Текст книги "The Release"
Автор книги: Shelbi Wescott
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 16 страниц)
One minute.
Lucy stood up, viscerally aware of how her knees wobbled together. Her heart thumped wildly in her chest; pulsating outward all the way to her fingertips. As if walking on a small ledge, she high-stepped along the row of lockers, until she reached her own and only then did she turn around, her hands shaking as she spun the lock.
Nine.
Twenty-six.
Seventeen.
There was a dead boy in the hall.
A dead boy in the hall.
Someone left a dead boy in the hallway.
And yet she was still fully fixated on her homework and getting the hell out of there.
She couldn’t shake the boy’s image as she pulled up and opened the locker with a click. Lucy grabbed her big purple binder that was covered in Salem’s doodles, political cartoons, and a photo of her family stuck on one side and a picture of her holding Harper on the other. She dropped the binder into the backpack and then grabbed her copy of Fahrenheit 451, sliding it into the bag and zipping it up. Only then did she realize she had been holding her breath and she let it in one giant hot gush. Voices down the hall snapped her to attention. Men’s voices, conversational, but hushed.
Time was up.
The voices were gaining on her.
No more than thirty feet away were the doors leading outside. Lucy could hear the distant sounds of sirens traveling up the street. Ethan was out there, waiting for her, and her mother and her family were at home. They had a plane to catch. This couldn’t be happening; she had a plane to catch.
Lucy struggled to wrap her mind around the evidence—the lack of students, the dead classmate. The lockdown. Her fear was intense; Lucy gnawed on her bottom lip until she tasted blood.
Her time was up.
The voices approached. To run to the door now would risk exposure. To wait would risk abandonment. She ducked into the closest classroom, grabbed the handle and shut the door without making a noise. Then she reached for her phone. It blinked with three unread messages. Amidst the panic she had not felt the phone pulsating in her pocket.
The first was a cryptic message from her mother:
“Not what we expected. Please come home. Please come home. NOW.”
The second was from Ethan:
“Mom needs me. She called. She was frantic. Bawling. Screaming. Going home. Taking Anna. We will come back for you. Sit tight.”
The third was from Salem:
“My family is dead. They’re all dead. It’s the end of the world.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Lucy collapsed against the door.
She closed her eyes and listened as the footsteps reached her and then passed her without incident.
When she opened her eyes, she cried out and then flung her hand over her mouth.
Splayed outward in the center of the classroom was another body. A man. His green Levis crept up to his mid-calf, exposing pink and gray argyle socks. The acidic smell of vomit wafted from his direction. Dried blood pooled on the floor, it had trickled down from the twisted mouth, opened wide as if in protest. His skin was yellow and waxy, and his eyes glassed over with a thin film, giving them the appearance of having cataracts.
Lucy knew that she was looking at Mr. North: Senior English teacher, recently married, advisor to the chess club. He was young and funny and impeccably dressed—a combination that added up to an adoring fan club of bright-eyed girls. She turned her head and then she saw the other bodies. A girl, head on her desk and a boy right next to her. And more. Six people altogether.
Some looked like they had sat down and fallen asleep, but others were a twisted mess of limbs and clothing.
She shook her head. A scream caught in her throat.
Lucy dialed her house number on her phone and hit send, but the phone beeped angrily at her. She dialed again. It beeped. Her screen flashed an angry All Circuits Busy message. Busy. Busy. Busy.
Lucy stuck the phone in her pocket and stood up; she gathered up her white shirt and pulled it over her nose and mouth—the futility of this act was not lost on her, but Lucy didn’t know what else to do. She pushed her anxiety away and focused as best she could. Was this related to the dogs? What was happening? Would this happen to her? Had it happened to her family? Where was Ethan? Would he really come back? The questions flooded her brain, and ran in a loop, like a clip playing without stop.
Staying in the room with the dead was not an option, and it was not a fear of the bodies, but a fear of what killed them. Lucy peered out into the hallway and discovering it quiet, left the room with her bag hoisted up on her shoulder. She rounded the corner toward the social studies hall and froze.
Scattered up and down the long hallway were more dead students.
Like the ones before, many of these victims had thrown-up prior to collapsing. They bled from their eyes, noses, and mouths; under the bright florescent lights of the high school, their skin took on a green tint. For the first time, Lucy noticed that one boy was covered in hives. The sickness did not bother her, but the smell was overpowering. While Lucy was certain from her biology classes that decomposition wouldn’t begin for hours or days, these bodies already seemed to bloat and smell like decay. Frozen in the hallway, she watched one boy, eight or ten feet away, and waited to see the subtle movement of his chest—waited to see his breathing resume.
This is what she did during movies after key characters died. She ignored all other dialogue and just watched and waited to see if she could spot the imperceptible movement of life. A short breath or small twitch. Most of the time, the camera cut away before she could see it, but sometimes she was rewarded with the slight rise and fall of an actor’s chest. Then she would clap her hands and jump the scene backward, watching again, pointing out the subtle movement to anyone around.
It was a reminder that this death was not final.
But the boy in the hallway didn’t move, didn’t breathe. He didn’t sit up and laugh and wipe away the blood—corn syrup and food coloring—from his mouth and ask if that was it for the day. This was real.
Her mother’s text haunted her.
In some way, she was comforted by being at the school and staring at this lifeless body of a stranger, instead of facing the grim reality that someone at home had fallen ill after she and Ethan ran off.
Where were all the living people? Where were her friends and teachers? Why was the school achingly quiet? When would Ethan come back for her? Her nagging questions changed direction. She now had one singular focus: Wait for Ethan.
“No one can see me,” she muttered to herself. “No one can know I’m here.” Her hand shook as she raised it to her face to wipe away a flyaway strand of dirty-blonde hair.
Lucy glanced inside the small rectangular window of a door to a social studies classroom and found it void of bodies and movement. She stepped inside and pushed the closest desk against the door, then another, barricading herself from the multitude of unknown threats with nothing more than cheap furniture. World maps covered the walls, stuck into the thin cardboard walls with multi-colored tacks; a globe had been knocked from its perch on a front table—it had broken open and rolled a few feet and a large cavernous gash extended from the Atlantic Ocean and cut down into South America. Lucy kicked it to the side. Then she climbed up onto a table and tore down an American flag hanging uselessly next to the clock. Using masking tape, she affixed the flag over the small window—blocking the view from the outside. Security on patrol wouldn’t spot her easily and that was comforting.
On the inside of the door, the teacher put up an old World War 2 propaganda poster. “He’s Watching You” it read, with a shady man peering out under his helmet. Lucy turned away from the figure’s militant stare.
The large canvas blinds had already been drawn over the large windows, per lockdown instructions. While everything inside of her wanted to peek out and catch a glimpse of the parking lot, Lucy worried that even the slight rustle of a curtain would give away her position. So, she steered clear. With the lights off, the room was dark. Heat funneled through large vents above her, creating a warm, womblike atmosphere, which made Lucy feel claustrophobic.
Creeping on her tiptoes, Lucy reached her hand up and flipped on the television in the corner. She pressed her pointer-finger on the volume button instantly, lowering it to just barely above mute.
Then she stumbled backward and watched the images flood the screen.
The emergency broadcast system ran below—a ticker of bright red, following by instructions. Stay inside your house. Threat origin unknown. Do not drink water from the tap. Avoid all fruits and vegetables. Avoid contact with infected people. Stay away from populated cities. This is not a test. Stay inside your house.
Above the warnings, a young woman sat behind an anchor desk; her hair pulled up into a sloppy pony-tail; thick black glasses pushed up to the bridge of her nose; she was wearing a college sweatshirt, a coffee stain in the shape of the state of Florida above her right breast.
“I’m getting word…” the girl said tentatively. She squinted her eyes—they darted back and forth as she tried to read the teleprompter, her lips curling around letters she hadn’t yet said. “That…” she leaned forward, adjusting her glasses, “the…center for disease control…is linking these attacks to several sources.”
Attacks.
“There is no...clear indication...of how the...vi—vi—virus,” she stopped and sighed. Then she glanced off camera, her eyes pleading.
“I can’t do this, I’m sorry.” She started to tear at the microphone hooked on her sweatshirt. From the left, a man with a headset appeared, shaking his head and trying to get her to stay in her seat. But the young woman pushed herself past him and left him alone on the set. He turned toward the camera, his eyes wide. He opened and closed his mouth like a fish. Someone shouted something indecipherable; the man inched his way behind the desk and sat down, fumbled with the abandoned microphone, and pinned it on his own shirt. He then smiled a non-smile; his lips pulled upward, but his eyes were frantic.
“Sorry ladies and gentleman about that. We’re experiencing some difficulties in studio. That was our sound design intern Jennifer. I am Tim…managing editor of KPSV news. Forgive our scattered delivery. We are trying to get everything to you as fast as we know it, but our communication is spotty. If you are just joining us, we can tell you, that many regions of our world today are experiencing great loss of life at the hands of a deadly, fast-acting, virus.”
Lucy took a giant step away from the television. She lifted herself upon a desk, her legs swinging over the edge, and watched as the screen bathed her in a blue and green tint.
“We are posting your updates and pictures now...if you can, keep sending them in. Our audience is our...are our...men and women in the field today.” Tim gulped, the microphone picking up on the sound of his swallow.
Then the screen went blank for a long, agonizing, second, and an electronic hum replaced the frenetic voice of the newscaster. The silence was jarring, but Lucy didn’t move; she remained planted on the desk, sitting on her hands, her legs twitching.
An image popped up. A familiar man. A nightly news anchor from some East Coast station—he was in his seventies with two hamsteresque eyebrows and a bad comb-over. Studio lights cast a yellow pallor over his face, and he wiped his brow while the sweat beads dripped down the side of his face. He addressed the camera, his voice strong and steady, and the familiar tone of it put Lucy at ease. In a world falling apart, here was something she knew and something recognizable she could cling to.
“Good morning,” he said. “It is with a heavy heart that I address our nation today. The news is grave beyond these walls.”
From outside the school, Lucy heard the unmistakable blast of a shotgun. She jumped, her heart pushing out painfully against her ribcage. She reminded herself to breathe and sucked in a shaky breath. She checked her phone. No new texts. She pushed her call log and tried to dial, but her phone would not relent to her request.
The anchorman continued.
“It appears our nation is under attack. Details, at this time, are few and far between. And we do not present this information to you to frighten you and your loved ones, but to express the importance of binding ourselves together to fight this unknown enemy.”
A scream. A siren wail. From the street outside, a crash of glass breaking, tires squealing. Then nothing. An eerie disquiet followed. Lucy glued her eyes to the man talking to her, just her, from the box on the wall. A country away, he sat and addressed her fear. His authority comforted her and she was happy that he had answers. She felt a hot tear roll down her cheek.
“It appears that over twenty-four hours ago, our water systems and the very air we breathe was contaminated. By what, we don’t know. By whom is only conjecture. While the sickness claimed its victims, nations began to place blame. It appears that some of the loss of life today is based on retaliation from our political enemies as well as the initial biological threat. But to be honest, viewers...” The man dipped his head. Lucy saw his grief in the wrinkles around his eyes, the quivering of his chin. And then his heavy brows lifted and sank, but he continued.
“We are a nation at war with several enemies. The bioterrorism is our first threat. The government is asking that you stay inside. Do not leave your house. If you find yourself away from home and need shelter, then schools and churches are our sanctuaries. Find one. Stay there. Our…”
Thunk. Thunk. Lucy jumped. Someone was pushing against the door and sliding her carefully positioned tables forward. The flag came unfettered from the tape and drifted downward and an angry face from one of the school’s security guards peered through the glass, his eyes darting around the room—landing on the television before finally locking on Lucy. She dropped off the desk and rushed to the window, throwing wide the curtain, before realizing that these windows would never grant her an escape. But her eyes caught a glimpse of the world outside for one brief moment. It was long enough to see a tower of smoke billowing into the sky, and even the clouds looked yellow and green and hazy. This vantage point had her looking across the football field where a storm of people gathered huddled in masses, their tiny bodies approaching the school like a death-march.
The security guard gained access to the room and he placed a hand on her shoulder and pulled her toward him. She stumbled into his grasp and felt her hopes of reuniting with her brother slipping away from her.
On the screen, images from around the nation and around the world surfaced in a slideshow. Nurses in biohazard gear treating the sick, a man slumped over a steering wheel in the middle of traffic, the wreckage of a downed plane, and a young mother carrying a small bundle out of her house, agony written on every angle of her face.
Lucy looked away.
How had so much happened in such a short amount of time?
The man caught a glimpse of the TV too, and his face collapsed a bit, softening in all the right places, before he toughened himself, shook the image from his mind, and tightened his hold on her. “All students in the auditorium. We’re in lockdown,” he stated.
“I just got here,” Lucy said.
“School is secure. Has been since ten minutes into first period. So, no way, darlin’. Come on,” he pushed her forward, pulling a walkie-talkie from his waistband. “McGuire here. Got a hider in Havs old room.”
It took a moment before someone radioed back. “Is she symptomatic?”
The guard looked her over. His finger rested on the button. “You feel sick?” he asked Lucy. “Feverish? Nauseated?”
She contemplated a snide reply, but then thought better of it. She shook her head.
“If you start to feel achy or if you start to get a headache or blurred vision,” he continued rattling off a list of ailments associated with the flu, while Lucy dropped her eyes to the floor. He led her into the hallway, maneuvering past the fallen, “You tell someone immediately. Understand?”
“Are people contagious?” she asked when he was done instructing her about what to expect upon entering the school’s self-imposed quarantine. She stepped in something wet and slimy; she refused to look down and tried to drag her soiled shoe along the floor to wipe it clean.
The guard shrugged.
Together they walked past a small alcove and Lucy turned her head. The doors and windows leading to the outside were covered in long strips of bulletin board paper. The guard followed her gaze.
“It’s part of the lockout procedures,” he offered. “Cover all windows and doors.”
“The news said that schools were a sanctuary,” Lucy said. Aware of her own impertinence, she blushed.
“Not this one.”
She felt tightness in her legs, and she kept her head low, looking at the ground. The guard’s walkie-talkie came to life with a booming distinct voice, a man she recognized as Friendly Kent, a tall man, with extreme biceps and a closet full of V-necked sweaters. He was the administrator in charge of student discipline, but his nickname was derived from the fact that Kent couldn’t, and didn’t, really enforce anything—excuses and sob-stories were laid at his feet and Kent ate them up greedily, walking students back to the same class they were just kicked out of and telling frustrated teachers to “give the kid a break.”
“Pablo Vasquez was hiding in the staff lounge,” Friendly Kent crackled through.
“Not a chance. Checked it twice,” Lucy’s guard answered.
“In the ceiling,” was Kent’s reply. “Fell through a piece of sheetrock tile trying to move himself to the edge.”
Lucy’s guard chuckled. The sound of his small amusement at a student’s legitimate fear and panic was grotesque to her.
They approached the cafeteria and she noticed all the lights were off and the long windows along the courtyard were also covered out and blackened. The second-period bell rang out into the empty hallways. It was a sound that normally signified chaos and excitement, inciting masses of students scurrying from one end of the school to another with sounds, squeals, yells, and shoes hitting the floor with clacks and squeaks. But now there was nothing. No laughter, no eagerness. No sounds but the two of them walking down the hall in isolation.
Lucy followed in silence past another row of covered windows. Shadows approached the paper and moved carefully along the outside wall like rows of zombies in old horror movies, sniffing and nudging for a way inside, aware of the warm bodies within. Lucy wanted to rush to the paper and pull it free, but the guard edged his way between her and the windows, as if he read her mind.
They rounded the corner past the gym and finally, after opening and closing two sets of double doors, closed upon the auditorium.
Friendly Kent came into view, escorting a sullen Pablo Vasquez, who was covered from head to toe in chalky sheetrock, and he reached the doors to the auditorium before them. He swung them open and sounds and smells poured outward—a roar of energy, hushed, intense—with voices lifting in anger and worry.
And then the meaty aroma of teenage stink burped toward them. Lucy turned her head away. She could almost taste the hormones and the racing fear. Then the doors crashed closed and everything was gone. It was like the opening of Pandora’s Box: Allowing the evils of that room to tease them for a moment before being contained back inside.
Lucy took a step backward, unaware that she was shaking her head.
Her guard pushed her forward, her feet tripping slightly on the outdated red and blue checkered carpet.
“Go in here. Find a place to sit. Don’t be a problem,” he commanded, switching tactics and grabbing her hand.
Lucy stole her hand back and shook her shoulders away from him as he reached back toward her shifting body. “Please don’t touch me,” she whispered. In her own mind, she had made the command with power and aggression—her words dripped with the vitriol rising within her. But instead she had sounded meek and unsure. “I’ll go in by myself,” she added, hoping to ease the temper she saw flare up in the guard’s eyes—a flash that dared her to run, dared her to defy him.
She reached forward and grabbed the door, the smell and the sound bursting forth a second time. And with a deep breath she walked into the darkened auditorium. Even with the lights on full-blast, the whole room was dim and the corners and walls lined with shadows. The stage was in a state of half-construction for the play Into the Woods. The pieces of buildings were flat on the floor while a mural of a dark forest with black twisty trees rising up to a yellow moon was nearly complete. The trees kept reaching backward into a dark unknown. Lucy resisted the urge to climb up on the stage and crawl her way into that forest. Even though it was black and uninviting and full of the unknown, it seemed safer than being forced to congregate with her peers.
All around her, people gathered in various levels of distress. Many students sat, staring straight ahead in the stadium seating with phones lighting up their faces. Another group sat huddled in a semi-circle, hugging and crying into each other. Lucy watched a girl with a long streak of red in her hair stroke the head of a boy bawling in her lap; she shushed him and rocked back and forth, her eyes closed tight.
Many students cried out, but most sat in stoic silence, waiting and waiting for someone to tell them what to do. In the back of the room, several teachers stood around the glow of a television. The old newscaster was still talking, his face drawn in a perpetual frown. The crowd spoke intensely, like a wave rolling from the back to the front, and Lucy just stood, planted firm, eyes wandering for a familiar face. She was desperate to see Salem.
But Salem wasn’t there.
Stepping away from the doors and up the first aisle, Lucy meandered. She looked at every face and tried to find a friendly one among them. There was a girl from science class, a boy she used to know in elementary school, a boy in her math class, a girl in yearbook. This one was in band. That one was a cheerleader. She used to talk to those three girls her freshman year at lunchtime—during the year that Salem’s family moved themselves to Texas and she found herself bereft of friendship—but they had all fallen out of touch. Lucy chose to distance herself from the crowd of “fakers,” as she labeled them, brilliantly loyal to your face and the quickest to sell you out to anyone who would listen. Lucy responded to their hurt by eating lunch in her math teacher’s room for two whole months, before, she assumed, that teacher tattled on her and Ethan came and rescued her by dragging her off to eat with his upperclassmen friends. Her entire freshman year was marred with navigating the murky waters of varying degrees of social ostracism. Then Salem’s family decided that they hated Texas and they found their way back to Portland. A move that Lucy credited with saving her life.
Lucy made eye contact with one of her former friends on accident, and as if she had conveyed some social cue that she needed to talk, the girl lurched forward from her seat, stumbling over the back of the chair in front of her.
“Lucy!” the girl screamed and then wrapped her arms around Lucy’s shoulders.
She had forgotten the first girl’s name. Under different circumstances she might have remembered, but her brain was a mess, a total fog. The name slipped away before she could grab ahold. It was Kylee. Or Keeley. Kyra. Kiyah. There it was just hiding in the back of her brain, pushed to the side and momentarily irretrievable. “I am so glad you’re here. I’m so glad to see you. I’m so glad you’re okay.” The other girls stood up from their seats and wandered over, their heads nodding in agreement, eyes wide.
“We saw you walk in. What happened? Were you hiding?”
“I got to school late,” Lucy mumbled and then tried to extricate herself from them by walking backward. She stumbled on a backpack without an owner.
The girls exchanged glances.
“You weren’t locked out?” one whispered conspiratorially. Maddy or Molly, McKenzie. Michaela.
“Found an open door near the cafeteria,” she lied. It was a silly lie. Who cared now about the secret passageway in the pool? Who cared about any of it?
“Wow,” one girl said.
“Unlucky, I guess,” said another. “Been better if you never got inside.”
Everyone paused and then sighed in unison.
“But it’s chaos outside too,” Lucy replied. “Maybe we really are safer here.” She regretted it as soon as it left her mouth because it aligned her with their common enemy—the girls turned on her; all but baring their teeth under throaty growls.
“We’re hostages,” one of the Kylees said.
“They have us locked in this room.”
“My parents must be worried sick, I just want to get home.”
“It’s awful. This is against our rights,” the maybe-McKenzie seethed and glared down at Lucy. “We still have rights.”
Lucy didn’t want to disagree with them, but she didn’t know if she agreed. She didn’t entirely disagree though. Confusion overwhelmed her. But she nodded anyway, mumbling something about just wanting her parents, which sent the trio into a blubbering mess. The middle girl, short, with a sleek dark bob and peacock inspired eye shadow, buried her head into Lucy’s arm, staining her shirt with a thin streak of snot and tears.
“I’ll be right back,” Lucy said, pulling herself away.
She noticed Mrs. Johnston in the back, her arms crossed over her shirt. She was shaking her head at the television and wiping away tears. Briefly, she conversed with an older male teacher, and he leaned a protective arm around her and she collapsed against him. Then, as if she knew she was being watched, the English teacher turned and spotted Lucy.
Lucy took three giant steps toward her teacher, and for the first time since setting foot in the school she began to feel untethered. She watched Mrs. Johnson’s shoulders shake with the heaviness of silent sobs, her legs trembling under her. This adult was falling apart. Her whole face was swollen and puffy from crying; her eyes, normally outlined in the perfect balance of liner and mascara, were now bare, giving her face a thinner, paler look. Lucy almost looked away, as if she had caught Mrs. Johnston naked.
Mrs. Johnston stared at Lucy with a lost expression. She didn’t smile warmly or beckon her closer. Instead, she just lifted her hands from her chest and dropped them to her side, letting her arms dangle next to the pockets of her jeans.
And only then did Lucy notice that Mrs. Johnston’s entire shirt was soaked with dark, dried, streaks of someone else’s blood.
