Virulent: The Release (17 page)

As Lucy tried to pull away from the creatures, she saw a mass of dark hair the same color as her mom. The body ebbed and flowed toward her and away from her. Lucy reached out to touch the hair and get a closer look. She needed to know. She had to know.

The face started to shift toward her and Lucy put a hand on the back of the dead woman’s head.

But as the face rolled into view, Lucy scrambled backward. The woman had no face; there was just a giant gaping hole where her features used to be.

It was the pounding that woke her.

Vigorous strikes of a hammer against wood.
Thunk-thunk. Thunk-thunk. Thunk-thunk.

Grant mumbled and his clothes rustled in the dark as he fumbled around, trying to sit up.

Then they heard the creaking of footsteps on the roof, the dragging of material across the tar, a crash, and then more hammering.

“He’s on the roof,” Lucy said, sitting up, rubbing her eyes.

“What’s he doing on the roof?” Salem asked sleepily.

“He’s on the roof!” Lucy said again and shot up, stumbling forward, kicking an empty juice bottle, and reaching for the lights. When she hit the switch, the room lit up brightly and they all groaned and covered their eyes, squinting and adjusting. Grant and Salem looked at her, failing to grasp Lucy’s urgency. “He’s blocking us in. He’s taking away our escape route. Between the gates and covering our roof access? We will be stuck in the East Wing.”

“You think he knows we’re still here?” Grant asked, standing up and stretching.

“No,” Lucy shook her head. “I think he thinks we bolted.”

“Good, then we’re safe!” Salem let out a long breath.

“No,” Lucy said again through clenched teeth. “We’re not
safe.
And we
are
definitely trapped.”

“We need to get the stuff we dropped when we were running away.”

Salem confessed that she had dropped the loot from the locker cleanout on to the blue couch in the journalism room. “But I suppose we can’t go in there now…it’s lost forever.”

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 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 even. 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. Their lives mattered.” 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, her phone buzzed in her hand.

She had a text message.

Lucy’s heart stopped and her 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.

His message was from mere seconds ago and it just read: “
Don’t leave. 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.

They all worried about immediate details. How would Ethan find them? How would he navigate Spencer’s supreme desire for a school absent of all other life? 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.