The Variables (Virulent Book 3)

by Wescott, Shelbi

  He didn’t just write that. He didn’t just give her the go-ahead to abandon everything they had built together. Leaving the Islands without him was not an option. She kept reading.

  I’ll understand, Lula. I’ll cheer you on, even! I just don’t want you to feel like you owe me anything. I’ll spend my whole life trying to get back to you. So, don’t wait for me. If you see a window, climb out of it as fast as you can. I mean it. I’ll be mad if you don’t. Don’t wait for me, Lucy Larkspur King.

  I love you. I love you. I love you. Grant.

  Lucy looked at the letter and read the last paragraph again and again. She could leave without him? He wanted to have kids with her, but it would be okay if she forged a path toward the future without him by her side? He’d cheer her on for what exactly? He loved her, but what did that mean? He liked her blush, but didn’t want her to wait for him. Somehow he had undone all of the effusive compliments from the first part of his letter by missing the most crucial fact of all: Lucy only wanted to be with him. Freeing her from obligation to him wasn’t some selfless act of chivalry; it was a gross miscalculation of the type of relationship she thought she had with Grant.

  She couldn’t help but think that he had written her a thinly veiled goodbye. Permission to seek a life outside of Grant and Lucy?

  There was no life outside of Grant and Lucy.

  Her parents had lied to her, Ethan blamed her for the death of Teddy’s mother, and Cass betrayed their friendship by keeping secrets. Her younger siblings looked to this life as an adventure, unable to conceptualize the evil that built it. And the people her own age reveled in this false feeling of specialness that Kymberlin was breeding within them. Fools. All of them.

  Grant was the only one who saw through it all. He was the only one who knew how dangerous Huck’s world was. And now even he had stamped her with irrevocable aloneness. Without thinking, she tore his letter in half. It felt liberating to hear the paper tearing. Then she held it and looked at the two halves, and she felt so misunderstood. It wasn’t like she could get him on the phone to discuss his wayward thinking—with the heaviest of hearts she had to endure a communication blackout.

  Feeling a tightening in her chest, she took the letter and tore it systematically into forty little pieces, careful that no words of import were visible on each tiny strip. Then she wandered around the entire library, from one end to the other, and scattered his note within the pages of the great novels: leaving say. It’s among a copy of Moby Dick and normal life in a collection of Plutarch’s essays. She put owe me anything right in the middle of Little Women where Amy threw Jo’s novel on the fire. She took cost you and pushed it into a Nancy Drew Mystery. And then she took the three final I love yous and put one in a romance novel in the paperback section, one in a copy of the Bible—smack dab in the Psalms—and one she tucked into a cushion on a chair stolen from the White House.

  It took an hour to thoroughly displace Grant’s letter from one end of the library to the other—leaving pieces of his words in Ellison, Asimov, Cleary, Seuss, Twain, Brontë, Angelou, and Borges—and when she left the low light and ventured back out into the open and airy tower of Kymberlin, she made a beeline to the elevator and pushed the down button. When the elevator arrived, she pushed the button to the LL and then turned to look around at the people wandering the verandas. Many of them were smiling: families milled around; people laughed and soaked up the sun that beamed down onto them from the glass ceilings.

  Huck had been successful.

  He’d created a place where everyone wanted to be.

  Everyone except Lucy.

  The Remembering Room was empty.

  The circular room had a large imbedded television against one side, and every other square inch of wall space had built-in bookshelves. On the bookshelves were binders. White binders along one wall. Blue in another section. Purple and green. Black.

  Lucy took a binder down off the bookshelf and flipped through its pages. They were filled with laminated news stories. It didn’t take long to figure out the details of this room and the system of the binders: white binders were filled with stories of war and famine. Blue binders were filled with the devastations and aftermath of natural disasters. Purple was abuse against the elderly, children, and animals. Green was filled with stories of greed. Black was murder.

  Some of the main stories were familiar to her—she remembered hearing about these miscarriages of justice in the news or about the children locked in the basement and left to starve. Drunk drivers who killed whole families, and kids who got into their parents’ guns, and school shootings and collapsed mine shafts. Whole collections of articles gave way to decades of horrors; old stories of death and destruction that she had never even known about. A little girl had been kidnapped from her front yard in 1952, her body discovered a year later in the underbrush of a park. A cold case, never solved; no one ever brought to justice. Her heart ached for the people whose stories were told in this room. It was a sick memorial of the worst of the world.

  “You came back,” Gordy said behind her, unsurprised. Lucy jumped and shut a binder. She slid it back on the shelf and turned to him.

  “This is an awful room,” she whispered.

  “A necessary room,” Gordy said. “The Islands will be our home for at least 500 years. Generations will come and go here, and my father’s legacy must remain strong in his absence. We must remind people of why...so they don’t question how. That’s always the way it’s been...”

  “Propaganda to support your genocide?” Lucy asked, taking a step backward.

  “Truth to support a new start.” He looked straight at her. “That’s how we choose to look at it.”

  He walked to the center of the room and ran his hand over a glass case. Inside was a collection of news articles on a specific murder. The murder of a girl named Kymberlin Truman. Daughter of wealthy businessman Huck Truman, and his socialite wife, Josephine. Murdered on her college campus by a man suspected of murdering other co-eds over a period of ten years. However, it was nothing but circumstantial evidence to connect the man to the deaths, so he lived his life after his acquittal like a hermit.

  “Your sister?” Lucy asked, pointing to the case. She had read the story minutes earlier when she first arrived—walking straight to the shrine of a girl’s life cut short.

  Gordy nodded.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He smiled sadly. “She altered the course of our lives with her rebellion. It started many summers before her murder. Not rebellion like you think…she didn’t rebel against us. She rebelled against the world, against hate, against people who are doomed to repeat the awfulness of the past.”

  Lucy stared blankly ahead. “I don’t understand.”

  “Kymberlin was not fit for this world. She was too good for it. She was a big thinker and she would have done amazing things with her life if someone hadn’t decided to end it. Losing her opened up a hole in my life that could never be filled. She was my best friend. Our siblings are often our first friends and, if we’re lucky, our closest friends. You’d be wise to remember that, Lucy.”

  She wondered how much Gordy knew about her relationship with Ethan. She let her eyes wander across the spines of the binders. Hundreds of binders. Maybe a thousand.

  “Your dad did all this for her?” Lucy asked.

  Gordy shook his head. “No. He did all of this for him.”

  “But because of her?”

  “No,” Gordy said softly. “When you are consumed by grief, if you’re not doing something, anything to try to move forward, then you’ve let the grief win. This was not just for Kymberlin, my sister. It was for the world...a world that needed to heal. You are young, so I cannot expect you to see the depths of our destruction.”

  “This place won’t fix humanity,” Lucy said. “Didn’t your Systems already show that?”

  “You’re wrong,” he said. He tapped a single finger on the glass display. “People here will be
happy. And you will, too, if you give it time. I understand adolescent discontent, Lucy, trust me. But everything about the Islands is scientific and adjusted perfectly to the people who inhabit them. You will want for nothing, yet you will learn the value of hard work and perseverance.” He rubbed his fingers along his thin beard. “I still owe you a dress, I see.”

  “I’m fine,” she answered.

  “We want you to be happy here. Part of the reason my father was so concerned about the variables, as he calls them, was because he knew that once you saw how this new world was built, it would be hard to understand why.”

  “I’m old-fashioned, I guess,” she answered him. “Murder is wrong.”

  “We agree.”

  Lucy paused. She turned her head and looked at Gordy as he patiently watched her. Raising an eyebrow, she picked up her bag near the front and started to leave the room. “Thanks for the chat,” she said as she made her way to the exit.

  “Don’t be stupid, Miss King,” Gordy continued, using her surname to gain her attention. “Look at this room, read these stories. Murder. Injustice. Mayhem. Governments purposefully starving their citizens. Corruption.”

  She turned and looked at him, and she blinked, and then she took a step outside into the hallway. She wanted him to feel every ounce of her freedom to walk away.

  “Of course, we cannot ever protect you against the travesty of a broken heart,” he called to her. And Lucy stopped in her tracks. When she realized Gordy was approaching her, his arm outstretched, she froze. Her limbs dangled at her sides as her purse fell from her shoulder.

  “What are you talking about?” Lucy asked.

  He took her hand, pried open her palm, and placed a small slip of paper inside. Then he closed her hand and gave it a squeeze.

  “Just a guess,” he replied. “I lack Cass Salvant’s ability to predict the future. But I have other means at my disposal.” And he left her in the doorway of the Remembering Room as he walked back down the hall, pushing the button to the glass elevator and walking on board without giving her the satisfaction of looking back. When he was safely out of sight, Lucy opened her palm and stared at the piece of paper Gordy had left there.

  I love you it read in Grant’s distinct handwriting. The jagged edges around the paper were torn and missing.

  She let out a small gasp of surprise and let the paper float to the floor. Then she marched back down the hallway, out of the hall of memories, away from the room of remembering, and back out of the lower level. Though it wouldn’t matter where she went. She was being watched. Forever.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Ray and Jillian pulled over to the side of the road. A dirt-smeared sign greeted them with the message: Welcome to Brixton. Population 26.

  “This the place?” Ray asked through the back window into the bed of the pickup truck where Dean, Darla, and Ainsley had sat for the bulk of the sixteen-hour drive. They had stopped a few times along the way, once to drop off Liam and the girls and meet the other survivors in Montana. The Montana community welcomed their trio without fear or apprehension. They pooled together their limited resources to treat Darla’s hand and feed them well before they journeyed onward. Those who had discovered the commune felt blessed and safe.

  The whole time they were there, Darla regained some of her dashed hopefulness. Perhaps not everyone’s spirit was broken. Some goodness did survive.

  Like they promised, Ray and Jillian agreed to make the trip to Nebraska without payment. Whether propelled by kindness or some other motivation, Darla didn’t know, but they did it without complaint.

  They didn’t have to.

  Along the way, Darla, Dean, and Ainsley could have acquired a new vehicle and ventured out on their own. But they couldn’t deny that it was comforting to have a chauffeur. Ray and Jillian switched off driving while the trio slept and relaxed in the back. Though their time together was brief, it provided a needed respite.

  Darla looked at the Brixton sign and nodded.

  Brixton, Nebraska. It didn’t seem like anything was here, but she wanted to reserve her fear until she knew for sure.

  “You want us to take you further in?” Jillian asked.

  “No, ma’am,” Dean answered. “We got it from here.”

  Ray stuck his hand through the window and Darla grabbed on tight, shaking it with a strong grip. “We wish you luck and hope you find your son,” he said. He waited, paused. She had given him bits and pieces of their story, but she hadn’t told them that Ethan’s father was connected to the bioterrorism group or that the guards who stole her child were anything more than the Sweepers they had come to fear. It was a small white lie, but it felt right—the duo didn’t want to drive them into the lion’s den, but they did anyway. They deserved some tidbit to take back to their group.

  Darla knew their generosity was a sacrifice she could never repay.

  “Thank you,” she answered. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you enough...”

  Ray let go of her hand and batted the comment away. “We’re good here. And you know where we are...if you need a place to go, our doors are open.”

  “That means a lot,” Darla said as she sat on the edge of the truck and then hopped down to the dusty ground below. She extended her left hand to Ainsley and helped her down; Dean followed after. “Once I have Teddy, I don’t know where we’ll go. Maybe you’ll see us soon?”

  “We’d like that,” Jillian said. “You’re good people.”

  Darla looked at the ground and kicked the dust. She looked up and squinted. “Sometimes,” she replied and smiled. “Drive safe?”

  Ray nodded and saluted, and without any prolonged heart-warming goodbyes, the truck did a u-turn and disappeared back down the dusty road, kicking up a film of dirt around them, the truck’s tires crunching along until it was out of sight.

  From the sign, they walked in silence. Darla had her gun and nothing else. She held it in her wounded hand, keeping her finger poised on the trigger in anticipation of spotting someone worthy of shooting at any second. It was nearly half a mile of walking before they even reached a building.

  Darla was the first one to spot the car with Wyoming plates sitting at the start of Main Street. Its passenger side door was wide open, and she jogged over to inspect it. The interior was littered with wrappers and empty water bottles. In the back seat there was a small bag—Darla hoisted it into the passenger side and unzipped it; she tossed out a few pieces of clothing, but there was nothing identifiable in either the car or the bag. Darla crawled back out with her hands on her hips, assessing the town with one long sweep.

  Dean paused in front of a bar called Carson’s Place.

  “Whatcha got?” he called to Darla.

  “Nothing,” Darla shouted back.

  “And we’re sure this is the place?” Ainsley asked. A heavy wind rushed down the street, throwing dust into miniature cyclones.

  “This is the place,” Darla said with authority. “These were the coordinates. This is the city. Ethan and I talked about it all the time—” she trailed off, remembering that Teddy was not the only thing they had lost that day. Ainsley looked at the ground and dug her toe into the dirt road, and then she looked up into the sky. It was a deliberate sort of quiet that blanketed the street.

  “This is hardly the type of place that is housing some sort of vast terrorist cell,” Ainsley muttered. “We’re missing something.” She peered through the darkened windows of the bar, wandered down the street, and kicked small tumbleweeds underfoot as she walked. Stopping, she paused and spun around. “Where’d Dean go?” she asked, scanning each area, rotating her head back and forth and looking perplexed.

  Darla stopped and looked around. “Dean!” she called. “Dean!” she called louder when he didn’t reply to their shouts.

  Ainsley started walking out of the main area, past the church and the school. The rolling Sand Hills of Nebraska spread out all around them. Behind the church, there was a sm
all knoll, and atop it, she could see Dean’s figure standing, looking out and beyond at something out of sight.

  “Up there!” Ainsley called back to Darla and she took off toward Dean, who remained unmoving on the hill. As she approached from behind, she laughed. “You disappear for like one minute and I think we all think you’ve been abducted or shot,” she said.

  “I had to take a leak,” Dean replied without turning.

  “Oh.” Ainsley froze mid-step. She turned. “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” Dean said. “I’m done. No...come here. You should see this.”

  She turned around and could see Darla following her route up the small hill, past an American Sycamore tree with branches full of richly green leaves. Following Dean’s command, Ainsley perched herself beside Dean and looked down into a valley below. She gasped, bringing her hand up over her mouth. Silently, Ainsley turned to him, her eyes wide, and Dean smiled.

  Darla approached and slid up next to Ainsley; she put her hand above her eyes to shield the sun and peered outward. She whistled loud and low.

  Stretched beneath them were rows upon rows of solar panels, like little metal worshippers all lifting their bodies up to their sun god. And sitting off to the side, angled against the hills so the flat plains were in front of it, was a medium-sized passenger airplane sitting on a short black tar runway. A staircase was pushed up to its side and the cabin door was open. The three of them looked at the plane and the panels and then at each other.