The Virulent Chronicles Box Set

by Shelbi Wescott

  “Happy?” he asked.

  “Let me see,” Darla said and made a motion to tear the blankets off his legs, but Ethan ducked his body in front of her hand. Then she paused, looking between Ethan and Lucy, and back again. “You didn’t tell her.”

  “She’s been in this room for sixty-seconds!” Ethan replied, his tone angry and combative. “Come on Darla, give me a break.”

  “I’ll ignore the opportunity for a joke,” she replied and then she looked around the room. “Where is he?” she asked, softening. She unhooked the holster from her hip and gripped the gun, then placed it on a high bookshelf, standing on her tiptoes to store it out of reach.

  Ethan pointed above him to the second floor. “In the twins’ room. He discovered my old Legos.”

  Darla ducked her head out of the den and called up the stairs, “Teddy? Mommy’s home!”

  Confused, Lucy looked between Ethan and Darla, and then she stood and wandered to the center of the room where she had a clear view of her family’s staircase.

  A little boy appeared at the top carrying her brother’s tiger flashlight in one hand and a fireman hat in the other. He was a dark-haired child, with large eyes and a rash of freckles, and bounded down the steps in a rush of energy and extremities. Arms flailing outward, feet stomping and jumping, the child didn’t stop until he reached his mother as a barricade, moving Darla back a few inches as she absorbed the hug.

  “You were good for Ethan while I was gone?” she asked and the boy nodded vigorously. “And did you eat?”

  “Hamburger,” Teddy answered.

  Darla looked over her shoulder and saw Lucy staring. She put a protective arm on the boy and moved him into the light from the windows.

  “Lucy, this is my son Theodore. Teddy, we call him.”

  “You have a son,” Lucy stated and then immediately regretted not having anything else of value to say about it. Here was a kid, alive. The odds of a mother and a son; a brother and a sister.

  “I have a son,” Darla repeated. For the first time since she met her, Lucy saw emotion in Darla’s eyes: A flicker of fragility underneath the comic-book persona. “He’s five. He’s sweet, and he loves to sing…and he’s intuitive,” she stopped and swallowed. “And he is alive because of your brother. We are alive because of your brother.” She picked the boy up and he wrapped his legs around her middle and placed his head on her shoulder.

  “Mama,” Teddy whispered loudly. “What’s the girl’s name?”

  “Lucy,” she answered. “Her name is Lucy. She’s Ethan’s sister, sweetie. Go ahead, say hello.”

  “Hello,” Teddy said and then he buried his head into his mother’s shoulder, shielding his eyes. Then he lifted his head again and smiled, displaying a neat, straight row of perfect baby teeth, before burying his head again.

  The child was around the same age as Harper. Lucy crossed her arms and smiled at the boy, her lip trembling. Alive because of her brother. Lucy turned to Grant and she looked at him apologetically.

  “I’m sorry, but can everyone just give me a moment with Ethan? Alone.”

  She waited until Grant had risen from his seat and wandered off with Darla before she turned her attention to her brother. The discharged duo followed Teddy up the stairs, their footsteps echoing overhead. It amused Lucy that this was the quietest she had ever heard her house. She kept waiting for the rowdy shouting from her brothers, the crashing and tumbling, of Harper’s whining that someone stole her toys. She missed it.

  “What’s going on?” Lucy’s voice was on edge. She took a giant step toward Ethan.

  “I don’t know how any of this must appear to you…” Ethan started and then frowned.

  “Let’s start with this vaccine. With our siblings’ names on them? Can we start with that, please?”

  “Okay.”

  She gulped. “Okay, what? Just tell me what you know. Tell me everything.”

  “I can’t. It won’t work like that. I don’t think you’d believe me.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do? Wait until you feel like filling me in? I feel like we’re running out of time. Grant—”

  Upstairs, Teddy dumped out what sounded like a crate of blocks.

  “I’m really glad you’re home and that you’re okay. You don’t know how much I worried that I would lose you forever.”

  “Darla said that I was safe. Are we safe?”

  “From the virus, yes. You and I are safe. We were already vaccinated.”

  “When?”

  “Really? You don’t remember being vaccinated lately?” Ethan asked with his eyebrows raised. When Lucy’s stare remained blank, he sighed, and then added, “For our vacation. Our injections.”

  “The ones for the trip? But…” she lowered her eyes and her head began to hurt. Her father had been the one to supply them with their inoculations and, at the time, it seemed reasonable and normal—par for the course of living in their household. Besides that, they were going to Africa. They needed vaccines.

  After a rant about lobbyists and health-care costs, their dad had convinced their mother that he could talk his co-workers into providing him with the vaccines on the cheap. So, he gave them at home.

  Lucy was starting to gather the facts, but still there was a shadow over what those facts implied. She couldn’t see the big picture.

  “The vials we gave Spencer were back-ups. A precaution. A safeguard dad left us..”

  “Where did our vials go then? The Ethan and Lucy vials?”

  Ethan looked to the ceiling.

  Darla and Teddy’s voices drifted downstairs.

  “Oh.”

  “I couldn’t—” he struggled with his words. “She helped me. And Teddy is so young.”

  “Of course.”

  The decision seemed reasonable. There was no way Ethan could have predicted Salem and Grant surviving to Day Six. She wanted to respect Ethan’s compassion toward these strangers—especially a child—and she fought the instinct to be angry with him for giving away the only way she could help her friends. It was too late for Salem, but she felt so impotent and lost with Grant, upstairs, just waiting to die.

  The power to stop that death was in Ethan’s control and he squandered it.

  “You should have kept some back,” Lucy said.

  “We had no way of knowing.”

  “That isn’t the point!” She felt her cheeks blush. Arguing with Ethan always felt so personal.

  “Spencer wasn’t going to let you go. There were talks happening with Darla before he even got you to the front office. Don’t you think we tried everything? You don’t know what it would’ve taken to get you out of there. And besides…how was I supposed to know about the boy?”

  “Grant.”

  “Grant. Right.”

  “He’s going to die and we could have saved him.”

  “That isn’t my fault,” Ethan said to her, his voice rising.

  Lucy threw her hands up in the air. “Then whose fault is it?”

  Ethan shook his head. “Lucy. Just stop. It hasn’t been a picnic for me either. Can we stop? Let’s back-up.”

  Whisking away the throw blanket from his legs, Ethan exposed the broken, beaten, and bloodied mess that lay beneath. His left leg dangled unmoving to the side; there was a swollen mass above the knee that seemed to float to the side, which defied Lucy’s understanding of human anatomy. The skin was yellow and black like someone had attempted to paint him into an exotic animal.

  Recoiling at first and then moving her body closer to inspect the injury, Lucy held out a tender hand and it hovered above the wreckage.

  “This looks horrific,” she said. “Ethan…what happened?”

  He took a breath and then launched into his story. He had gone to the airport looking for their family and encountered Darla and Teddy there. It was the boy that Ethan encountered first; the child was calm, but rattled, and Ethan wanted to get him somewhere safe. Compelled, in the absence of his siblings and his mother, to do something good a
midst the disaster, Ethan convinced Darla that he could offer them shelter.

  “She wasn’t convinced at first. But as soon as we got out of the airport and to a side street, this truck comes out of nowhere, barreling toward me. The driver…impaired by the virus…is—”

  “Dying?” Lucy asked, interrupting, and the question drew Ethan out of his storytelling daze.

  “Dead already.”

  “He hit you.”

  “Pinned me to the side of another car.”

  Lucy gasped and looked down at his legs, imagining her brother stuck between two vehicles, scared and facing the realization that there was no one there who could help him. “You could have died.”

  “I should have. Darla…she had to pull the dead man out of the truck and put the car in reverse to get me out. But my legs were broken. Shattered, I suppose. Not like we could just call 911 and hightail it to the ER, right? And poor Teddy. Just standing there…so concerned. But so brave too. That’s a brave little dude.”

  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…” he 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 video games, 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 ago 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.