partner from Japan, Kazuma, nudged him awake.
“Go on,” Mueez said and he crossed his arms, waiting.
“You cannot pick when you think murder is okay and when you don’t. You already agreed to the demise of nearly 7 billion people. And now...now...you raise your voice against people who truly don’t deserve to live.”
No one said anything.
“Great,” Gordy said. “We’re understood.”
“No,” Mueez pushed. “It’s different. And we refuse to accept that this is the only way.”
“Victor is unusually quiet,” Huck said. “What does Victor think?”
Victor leaned forward. “How many people fit the profile?”
“Roughly one hundred people from every System.”
“Six hundred people total?” Victor clarified. “And what is their sin? Disagreeing with you?”
Huck smiled, and tilted his head, every bit the picture of patronization. “Hardly. This is about the greater good.”
Victor shrugged. “If the list is supplied with intelligence on their crimes...if we feel these people are a threat to the Islands...”
“You can’t be serious,” Shay snapped.
“...we would support Huck’s decision,” Victor finished. “As a voice of my people, I would have to agree...there are people here, in the EUS One, who are problematic to our way of life. Variables, or whatever you would like to call them.”
“Shall we vote?” Huck asked.
“This is a sham,” Mueez shouted at his screen. “We will not take the lives of the people we have offered sanctuary. We won’t. Every life here has value, more value than before.”
“You will follow my lead,” Huck said with deliberate calm.
“We oppose this new direction. Our disagreement is final.” Mueez lifted his chin in defiance.
Huck knocked on the boardroom table. “Claude?” Claude looked up and raised his eyebrows. “Make the call to our central command on the Islands, please.”
“You sure, sir? You don’t want to give them another chance to change their minds?”
“Make the call,” Huck repeated.
Claude stood up and left the room again, the door shutting behind him.
“If you do not abide by the rules, then you do not get to benefit from our protection,” Huck said to the men. “I’m sorry, dear friends. But you leave me with no other choice than to show you what your world would look like without my backing.”
Before the men could reply, their screens went dark.
Kazuma nudged Yuri again. Roman sighed. Morowa looked down, pained, but silent.
“You cut them off,” Victor stated and shook his head. “For how long?”
“Claude can remotely turn back on their solar power in a few days...when the oxygen depletes enough to make them feel like they are near death.” Someone muttered, and Huck’s eyes flashed. “You are guests in my houses,” he seethed between clenched teeth. “These buildings do not belong to you. Whether your hands toiled to make them or your money went to build them...you are in my home. And only through the grace of me will you continue onward to reside in my mansions.”
No one dared to comment.
Huck rose. “Meeting adjourned.” And Gordy swiftly ended the video conference; each screen fading away, leaving only the blank, glassy monitor in front of him, reflecting Scott’s tired, sallow cheeks.
“Father,” Gordy said as they moved past the side of the table. “Be careful...these men are your alliances in Systems out of reach. They could defect before we would have a chance to respond...if you want to keep the men in line, make them comfortable, not fearful.”
“Don’t be stupid, Gordy,” Huck replied.
Claude reentered the room and he paused when he saw the chat had been discontinued. “How long do you want me to keep them in the dark?” he asked Huck. “I have good men there and I’d prefer not to push it.”
“You will turn back on their power when I say for you to turn back on their power. And we will keep them in the dark as long as it takes,” was Huck’s reply and he started to shuffle out the door, his son on his heels. Blair grimaced and marched out after her dad, calling after him. Huck paused and looked at her with twitchy eyes and an annoyed expression. “Be quick, Blair.”
“You promised you’d discuss what we talked about,” Blair said, tapping her high-heeled foot for emphasis. “Today, Dad. You promised. Talk to him about the boy. Please?” She shot a brazen look to Scott and lifted her chin, and then when her father didn’t reply, she looked to him, eyes flashing, begging.
Huck ran his fingers over his head and mumbled under his breath. “Not right this second, Blair. Don’t you have any sense of what just happened in here? Why don’t you show some goddamn self-awareness?” Then he pushed the boardroom doors open and left everyone standing there, glancing at each other in awkward silence.
Scott’s hands were still shaking and he balled them into fists to steady them. Claude put a comforting hand on his back.
“This will all be over soon, friend,” Claude whispered.
Blair turned
and looked at Scott. She cleared her throat and tightened her grip on her bag, sliding it up higher on her shoulder.
“Fine,” Blair said to no one in particular, her lips pursed. “I’ll just tell you myself. My father and I have been discussing the future for the child—”
Without waiting for her to finish, Claude opened the boardroom door wide and held a hand outstretched for Scott to exit first.
“Excuse us,” Claude said to her. “We’re quite busy, Ms. Truman. Perhaps you could take this up with Mr. King at another time. Make an appointment.” Scott hesitated, looking between the hallway and Blair. She had gone rigid, and she bit the inside of her right cheek. Her nostrils flared.
“Of course,” she managed to say before Claude and Scott left her standing alone in the boardroom with only the empty monitors and the lemon smell of cleaning wipes to keep her company.
Chapter Two
Lucy never had a boyfriend before the end of the world.
She had kissed people, sure, various boys here and there, and in the sixth grade she had held hands with an eighth grade boy every day during lunch; he was a cross-country runner with big ears, the beginnings of a moustache, and he always smelled like garlic. Then they ran out of small talk and went their separate ways. When they finally stopped standing in the cafeteria breezeway, clasping their sweaty palms together, discussing teachers and movies and gossiping about classmates, it was a relief: No more forced conversations. No more banal text messages. No more embarrassing questions at dinner.
Dating was awkward. Each and every time she attempted to engage in that teenage rite-of-passage, Lucy couldn’t understand the attraction of muddling through social interactions like bumbling idiots. The boys never talked, or if they did, they were uncultured jerks, and who approached her acceptance of a cheap dinner as permission to paw at her once the sun went down.
Ethan had once told her she needed to date different guys.
But Lucy didn’t think Ethan’s track record seemed worth emulating. After all, Anna’s idiocy was so evident that Lucy often theorized about what Ethan got out of that particular relationship. The suspected answer painted an unflattering portrait of her brother and of love in general.
Unlike Salem, Lucy hadn’t romanticized the idea of falling in love. She hoped it would happen to her, and longed to be someone’s chosen one, but she understood that desire was fleeting. It was easy to slough off the absence of a boyfriend.
But now she had Grant.
It was surreal.
Unexpected.
Natural, even.
Maybe it was because of their shared history, maybe it was because they didn’t have to second guess intentions, but everything about being Grant’s girlfriend felt easy. He grabbed her hand while they walked down the sterile corridors of the System, and he wrapped his long fingers around her waist. Her heart fluttered each time and she’d look at him, really look at him, and think, this guy likes me. They laughed together, played together, and talked in hushed tones, during quiet hours, about the future.
The future. Being in love masked the question marks and gloom most of the time. Now they relished the idea that there was a future together, no matter how uncertain that future looked.
Not so long ago, two sweethearts in their senior year of high school would have much to think about. Would they go to college together? How would they handle jealousy and time apart? Were they a burden on each other’s schoolwork? Did their parents approve of the burgeoning love?
Those were not the dark worries that clouded their conversations.
Instead, they discussed their days inside the System. At worst, they discussed a bleak future ruled by a police state under Huck’s watchful eye. At best, they discussed their ever-growing ennui.
“I agreed, Lucy,” Grant said to her as he laid with his back against the floor of the King family apartment, tossing a spongy miniature football into the air. He missed and the ball bounced off his hands, clumsily bouncing into furniture until resting by Lucy’s feet. She kicked it back to him, frowning. “Don’t look at me with that pout. You know that I can’t take it back. I promised him. And I think he needs me, you know? I think he likes having me there.”
Lucy grumbled and shook her head. “I fought hard to get you out of that lab.”
“We lied to get me out of that lab.”
Her eyes darted to the ceiling, then to the door, as if she expected the guards to descend upon their fraud like rabid dogs. “Hey...you just can’t...Cass said...”
Grant sighed and sat up. “Okay, okay.” He palmed the football and then tossed it under his left elbow, aiming for Lucy, but he missed by a foot, the ball careening into one of the dim table lamps where it knocked the shade askew. He shrugged and offered her a sheepish grin. “I want to help your dad. I like working with him in the lab, okay? It gives me something to do...I grew up on a farm, Lucy. I’m accustomed to being made to feel useful. I hate being holed up down here, but if I am? Might as well learn a trade.”
“Oh, yeah?” Lucy raised her eyebrows. “You think in the future, scientists doing studies on human tissue will be a lucrative profession?”
“Will there be professions on the Islands?” Grant asked, changing the subject.
Lucy hummed and shrugged. She didn’t know anything about the Islands.
“I’m kinda excited. About the Islands,” Grant continued. “Anything is better than this, right?”
“I’m sure that’s the point,” she replied.
Grant looked wounded. He crawled over to his abandoned football and grabbed it in his right hand, bringing it up into the air, letting it drop, and catching it with his left hand. Then he repeated the process, the ball falling into his hands with soft thuds. When he tired of the game, he let the football roll away, and he crawled up onto the King’s couch next to Lucy. She rolled her head over to him and smiled a tight-lipped smile.
“You’re grumpy,” Grant whispered.
And Lucy couldn’t fully deny it, but she sighed and turned her body to face him, tucking her bare toes under his legs. Grant draped an arm over her knees and leaned back against the couch. His coarse blond hair stuck straight up at his crown. She loved that cowlick, and she loved how it gave the vague impression that Grant was still a rambunctious child, too concerned with living his life to comb his hair.
“I’m not grumpy. That makes me sound like an insolent teenager. I’m worried. And there’s too much to worry about right now without you deciding to go work for my father. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that you forgot he was trying to kill you.”
“But he didn’t.” Grant shrugged, as if that was the only thing that mattered.
The door to the King apartment burst open in a whoosh of sound and activity. Galen entered first, holding the hand of Harper, whose hair was neatly wrapped into two bursting topknots. He looked at Grant and Lucy and rolled his eyes.
“Were you kissing? Please tell me you weren’t kissing,” Galen mumbled as he swung his hand free of Harper.
“Ewww, kissing,” Harper repeated and then promptly stuck her thumb into her mouth, sucking away, her index finger curling around her nose.
Maxine entered next, her body laboring under the weight of a sleeping Teddy. The young child’s head was tucked up on to Maxine’s shoulder; his mouth agape, his left eye open ever so slightly. Lucy had readied a retort at her younger brother, but refrained from using it as her mother emitted a death stare, hushing them all with one sweep of her narrowed eyes. When she thrust her chin out toward the bedroom door, Galen opened it and Maxine carried the child inside. Lucy could see how delicately she set him down across the comforter, and how she wiped his forehead with the back of her hand, and bent down to give him a kiss.
When her mother reappeared, she stood outside the door like a sentry, her hands on her hips.
“Nobody wake that child.” She pointed a wagging finger of warning at Monroe and Malcolm who lurked in the doorway. Then she turned her attention to Galen. “Not
a peep. Not a breath. Don’t go near that room, think of going near that room, tell me you forgot something in that room. Don’t laugh. Don’t talk. As a matter of fact, why don’t you all go read a book. Forever.”
Then with an exhausted sigh, she walked over to the couch and plopped herself down next to her daughter, and closed her eyes. Galen spread himself out on the floor, and he stared at the ceiling. The twins pointed back down the hall, communicating some previous question, and then when they realized their mother was too far gone to answer, they disappeared anyway, shutting the door noiselessly behind them. Maxine looked up half-a-second later and acknowledged their absence with a subtle head nod.
When it felt safe enough, Lucy put a hand on her mom’s shoulder and whispered, “Can I go see him now?”
Her mother sighed a second time. “There’s no use, Lucy,” Maxine answered. “Nothing has changed.”
“I thought you said he wanted to see Teddy. He didn’t talk to Teddy?”
Grant pulled his arm off of Lucy’s knees, and she automatically pulled her feet out from under his leg. She swung herself around to face her mom. She waited. Maxine shook her head.
“He didn’t say anything?” Lucy asked, aware of how her voice was rising, trembling. Her mother had no reason to lie, and yet Lucy thought Maxine had to be leading her astray. How could Ethan be so cold?
Maxine parted her lips, but they were so dry that they stuck together, her skin pulling upward and tearing. She ran her tongue over the dryness to moisten them and swallowed. “He was tender toward the child,” Maxine recounted. She looked near-tears, but then she steeled herself with a sniff. “He picked him up. Held him. Cried over him. Teddy talked and Ethan listened...honestly...it was the most we’ve seen. But when it was time to go, he turned to the wall. He wouldn’t look at me. Harper. The boys.”
Galen cleared his throat for attention. But the room ignored him. Harper sucked her thumb to a rhythm in her head. Suck-suck rest. Suck-suck rest.
“Did you tell him? Did you tell him Teddy needs him?” Lucy asked her mother.
Maxine went rigid. She rolled her head over and stared at Lucy, unblinking. “Ethan has been through a trauma, that is clear. But let’s not muddy the water. Teddy,” she paused, as if saying his name caused her a great amount of emotion, “does not need Ethan. The boy needs us. Stability. Love. Compassion. A big family to love him and play with him and care for him. Your brother is offering him none of those things. Teddy had a fit when we left that room. He kicked, screamed, yelled unintelligibly for Ethan and for his mom. I had to sit with him in a dark room of the hospital wing until he calmed down. If that’s what seeing Ethan does to him, then I don’t want Ethan near that child.”
The Virulent Chronicles Box Set Page 74
