Virulent: The Release (16 page)

She stopped and leaned her head against one of the doors. It moved under the pressure and she could feel the metal digging into her forehead.

“Find anything? Salem called to her. Then without waiting for an answer, “Oh, gross…Grant…look at this one…”

Lucy raised her head from the door and sighed. She went to the next locker and rummaged through the usual assortment of items. Then she shoved a paper bag out of the way and realized that it didn’t budge. She picked it up, unnerved by the heaviness, and looked inside. It was then she caught the shiny flash of silver and the black handle. Roaming around at the bottom of the bag was a handful of copper bullets, clinking against each other.

In the background, Grant and Salem expressed amusement and intrigue over someone’s large collection of American flags. They found a small pill bottle filled with Vicodin and high-fived at the find.

Lucy reached into the bag and took the gun in her right hand, and she let the bag fall to the floor where it fell to her feet. It was a revolver, like the cowboys in Westerns used to shoot. She examined it, rolling her hand over and she noticed the tremors in her fingers. She had never held a gun before, never felt the weight of it against her skin. Lucy recalled, with embarrassment, when her mother first dropped her off at Salem’s house for a play date, she took Mrs. Aguilar aside and asked brusquely if they had any guns in the house. “No. Of course not,” Mrs. Aguilar had answered in return, her face struggled against showing her offense. Only then did Maxine leave Lucy, kissing her for a second too long on the forehead and whispering instructions to call if she got homesick.

They did not own guns. Her father did not hunt.

And here she was, holding this gun and wondering—what did it mean? Why was it here?

Hidden in a lunch bag, with bullets.

Who did it belong to?

Lucy pondered the danger of it all, and she tried desperately to place a person at this locker mere feet from her own. Who opened it? Who sat under it in the morning? Had she ever been in danger?

But then the realization poured over her: Whoever brought this gun to school was likely dead now. Their intentions—to intimidate a bully, self-harm, bragging rights to friends—didn’t matter anymore. She pondered putting it back in the locker and shutting it back up, burying it under a geometry book and gym socks, hidden out of sight. Then Lucy realized that this could be a blessing. She spun and held the gun resting in the palm of her hand.

“Sal? Grant?” Lucy called, aware of the rise in the timbre of her voice. “I found something,” she said and turned to her friends.

“Is that a—” Grant started and he took a step. Sal turned around. She was holding a giant fleece blanket in one hand and a bulk container of hand-sanitizer in the other. She opened her mouth to speak, but then her head snapped quickly to the right.

They all heard the clank and rumble of the gates as they moved upward, unhooking from their magnetic bases. They were exposed. Lucy’s eyes darted to the camera and it was trained directly on them.

“The intercom is off,” Grant shouted and he scrambled forward to collect the items he had set aside. “We didn’t even notice…dammit…we didn’t even notice!”

Spencer had spotted them. He had been watching them and he knew they were there; knew they were hiding. But more disturbingly, he knew they had a gun.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Shit!” Grant yelled and he tugged Salem’s arm toward the East Wing hallway, pinning a collection of confiscated locker items to his side. “Lucy, come on!”

Lucy leaned down and grabbed the paper bag of bullets and darted forward, her bare feet slapping against the floor. But instead of turning up the narrow hallway, Lucy ran straight past them and down the English hall, toward the opening gates and toward Spencer.

“Are you crazy?” Grant called after her. “We gotta get out of here.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the camera and its subtle shift following her. She slowed at the turn and then peered around the corner.

“Wait,” she yelled to her friends, her voice was shrill and panicky. “Don’t go anywhere!”

Salem and Grant stood waiting at the edge of the hallway, ready to run, but Lucy kept peering around the corner. It was a long hallway to the main office and security office, roughly one hundred feet, but she had a perfect view. Unless Spencer was lying about being alone, there was no way he had time to man the cameras and also bolt after them.

“He’s still in the security office, just watching,” Lucy called to her friends.

“You sure?” Salem called.

Lucy nodded. “He put the gates up so we would run…so he could watch where we ran to.” Her heart pounded as she kept her eyes trained on the hallway, watching for Spencer’s lanky body to come barreling down upon them.

“I have an idea,” she called back to them. “Go to the lab, put the tables back and the ladder up. Then wait by the door for me. Don’t leave the lab until I come for you.”

Grant shook his head, just once, a quick and sudden shake and stepped back out into the hallway. “What? You’re bait?”

“I’m bait,” she replied and then drew in a tight breath.

Salem opened her mouth to protest, but Grant saluted her. “Good plan,” he said with admiration. The tone encouraged her, helped stay her shaking hands a bit. Lucy didn’t have a real plan other than to draw Spencer out of the security office so she could get them safely in their hideaway without detection. And if that didn’t work, she was fresh out of back-up plans.

Grant and Salem darted out of sight.

Lucy took a deep breath and with her back to the camera, she dropped the gun back into the paper bag. She crumpled up the top and then held it tightly in her hands. The gun was not an asset if Lucy didn’t know how to use it. She knew that Spencer was armed and she was not, but it was a risk she had to take.

She slid back out of view and pressed her back against the wall. The camera was on her. It moved, zoomed in, zoomed out. Spencer was no doubt watching Salem and Grant lead him to the journalism room, but there was Lucy, unmoving, a sitting duck. He had to wonder why.

For a second she wondered if Principal Spencer recognized her. If he knew her name or her year in school. She wasn’t an athlete or a drama kid. She never took a student council class and despite Salem’s pleading, she never wrote for the newspaper. Before all of the madness started, Lucy assumed that she would graduate from Pacific Lake with relative anonymity. She would be the person her classmates years later would sort-of remember as that “one girl in that one class”. People would try to pin down a list of defining characteristics, but they couldn’t.

Then she heard the echo of a door shutting. She peeked around the corner and saw a flash of movement and a blur of gray and black. She glanced at the camera and stood up, she sprinted forward a few steps and then turned—the camera had stopped following her. At that moment, she could recognize the loud pounding of feet racing down the extended hall. Her breath catching in her chest, she made a dash for the East Wing.

And that was when she heard the shot.

A blast echoed down after her and Lucy jumped.

She ran wildly, hitting her shoulder against the wall as she turned the corner, her body unable to keep up with her feet. Lucy ran up the East Wing hallway, around the corner, and up to the lab where Salem stood guard in the doorway and Lucy yanked her out, motioning for Grant to follow, but he was still carrying the ladder into place, holding it with outstretched arms, wobbling forward with obscured vision.

“Who has the keys?” Lucy asked, out-of-breath.

Salem shook her head and pointed at Grant.

They heard Spencer’s footsteps pound down English hall and then heard him turn into the East Wing hallway. Like a honing pigeon—he knew where they were. A second shot rang out and the blast seemed much louder and menacing than before.

Lucy ran back into the lab, terrified that they were too late. Her plan was failing, instead of leading them all into security, they were going to be caught and shot by a crazy man.

“Keys Grant! Keys!” she whispered, cognizant that Spencer could now hear their voices echoing. But Grant was positioning the ladder under the skylight with both hands and unable to grab them. “Hurry, hurry!” Lucy commanded and Grant stepped back, dug into his pants, and pulling out the jangling janitor’s keys he ran toward the door.

Salem was wracked. Her face was flush with spotty red circles and her hands had gone ghostly white. Lucy opened her mouth to talk, but Salem shook her head violently to stop her. Spencer was close.

They all heard him and his shoes on the tile in the East Wing. He was walking with purpose, but no longer running, as he stopped to peer into rooms. The art room door had been propped open with a garbage can and Lucy only now registered the luck of that. As they pushed themselves to become one with the wall, they listened as he yanked the door open and then disappeared inside.

“Now,” Lucy mouthed and Grant opened the supply closet door. They flew inside. Shut the door and locked it without a sound. And sank to the ground.

“He’s going to find us, he’s going to find us,” Salem mumbled.

“Stop,” Lucy said and crawled over in the darkness to her friend.

A sliver of light was all they had—illuminating a few centimeters of carpet beyond the door and nothing else. Lucy waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, but they never did. It reminded her of her freshman photography class, when Kyle Ingwood took her into the tiny rooms where they unrolled their film, and tried to kiss her in the complete darkness, his lips groping the air and then the side of her chin before finally landing on her lips. Photography class suffered extinction at the hands of budget cuts the following year and Kyle never spoke to her after their messy make-out session in the dark.

But she still could taste the dark in that room. With her eyes wide open, she could not register anything around her; the thickness of the dark was oppressive.

Pitch-black.

No outlines of the couches or of each other’s bodies as a reference as the room pressed down on them. It weighed on them like a heavy blanket—the sound of waves inside a seashell hummed near their ears. Lucy struggled to take a breath, her head pressurized like she was in an airplane.

Spencer was done with the art room and he paused outside the woodshop. They collectively held their breath. And Lucy had to cover her mouth to keep from screaming when they heard the rattle of the doorknob into their hideout. He turned it once and then twice, pulled on the door, found it locked, and soon gave up the idea. Spencer then must have seen the door ajar to the journalism room, because they heard the door creak open, and without warning or fanfare he was walking away from their hiding spot. For a brief second, the fear of discovery left them like a deflating balloon.

They heard the tumble of the ladder as it crashed to the floor and hit the desk along the way, then the scraping of desks, the push and screech of metal on tile. And afterward: Nothing, just silence. They waited to hear him exit, waited—holding their breath—to see if he would examine every room in the East Wing. After a long moment, the journalism door swung open, hitting the wall with blunt force and then shutting with a distinct click. Spencer’s heavy footsteps walked away from them—away, away—until they couldn’t hear anything anymore.

“Is it safe to turn on the light?” Salem asked.

“No,” Lucy answered. “Not until we know he can’t see us for sure.”

“The cameras in the East Wing don’t show this door,” Salem added. “I don’t want to sit here without being able to see...it’s suffocating.”

Lucy waved her hand around until she felt the cotton of Salem’s shirt and then felt for her hand, grabbed it, and gave it a squeeze. “He might come back.”

“We’ll wait,” Grant said, his voice floated to them from somewhere near the door. “We have no intercom now. No way of knowing what’s happening out there. So, we wait.”

They listened intently, but couldn’t hear a sound.

For minutes, long hour-like minutes, they waited.

Lucy curled up on the floor, the scratchy carpet rubbing against her cheek, as she felt her body melt against the fibers. Even though she struggled against it, Lucy found herself succumbing to sleep. She wished she would will herself to stay alert, but sleep dragged her down into a fitful abyss.

She dreamed Spencer found them. Yanked them out by their hair and dragged them to the auditorium where the boy who had died right in front of her was inexplicably alive, but bleeding out his nose and eyes. The blood pooled at his feet, thick, red, and sticky and his mouth was moving, but no sound came out. As they were pulled past him, his arms shot up he reached for Lucy’s kicking feet.

Defying physics, Spencer hoisted them all on stage and tried to deposit their broken and tired bodies into the dressing room, which was filled to the top with bodies like a hall closet shoved with piles of junk and clothing. But Friendly Kent sent them away.
“No room. No room. No room.”

So, Spencer grabbed them back and took them to the pool. The cement cavern was now a mass grave of tangled bodies. He threw them into the sea of limbs and blood. Lucy tried to get out, flapping her arms forward and gaining leverage against the dead, but she couldn’t make any progress forward. The dead pulled her down into them and she sank, as if their mushy decomposing bodies were quicksand or a riptide. Frantic and calling for Grant and Salem at intervals, Lucy gripped a body and the head rolled over to her.

It was Ethan.

She screamed and pushed his bloated features away. Her scream echoed, carrying on for ten full seconds and it appeared to trigger something as select tiles in the ceiling slid out of the way, creating cavernous black holes.

From the ceiling, green and orange snakes descended. Their blood red fangs gripped dead rats in their mouths. But even Lucy could see that the rats were also decaying, clumps of their fur was missing, holes in their sides oozed thick white pus. Down the snakes, with their prizes, slithered, sliding in and out of the masses, appearing and disappearing and reappearing.