And that was when she saw him—Ethan.
He stood by the window, his hands outward on the glass. He was pointing to planes and scanning the sky. Darla moved with the crowd and eased her way closer. Then Ethan pounded his fists against the glass and jumped up and down; he ran the length of the window twice, before he bounced over to an emergency exit door. The guard who had been at that door was dead, and Ethan rushed over the body, flung the door wide, and disappeared.
When Darla looked out the window, she saw what had made Ethan so panicked and exuberant. She walked straight to the glass and watched.
Up in the sky, there was a plane. Darla only caught a glimpse of it, but it was clearly a passenger plane, maybe even a Boeing 747, and it rumbled out of view, leaving a white tail behind it. Her mouth went slack, and Darla shook her head.
Ethan, the psycho, had been right.
There was still a plane in commission—one that operated in defiance of the FAA. And suddenly, like a switch, Darla was curious. If he had been right about that, maybe he was right about other things. He said he had food and water; he said he could protect them. Only she could protect her family now, but maybe the weirdo with the insider information was her best bet for an alliance. After all, she wasn’t from here and had no place to go. Darla didn’t want to carve out a new life for herself in the hugely infected PDX airport. She followed in Ethan’s footsteps and walked down the metal steps of the exit door until she reached the world outside.
She sucked in a deep, fresh breath. Until then, she hadn’t realized how awful the terminal smelled. But the air was beautiful, crisp, and clean.
“Where are we going?” Teddy asked.
“We’re going to find your friend Ethan,” Darla replied.
“I hope he found his sister,” Teddy added wistfully.
Darla didn’t reply.
Ethan wasn’t hard to find. Darla watched as he ran from plane to plane, up and down the emergency steps. She marveled at how few people tried to stop him from his plight. An hour ago, the guards would’ve shot him on sight for running around the tarmac unassisted, but now, he had free reign.
“Ethan!” she yelled as he ran past her, and the young man skidded to a stop.
He froze and turned, his face expectant and bright, but when he saw that it was her, he paused, considered her appearance before him, and then burst into tears.
“Oh, Jesus,” Darla mumbled. Walking over to him, she handed him Teddy. Ethan wrapped his arms around the boy and blubbered into his shoulder while Darla attempted to comfort him with small pats on his back. She wasn’t very good with crying people. Grace. She was good with Grace.
“They’re gone,” he sobbed. “Gone.”
“I saw the plane, too,” she said.
“I wasn’t fast enough. I just missed them. You don’t understand… I just missed them—”
“You were right.”
“If I hadn’t. Oh,” he moaned. “If I hadn’t stopped…looking—”
She caught the implication through his tears. Darla felt nauseated by her guilt.
“You helped my son find me instead,” Darla said, but it was to comfort herself, too. “Don’t think I’m not aware of that sacrifice.” She looked at the young man—how old was he? Eighteen? Nineteen? Surely, no older than twenty.
“Sacrifice,” Ethan repeated. He sniffed.
Darla didn’t have anything to say. She wanted a redo.
“I have to get home. I have to get back home,” Ethan said in a flurry. “You have to come with me if you want to live—”
“What’s at your home?” Darla asked. She didn’t want to trust him, didn’t want to follow him anywhere, but she knew it might be her only shot at survival. And the boy was a mess, snot dripped from his nose, and he had ripped a hole in his jacket. He was pained, not manipulative. He was hurting, not dangerous.
“I promise if you can help me find my family, I will help you in any way I can,” Ethan said.
“How can I help you find your family?”
“Clues… clues…” he sputtered. “He left clues.”
Darla was now solely convinced the young man was special. She looked at the way Teddy clung to him, so trusting, and she closed her eyes and tried to see how the afternoon would play out. He’d been right about the plane, and their prolonged conversation in the terminal had cost him his chance to find his family. She owed him.
“I can help you get back home. Do you live far?” she asked. She had slowed down her words, and she found herself addressing Ethan like a child. He was a child—a big, blubbering baby.
“No,” he replied. “But we’ll have to walk part of the way… I couldn’t… drive. It was hard to—”
“Sure,” Darla said. “Sure. You promise to help me feed my child… provide us shelter—” She reached over and took Teddy back from him; the four-year-old was silent and concerned.
Ethan put his right hand up to stop her from talking and then wiped his tears with his left. “Hey,” he said, and he blinked once, then twice. “I was rattled earlier, and I’m rattled now… but…”
“We don’t know each other,” Darla interrupted. “You’re a grown kid, saying your mom and sister—”
“—and brothers—”
“Sure, and brothers, are on that plane. I saw that plane… so, I believe you, but I don’t know you and you don’t know me.”
“Ethan King,” he said and stuck out his hand.
“Darla. And you’ve met Teddy. And inside that airport is the body of my wife Grace…”
“I’m so sorry,” Ethan said, and he looked like he might cry again.
“Don’t be sorry,” Darla replied. “But I don’t know what the hell is happening here. Do you understand? I don’t understand. Today, hours ago, I boarded a plane to see my in-laws and now, I’m here, on a tarmac, and my wife is…” She trailed off. “And you’re here… and… look, help me get my child to safety, okay? And I can take care of the rest. I won’t be able to think until he’s safe. Inside. With water. Away from this.” Even as the words left her mouth, Darla thought she might regret them. What was she doing? Was she mad? Did losing Grace make her weak? She could handle anything on her own; she would protect Teddy, she would find them food. She was a fighter, a survivor, a mom. This was a blubbering teenager.
She saw Ethan contemplate words, and he looked relieved. He took Teddy’s hand and gave it a small squeeze. Then his eyes lifted to the sky and stared after the plane. It no longer existed in the sky; even the contrails had disappeared and floated into the clouds.
“I can help—”
“You keep saying that and I sure hope so,” Darla replied. “My boy deserves some peace today and a sanctuary.”
Ethan took in a shaky breath and then spun and started to walk north. “It may not have been their plane,” he said after a few minutes of silence. Darla jogged up to him and didn’t say a word. “What if it wasn’t their plane?”
“I’ll help you find them,” she said. It was a promise she didn’t know she could keep. But she knew that Ethan King, the sad boy who had shown kindness to her son, needed to hear it. She knew that he might need them more than she needed him. And she knew that above all, no matter what happened, Teddy would come first. If aligning herself with Ethan kept Teddy safe, she could swallow her pride, she could push down her doubts, and she could accept that today was just a horrible dream.
“I don’t know how…” Ethan mumbled to himself. “How anyone… how he… how… they’re killing children. Children.” Then Ethan paused, turned to the side, doubled over, and puked on the black tar.
Darla jumped back and screamed. She started to back away, and the world spun crazily around her.
“No!” Ethan shouted. “No. I’m… not! I’m not dying! I just—” He panted and stumbled toward her. “I just feel sick… like emotionally sick. Not. Not dying! Please believe me!”
She blinked. She clutched Teddy tighter than she ever had before, and she waited a few long seconds to see i
f Ethan was lying. Maybe he’d keel over at any second, and maybe he would die on her, too. Maybe she had hitched her wagon to a corpse.
“Don’t die on me,” she said, and she couldn’t contain her anger or her worry. “No one else is allowed to die on me today.”
Ethan nodded and continued onward. They scrambled down a side hill and left the airport via a side street. For one moment, Darla turned around and looked back at the airport. There was still a flurry of activity out and around the planes and inside the terminals. Most people milled about, like zombies, but some ran with great urgency to the side streets. A pain stabbed Darla in the chest and traveled to her side; she wanted to double over, but she kept herself upright and kept her arms around her son.
Grace was in there.
Her grave would be Gate E2. Her shroud a fast food napkin. Her body would decompose and rot next to strangers.
Darla pushed the image away. She refused to stop and let her grief disable her.
What Darla was upset about most of all was that her cell phone had been stored in Grace’s purse, which was still hanging across her chest. On that cell phone were all the messages Grace had ever left—her voice greeting Darla with warmth and love. Sometimes, she sang a song.
There was one. Saved message sixteen. It was fifteen seconds long. And Darla had saved it through three phones and six years.
“I’m on my way home, and I love you,” Grace crooned to a made-up melody, “and you don’t need to call me back ‘cause I’m driving. But I can’t wait to see you… and I can’t wait to hold you! And I love you…. you-you-you. Love you, you, you.”
The skies were silent and the earth was dark. But Darla was still alive, and each second that passed gave her the reassurance that she and Teddy would stay that way. Not only stay alive and survive the atrocities of the day, but thrive, too. And Grace could live alongside them as long as her song kept playing in repeat in Darla’s mind like a soundtrack.
“I’m on my way home, and I love you.”
“Just follow me,” Ethan said.
Darla obeyed. She had a choice, she had options, and she chose this one. She chose Ethan. It didn’t make sense and it didn’t have to—she chose this kid and this kid chose her.
“And you don’t need to call me back ‘cause I’m driving. But I can’t wait to see you… and I can’t wait to hold you!”
“I’m following,” Darla replied. She flipped Teddy up and moved him to her shoulders; she held him by his light-up tennis shoes, and soon, he put his head on top of hers and wrapped his small hands under her chin to hold on.
“And I love you…. you-you-you. Love you, you, you.”
NEIL GREGORY’S DAY – Northwest Hills Veterinary Clinic
She’d called him twenty-three times between the hours of six and ten. Then seven more times in the last hour: starting at 5am, the last one at 6am. Each time, he saw her number on the caller ID and let the ringing run its course. Out of the thirty phone-calls, she’d left four voicemails, and Dr. Neil Gregory checked them within seconds.
The lapse in calls between the evening hours and morning hours implied that either Shirley had fallen asleep or she adopted some restraint. Dr. Gregory was confident it was the former, as clearly the woman lacked restraint of any kind. Who calls their veterinarian at five in the morning? He felt sorry for her, certainly, there was no doubt about that, but what was he expected to do? He wasn’t a miracle worker—he could not bring animals back from the grave. He was inundated, up to his eyeballs, almost literally, in dead dogs.
He hadn’t slept all night.
Instead, as the hours ticked by, he replayed the images of the day in his head. There was the first dog, a Shih Tzu with a bow in her hair named Mimi. The owner, a nurse at the free clinic down the street, had taken off work to get Mimi’s teeth cleaned, but when she went to leave for the appointment, she found Mimi dead. Of course, poisoning was the likely cause, and Dr. Gregory had counseled the owner to return home immediately to assess her house for the cause. Ten minutes after she left, four more dogs turned up dead, warm, and waiting for him in the front office. That was when Dr. Gregory felt a cold trickle of fear pass down his spine.
Mass poisoning. It had happened before, but never anywhere near the vicinity of his own clinic. Or it could be tainted dog food. Possibly some psycho at the park. He quizzed them all with a laundry list of questions that seemed relevant at the time, and played amateur detective to the crimes committed against them. But the animals in his office hadn’t played together at the same park or eaten the same food; they didn’t have the same collar manufacturers, they weren’t the same breed.
Whatever was killing the dogs was doing so indiscriminately.
When he checked on the dogs in his care, he wasn’t surprised to find many of them in distress: labored breathing, vomiting, lethargy, seizures. The nurses bounced around from room to room and sent people home with their dead animals, unable to give them the answers they demanded. It wasn’t the dead dogs that caused the tears and lashing out but the lack of clues. Why is this happening? How? Who? Can we stop it? Will it kill all the dogs? Yes, it would appear. It was killing all the dogs.
A mousy-looking woman with large teeth and feral hair hurried up to the counter at midday clutching her cat and screamed, “When will it get the cats? Are the cats safe?” Then she deposited the hissing creature on to the counter, threw a display of dog tags to the ground, and demanded someone see her before she caused a scene. He didn’t want to imagine what she thought a scene looked like—he had terrifying visions of her defecating on his floor.
That was when Dr. Gregory decided to close.
There were twenty-eight dead dogs, seven live cats, and one rambunctious ferret in the back of his veterinarian office. People clogged his phone lines and filled up the clinic’s voice mailbox with questions.
In a childish scrawl, Dr. Gregory wrote: CLOSED DUE TO VETERINARY EMERGENCY. WE ARE SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS, BUT WE CANNOT ASSIST. He taped it to the door with medical tape and turned off the lights. He sent the nurses home, although they protested, and sat in the dark among the dead. At some point he also ate a granola bar and left the wrapper discarded on the ground—it was the only thing he could remember eating all day.
At some point his wife called his cellphone.
Their husky and their red heeler were unsurprisingly dead, too.
“I can’t do this without you,” she said and she hiccupped.
“There are things I need to do here,” he replied. It wasn’t a lie, but he felt guilty for saying it. He should go home and deal with his own loss, but still it seemed idiotic to leave the mess for tomorrow. His future-self would thank him.
She was silent for a long time on the other end, and then his wife whispered, “I’m evil…because I just keep thinking…so much of our business at the clinic is canine—”
“Don’t say it, Carol,” he stopped her. “Karma.”
“It’s our livelihood, Neil,” she replied. It was hard to hide her defensiveness. “You have to think about these things. I wish I didn’t have to, but I do. I do the books, remember.” He remembered.
“No, I don’t have to think about it. I’m a man and a doctor and I love these dogs. I only have to think about how to—”
“Did you charge a fee for disposal?”
Neil sighed. “Yes, Carol. Of course. Nominal.”
He hadn’t charged a thing all day. How could he?
“Then I think you should open back up.”
“I sent everyone home.”
“I’m not burying these dogs by myself, Neil. They’re heavy and I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. And there are lots of people like me…and they need you. At the very least, assist with disposal. A caring hug, a small fee, and all the normal things you say. Then take them and start piling them up in back.”
“Carol—”
She was silent. He could hear her short, noisy bursts of breath.
“Aren’t you scared?” he asked.
&n
bsp; “Confused,” she replied tersely. “Angry. Worried.”
“But not scared?”
“Are you scared?” she asked and somehow Dr. Gregory knew that if he admitted his fear, she would mock him. So, he said he wasn’t scared, he was thinking, plotting, and would call her back later.
That was when Shirley began to call.
He remembered exactly when he gave Shirley Finch his cellphone number. It was a single act of kindness in a moment of flustered appreciation for her celebrity. After all, she was the former governor’s wife, a silver-haired beacon of respectability. And when he’d treated her aging Bernese Mountain Dog for some joint issues, she’d asked if he did house calls for euthanasia. It was a simple request: that her beloved Niko would not die in a sterile office, but at home, with his own bed and toys and loved ones by his side. The dog was eight at the time, aging and slowing down, but Dr. Gregory assured the wife to the former governor that she had good years left with the beloved pet.
Then he agreed to administer the small shot of medicine when the time came, and she could simply call him on his personal line. Any time of day, he had said. When you need me, I’ll come, he’d promised.
Shirley pocketed the scrap of paper with his number on it, and had given him her number in return (so, he’d know who was calling) and walked out of his office with her regal head held high. She hadn’t called him, but that was two years ago, and then her number popped up on his phone with persistent consistency.
Her voicemails all said something to the effect of: “Dr. Gregory, I’m sure you are inundated with disaster at your small clinic, but I need you. You see Niko is…would you call me? Call me the moment you get this message.” They were vague, hurried, and always with a tremor on her voice.
The Virulent Chronicles Box Set Page 35