Virulent: The Release

by Shelbi Wescott

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Shit!” Grant yelled and he tugged Salem’s arm toward the East Wing hallway, pinning a collection of confiscated locker items to his side. “Lucy, come on!”

  Lucy leaned down and grabbed the paper bag of bullets and darted forward, her bare feet slapping against the floor. But instead of turning up the narrow hallway, Lucy ran straight past them and down the English hall, toward the opening gates and toward Spencer.

  “Are you crazy?” Grant called after her. “We gotta get out of here.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the camera and its subtle shift following her. She slowed at the turn and then peered around the corner.

  “Wait,” she yelled to her friends, her voice was shrill and panicky. “Don’t go anywhere!”

  Salem and Grant stood waiting at the edge of the hallway, ready to run, but Lucy kept peering around the corner. It was a long hallway to the main office and security office, roughly one hundred feet, but she had a perfect view. Unless Spencer was lying about being alone, there was no way he had time to man the cameras and also bolt after them.

  “He’s still in the security office, just watching,” Lucy called to her friends.

  “You sure?” Salem called.

  Lucy nodded. “He put the gates up so we would run…so he could watch where we ran to.” Her heart pounded as she kept her eyes trained on the hallway, watching for Spencer’s lanky body to come barreling down upon them.

  “I have an idea,” she called back to them. “Go to the lab, put the tables back and the ladder up. Then wait by the door for me. Don’t leave the lab until I come for you.”

  Grant shook his head, just once, a quick and sudden shake and stepped back out into the hallway. “What? You’re bait?”

  “I’m bait,” she replied and then drew in a tight breath.

  Salem opened her mouth to protest, but Grant saluted her. “Good plan,” he said with admiration. The tone encouraged her, helped stay her shaking hands a bit. Lucy didn’t have a real plan other than to draw Spencer out of the security office so she could get them safely in their hideaway without detection. And if that didn’t work, she was fresh out of back-up plans.

  Grant and Salem darted out of sight.

  Lucy took a deep breath and with her back to the camera, she dropped the gun back into the paper bag. She crumpled up the top and then held it tightly in her hands. The gun was not an asset if Lucy didn’t know how to use it. She knew that Spencer was armed and she was not, but it was a risk she had to take.

  She slid back out of view and pressed her back against the wall. The camera was on her. It moved, zoomed in, zoomed out. Spencer was no doubt watching Salem and Grant lead him to the journalism room, but there was Lucy, unmoving, a sitting duck. He had to wonder why.

  For a second she wondered if Principal Spencer recognized her. If he knew her name or her year in school. She wasn’t an athlete or a drama kid. She never took a student council class and despite Salem’s pleading, she never wrote for the newspaper. Before all of the madness started, Lucy assumed that she would graduate from Pacific Lake with relative anonymity. She would be the person her classmates years later would sort-of remember as that “one girl in that one class”. People would try to pin down a list of defining characteristics, but they couldn’t.

  Then she heard the echo of a door shutting. She peeked around the corner and saw a flash of movement and a blur of gray and black. She glanced at the camera and stood up, she sprinted forward a few steps and then turned—the camera had stopped following her. At that moment, she could recognize the loud pounding of feet racing down the extended hall. Her breath catching in her chest, she made a dash for the East Wing.

  And that was when she heard the shot.

  A blast echoed down after her and Lucy jumped.

  She ran wildly, hitting her shoulder against the wall as she turned the corner, her body unable to keep up with her feet. Lucy ran up the East Wing hallway, around the corner, and up to the lab where Salem stood guard in the doorway and Lucy yanked her out, motioning for Grant to follow, but he was still carrying the ladder into place, holding it with outstretched arms, wobbling forward with obscured vision.

  “Who has the keys?” Lucy asked, out-of-breath.

  Salem shook her head and pointed at Grant.

  They heard Spencer’s footsteps pound down English hall and then heard him turn into the East Wing hallway. Like a honing pigeon—he knew where they were. A second shot rang out and the blast seemed much louder and menacing than before.

  Lucy ran back into the lab, terrified that they were too late. Her plan was failing, instead of leading them all into security, they were going to be caught and shot by a crazy man.

  “Keys Grant! Keys!” she whispered, cognizant that Spencer could now hear their voices echoing. But Grant was positioning the ladder under the skylight with both hands and unable to grab them. “Hurry, hurry!” Lucy commanded and Grant stepped back, dug into his pants, and pulling out the jangling janitor’s keys he ran toward the door.

  Salem was wracked. Her face was flush with spotty red circles and her hands had gone ghostly white. Lucy opened her mouth to talk, but Salem shook her head violently to stop her. Spencer was close.

  They all heard him and his shoes on the tile in the East Wing. He was walking with purpose, but no longer running, as he stopped to peer into rooms. The art room door had been propped open with a garbage can and Lucy only now registered the luck of that. As they pushed themselves to become one with the wall, they listened as he yanked the door open and then disappeared inside.

  “Now,” Lucy mouthed and Grant opened the supply closet door. They flew inside. Shut the door and locked it without a sound. And sank to the ground.

  “He’s going to find us, he’s going to find us,” Salem mumbled.

  “Stop,” Lucy said and crawled over in the darkness to her friend.

  A sliver of light was all they had—illuminating a few centimeters of carpet beyond the door and nothing else. Lucy waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, but they never did. It reminded her of her freshman photography class, when Kyle Ingwood took her into the tiny rooms where they unrolled their film, and tried to kiss her in the complete darkness, his lips groping the air and then the side of her chin before finally landing on her lips. Photography class suffered extinction at the hands of budget cuts the following year and Kyle never spoke to her after their messy make-out session in the dark.

  But she still could taste the dark in that room. With her eyes wide open, she could not register anything around her; the thickness of the dark was oppressive.

  Pitch-black.

  No outlines of the couches or of each other’s bodies as a reference as the room pressed down on them. It weighed on them like a heavy blanket—the sound of waves inside a seashell hummed near their ears. Lucy struggled to take a breath, her head pressurized like she was in an airplane.

  Spencer was done with the art room and he paused outside the woodshop. They collectively held their breath. And Lucy had to cover her mouth to keep from screaming when they heard the rattle of the doorknob into their hideout. He turned it once and then twice, pulled on the door, found it locked, and soon gave up the idea. Spencer then must have seen the door ajar to the journalism room, because they heard the door creak open, and without warning or fanfare he was walking away from their hiding spot. For a brief second, the fear of discovery left them like a deflating balloon.

  They heard the tumble of the ladder as it crashed to the floor and hit the desk along the way, then the scraping of desks, the push and screech of metal on tile. And afterward: Nothing, just silence. They waited to hear him exit, waited—holding their breath—to see if he would examine every room in the East Wing. After a long moment, the journalism door swung open, hitting the wall with blunt force and then shutting with a distinct click. Spencer’s heavy footsteps walked away from them—away, away—until they couldn’t hear anything anymore.

  “Is it
safe to turn on the light?” Salem asked.

  “No,” Lucy answered. “Not until we know he can’t see us for sure.”

  “The cameras in the East Wing don’t show this door,” Salem added. “I don’t want to sit here without being able to see...it’s suffocating.”

  Lucy waved her hand around until she felt the cotton of Salem’s shirt and then felt for her hand, grabbed it, and gave it a squeeze. “He might come back.”

  “We’ll wait,” Grant said, his voice floated to them from somewhere near the door. “We have no intercom now. No way of knowing what’s happening out there. So, we wait.”

  They listened intently, but couldn’t hear a sound.

  For minutes, long hour-like minutes, they waited.

  Lucy curled up on the floor, the scratchy carpet rubbing against her cheek, as she felt her body melt against the fibers. Even though she struggled against it, Lucy found herself succumbing to sleep. She wished she would will herself to stay alert, but sleep dragged her down into a fitful abyss.

  She dreamed Spencer found them. Yanked them out by their hair and dragged them to the auditorium where the boy who had died right in front of her was inexplicably alive, but bleeding out his nose and eyes. The blood pooled at his feet, thick, red, and sticky and his mouth was moving, but no sound came out. As they were pulled past him, his arms shot up he reached for Lucy’s kicking feet.

  Defying physics, Spencer hoisted them all on stage and tried to deposit their broken and tired bodies into the dressing room, which was filled to the top with bodies like a hall closet shoved with piles of junk and clothing. But Friendly Kent sent them away. “No room. No room. No room.”

  So, Spencer grabbed them back and took them to the pool. The cement cavern was now a mass grave of tangled bodies. He threw them into the sea of limbs and blood. Lucy tried to get out, flapping her arms forward and gaining leverage against the dead, but she couldn’t make any progress forward. The dead pulled her down into them and she sank, as if their mushy decomposing bodies were quicksand or a riptide. Frantic and calling for Grant and Salem at intervals, Lucy gripped a body and the head rolled over to her.

  It was Ethan.

  She screamed and pushed his bloated features away. Her scream echoed, carrying on for ten full seconds and it appeared to trigger something as select tiles in the ceiling slid out of the way, creating cavernous black holes.

  From the ceiling, green and orange snakes descended. Their blood red fangs gripped dead rats in their mouths. But even Lucy could see that the rats were also decaying, clumps of their fur was missing, holes in their sides oozed thick white pus. Down the snakes, with their prizes, slithered, sliding in and out of the masses, appearing and disappearing and reappearing.

  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.r />
  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.”