Virulent: The Release (13 page)

“I have four brothers. So, I’m not embarrassed to pee in front of
you
.” Lucy marched into the stall and slammed the door, locking it for good measure. She pulled down her jeans and underwear, careful not to pull them too low so that Grant, if he were so inclined, would notice the bright blue and pink argyle pattern of her undergarments. After a second, Lucy sighed. “Salem...can you turn on the sink water or something?”

“What? Need inspiration?” Salem asked and soon the sound of the sink filling with water echoed in the small bathroom and Lucy allowed herself to go to the bathroom—she realized as her bladder released, how much better she would feel and she rested her elbows on the exposed flesh of her thighs and closed her eyes. After she was done, she just sat for a long second. It was a second that belonged only to her.

Then she felt wetness hit her exposed flesh; a gush of lukewarm water bubbled up, pouring over the sides, spilling at her feet.

Lucy shrieked and scrambled off the toilet, pulling up her pants and underwear in a quick motion and clawing at the door, yanking it with force. The water had pooled below her feet and Lucy slipped, sliding forward into the side of the bathroom wall; she turned to look as the toilet overflowed—the water was clear at first, and then it turned a murky brown, and it began to spew like a geyser, sending a spray of water and sewage into the stall, drenching the wall and the floor—creating a stream that ran down into the drain in the floor.

Then the other toilets followed suit by gurgling and belching up waste and water. Salem and Grant sprang up and huddled together on a tile near the door while the water crept slowly toward them. But every time Lucy tried to move, she would slip and tumble back down into the wetness. When the water calmed down to a mere trickle, the explosion subsiding, Lucy regained her footing and stood sopping wet in the middle of the bathroom. Her jeans clung to every inch of her skin, scraping along the inside of her thigh like a razor as she took a step forward. She lifted her arms up and watched the water drip with a repetitive
plop-plop-plop
to the floor.

Salem cried out, “Oh no, Lula!”

She wanted to laugh—her instinct encouraged her to let out a giggle. Embarrassment usually garnered this type of response; she wanted to laugh and blush while she wished for reprieve. Her pants were still unbuttoned and she reached to fasten them, but as she looked up she saw Grant and Salem huddled in the bathroom corner, close together, pushing themselves as far away from the water as physically possible. Lucy stifled her smile when saw the fear in their faces.

Lucy took a step toward them, her shoes swishing.

“No, Lucy, wait,” Grant said and put up his hand. “Just wait.”

The water was contaminated.

The water was poison.

They stared at her as if she were already dead.

CHAPTER TEN

They stood there for a long moment and then Lucy lowered her arms a bit, feeling the weight of her clothes pull her body toward the floor. The intercom right above her broadcast the banal sounds of an empty office. Then they heard a door click and Spencer started to hum again. Not happy, jaunty humming, but a focused and intense hum. There was an edge to his musical interludes, a hardness to the melody that seemed entirely for show.

It unsettled her.

Lucy opened her mouth to speak to Grant and Salem, but as she opened her mouth, she saw Salem flinch and draw back and place her hand immediately on Grant’s arm with her long fingers wrapped around his biceps. Grant regarded Salem’s grip for just a second and Lucy saw his eyes flit to his arm and then back up at her, as though even among the tragedies of the day, he was still aware of being touched by the opposite sex.

“No,” Lucy replied to a question that hadn’t been asked. “No. This is not the way it’s going to happen.”

Grant took a tentative step forward, “How do you know it’s not contaminated?”

“I don’t!” Lucy answered him and her eyes locked in on his. “But we’ve been around the dead all day. All day! All of us, all day, and we’re still here.”

“We’re allowed to be worried,” Salem said in a small voice.

Lucy’s eyes flashed to her friend; she swallowed hard and blinked back tears. “Worried for me?” Her eyes flashed. “Or worried for
you
?”

When Salem didn’t answer, Lucy bit her lip and nodded. “Right. So, we’re all just still alive because we haven’t been exposed yet? The bioterrorists polluted our water, our food supply, our air and we just
lucked
out?”

“I don’t know how it works,” Salem’s hand still held on to Grant. Lucy took a giant step forward, her legs stiff. “We just don’t know.”

“Fine,” Lucy tore off her shirt, exposing a thin white camisole beneath. She balled it up tightly and then tossed it into the sink. Bending down she held the heels of her swollen canvas sneakers and slipped out of them too, picking each one up individually and throwing them over to the wall. One hit the wall and bounced back, and it landed on its side, empty and ownerless.

Then she walked right past them, while Salem buried her head into Grant’s armpit and cowered as if she were expecting Lucy to hit her, and stormed out into the empty hallway.

Waddling, Lucy walked to her locker and opened it without taking her ears off of the hum, which was now some bizarre arrangement of a familiar Mozart Waltz, and as she approached it, her eyes zeroed in on the camera—the red light was still blinking, but the angle of its lens was abandoned in the other direction. She knew that the cameras were live-feed only. There was a master record of the camera feed, but it was a convoluted series of tapes and buttons and memory cards. Spencer would figure out how to watch the recordings eventually, but they were safe for a small, limited, finite amount of time.

She knew about the camera’s issues with recording because last year she had been an unwitting helper in Anna’s quest to recover a stolen cell phone. Over an hour she wasted in that tiny security office, the bumbling men scrambling over the camera system struggling to locate the right disk that recorded the right hallway during the right time. It was a total mess and eventually the effort and Anna’s prized possession were relegated to paperwork and nothing more.

Lucy knew that an old pair of yoga pants and a tight leopard print exercise shirt, from her first semester PE class and purchased by her mother, who had no sense of style, were stuffed down under the weight of unused textbooks and discarded papers. When she felt the soft fabric hit her fingers, she grabbed and yanked, sliding them out, and catching anything that fell in the process. Her eyes scanned the hall. Grant and Salem were still holed up in the bathroom, no doubt discussing her septic state. Grant, perhaps, bringing up his undead theory to her and bravely volunteering to be the one to attack Lucy with the wire cutters from metal shop if the need arose.

Maybe turning into a flesh-eating monster wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. For a juicy moment she realized the idea of attacking her friend and burying her teeth into her arm or leg sounded deliciously evil. She wondered if Grant and Salem really were going to avoid her until they knew if she was infected. It seemed childish and born of irrational fear. Or maybe it was rational fear; maybe their decision was smart and cautious. Either way, it hurt. Then she let the thoughts slip away and slammed her locker shut, the echo bouncing down the hallway. Arguments between close friends were always riddled with personal hurt. Salem, out of all of them, probably had the most exposure to the virus—she arrived from a diseased house and was outside among the infected. Those barbs could have stung, and she wanted them to sting, but she would have never said it out loud to her friend. What good would it have done?

Living would have to be her giant middle finger to them both.

With the clothes in her hand, Lucy walked slowly back to the journalism room and once she was alone, she shed her jeans and her underwear, and pulled the stretchy black fabric of the pants over and up her legs. She took off her bra for good measure and put on the tank top. Then she sat with her back against the couch, her knees drawn up to her chest, and waited. Goosebumps prickled her skin.

Her toes were cool on the tile.

She concentrated on her body. Did she feel sick? What would it feel like? Did people know they were about to die or did it just happen suddenly? If it happened to her, would she have time to say goodbye?

Lucy found a discarded hoodie with their school mascot on it and used it as a blanket. She stretched along the couch and listened to the background noise of the office. She felt her brain pulling her body toward sleep and she resisted. The room was getting darker and she realized she didn’t even know what time it was now. Her phone was still in her jeans pocket and it was possibly wet and beyond repair. While her thoughts spun with worry, all her energy left her body and Lucy couldn’t even bring herself to check if the phone had survived the flood.

She closed her eyes. Her body sunk into the cushions of the couch.

Sleep claimed her.

Her eyes snapped open.

The room was bright and light.

Lucy tried to sit up, but her body resisted, pulling her back down into the comfort of the fabric. The inside of her mouth was dry and she smacked her lips together and swallowed. It hurt to swallow and she needed water.

Lucy was totally disoriented, forgetting where she was and what had happened to her in the past twenty-four hours. She reached out to silence her alarm clock and felt nothing but air where her bedside table was supposed to be. She tried to tug her comforter around her body, but the fabric slid off and wouldn’t cover her shoulders or reach her feet.

“Mom?” she called and then she cleared her throat and sat up. Rubbing her eyes, she looked around and recognized the journalism room and her brain began to make sense of their surroundings. Tossing the flimsy Spartan-themed sweatshirt to the floor, she put her feet on the tile. For a moment she sat with her head in her hands as her stomach growled, and she put her hand over it to silence it.

It didn’t take long to reconnect to her reality. She was in the journalism lab at school and she had been sleeping on the couch, there was a hole in the roof, and outside the world was dying. She was cold and shivering, hungry and confused, and to make matters worse, she was alone.

Grant and Salem were not asleep in a corner of the room and they were not awake and waiting for her. If they even came back to the room that evening and had seen her sleeping, she didn’t know, but they weren’t there now and the anxiousness and heaviness in her chest felt oppressive and unmanageable. The terror of day two was here and Lucy woke up abandoned.

Lucy stood up and stretched. For good measure, she walked to the computer and tried to refresh the Internet pages, check on the status of the world, but it was futile. Not only would the news pages not refresh, they simply did not exist.

They were off the grid.

She tried to check her feed. Nothing. In that moment, more than any other, Lucy felt her brain grow fuzzy from the realization that she was cut-off. There was no way to connect with the outside world and without the news, status updates, feeds, her endless salvo of human contact would come to an end. Now she realized how much she needed Salem and Grant, without them she would be left with only her overactive brain.

She hurried back over to her pants and found her phone in working order, but empty. Void and lifeless. Not a message, not single a notification. And to top everything off, her battery life was diminishing fast. With a fast-building fury, Lucy tossed the phone to the couch and let out a primal growl.

It was then she heard the journalism door slide open. In the silence of the morning, it was impossible to disguise the subtle squeak and she spun her head toward the sound and eyed a tentative Salem poking her head through the doorway, the rest of her body planted in the hallway. Salem’s eyes were wide with worry, but Lucy recognized the look—it was not the fearful expression of someone expecting to find a dead body, but the hesitant mien of someone who was guilty and afraid of being yelled at.

“Good morning,” Lucy said, her words clipped and dripping with as much sarcasm as she could muster. She would not yell at Salem, but she didn’t feel like acting particularly warm toward her either. Salem looked behind her, nodded to an unseen lurker and then ventured inside—she was frowning as she walked back over to the couch. Her clothes were wrinkled and her hair matted in the back; her lips were void of her trademark lip-gloss. Salem collapsed upon the couch and leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Her hand found an errant thread, and she began to pull at it mindlessly.

“I’m alive,” Lucy said. “Not what you were expecting?”

Salem’s face collapsed and she tipped her body over on the couch and she let out a giant, far-reaching wail. Lucy rushed over and sat herself down beside her and stroked her hair. All her plans for stoic and coldhearted responses leaked out of her and Lucy felt only compassion for her crying friend. It was, she supposed, a consistent reaction based on the last few days; there was comfort in knowing what was expected of her.

“Lo siento. Lo siento,” Salem said over and over. She sat up and her eyes were bright red, a thin stream of snot dripped from her right nostril and she let it fall until it passed her lip. “Forgive me. Please?”

Lucy looked down. Then she took Salem’s hand and held it. “I didn’t leave this school for
you
. I stayed with you.”

“I know, I know,” Salem said. “I was afraid. I can’t lose you Lucy don’t you see? I’ve got nothing else.”

She sat up. She had wrapped the thread around her index finger until the skin around it turned white.

“Yesterday, when I woke up, my dad was just hovering over my mom. He was just screaming at me and screaming and I didn’t understand. And I ran to call 9-1-1 and the recording said that the hold time was over an hour to reach a dispatcher,” Salem looked at Lucy, pleading. “He wouldn’t let me near her. All I wanted to do was just touch her...feel her for myself. But he just grabbed me and shoved me.”