Virulent: The Release (6 page)

“We are a nation at war with several enemies. The bioterrorism is our first threat. The government is asking that you stay inside. Do not leave your house. If you find yourself away from home and need shelter, then schools and churches are our sanctuaries. Find one. Stay there. Our…”

Thunk. Thunk.
Lucy jumped. Someone was pushing against the door and sliding her carefully positioned tables forward. The flag came unfettered from the tape and drifted downward and an angry face from one of the school’s security guards peered through the glass, his eyes darting around the room—landing on the television before finally locking on Lucy. She dropped off the desk and rushed to the window, throwing wide the curtain, before realizing that these windows would never grant her an escape. But her eyes caught a glimpse of the world outside for one brief moment. It was long enough to see a tower of smoke billowing into the sky, and even the clouds looked yellow and green and hazy. This vantage point had her looking across the football field where a storm of people gathered huddled in masses, their tiny bodies approaching the school like a death-march.

The security guard gained access to the room and he placed a hand on her shoulder and pulled her toward him. She stumbled into his grasp and felt her hopes of reuniting with her brother slipping away from her.

On the screen, images from around the nation and around the world surfaced in a slideshow. Nurses in biohazard gear treating the sick, a man slumped over a steering wheel in the middle of traffic, the wreckage of a downed plane, and a young mother carrying a small bundle out of her house, agony written on every angle of her face.

Lucy looked away.

How had so much happened in such a short amount of time?

The man caught a glimpse of the TV too, and his face collapsed a bit, softening in all the right places, before he toughened himself, shook the image from his mind, and tightened his hold on her. “All students in the auditorium. We’re in lockdown,” he stated.

“I just got here,” Lucy said.

“School is secure. Has been since ten minutes into first period. So, no way, darlin’. Come on,” he pushed her forward, pulling a walkie-talkie from his waistband. “McGuire here. Got a hider in Havs old room.”

It took a moment before someone radioed back. “Is she symptomatic?”

The guard looked her over. His finger rested on the button. “You feel sick?” he asked Lucy. “Feverish? Nauseated?”

She contemplated a snide reply, but then thought better of it. She shook her head.

“If you start to feel achy or if you start to get a headache or blurred vision,” he continued rattling off a list of ailments associated with the flu, while Lucy dropped her eyes to the floor. He led her into the hallway, maneuvering past the fallen, “You tell someone immediately. Understand?”

“Are people contagious?” she asked when he was done instructing her about what to expect upon entering the school’s self-imposed quarantine. She stepped in something wet and slimy; she refused to look down and tried to drag her soiled shoe along the floor to wipe it clean.

The guard shrugged.

Together they walked past a small alcove and Lucy turned her head. The doors and windows leading to the outside were covered in long strips of bulletin board paper. The guard followed her gaze.

“It’s part of the lockout procedures,” he offered. “Cover all windows and doors.”

“The news said that schools were a sanctuary,” Lucy said. Aware of her own impertinence, she blushed.

“Not this one.”

She felt tightness in her legs, and she kept her head low, looking at the ground. The guard’s walkie-talkie came to life with a booming distinct voice, a man she recognized as Friendly Kent, a tall man, with extreme biceps and a closet full of V-necked sweaters. He was the administrator in charge of student discipline, but his nickname was derived from the fact that Kent couldn’t, and didn’t, really enforce anything—excuses and sob-stories were laid at his feet and Kent ate them up greedily, walking students back to the same class they were just kicked out of and telling frustrated teachers to “give the kid a break.”

“Pablo Vasquez was hiding in the staff lounge,” Friendly Kent crackled through.

“Not a chance. Checked it twice,” Lucy’s guard answered.

“In the ceiling,” was Kent’s reply. “Fell through a piece of sheetrock tile trying to move himself to the edge.”

Lucy’s guard chuckled. The sound of his small amusement at a student’s legitimate fear and panic was grotesque to her.

They approached the cafeteria and she noticed all the lights were off and the long windows along the courtyard were also covered out and blackened. The second-period bell rang out into the empty hallways. It was a sound that normally signified chaos and excitement, inciting masses of students scurrying from one end of the school to another with sounds, squeals, yells, and shoes hitting the floor with clacks and squeaks. But now there was nothing. No laughter, no eagerness. No sounds but the two of them walking down the hall in isolation.

Lucy followed in silence past another row of covered windows. Shadows approached the paper and moved carefully along the outside wall like rows of zombies in old horror movies, sniffing and nudging for a way inside, aware of the warm bodies within. Lucy wanted to rush to the paper and pull it free, but the guard edged his way between her and the windows, as if he read her mind.

They rounded the corner past the gym and finally, after opening and closing two sets of double doors, closed upon the auditorium.

Friendly Kent came into view, escorting a sullen Pablo Vasquez, who was covered from head to toe in chalky sheetrock, and he reached the doors to the auditorium before them. He swung them open and sounds and smells poured outward—a roar of energy, hushed, intense—with voices lifting in anger and worry.

And then the meaty aroma of teenage stink burped toward them. Lucy turned her head away. She could almost taste the hormones and the racing fear. Then the doors crashed closed and everything was gone. It was like the opening of Pandora’s Box: Allowing the evils of that room to tease them for a moment before being contained back inside.

Lucy took a step backward, unaware that she was shaking her head.

Her guard pushed her forward, her feet tripping slightly on the outdated red and blue checkered carpet.

“Go in here. Find a place to sit. Don’t be a problem,” he commanded, switching tactics and grabbing her hand.

Lucy stole her hand back and shook her shoulders away from him as he reached back toward her shifting body. “Please don’t touch me,” she whispered. In her own mind, she had made the command with power and aggression—her words dripped with the vitriol rising within her. But instead she had sounded meek and unsure. “I’ll go in by myself,” she added, hoping to ease the temper she saw flare up in the guard’s eyes—a flash that dared her to run, dared her to defy him.

She reached forward and grabbed the door, the smell and the sound bursting forth a second time. And with a deep breath she walked into the darkened auditorium. Even with the lights on full-blast, the whole room was dim and the corners and walls lined with shadows. The stage was in a state of half-construction for the play
Into the Woods
. The pieces of buildings were flat on the floor while a mural of a dark forest with black twisty trees rising up to a yellow moon was nearly complete. The trees kept reaching backward into a dark unknown. Lucy resisted the urge to climb up on the stage and crawl her way into that forest. Even though it was black and uninviting and full of the unknown, it seemed safer than being forced to congregate with her peers.

All around her, people gathered in various levels of distress. Many students sat, staring straight ahead in the stadium seating with phones lighting up their faces. Another group sat huddled in a semi-circle, hugging and crying into each other. Lucy watched a girl with a long streak of red in her hair stroke the head of a boy bawling in her lap; she shushed him and rocked back and forth, her eyes closed tight.

Many students cried out, but most sat in stoic silence, waiting and waiting for someone to tell them what to do. In the back of the room, several teachers stood around the glow of a television. The old newscaster was still talking, his face drawn in a perpetual frown. The crowd spoke intensely, like a wave rolling from the back to the front, and Lucy just stood, planted firm, eyes wandering for a familiar face. She was desperate to see Salem.

But Salem wasn’t there.

Stepping away from the doors and up the first aisle, Lucy meandered. She looked at every face and tried to find a friendly one among them. There was a girl from science class, a boy she used to know in elementary school, a boy in her math class, a girl in yearbook. This one was in band. That one was a cheerleader. She used to talk to those three girls her freshman year at lunchtime—during the year that Salem’s family moved themselves to Texas and she found herself bereft of friendship—but they had all fallen out of touch. Lucy chose to distance herself from the crowd of “fakers,” as she labeled them, brilliantly loyal to your face and the quickest to sell you out to anyone who would listen. Lucy responded to their hurt by eating lunch in her math teacher’s room for two whole months, before, she assumed, that teacher tattled on her and Ethan came and rescued her by dragging her off to eat with his upperclassmen friends. Her entire freshman year was marred with navigating the murky waters of varying degrees of social ostracism. Then Salem’s family decided that they hated Texas and they found their way back to Portland. A move that Lucy credited with saving her life.

Lucy made eye contact with one of her former friends on accident, and as if she had conveyed some social cue that she needed to talk, the girl lurched forward from her seat, stumbling over the back of the chair in front of her.

“Lucy!” the girl screamed and then wrapped her arms around Lucy’s shoulders.

She had forgotten the first girl’s name. Under different circumstances she might have remembered, but her brain was a mess, a total fog. The name slipped away before she could grab ahold. It was Kylee. Or Keeley. Kyra. Kiyah. There it was just hiding in the back of her brain, pushed to the side and momentarily irretrievable. “I am so glad you’re here. I’m so glad to see you. I’m so glad you’re
okay
.” The other girls stood up from their seats and wandered over, their heads nodding in agreement, eyes wide.

“We saw you walk in. What
happened
? Were you hiding?”

“I got to school late,” Lucy mumbled and then tried to extricate herself from them by walking backward. She stumbled on a backpack without an owner.

The girls exchanged glances.

“You weren’t locked out?” one whispered conspiratorially. Maddy or Molly, McKenzie. Michaela.

“Found an open door near the cafeteria,” she lied. It was a silly lie. Who cared now about the secret passageway in the pool? Who cared about any of it?

“Wow,” one girl said.

“Unlucky, I guess,” said another. “Been better if you never got inside.”

Everyone paused and then sighed in unison.

“But it’s chaos outside too,” Lucy replied. “Maybe we really are safer here.” She regretted it as soon as it left her mouth because it aligned her with their common enemy—the girls turned on her; all but baring their teeth under throaty growls.

“We’re hostages,” one of the Kylees said.

“They have us locked in this room.”

“My parents must be worried sick, I just want to get home.”

“It’s awful. This is against our rights,” the maybe-McKenzie seethed and glared down at Lucy. “We still have rights.”

Lucy didn’t want to disagree with them, but she didn’t know if she agreed. She didn’t entirely disagree though. Confusion overwhelmed her. But she nodded anyway, mumbling something about just wanting her parents, which sent the trio into a blubbering mess. The middle girl, short, with a sleek dark bob and peacock inspired eye shadow, buried her head into Lucy’s arm, staining her shirt with a thin streak of snot and tears.

“I’ll be right back,” Lucy said, pulling herself away.

She noticed Mrs. Johnston in the back, her arms crossed over her shirt. She was shaking her head at the television and wiping away tears. Briefly, she conversed with an older male teacher, and he leaned a protective arm around her and she collapsed against him. Then, as if she knew she was being watched, the English teacher turned and spotted Lucy.

Lucy took three giant steps toward her teacher, and for the first time since setting foot in the school she began to feel untethered. She watched Mrs. Johnson’s shoulders shake with the heaviness of silent sobs, her legs trembling under her. This adult was falling apart. Her whole face was swollen and puffy from crying; her eyes, normally outlined in the perfect balance of liner and mascara, were now bare, giving her face a thinner, paler look. Lucy almost looked away, as if she had caught Mrs. Johnston naked.

Mrs. Johnston stared at Lucy with a lost expression. She didn’t smile warmly or beckon her closer. Instead, she just lifted her hands from her chest and dropped them to her side, letting her arms dangle next to the pockets of her jeans.

And only then did Lucy notice that Mrs. Johnston’s entire shirt was soaked with dark, dried, streaks of someone else’s blood.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Oh my goodness,” Lucy said and she walked forward toward her English teacher. But before she could maneuver herself closer, a burly Health teacher, still wearing a whistle around his stump-like neck, swooped forward with his hands out.

“No students in this area. Back to your row please,” the man said, swollen with self-importance.

With no energy to protest, Lucy turned on her heels and turned her back to Mrs. Johnston, who probably had no memory that Lucy wasn’t even supposed to be at school at all. Pulling her phone from her pocket, Lucy had no new messages. The time broadcast itself in large block numbers at the top of her screen. Their initial domestic flight to the East Coast would be in the air within the hour. Lucy entertained the notion in the back of her mind that sunny island weather and fruity drinks in coconut cups were in her future. She clung to those images as a last thread of hope that anything familiar could be salvaged. Halfway down the aisle, Lucy found a clearing of seats and wedged her way to the middle of the row, plopping herself down.