Lucy waited for him to continue.
“Good Samaritans brought me home eventually. Some couple in their forties, driving a minivan. Carting people around obstacles like some sort of taxi service. By that time, I think Darla figured she was stuck with me. She really did save my life though, by helping unpin me, flagging down the van. And then everything she did afterward to get me medicine. I was in shock. I should have died, but she just, I don’t know, made it a priority to get me better and she didn’t have to. She didn’t know me.”
“You owed her.”
“Yes.”
“And now she owes you?”
“Maybe she sees it like that, but I don’t know. It was…” Ethan paused, “it was awful out there…Lucy…everything about this. And I feel so…I felt like I couldn’t help you…” Ethan began to cry. He collapsed forward and buried his head in his hands. She had never really seen Ethan cry before and it took her by surprise. “I just keep thanking God that you’re alive,” he said after he composed himself. “After everything…Mom’s phone messages, the house…”
Lucy had put a hand on her brother’s back and was patting him gently, but she paused.
“What phone messages?” Lucy blinked.
“I have a lot to tell you,” Ethan said, his voice quieter and more alert.
Both heads turned in unison as Darla reappeared in the doorway. She had changed her clothes and she was now wearing a pair of sweatpants that belonged to Lucy’s mother and a hooded sweatshirt that belonged to Galen; she stood barefoot clad from top to bottom in gray.
“Grant?” Lucy asked, attempting to make her question sound as casual as possible.
Darla shrugged. “He’s playing with Teddy. He said if he starts to feel sick he’ll leave the room. But Teddy knows what to look for. Teddy will tell us if anything changes.”
“That’s really sad.” Lucy didn’t mean it to sound harsh, but Darla bristled.
“The world changes and you change with it,” she answered, clearly defensive. “A lot can happen in a week.” She spun a lock of her hair between her fingers.
Lucy thought of poor Teddy, only a year younger than Harper. He seemed so oblivious, so fixated on his own needs, but also so aware that things had changed. Her heart ached for the children abandoned and orphaned, lost and confused. Those who, unlike Teddy, had no parents left to protect them. It was unfair.
“Ethan’s been telling me about how you helped him,” Lucy said. “Thank you.”
“Yeah well. It worked out that way. And he’s helped with Teddy and anyone who can be so nice to my kid, well, you know.” She smiled, but it was reserved and lacking. It was difficult to get a read on her.
“Does Teddy understand any of this?” Lucy asked. And Darla took a step forward. She shoved her hands into the pouch of the hooded sweatshirt.
“Teddy? Sure. A little. He knows he’s suffered a loss. He knows that our lives feel different.”
“I’m glad he has his mom though,” Lucy tried to smile. She meant it to be comforting, but Darla’s face fell.
“He has only one Mom,” she replied and she closed her eyes. “And I haven’t come to terms yet with that…with the idea of doing this by myself. I never thought I’d have to.”
“And you know? That—”
“That she’s gone?” Darla nodded. “Yes. It happened at the airport. Right away after landing and before Ethan and I saw each other. She went so quickly. It was the three of us and it was chaos and then she slipped away and I couldn’t stop to stay…I couldn’t have Teddy see. Couldn’t have him watch his mama die. Above all, he couldn’t see that.”
Ethan sniffed. “That’s how we met,” he said.
“I asked Teddy to stay by this trashcan to wait for me while I said goodbye.” Darla looked straight at Lucy, her emotion was raw, but she didn’t break. “And when I looked back, he was gone.”
“I found him crying about thirty feet away. He was disoriented. Wandered a few feet, got pushed around, ended up down the terminal. I picked him up,” Ethan added.
“Then I saw this guy holding my kid. I just lost my wife, I was a mess, and I thought someone was kidnapping my son. So, I took a swing at him.”
Ethan smiled. “I’m glad you missed.”
Darla returned the smile and then she closed her eyes. “Teddy was bawling for his mama. Over and over…just mama, mama, mama…and I couldn’t help him. Ethan—it was Ethan. He said he had to find his sister, who was his age, and did Teddy want to help him on an adventure? It was the only way to distract him from the fact that we both just…left her there.” She stopped, overcome with emotion and then she pulled her hand out and put it up as if to say, “No more.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Lucy said and it felt so small and trivial.
“Me too.” Then Darla let out a thoughtful hum. “You never think it’ll be you who’s left behind to pick up the pieces. And then all of sudden you realize it is you and you didn’t get a choice. And maybe if you had the choice, maybe if someone had let you make the decision, you would have picked yourself to be the one to die. I mean, yes, I’m grateful to your brother.” Darla nodded toward Ethan with a smile. “What I did is no repayment. If I hadn’t decided to follow this kid around who was helping me with my son, we’d be dead. I may question how hard things are, but I can’t imagine a world without Teddy.”
Darla attempted to fill in some of the gaps of her and Ethan’s story. Like Lucy’s and Grant’s, it was one of survival against the odds. Once they got back to the house, Darla had left Ethan, with Teddy as a guardian, shivering and feverish, aching and unable to move, to raid the local super store a mile from their house. Luckily for them, the looting was just beginning and Darla’s tenacity and bullying got her right into the fray. During this Herculean task, she managed to locate heavy-duty painkillers and gauze. And she also happened to steal a wheelchair. She had marveled at the people still running out of the store with TVs and videogames, sporting equipment, clothes.
Food. Guns. Medicine. This was what people needed and those who knew what to steal were the dangerous ones. “Anyone using manpower to lug a fifty-inch plasma to his or her car was missing the point,” Darla had said.
Lucy realized that, if the car had killed Ethan, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had been vaccinated. From start to finish, the fact that they were alive was a testament to something larger than them. The thought reminded her of Salem’s crucifix, shoved into her pocket. She took it out and held it in her hand, then put it on and clasped it around her neck.
With the sun setting, the house slipped into darkness. Darla started a fire in the den and then yelled upstairs for Grant so they could work together to get Ethan into his wheelchair for the first time—something Darla couldn’t do on her own. He barely passed through the study door and into the living room, but out in the open he could move about freely. While Darla hunched over the fire burning brightly in the fireplace, Teddy ran matchbox cars over the hardwood floors. Between the fire and a collection of candlesticks, the room was lit in a flickering orange hue.
Everyone’s features were cast in shadow.
Grant was quiet and staring at the wall. Occasionally he’d connect with a piece of conversation but, for the most part, he remained stoic and apprehensive. Lucy couldn’t blame him. She wondered what she would be thinking about if she knew she had hours left to live. She hated that Grant was spending this time with the rest of them trying to carve out daily routines. They were catching up with each other and plotting to move forward. She got up and sat next to him and placed a hand on his knee.
Right as Lucy was about to ask him if he wanted to take a walk with her, sneak away to the darkened kitchen or the family room, Ethan cleared his throat.
“Darla,” he said and she looked up at him. “Could you get the video camera? I think it’s time to show Lucy everything.”
Following Ethan’s orders, Darla rose and went over to the bookshelf and grabbed the video camera her parents used years ag
o to record first steps and school outings. Handing it to Ethan, he opened up the tiny screen and handed it to Lucy and instructed her to press play.
“What am I watching?” Lucy asked. Her hand shook and she wished that she could hold it steady.
“Mom left me a message. I didn’t know if I would still be able to access my voicemail when the network went down, so I videotaped it.”
She pressed play.
The camerawork was shaky and she could hear a news report broadcasting in the background. In the video, Ethan’s phone was on the kitchen counter and he had put it on speakerphone. The Ethan holding the video camera leaned down and pressed a button to access his voicemail. Lucy deeply drew a breath as she waited anxiously to find out what she’d hear. The moment the message clicked through, she heard her mother’s voice—it filled the kitchen on the video and as Lucy held the camera, her voice filled the den as well—the first syllable was immediately recognizable as her Mama Maxine. And Lucy bit back tears. For the first time she realized that she truly believed she’d never hear her mom say another word to her again, but there was her voice, captured for her to listen to again and again.
“Ethan. Ethan. There’s no time. They took us. Dear God, they took us. Some guys, from an agency…I’m calling you from a car…a transport…I tried to get them to wait. But…” the voice was indecipherable for a moment. And then there was a click.
Lucy kept watching.
From the videotape, a woman’s voice announced a second saved voicemail and said the date and time, mechanical and rote, like any other day. Like it was just any other message.
It was their mom’s voice. Again.
“Ethan. Listen to me. Get to the airport. Get to the airport now. Get to the airport. That’s where we’re going…but I don’t know yet…”
Another click.
Another announcement of a saved voicemail.
“No time. I’m sorry. You need this message.” In the background, there was a rumble. It was the distinct and unmistakable rumbling of an airplane funneling down a runway. “I called your dad. I…your dad says…” there was a bump, a pop. Their mother was yelling and the phone was far from her mouth now, but her voice trailed after it, barely audible. She was yelling two words over and over again, screaming them, with vigor and intensity, until the line went dead and her voice disappeared.
The automated woman announced: “That is the end of new messages…to replay this message press four…” and Ethan in the video pressed four and listened to the last message again. Zooming in the camera to the front of his phone screen. Hearing it a second time didn’t make her mother’s panicked voice any less haunting.
Then Ethan turned the camera on himself.
“Lucy…I’m in a rush…I’ve got to get to the airport. But in case you get back…I need you to see this.” He jostled the camera back toward the house and out of the kitchen and through the dining room to the entryway. At the time of the video, it was only a half hour or hour after Lucy had left that area. Ethan zoomed in on Lucy and Ethan’s monogramed bags. The only bags left at the foot of the stairs. A lump formed in Lucy’s throat when she saw those—their things had been left behind.
They had been totally and completely left behind.
Then the camera panned to the entryway. And when Lucy saw it on the camera, she opened her mouth in horror and turned to Ethan, who confirmed with a nod. There had clearly been a struggle. Lucy had watched enough cop dramas on TV to know the signs—the mirror was broken, a potted plant on the floor, the vase shattered, the roots exposed. The entry table was turned on its side.
Lucy hadn’t gone through the front door when she came home, she had gone through the side door through the carport. Was this chaos still there?
Would it be a permanent reminder that something bad had happened at their house?
Not taking her eyes off of the camera, she spoke—shocked by the waver in it. “What was Mom saying?” she asked as video-Ethan opened the front door and panned to muddy tire marks in the grass which right led up to the door. A car had pulled up on their recently mowed lawn.
If what Lucy was seeing was true, then people got out and grabbed her family. In the midst of nuclear war, a deathly virus, and the end of the world and life on the planet, her family had also been kidnapped. It was mind-boggling.
“What was she saying?” Lucy asked again. The video had ended. She slammed the monitor shut and held the camera against her chest. “Do you know? Did you figure it out?”
Ethan nodded and glanced to Darla and Grant.
“Ethan?” Lucy asked again.
“Yeah,” he finally answered, his voice small. He sniffed and looked at his sister and then tilted his head. “She was saying fruit cellar.”
“Fruit cellar?” Lucy couldn’t hide her incredulity. “Fruit cellar.”
Their mom canned fruits and vegetables. As kids, she took them cherry picking and blueberry picking and made them go out and play on long canning days. Then she meticulously stored her goods in a dirt-walled fruit cellar in their basement. It was slightly raised off the basement ground and could be accessed by climbing up and over a two-foot wooden barrier. It was a fruit cellar—and their mother referred to it as such—but the children called it “the dungeon” and loathed stepping foot inside the tiny space. Monroe and Malcolm always chose to hide there during games of sardines or hide-and-seek; but they usually were left to discover on their own that no one was coming for them because none of the other kids wanted to open the giant wooden door to see if they were there or not. It was the only place in the house that elicited nightmares and phobias among each of the King kids. They hated the fruit cellar.
In her final message to her lost children, Maxine King had been shouting for them to go to the one place they dreaded more than anything.
“The dungeon.” Lucy reworded. And then she shook her head. “Mom was sending us to the dungeon? No, I don’t get it.”
Ethan and Darla exchanged another look.
“Grab a flashlight,” Ethan instructed. Then he turned to his sister, as the color drained from her face. “Lucy…Grant…there’s something in the fruit cellar that you two need to see.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The fruit cellar. It sat in the pitch blackness with the wooden door slightly ajar. It was cool and quiet and isolated. Every horror movie had a scene like this: Three shuffling people moving forward in a dank basement toward an eerie looking door—their flashlights only creating a small circle of concentrated light and leaving the rest of the space full of dreaded mysteries.
If Lucy had been afraid of her mother’s dungeon before, she was petrified now. Without power, they had no secondary light to illuminate the way, and every box or broom or any other basement belonging seemed particularly foreboding and potentially murderous in the dark. Ethan had demanded Lucy just go explore for herself, like he had, without any warnings or hints about what she would find. Darla, who clearly already knew about the fruit cellar’s contents, tagged along, but even she seemed turned off by the darkness of the basement combined with the growing momentum of fear and worry.
Unable to travel to the basement, Ethan stayed upstairs with Teddy and waited for their return. Teddy seemed to adore Ethan; he was conscious of Ethan’s pain and before they had opened the door to the basement, Teddy had climbed into Ethan’s lap with a collection of books.
They approached the door to the fruit cellar and everyone slowed to a halt.
“You open it,” Lucy said to Grant and gave him a small push toward the door. “This is massively frightening to me.” Grant responded with a resounding no and, as the holder of the flashlight, turned the object onto Lucy and Darla, blinding them—their hands flew to their faces in protest. “Stop. Get that out of my eyes,” Lucy complained.
“Make Darla open it,” Grant said and when Darla sighed and consented, he lowered the light and lit her path to the door. Darla peeled back the door and it squawked at them.
“There,” Darla annou
nced and stepped out of the way. “Boys first.” She motioned for Grant to crawl up and through, he hesitated and then took a step forward, sticking just his upper body into the cellar first and shining the light all around.
“It’s a normal, boring fruit cellar,” Grant called back to them, annoyed. He then climbed in all the way and shone the light on the door so Darla and Lucy could watch where they were stepping as they followed him inside.
All three of them shoved together in the confined space was suffocating—Lucy could move, but every time she did, she ran into another person. There were arms and legs and hands touching. Darla tried to scuttle away to the corner to give them space, but she stepped on Lucy’s toe in the process. Grant tried to control the light, but viewing the fruit cellar through the lens of what Grant deemed important was making Lucy nauseous. She reached over and took the flashlight gently and then began to illuminate each area of the small space in turn.
The entire space was the size of a walk-in closet. Lucy noticed almost immediately that one of the shelves was empty. The cans their mother had carefully prepared over the summer had been moved to the floor. And the whole shelving unit was moved away from the dirt wall, giving just enough room for a body to slip behind it. Ignoring the tickling on the back of her neck, her warning beacon of intuition, she stepped over the grape jelly and peaches and asparagus spears and slid herself behind the wooden shelving unit. Up close, she realized that the wall was not dirt and earth, but wood. And there, sparkling brightly underneath the flashlight was a long, thin door handle.
“Oh my goodness,” Lucy breathed out in a gush. “There’s another room back here.”
Darla’s disembodied voice rose to her from the darkness, “Took Ethan ten minutes to find that door. Go ahead now,” she instructed in a small, sad voice. Lucy paused. It bothered her that Darla knew her family’s secrets before she did; she hated that Darla knew what was waiting for her in the next room and hadn’t made an effort to tell her, warn her, keep her involved in the story. What did Darla gain from being secretive?
Virulent: The Release Page 21