Virulent: The Release (8 page)

Without amplification, Spencer yelled, “Follow the orders! Just follow my orders.” And then, as he noticed other children coughing and slumping, reaching out to him for assistance and reassurance, he shot down the stairs of the stage and flung the auditorium doors open wide, running quickly away from the kids with whom he was instructed to protect.

For a second everyone looked at each other with confusion. But then the teachers moved into position—determined to follow the protocol even in the absence of their leader. Some walked swiftly, stern faced, and eager to take charge. It was not surprising that even amidst the turmoil outside, some of the adults found comfort in supervision. They could push aside their own fear and assuage their growing worry with a false sense of control. Lucy closed her eyes and sent up a prayer, a hope, that she would not get stuck with some adult with a superiority complex.

When her eyes fluttered open, it was Mrs. Johnston standing next to her. Blonde hair loose in wavy curls that fell to her shoulders; she was playing with a silver chain around her neck, twisting it around the fingers of her right hand, dropping it, twisting it again. Her normally bright skin was dull and pale, and a dried glob of mascara had latched itself near her cheekbone. With a shaky hand, she ran her hand over a section of five rows.

“You all. From here to here. Follow me,” she called to them, but her voice was small, absent of authority.

Ten of them, Grant included, rose from the chairs—the seats swung backward with repetitive whack-whack-whacks until they slowed to a stop. Lucy grabbed Ethan’s backpack, still weighted down with the textbook and binder, swung it high on her shoulder and stood beside her English teacher. Mrs. Johnston reached out as if to pat Lucy on the arm, then dropped her hand, a shuddering sigh escaping before she turned and began to walk down the aisle, each of the kids in her charge falling into single-file line, the old elementary habit returning.

“Mrs. Johnston?” Lucy asked when they had left the auditorium and were making their way back up the long hallway toward the English hall. The other kids from the auditorium disappeared into other hallways, other classrooms, out of sight. “Mrs. Johnston?”

“Yes...Lucy,” she answered, breathless, slowing her pace, dropping back to walk side-by-side.

“How long can they keep us here?”

“
They
can keep me until the end of my contract hours and then I’m gone,” Mrs. Johnston responded through clenched teeth. “I have a family.”

“But what about
us
? They can’t keep us here. Right? They can’t force us to stay against our will.”

Mrs. Johnson hung her head. “You don’t understand. I have to go. I have to go home. But principal Spencer isn’t wrong...it is safer in this building.” She glanced back at the ten students following her as each one sped up to walk in a huddle, hungry for news.

Grant leaned closer, “Before...when we were watching the television? Someone reported that military planes were flying over cities and dropping a green gas into heavily populated areas. Is that true?”

“I don’t know anything,” she said and put her hands up in surrender. “No one knows anything.” Her heels clipped on the tile, picking up her pace to a brisk walk.

“Who attacked us?” said a sophomore girl toward the back of the group—she clutched her bright red leather purse in front of her like a shield, knuckles turning white. “Do they know who?”

But Mrs. Johnston had decided she was done answering questions, so she did not acknowledge the growing bombardment of worries. As each student lobbed up a theory or a snippet of news, she just walked faster, until the whole group shuffled along at a near-run to keep up with her. It was clear that she was taking the group to her own classroom, steering them back through the trail of bodies that Lucy had traversed earlier. As they hit the long corridor littered with the dead, some of the students slowed. This carnage was new to them, and some of these people were their friends. The sophomore girl closed her eyes tight and stopped moving entirely. She just stood there in the middle of the hallway, her red purse covering her stomach, her feet shoulder width apart, unmoving. She kept her eyes scrunched closed, her mouth grimacing, her teeth showing.

Lucy recognized a boy named Clayton from her biology class among their small group. He called down the hallway. “Mrs. Johnston! Wait up!” Then he walked back and stood next to the girl, touching her purse and gently leading her forward.

“I won’t. I won’t go,” she said and stiffened her body even more.

But Clayton was patient. “I’ll lead you. But you have to take my hand. Like those trust walks, right?” But she wouldn’t lift her hand up, wouldn’t take it off the purse, and wouldn’t open her eyes or budge.

By that time, Mrs. Johnston had noticed half the group wasn’t keeping up with her quickened pace. She stopped and turned, eyes red, new rivulets of black running down her cheeks.

Then Lucy felt it.

Not the quick
buzz-buzz-buzz
of a text.

But the long and sustained
buzzzzzz
of an incoming phone call.

At first she thought she was imagining it—that all of her hoping and daydreaming had turned into an auditory hallucination accompanied by phantom vibrations. Frantic, she dug her hand into her pocket and retrieved her phone. The phone slipped, but she caught it against her jeans, and her sweaty fingers attempted to grab ahold.

As the other students noticed the action, each one looked to their own phones, scampering to send a text, place a call. Hope. Lucy saw it in an instant in all of their faces. Technology was back, so there was hope.

Without even looking, Lucy answered. A lump rose in her throat as she waited for her mom’s voice to hit her ear. Please just tell me everyone is okay, she thought. Please, Mommy, please.

She pleaded for the news to be good.

“Lula? Lula? Are you there? Are you there?” The voice was high-pitched, rushed, and jumbled. Voices swirled in the background and there was a distinct gunshot again—it was louder in the phone, but the blast echoed in the school too.

From outside, this call was from somewhere right outside.

Salem.

“Sal? Sal?” Lucy answered. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the school,” Salem said and Lucy hopped up and down when she heard the news.

“Thank God! Sal, I’m here too! It’s a long story…but I’m inside Pacific right now. No one can get
out
, Salem. They have everyone locked inside! It’s a total nightmare.”

“Lucy, listen. I’m
outside
. I’m right outside the cafeteria, by the big doors. We can’t get in Lucy. No one can get in!”

“No one can get out!” Lucy said overlapping. Then she paused and processed their conflicting wishes.

Another gunshot. Again, she could hear it both in the phone and in her ear. There was a slight delay between one and the other—a small disconnect, as if two shots were ringing out upon each other.

“Salem? What the hell is going on?”

“They’re trying to shoot the card lock off. They’re trying to shoot the glass. I tried to tell them it’s bulletproof, but it’s madness here. God, Lucy, help me! Help me, please!” Salem’s voice was beyond begging, her sobs shot through the phone in short bursts of pure panic.

“I’m coming! Okay, okay! I’m coming,” Lucy yelled into the mouthpiece and, with only a quick look to Mrs. Johnston and the rest of the group—all of whom had frozen to listen to her conversation—she took off running back in the other direction, her phone still pressed to her ear, her backpack rising and falling as she ran, the gravity of it threatening to pull her to the ground. She didn’t know what she would do when she got there, and it only occurred to her that she was running toward gunfire as the cafeteria doors came into view.

“I’m almost there, Sal. I’m almost there,” she said into her phone.

“Lula. You have to get me inside the school. You have to get me inside the school right now.”

CHAPTER SIX

Lucy slowed to a stop in front of the windows and doors in the cafeteria. They were covered in thick black paper, and even though she couldn’t see the people outside, she could hear them—yelling and crying and pounding on the glass. Part of the district’s safety plan included upgrading all the windows to war-grade fortification, thick, resilient, bulletproof glass. Before the update, an angry student on a rampage after a suspension broke an entire windowpane by throwing a metal garbage can into the center of the cafeteria door. It shattered during the school day and wasn’t replaced until the following evening at which point an assistant principal found a homeless man curled up in the waterless pool.

In an instant, Lucy reached as high as she could and grabbed hold of the paper and tore it down. The strip slid to the floor and bathed the area in light. She tore another and another, swinging each discarded piece to the side.

Then she stepped back.

Forty. Maybe fifty—she was never good at estimating—people congregated outside in the alcove beyond the cafeteria doors. They were everywhere, pressing up against the glass, their fists pounding in earnest. A woman near the door was pushed forward, the side of her cheek flat against the smooth surface, and in her arms she held a toddler. The child was wearing a blue backpack, and his face was stoic, shocked, and he clutched to his mother out of necessity, trusting that she was leading him to safety.

Lucy scanned the crowd and finally saw Salem a few people deep near the door, waving at Lucy with wild abandon, tears streaming down her face. Salem was still in the clothes she wore yesterday. And for a moment, Lucy wondered if perhaps Salem had never gone to bed. Perhaps she had laid in wait, pondering Bogart, crying with her mother, and snuggling in her mom’s bed. Salem’s mom was a large woman and the soft folds of her body were perfect for hugging. Or maybe, Salem had merely thrown on the first clothes she saw this morning—the ones she had shed the night before near her laundry basket.

The crowd breathed in and exhaled as one, so Salem seized her chance and pushed against the flow, rushing forward to reach the door. Against the glass at last, she reached her hands up and placed them flat. Lucy sprinted forward and matched them—the two-inch thick windows separated them, but their hands touched nonetheless.

“What can I do?” she asked. Her voice was loud, booming in the cafeteria; she was shocked by the sound of it. Salem couldn’t hear her, but she understood.

“Please, please, please,” was all Salem said in return. Over and over she said it, begging for Lucy to do the impossible. She took a step back and the crowd surged and what Lucy saw scared her. She could feel her classmates, Clayton, Grant, and the group, assembling behind her, but she dared not turn to look at them. She knew she would see on their faces what she already knew in her heart: There was no way to open that door.

Lucy felt a hand on her shoulder, but she didn’t look to see who had approached her. She stayed staring straight ahead, her eyes on Salem and the others, her stomach twisting.

“Lucy—” she heard Grant say in a voice hovering above a whisper.

“I know,” she replied without looking at him. But her heart ached for everyone who left the pandemonium of the outside world and turned to the high school for shelter and help. The people arrived there hopeful and scared, seeking solace and aid. Some of the people outside, relegated to the perimeter of the crowd, sat huddled with suitcases and other mementos. What had they expected to find? No place was protected from death.

But this was her friend. Her best friend. This was the girl who convinced her to sit on the uppermost part of the jungle gym in the third grade, a book of mythology in their hands, and pretend it was a book of witch’s curses. They sat for an entire recess casting down spells on unsuspecting second-graders. This was the girl who first introduced her to nail polish and told her, in a whisper-voice one night during a slumber party, to be proud of her laugh. Salem was in every major memory from her childhood and into those petrifying and awkward junior high years and into their high school. College was next—shared dorm rooms, double dates: These were the things they dreamed about. And as she watched Salem’s body ebb and flow outside like a wave, Lucy just assumed that it would be her and Salem forever.

She rushed forward to the doors, not even sure of what she would do once she got there. But she stumbled when she felt a rough hand latching on to her upper arm, forcing her backward. Lucy tripped and ended up on the cold tile of the cafeteria—the floor was littered with dried ranch dressing, crushed corn chips, and strings of wilted lettuce.

Before Lucy could get up, she felt Grant kneeling down next to her. “I’m on your side, Lucy,” he said into her ear. “But this is not the way.”

She paused. Lucy hadn’t even known Grant knew her name. She looked up at him, pleading. “What if there is no other way?” she asked.

“This
can’t
be the way,” he repeated and he gestured toward the mob.

Lucy crawled back to the window. She was still clutching her phone in her hand and she sent Salem a text.

“Pool door?”

But her phone kicked back an error message.

“Send. Send.” She willed it to go through, but it was no use. The phone gave her error message after error message every single time.

Lucy decided to press her phone against the glass, only for a second, while Salem, and others scrambled to read the message.

Then Salem froze. Her face fell, her shoulders slumped, and she allowed those around her to toss her around.

Blocked.
She mouthed.
Or locked.
Then distinctly—
No.

Salem stared directly at Lucy. She motioned around the chaos and someone bumped her. An arm hit the glass, then Salem’s head, and she rocked backward, reeling away. Salem’s body was pitched downward and someone pulled her arm behind her back and flung her to the ground.

Salem cried out. Then she shut her eyes tight; she tried to wiggle upward, and when she opened her eyes, she stared right at Lucy.

She shook her head. Just once. Fear flooding her face, defeat and worry settling around the dark pockets of skin under her eyes.