The System (Virulent Book 2)

by Shelbi Wescott

  Your partner in crime and zombies. Grant.

  Lucy looked up. She had been so absorbed in Grant’s words that she hadn’t realized her father the water was off and her father was out of the shower. She folded the letter and started walking, pushing the paper against her leg as she walked. Flinging the door open, Lucy marched into the open room and looked around. The bathroom door was open and her parents’ bedroom door was closed. Without a thought about her father’s potential level of undress, Lucy grabbed the handle and waltzed straight inside, slamming the door behind her.

  Scott King stood in his boxer shorts and a t-shirt, one leg balancing as he slipped on a pair of jeans.

  “Lucy, what are you doing?” Scott exclaimed and he stumbled backward toward the bed, hopping on one foot. He looked startled, but then when he saw her face, he looked confused.

  “Why?” Lucy seethed. “Why couldn’t you do the right thing for once in your life? You had the whole world…the whole world…and all I asked for was one boy. What was one more to you?”

  Her father dropped his pants to the floor and stepped out of them. Then he started to walk toward Lucy as she started to charge forward. She had never felt more full of rage. So murderous. As Scott put out his hands to embrace her, Lucy raised her fists and pounded his chest as hard as she could. He flinched, but did not retreat, and eventually he puffed out his chest in an attempt to absorb her blows.

  “Lucy, Lucy,” Scott repeated her name, calmly and firmly. “Stop. Sit. Stop!” He raised his voice and Lucy, breathless, sunk to the ground.

  “You killed him. You killed him! And you’re going to kill Ethan too? You’re nothing. You’re evil. I wish I’d never been born. That’s better than admitting that I’m your daughter.”

  Her words stung him. When she saw him flinch, she couldn’t help it—she wanted to keep going. Hurt upon hurt; she relished being able to tell him what she thought.

  “You’re a coward. And I hate you.”

  Her father wrapped his arms around her shoulders and tucked her into his chest. His arms were still damp from the shower, his skin warm. She tried to wriggle away, but he only increased his grip; still, Lucy struggled against him. Her tears dampened his shirt and she stomped her legs, hoping to catch his toes or his shins.

  “Lucy,” her father repeated. “Lucy. Stop.”

  When she wouldn’t calm herself, he raised his voice.

  “Stop!”

  “Why? Why do you have to be so horrible?” Lucy sobbed. “Why do you have to take away everything I love?”

  Her father killed Salem.

  Her father killed Grant.

  Her family was alive, but what did it matter?

  Lucy heard the bedroom door creak open and from the corner of her eye she saw her mother standing there holding two cloth grocery bags by the handles. Her eyes traveled between Scott and Lucy and then she set her bags on the floor and walked over to them, tugging Lucy by the arm.

  “I leave for twenty minutes and everything goes straight to hell,” Maxine muttered. She wedged herself between daughter and husband and went to move Lucy away, but Lucy would not be budged.

  “You were strong,” Lucy seethed. “You were my role model, my hero.” She looked straight at her mother.

  “Careful,” Maxine replied, her voice steeped in warning.

  “You’re nothing. You let him do this. You went along willingly.”

  Maxine raised her hand. “Enough,” she yelled in protest. But Lucy did not stop. She launched an even greater attack, screaming in hysterics until she saw her mother raise her hand and let her palm fly toward Lucy’s cheek.

  The sharp string of betrayal landed squarely on her face. Lucy was shocked into silence. She brought her hand up and placed it over her injury; tears welled up in her eyes and spilled over her hand and her other cheek—silently rolling down. But she did not say another word, or sniff, or dare to move.

  “The punishment for insubordination is the tank,” Maxine said calmly. “You’ve already been through that once before. Did you feel like once wasn’t quite enough? If you are so hungry to die, then I’d be happy to walk you down there myself.”

  “I don’t want to die,” Lucy mumbled after a period of silence. “No one else should die.”

  “Then learn to live. Here.” Maxine slid out from between Lucy and Scott, rubbing her right hand with her left. She then slipped the handles of the grocery bags onto her wrists and left the room, slamming the door behind her.

  When Lucy was certain her mother was no longer in hearing range, she turned to her father and lowered her eyes.

  “This is not a life,” she said.

  “It is the only life I can offer you,” Scott replied, and he sank downward, sitting on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands.

  “I don’t want to be here.”

  “There is food here. Protection. An education. A hope for a better life. A plan for the future. My only other option was to let you die at the hands of a man who wanted to take that from us. Should I have let him?”

  Lucy was silent for a long time and then she thought of everything that had happened in the last few weeks, and she simply nodded. “It’s never the right thing,” she said to her father. “It was selfish.” The word popped out of her mouth before she had time to self-censor.

  Scott lowered his head. “It was selfish to want to save my family.” She was uncertain if he was asking her or tossing the statement out into the ether.

  “At the expense of everyone else?” Lucy nodded a reply to her own rhetorical question.

  “But you want to save Grant,” Scott answered and he raised his eyebrows. “What would you risk to accomplish that goal? What sacrifice would you make?”

  The tense was not lost on her. “Want to? As in, I still can?”

  He shook his head, “Lost on semantics. You’re missing the point. We do everything in our power to protect the people we love. The line between good and evil is not as black and white as you may think.” He raised his finger, but he looked defeated. “Especially when it comes to family. There are no rules.”

  That assertion defied everything she had been taught by her parents. They instructed her to be a good citizen and a good friend; to live according to the laws of the land. That there was a wrong thing to do and a right thing to do—things that hurt people were wrong things to do. Moral relativism was never part of their family creed and guidelines. While her father was a self-proclaimed atheist and her mother agnostic, she had been raised in one of the most moral, ethical, and responsible households: what’s wrong was always wrong, no matter what.

  She rubbed her cheek.

  “Dad—” she started, but she didn’t know what to say to him. There were no words. No greeting card canned sayings that helped her navigate these murky waters of their tenuous relationship.

  Scott looked up and his eyes were red. “Perhaps it’s time we go see Huck. You’ve missed it all. The explanations, the comfort. Huck will help you see…you are safe here.”

  “I never guessed you to be such a lemming, Dad.”

  Scott looked straight at her. “I’ve told you before that blind social behavior is not an actual trait of lemmings. It was manufactured, by a studio, for Hollywood effect. They flung those lemmings off the cliff to make it appear that they followed the first one. It’s false. A charade. There is an entire phrase, imbedded into the lexicon of our language that is a scientific lie. Perpetuating that belief by attributing my behavior to that animal is incorrect.” He tried to smile; tried to pass off his mini-lecture like a joke.

  Lucy wasn’t buying it.

  She raised her arms in disbelief. “Are you serious right now?”

  “Yes,” Scott answered quickly. “You see…think about the make-up of an animal whose instincts would instruct it to rather die than seek self-preservation…”

  With a sigh, Lucy hit her hand against her forehead. “Oh, Dad. How did you do this? You couldn’t
have possibly known I was going to use the word lemming…but you’ve turned it around, to prove your point? You’re a mind ninja.”

  Under different circumstances, that might have been a compliment.

  This time Scott didn’t smile. “I’m serious. Monkeys, lemmings, ants. It doesn’t matter. All of our evolutionary instincts are to survive. And when humans are threatened we also naturally digress to that innate foundation as well…”

  “Dad—” Lucy couldn’t handle it anymore.

  “I’ve always taught my kids how to be critical thinkers.”

  “And yet we’re living in an underground apartment building,” she exploded. “With blind allegiance to some crazy old dude? Dad! You and Mom told me once that you didn’t want me to attend church with Salem because their religion was based upon a crazy, narrow belief system.” She paused and searched her father’s face for clues that he knew what she was going to say next. “And here we are.” She motioned around the room.

  “Huck could answer some of these things. He’s—”

  “If you tell me you did this because you thought it would save our lives, fine. But if you tell me you believe him, this…everything?” Lucy couldn’t even finish her thought; the idea that her father could get caught up in some cultish organization was so unbelievable she was afraid that hearing him admit it would cause her to shrivel up and no longer exist. More than anything she had seen or heard, that fact, alone, would unravel everything she had ever believed. It was too much.

  “There’s so much more to this than you could possibly understand,” Scott finally answered—it was a lazy move by a cowardly parent: expressing that she couldn’t understand and so therefore didn’t deserve answers. He had always been better than that. Always.

  “I want to see Grant,” Lucy stated and put her hands on her hips. “Please?”

  With a deep sigh, Scott looked at his oldest daughter and then scratched at the stubble on his chin. “You can’t.”

  “I have to.”

  “No.”

  “His letter says he’s dead. Is he dead?”

  “I can’t answer that—”

  She took a defiant step closer. “You owe me an answer. You owe me that much.”

  “Lucy…” Scott closed his eyes. “Grant is gone. Grant is gone and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  She hadn’t moved in over an hour. Her mother put away the food items—collections of grains and fruits that Maxine planned to use for a special family dinner—in the small cupboards and stepped over Lucy’s body on her way to make beds in the two bedrooms. It was like Lucy didn’t exist. She didn’t have any energy to cry or fight; instead she just stayed on the floor and hoped someone would kill her.

  Maybe someone would step on her head on accident. Maybe someone would come and tank her anyway.

  Lucy hugged Grant’s letter to her chest.

  Maxine wandered over and stood above Lucy, with her arms over her chest.

  “Get up,” she instructed.

  Without reacting, Lucy stayed where she was.

  “I’m taking you to the Center. It’s not healthy to stay cooped up in this apartment.”

  “You think so?” Lucy stated, dripping with all the facetiousness she could muster, and then she rolled on her side, away from her mother.

  For her entire life, Lucy had loved and adored her parents. While the rest of her teen friends wallowed in angst about over-protectiveness and fought ad nauseam about cell phones, grades, dating, and privacy, Lucy thought of her mother as one of her closest friends and looked up to her father as a wise leader. The strangest part was how quickly the facade tumbled, and how instantaneously her disillusionment took over. When she felt a tug of remorse for judging them too harshly, her mind pulled her back into the grim reality of the System. Housed inside these walls, walking freely and comfortably were people who, at the very least, were complicit in the release of a virus that killed billions of people. Billions.

  With the loss so staggering, it was difficult to comprehend.

  She had no answers, no understanding of why. She only had a face of evil: Huck. And her own father. And now, she realized, her mother too.

  “I’m serious,” Maxine stated. She reached down to lift Lucy off of the ground, but Lucy yanked her arm back and tucked herself into a ball.

  “The Center. The System. The Sky Room.”

  Maxine stood directly over her daughter, both legs on either side, and peered down with her hands on her hips. She was seething, her chest rising and falling in rapid bursts, her eyes narrowed. “Why are you acting like this?”

  “Because I’m a teenager,” Lucy replied with a flippant eye-roll. She was unafraid of being slapped again.

  “I want to help. But you have to let me in,” Maxine replied. Lucy looked at her mother and felt a twinge of remorse for her flippancy. Her mother was worried. She’d never catered to Lucy before.

  There was a knock on the door. Lucy knew that the doors in the pods were unlocked, so a knock was strange—someone from outside their family was waiting to be let inside. Feigning disinterest, Lucy kept her eyes on the door as her mother, with a sigh, left her post to answer it.

  As Maxine opened the door wide, Lucy, from her vantage point on the floor, saw the girl from her first day standing outside in the hall. The one who had peered at her and closed the door.

  “Hello, Cassandra,” Maxine said with a sigh. “Galen went to the Center…then he’s an assistant cook in the Sky Room today. He’s not here, if that’s who you’re looking for.”

  The girl named Cassandra ignored Maxine’s exasperated expression and clear dismissal. Unlike anyone Lucy had ever met before, the girl disregarded Maxine’s outstretched arm across the threshold and slithered her way into the King family residence.

  “No, no,” the girl said and she walked straight up to Lucy. “I came to see her.”

  Maxine’s shoulders slumped, and she looked back out into the now-empty hallway, and then shut the door. “Come in, of course,” she said to the closed door before turning around.

  Lucy was able to get a good look at the girl without moving. Her sleek black hair was parted down the middle and braided into two long plaits; large golden hoops dangled from her ears, and pale pink lipstick glistened on her lips. Despite all the surrounding factors of their living situation, the girl—Cassandra—was stylish in a red shirt-dress and a yellow belt. She spoke with a slight accent, although Lucy couldn’t place it. She had to be close to Lucy’s age, although even age seemed relative in the System. Her dark skin was flawless and smooth.

  But it was her eyes that caused Lucy pause. One eye was the color of night and it was so dark that even the pupil blended into the iris: just a dark black circle. Her other eye was a kaleidoscope of color: one half started off as brown, but toyed with turning green or gold, before settling on a sky blue. The effect was so arresting that Lucy couldn’t stop staring.

  “So. We meet. The girl who arrived late to the party,” the girl said, looking down on Lucy’s rolled up body. “Come on. Get up. Let’s go.”

  Lucy shifted into a sitting position and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Go where?”

  “Around. Don’t you want to?”

  “Not really,” Lucy answered to the stranger. “I don’t know you.” She stole a look to her mother who stood back, but appraised the situation with a look of annoyance rather than relief. It was written all over her face: Don’t come in here and achieve what I could not. Lucy looked between her mother and the new girl and back again.

  Cassandra raised her eyebrows and smirked. “Of course not. That’s why you should come. You won’t ever meet anyone like this. Consider me your welcoming committee.”

  With one final look to her mom, Lucy nodded. “Sure,” she agreed out of spite and rose to her feet. Tucking Grant’s letter into the waistband of her pants, she looked over at her mother again for permission—with raised eyebrows and an expectant silence�
�and after a long stare, Maxine motioned for the door.

  “When will you be back?” her mother asked crossing her arms.

  Cassandra shrugged. “By curfew?” she suggested, but Maxine laughed at her reply. The girl didn’t cower. “Fine, fine, Mrs. King. Let’s say by dinner. Lucy has a lot to see.”

  With visible frustration, Maxine relented. Turning away and placing her palms flat on the apartment’s small kitchen table. She bent over, as if in prayer, and didn’t say anything else as Cassandra and Lucy exited the apartment and walked out into the sterile hallway. The elation Lucy felt at winning against her mother’s will was quickly replaced by confusion and apprehension—did she really want to follow this girl blindly throughout the System?

  After the door was shut and they had meandered a few feet away, the girl flipped her long braids over her shoulders and smiled. “Parents in this place have become so predictable. They want you to buy in to the same lie they have. So much so that they’re eager to do things they never would have before. They’re permissive, to a point, and to a fault.”

  “I’m not sure I’ve found that to be the case,” Lucy said, thinking only of Grant.

  “Cass,” she said, sticking out her hand toward Lucy’s middle. Lucy grabbed her palm and gave it a small pump. “Your next door neighbor.”

  “Lucy. King.”

  “I know. The Head Technician’s daughter.”

  “So, how did you end up down here?”

  Cass smiled. “Your dad orchestrated the reason we’re here. My dad is the man behind the place.”

  “Oh yeah?” Lucy asked, her head still foggy and her mind still fixated on Grant and Grant alone.

  “Yuppers,” she replied. “Claude Salvant. Architect and designer behind all the Systems. Overseer of Building for this one. So,” Cass flashed Lucy a wink, “keep your complaints to yourself.”

  Joking or not, Lucy couldn’t even bring herself to smile. Cassandra seemed to notice her audience was struggling. They approached the door at the end and pushed their way through, then walked to the elevator and Cass called it to them by placing her palm on the device by the door. Once inside the elevator, Cass turned to Lucy and smiled.