The Virulent Chronicles Box Set

by Shelbi Wescott

  Josephine took a bold step forward and stuck her finger in Huck’s face. Her arm was shaking. She open and closed her mouth like a fish while she contemplated her response, her chest rising and falling in anger. Then she let her hand fall to her side, her shoulders slouched forward.

  “She’s never coming back.”

  “I can still want justice,” Huck said. He bent down and picked up his youngest child and held her in his arms. Blair rested her head on her father’s shoulder. She brought a hand up and ran it through his dark hair greying at the temples. His body aged a decade in the past four years. From the moment Kymberlin’s body was discovered, naked in the woods, covered loosely with dried leaves, her skin and fingernails scrubbed clean, her eyes left open, Huck watched his own eyes set deeper in his sockets and deep lines etch in broad strokes across his forehead.

  From behind them, someone stirred. Their driver took a tentative step forward and cleared his throat and motioned to the town car, which was idling on the gravel drive. “On the radio...I just heard...it’s time.”

  Huck and Josephine turned to him, their faces ashen. Josephine looked like she was going to be sick.

  “Gordon!” Josephine called without looking. “Gordon! Get back here!” Her voice rose. Here here here echoed through the trees. “Oh, Huck,” she whispered, and she sucked in the air through her teeth. “I’m scared.”

  He trudged forward through the grass and reached for the handle of the car. “I’m not,” he nodded with a tense smile. “Short deliberation is in our favor.” Huck looked back at his daughter’s final resting place. He blew a kiss in the direction of the headstone and ducked into the waiting car.

  No one bothered to turn on the overhead lights. A single desk lamp illuminated Huck’s desk, his sprawling blueprints and stacks of paper. He tapped a pen against his temple and mumbled to himself while Bobby Darin crooned “Beyond the Sea” in the background. Blair, still dressed in her polka dots, had fallen asleep across the cushions of the front den’s leather couch, one foot dangling off the side. Her brother sat with his back against the edge, his head resting in his hands. Maybe he had drifted off to sleep, too, with an empty whisky tumbler turned over by his side, a melting ice-cube creeping toward the edge.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  Gordon’s head shot up. He looked to his dad and then to his sleeping sister. “Are we answering it?” he asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Huck didn’t reply.

  “Dad?” Gordon called, a little louder. “Dad?” But Huck hunched over his paperwork, picking up one piece and then another, oblivious to his son’s voice or the knocking. “Dad!”

  He turned, his red-rimmed eyes catching in the light.

  “If you care about who is at the door...then answer the damn door,” Huck replied. Then he stared, unmoving, as Gordon hesitated and finally rose, wiping his hands on his pants as he walked.

  Keeping the chain lock in place, Gordon unlocked the deadbolt and opened the door just a few inches. He looked out into the hallway at a tall man with sunken shoulders, his tie unknotted around his neck, hair disheveled.

  “You’ve been drinking, too?” Gordon asked, still peering, his voice raspy from sleep.

  The man gave a non-committal shrug. Gordon sighed and shut the door, slid the chain free, and then opened the door wide. The visitor squeezed Gordon’s shoulder as he walked past, making a beeline to Huck.

  “You don’t have any lights for this place?” the man asked.

  No one answered him.

  “Maybe,” Huck said after a long moment, “you should have called before coming here.”

  “We didn’t get to talk at the courthouse, about options, and for me to say how sorry...”

  Huck put up a hand. He turned to the man, his face flat, expressionless. “Save your sorry. You’ll need them in bulk when the other teenagers turn up dead. Their fathers are going to want to know how a man who kidnapped a college student in broad daylight and strangled her in his apartment, and then transported her to a well-traveled park...was able to walk out and see the sun today. Smell the rain coming in. Feel freedom. He felt it, on his skin, seeping into his pores. Freedom that he doesn’t deserve, that’s for sure. So, no, no—no sorry for me.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Save the sorry. Save them all.” Then Huck turned back to his desk. “Do you know what next week is?”

  The man swallowed loudly. Gordon resumed his place on the ground; he didn’t take his eyes off his father, even as the man looked to Gordon for reassurance.

  “Huck—”

  Huck drummed his fingers against the wood. “My question. Answer my question. In all those copious amounts of notes you needed...you have it written down?” He then wielded his pen in the direction of the man. “You must have it written down.”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry. It’s been a long day. God. Seriously, can we turn some lights on in here?” The man reached for the wall light, but Gordon coughed and Huck spun, lifting his pen as a weapon.

  “Tsk. Tsk,” Huck said. He waved the pen like a metronome keeping the beat. “I saw the date...bright and clear today on my daughter’s headstone. Her birthday, Harris. Next week would have been Kymberlin’s twenty-third birthday.”

  Harris didn’t reply. Then he opened his mouth into a long drawn out oh and closed his eyes.

  On the stereo, Darin’s voice repeated sailin’, sailin’, sailin’ as the song hummed its ending. Then after three long seconds of silence, the track picked back up at the beginning. Harris turned toward the music, but kept a poker face.

  “I should have remembered, Huck. Really, I should have.”

  “You failed us.” Huck took a step forward and then leaned in, poking the tip of his pen into Harris’s tie. “The jury failed us. Failure, failure everywhere.” He looked wildly between his visitor and his son and then his sleeping daughter. He paused and examined his pen against the green and white fabric of the tie, an inkblot spreading, and withdrew it with a swift motion. “Not again.”

  Harris put his hands up. “Huck, listen, friend. I mean this without offense, because I know what you’ve been through today...but if you’re planning on doing anything...extreme...I can’t let you. I’ll have to report you. We’ve been friends longer than this trial...I’m going to help you...”

  Retreating to his work, Huck didn’t answer. Then he slipped a piece of paper out from a single stack and held it to the light. “A-ha,” he said, pleased with himself. “Found it.” He flicked his finger against the middle and the paper wobbled in his hands. “Goodbye, Harris,” he said and he walked to the door and opened it wide.

  “Huck,” the man pleaded and he remained rooted to the floor. Then he looked around the room, and his eyes settled on the fully dressed Blair and the disheveled Gordon as if for the first time. He lowered his voice to a whisper and took three large strides over to his friend. “Okay, okay. I can call in some favors. Some people...from back in the day, they can help with these kinds of things.”

  “Please,” Huck interrupted. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Leave before you embarrass yourself.”

  “You always knew that was on the table—”

  “Stop.”

  “Where’s Josephine, Huck?” Harris asked and Huck narrowed his eyes, his hands remaining fixed on the open door. When no one answered, Harris took a step back toward the middle of the condo. “Let me just talk to Josephine before I go, okay?”

  Gordy stretched his legs out in front of himself and yawned with an exaggerated flair.

  “She’s on the roof. With a bottle of wine. And that’s where she wants to be right now...so leave her be,” Huck replied.

  “Oh, now.” Harris ran his fingers through his hair, his arm made a shadow on the wall. “Huck, now...”

  “Have a good night, dear old friend.”

  “Come on. Don’t kick me out. Today’s been dreadful, for all of us.”

  “No,” Huck said with an eerie calm. “Not
for all of us. But really, what could be worse than the day I found out she was gone? There’s no pain that measures up to that moment...so, this? Today? Your epic botching of a case giftwrapped for you?” Huck brought his free hand to his mouth and mimed blowing dust off of his palm. Then he wiped his hands together, tucking the single piece of paper under his arm. “That’s all we are. All you are to me...and I’d appreciate it if you got out of my house.”

  “Huck—”

  “Leave,” he instructed. And after a moment of hesitation, Harris rolled his shoulders back, waved goodbye to Gordon and disappeared into the bright, white, well-lit hallway; his shoes hitting the tiled floor with deliberate thuds as he traveled back the way he came, carrying himself away from them.

  “Was he right?” Gordon asked after Huck shut the door and the condo settled back into shadow.

  “He wasn’t right about anything,” Huck said as he turned with a methodical slowness and walked toward his son. He held out the paper and gave it a little shake. “You mean, will I let Harris intervene? Will I take that killer’s life like he took everything from me?”

  Gordon cringed.

  Huck lowered his eyes.

  “No,” he answered to the floor. “What’s the point?”

  “Revenge,” Gordon seethed and he hit his fist against the floor.

  “Revenge will eat you alive,” Huck said and crouched to the ground and put his hands on Gordy’s head. “That’s the thing you’ll learn when you become a man, my son, about the things that could kill you, devour your humanity...the part of you that still wants goodness and justice.”

  “I’m already a man, Dad.” Gordy pulled his head back from under his father’s touch. “I’ll be a senior in college. How is that not enough of a man for you?”

  “I won’t let this consume our family,” Huck said without answering his son.

  “You should go to her.” Gordy looked up at the ceiling and Huck nodded once. Then Gordy sighed a sleepy sigh and rested back against the couch. He placed a hand on his sister’s back and felt her tiny body rise and fall. “This one...she’ll never understand...not really. It will be like a dream. The sister she never knew, the long days at the courthouse, our loss. She’ll grow up and never know...”

  “She’ll know,” Huck corrected as he rose from the floor and walked toward the door. “She’ll feel it in her bones.”

  The roof of the building of luxury condominiums was a communal gathering place. Outdoor lights glimmered around the perimeter and a small fire pit had burned down to coals. It was spring, too cold for parties, and Josephine shivered, curled up in a wooden chair, her wine glass dipping precariously toward the cement.

  Huck watched her from the stairwell before making his entrance. Clearing his throat, he jogged her attention and she shifted, pulling her glass upright, the red liquid sloshing against the sides.

  “Harris came by,” Huck announced, and he pulled up a chair beside his wife.

  “It’s not his fault,” Josephine replied and she took a drink. Her words slurred and her eyes drooped. “No one’s fault. No one’s fault.” She repeated the phrase and then snickered at it without a hint of mirth.

  “Blair needs to be put to bed.”

  “You do it.” She raised her eyebrows.

  He stared at her. “Look at this. I found her paper.” He held up his prized white sheet with excitement. Josephine made a grab for it, but Huck pulled it way. “No, no. Not yet.”

  “It’s just a stupid school paper, Huck. You’ve put so much into it...like it matters. Like any of this,” she waved her hand, the side of it hit the chair, but she didn’t flinch, “matters.”

  “What makes today different?” he asked her. He folded the paper and held it in his lap.

  His wife looked at him and then hiccupped a lone, reluctant sob. Straightening her back, she tilted her head toward the sky. “Because it’s over.” Then he turned to him, her eyes wet and glistening.

  “In one sense...”

  “In every, single, sense.”

  “Kymberlin believed. She believed in greatness and she had her own ideas! She was going to be a great engineer someday.”

  Josephine laughed. “Oh...to be dead. Everyone remembers you how they wanted you to be.”

  Huck recoiled from the statement. “But—”

  “She was perfect. But she was lost. Amazing. Brilliant. Kind. But flighty. You hold that paper like it’s a key to our daughter...but it was just a fantasy, Huck. She wrote that paper to impress you. You think if our daughter was still alive, she’d want you throwing everything into her hippy-dippy ideas of communal living? Abandoning your business, your friends...because you thought that you could save the world?”

  “We are at war.”

  Josephine brought the glass to her lips and threw back the rest of the wine. Then she took the glass and held it out over the chair and let it drop, the stem cracking and the bowl shattering into tiny pieces.

  “We will always be at war,” came her reply.

  And Huck ran his fingers over the crease in the paper again and again.

  “Give it to me,” she commanded and he handed the paper over. She examined it, shaking her head. “It’s kid stuff. Science fiction. There is nothing even remotely possible about building this utopia of hers. You are so blinded by what you wanted her to become. She was a child when she wrote this. A child!”

  “She was still a child!” Huck replied. “Maybe, just maybe, if we listen to children—”

  Josephine raised a finger and cautioned him with one look. Then she stood up and brushed herself off and stepped over the shards of glass with delicate tiptoes.

  “At least say goodnight to Blair before you pass out,” Huck whispered to her back. “At least pretend like you give a damn about her.”

  “I have nothing to give that child,” she replied, and she waltzed to the edge of the building, putting her hand on the protective lattice.

  “You fought for that child,” he snapped. He rose to his feet. “You can’t give her back because she isn’t Kymberlin! You can’t punish her because she wasn’t the clone you hoped for.” As soon as the words left his mouth, he hung his head, his chin resting against his chest. “I’m sorry—” he looked up, but Josephine hadn’t turned. “That was wrong.”

  “You are right,” she said to the wind. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Blair would be better off if she had never have been born.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” he pleaded, practically begging. “We wanted joy...we wanted happiness...peace.”

  She turned and exhaled, the edges of her mouth rising in a snarl. “Go find it.”

  Huck paused. He stepped forward. He felt the glass under his feet. “Jo—”

  She took a step on to the cement wall and brought her legs up under her. She tottered for a second and then kicked the lattice swiftly where it fell—with a distant crash—to the street. “You have my blessing to find happiness. Peace.” She balled up the paper he had taken so much time to locate; crushed it in her hand and tossed it out to the night air. Huck watched the paper disappear and he spun to the rooftop door, taking several steps before turning and then taking a step back toward Josephine.

  She stepped up and over the cement barrier and to the ledge below. Then she turned and reached her hands up above her head, her dress rippling like waves.

  “Josephine!” he called and he imagined himself running after her, arms flailing, reaching, reaching for her hand and grabbing her bony wrists. He closed his eyes tight and called her name again, his voice echoed and bounced off the other buildings—the other condos and apartments, their curtains wide with people milling about, going through the motions of their day, oblivious to all facets of their tragedy.

  When he opened his eyes, his wife was gone. The space she had occupied consumed by darkness.

  And his feet remained rooted against the cement roof, planted over the remnants of the wine glass, crunching the pieces as he shifted this way and that—searching the
void and hoping for her shape to materialize. After a long minute, a gust of wind shook him into a startled inhale. He turned and walked back to the stairwell, his hands clenched into fists by his side. When he looked one last time, silent tears stung his cheeks, and Huck wondered if he would be able to find Kymberlin’s school paper drifting on the street. He tried to note the wind trajectory and tried to remember which way she had dropped it. Closing his eyes, he watched her ball up the white paper and he imagined being the paper, sliding past the eastside windows, maybe landing outside the pizza parlor or the nail shop. It had to be down there; the paper was waiting for him to find it. He would find it.

  Huck must have stood there with his eyes closed for minutes.

  It was the sirens that jolted him back to reality.

  Chapter One

  Scott King nodded to the guard on Floor E and ran his finger across the scanner to enter Pod 4. He smoothed down his blue button-down shirt and tried to walk with confidence toward the boardroom. He didn’t know the reason why Huck Truman, leader of the System and the new world, was calling the precious and elusive Elektos board together, but the air underground was tense, and the prolonged time without natural sun or freedom was wearing on the System’s inhabitants. Even Scott felt antsy, his armpits wet, his stomach churning as if he were on the brink of gastrointestinal distress.

  He wiped his forehead, and a droplet of sweat gathered on his index finger. He did not feel like facing the Board today. He did not know why Huck had asked him to bring three vials of his new virus or what he intended to do with them, but he knew that their appearance at this meeting wasn’t arbitrary. Or optional.

  Since their arrival in The System, Huck had called together the Elektos Board on two other occasions: the week they arrived to their new underground home and the day before Lucy and Grant appeared among the survivors. The first meeting, the entire board was there in person. The master tech had not yet been able to secure remote communication. Huck had assembled his fleet of pilots and airplanes, and shipped in each of his most trusted followers.