“Let our friend go,” he commanded, his voice breaking. The threat of using a weapon seemed to be making Grant physically ill. Sweat beads formed on his forehead. Lucy wanted to go over and hug him. Her heart was overjoyed at his act of bravery on her behalf, but she saw the glimmer of agitation on Darla’s face and realized that Grant might be in real danger.
Lucy ran and stood between them with her arms outstretched. She spotted Salem hovering next to another one of the buses and she motioned for Lucy to run to her.
“Stop!” Lucy yelled. “Just stop! Both of you. Grant…it’s okay…this is Darla. Ethan sent her. Darla, these are my friends. Don’t shoot them.”
“You know these kids?” Darla asked and she lifted her hands up in a show of faith and holstered her gun. “You have no idea how close I came to just shooting you. Maybe a warning next time.”
Lucy dropped her hands and placed them on her knees, taking a moment. “How does a wealth manager know so much about guns?” she asked.
“Why shouldn’t a wealth manager know so much about guns?” Darla replied.
“Spencer?” Grant asked, looking relieved to lower his gun too. And the moment the scene settled and everything seemed safe, Salem emerged and rushed over to Lucy, wrapping her arms around Lucy’s shoulders and squeezing her tightly.
“He let me go,” Lucy said, her breath constricted from Salem’s monster embrace.
“We’ve been so worried,” Salem said. “We spent all night trying to get back into the building.”
“Fort Knox that place,” Grant said.
Lucy wanted to believe it was true. She searched their faces and saw their exhaustion and worry and knew that they were being honest. Her rambling daydreams of Grant and Salem leaving her with Spencer so they could kiss unencumbered were unfounded. She let out a relieved sigh.
Darla cleared her throat. A noisy, exaggerated sound of frustration. She motioned for them to wrap up their hellos and hugs and then turned back to her original task at-hand, clearing the bus barn, taking glimpses of the undercarriage, peering into the windowed exit doors. The friends walked together after her and Salem grabbed Lucy’s hand as they walked.
“I’m sorry we left you—”
With a small squeeze, Lucy smiled. “You didn’t have a choice. He would’ve shot you. I’m certain of it.”
Salem noticed the raw cut in Lucy’s right wrist and she brought it up to inspect it. “What did he do to you?”
They heard Darla’s feet speeding toward them across the gravel and when Lucy looked up, she saw the dark haired woman bearing down on them, her face contorted with rage and fear. “Shut up,” she seethed. “Seriously. The chummy reunion dialogue can wait until we’re inside somewhere. Safe.”
Grant stopped walking and tilted his head at Darla, blinking. “Why are you paranoid?”
“Where’ve you been the last week?” Darla asked. “That’s right. Holed up in the school. With water, right? Food? Your basic needs were met that entire time. So whatever perceived hardship you think you might have experienced? No. You don’t know what’s going on out here.”
Salem bristled at Darla’s tone and let go of Lucy’s hand. She took a small step forward and raised her shoulders. “We’ve been outside for twenty-four hours…and if you haven’t noticed…there isn’t ANYONE LEFT.” Salem yelled, her voice echoing down the street and carrying into the abandoned houses and buildings that surrounded them.
No one moved for a long second and then Darla leaned in closer to Salem’s face, she lowered her voice. “This corridor is used for people like me…making a beeline to that school to trade with your former principal. You’re right. There’s hardly anyone left. But those that decided to survive by shooting you, taking your little bag…with your last little bit of water…they’ll be around here. You want to yell? Yell. But when they come, I’m not saving you from them. Not even if you beg me.”
“Fine,” Grant replied, not harshly. He looked at Darla and raised his hands in surrender. “So, you’re the boss.”
“I’m the boss?”
“You’ll get us somewhere safe?”
Darla shook her head. “No. I have one task…to get Lucy back to her own house…back to Ethan. You two,” she pointed to both Salem and then Grant, “have nothing to do with this. But if you’re tagging along? Shut up.”
The walk was serpentine. It might have taken an hour to walk straight from the high school to Lucy’s house, but Darla kept them off the main streets. Without a word, they cut through yards and parks and crouched along abandoned cars in the strip mall. The shop windows were nonexistent, reduced to piles of broken glass and the furniture from the stores had been tossed outward into the parking lot. There were bodies everywhere: Against the steering wheels of cars, across the sidewalks, inside the stores. And everything was quiet. Their footsteps echoed down the covered corridor as they passed by a shoe store, a fabric store, and a clothing boutique. Darla nodded for them to head into a darkened drug store.
“No power,” Darla warned. “From this grid and upward. Most of Oregon is out of power actually. Just a few zones left. I can’t tell you why they’re hanging on.”
“Is there power at my house?” Lucy asked and Darla shook her head no.
“Power has been out there for a few days now.”
The drug store was stripped clean. Shelves emptied of all essential and nonessential items. Even the rack of greeting cards was empty.
“Why would someone steal a congratulations on your bar mitzvah card?” Grant asked.
“To burn,” was Darla’s reply and Lucy’s mind wandered to the book in her backpack. Then she cringed. She had left the backpack in Spencer’s office. It seemed that leaving things at school was becoming a theme. This time, however, she would let it stay there.
They turned down an aisle and stepped over a man’s decimated body. Lucy noticed that his hand was curled in a perfect circle around an imaginary object and she couldn’t help but wonder if someone had actually pried a medicine bottle out of his cold dead hands. It was an expression she never imagined having a literal use and yet there was the evidence that nothing was sacred in the wreckage.
Darla, with the ease and speed of someone familiar with the landscape, pushed her way through two thick double-doors leading into a cavernous and nearly pitch black storage room. The back of the store was windowless and so they might have been blinded by the darkness, but the loading dock had been left open and the entire area was washed in natural light. They made their way down the cement stairs and found themselves on the back part of the strip mall.
Beyond the mall was an open field. A fence warned trespassers that the land was a nature preserve and violators would be prosecuted, but Darla held a flap of cut chain-link back and let the kids climb through one by one before following herself, shutting the small fence back into place with a loud clink. The field was muddy and wet and Lucy’s canvas shoes kept getting stuck. She slurped her way forward, yanking one foot and then the other. When they reached the other end of the field, they were at a wooden fence leading to a soggy backyard.
Darla marched them over the wet grass and through a gently rocking swing set. Lucy let her hand linger on the chain of the swing and then let her fingers slide down. Grant and Salem were trudging along behind; Salem held her hands around her stomach and her eyes watered, Grant kept a hand poised to catch her if she fell. They were out of breath and weak, but they did not complain.
The next backyard was littered with rusting lawn furniture and several green plastic garbage cans filled with yard debris. The house sported an abandoned porch– a product of owners who had decided their home didn’t need attention long before the world decided to crash down around them. In months, maybe years, the houses around this one would fall into the same sad state of disrepair. What had once been an eyesore to the manicured lawns and flower-basket neighbors was now just one more empty house.
Peering through the unwashed windows, Darla motioned for them to join her. The
n she moved to the door, grabbed the handle and twisted it slowly.
“Probably empty,” she said, as if she were a bloodhound, and she swung the door open wider and motioned for Grant, Lucy and Salem to follow. “Let’s go. Inside,” she instructed like they were half-cognizant toddlers.
“We’re going inside? Why?” Lucy asked in a hushed voice as she stepped on the porch.
“To sit,” Darla said. “To watch,” she nodded toward the front of the house. “To wait.”
“Watch and wait for what?” Grant asked.
“For what and for whom,” she answered ambiguously, and then took three giants steps into the house, passing through a small mud room, filled from top to bottom with cardboard boxes, black sharpie labeling them—tax papers, kitchen utensils, Christmas décor—all in flowery, capital letters, script.
They entered after her and followed her into a kitchen. The blinds were drawn shut and the house was dim and stale. Lucy allowed her hand to travel over items dumped on to a wrinkled red and white gingham tablecloth. Among the debris, a dog collar. The tag read: Einstein. Lucy held the collar for a long time before setting it back down in the exact place it had been before. Each house was now a graveyard and its evidence of loss and grief was so clear and profound.
“Are they home?” Grant asked. He was standing near the counter. He reached for a coffee mug and picked it up, the coffee sloshed around—it had not been around long enough to mold.
Darla cracked her neck. “No one’s ever home,” she replied. “No one will ever be home.” She opened the fridge and the front of the kitchen flooded with light spilled from the appliance. She tossed aside cardboard boxes filled with leftovers, mushy vegetables, and went straight to a can of soda, popping open the tab and sucking the whole thing down in gulps. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she crushed the can and dropped it to the floor where it clattered and rocked; the echoes of tin on linoleum reverberated throughout the house.
Lucy waited until Darla had moved into the living room before she bent down and picked up the can. She set it on the table gently and looked around.
“This doesn’t feel right,” she said. “This was someone’s home.”
Salem nodded.
From the other room, Darla had found a piano and was plunking out a clunky melody; the strings were in dire need of retuning and the song pealed out its tinny tune through the whole house.
Grant moved past Lucy in the kitchen and made his way to the living room, where he sat down on the couch and picked up a discarded book, left open, mid-page, on the coffee table.
When Darla was finished with her piano playing, she wandered to the front window. She hooked her finger along the floral curtains and parted them and watched for a long moment, then let the curtain fall. The window looked out to the main street, and in front of that, a small corner market.
“We have to travel this way. But I know of a small group that’s been hanging out across the way. Just a group of kids. Once I know the coast is clear, we’ll just cross the street quickly and head up through the park. Lots of tree cover. Nothing to steal in the park,” Darla said.
Above the mantel were pictures of an older couple surrounded by children. One framed photo stood out above all the others. It was a photo of a boy with a chocolate-smeared grin and missing teeth, his face smashed up against the wrinkled cheek of a chuckling loved one. Lucy walked over and took the frame in her hand and then flopped it facedown, the back-stand still sticking straight up in the air. She moved to the next picture, the people were so full of life and clueless about their future. They were smiling and hugging, cherishing moments together and Lucy pushed those downward also until the entire mantel was scrubbed cleaned of the memories of bright futures and happier times.
“Where’d you meet my brother?” Lucy asked, turning to look at Darla, then she sat down next to Grant and watched as he flipped the pages of the book mindlessly.
“The airport.” But Darla shot Lucy a look that implied she wasn’t in a chatty mood.
Threadbare nerves racked her and she wanted to shake Darla and demand all the answers. It had been a long time since she started following Darla’s orders and still she had no idea who this woman was and how she knew Ethan. Lucy’s eyes must have betrayed her agony, because Darla took note and exhaled. She leaned her head against the wall.
“Ethan was there, at the airport, looking for your family,” Darla said. “They had grounded my plane to Seattle. There weren’t any gates available, so they evacuated us out of the emergency exits. Those little slides aren’t as fun as you would think,” she paused, but then took a long look at Lucy and continued. “And when I was in the terminal, I saw Ethan trying to get out to the tarmac to look at the planes. He was convinced that one of the planes might have your family inside.”
“My family made it to the airport?” Lucy asked. She didn’t know what she wanted the answer to be. Was there a chance they made it out alive? Could it have been their plane submerged in the Columbia River? Was it possible the plane never left?
“They weren’t at the airport. Either weren’t there or they weren’t able to be found,” Darla continued without missing a beat. “Security was so diminished that it didn’t take long for Ethan to find his way to the tarmac. He was running like a madman. Going from plane to plane. They had grounded flights by then. Whole planes of people just sitting there, with the infected, waiting to die.”
“But Ethan thought my family was at the airport. So, they weren’t at home?”
Darla waited and then she nodded.
“How many planes did he check? It’s possible that they still left. Right?” Now she didn’t know which version she wanted to be true. If her mom could have left her daughter and son behind or if somehow they had never made it to the airport, both versions seemed awful.
She gave a non-committal shrug. “Nothing was happening smoothly over there. It wasn’t like he could just ask someone about a plane and they could point him in the right direction. But…Ethan believes the plane left. Took off. Escaped Portland.”
She didn’t know what that meant.
“So, you see this guy looking for his family and you decide to help him?” Grant asked.
“Not exactly,” Darla replied. She swatted at an invisible fly, fully aware that she was being vague.
No one said anything. Salem shuffled her feet and stared mournfully at the ground. Grant reached into his bag and pulled out his water; he had only a sip left and he dripped the last few drops on to his tongue.
“Wait, was there a girl with him?” Lucy asked and she couldn’t tell if she was hopeful for survivors or indifferent. Grant went back to reading and he flipped another page in the book.
“He was alone.”
This was not surprising news, but Lucy took a moment to process the implication that Anna was gone too. All those times she had encouraged her brother to end that dead-end relationship, her evil thoughts toward Anna’s idiocy and her false friendship. And now, somewhere between leaving her standing outside the secret door and the airport, Anna and Ethan had been dealt a forced separation.
Lucy was sorry that Anna was dead. But she felt worse for Ethan and she selfishly hoped that he had been spared watching her die in the end. There were too many people to weep for; even if she felt a pang of compassion, she would not shed tears for Anna.
“Tell me about the vials,” Lucy finally asked again. “Where did you get the information you shared with Spencer?”
“What vials?” Salem asked.
But before either of them could answer, Lucy heard the floorboards squeak. It was the familiar groan of a house bearing weight. They all heard it and paused, eyes, ears and heads pointed toward the ceiling. Their bodies shifted and they all went on high alert.
“What was that?” Grant asked and he stood straight up, crossing his arms over his chest. Darla stood up next to him, her gun slipping back into the palm of her hand.
“Nothing,” Lucy said because she wanted that to
be the right answer. “Don’t houses just settle, make noises?”
But they heard the creak again, and then the shifting and shuffling and footsteps above them. Unmistakable, distinct.
They had entered an occupied house.
“No way,” Darla said and went to the window, moving the curtain back and peering out. She grumbled and nodded outward. “And there are the other Raiders. Fantastic.”
Lucy darted to the window and stole a peek. A ragtag group of boys and one girl ambled up the street. There were four of them in a line. One held a semi-automatic weapon, another a baseball bat. They were dirty and weathered and none of them was over thirty. A boy on a motorized scooter with a wagon attached to the back was leading the crowd. They stopped in front of the storefront. The girl holding the baseball bat took a whack at one of the neon signs in the window and it cracked upon impact with the sound of breaking glass; she pulled it free, the cord trailing behind, and jumped on it for good measure. The group laughed, encouraging her. She batted at another sign and then took the bat to the hood of a car in the parking lot.
The steps above them had also paused. The movement ceased.
Two of the four people ducked into the store, shouting indecipherable messages to each other. It was just a lot of noise and consonants. Lucy made a move like she was going to back away from the window, but Darla put her hand out, commanding her to stay.
Grant, still standing between them, had no view of the outside, but he watched the ceiling with interest—his ears trained on the movement above.
Outside, with a swift motion, the girl raised her bat in mid-swing and then she stumbled forward. The steel slipped out of her hand and it hit the sidewalk with a clang. She clutched her stomach and slid to the ground. The boys watching guard rushed to her as she sank, then they recoiled. They called out and the looters rushed from the storefront.
Watching wide-eyed, Lucy covered her mouth with her hand as the boys dropped the goods in the wagon and took off. The boy on the scooter pulled ahead and the rest followed quickly on foot. There was a single boy who stayed and he held a gun in his hand. He spun wildly looking for something to shoot. Someone to dare cross his path in his moment of anger and surprise. He sat next to the girl, talking to her.
Virulent: The Release Page 18