The Release

“You were good for Ethan while I was gone?” she asked and the boy nodded vigorously. “And did you eat?”

“Hamburger,” Teddy answered.

Darla looked over her shoulder and saw Lucy staring. She put a protective arm on the boy and moved him into the light from the windows.

“Lucy, this is my son Theodore. Teddy, we call him.”

“You have a son,” Lucy stated and then immediately regretted not having anything else of value to say about it.

“I have a son.” For the first time since she met her, Lucy saw emotion in Darla’s eyes: A flicker of fragility underneath the comic-book persona. “He’s five. He’s sweet, and he loves to sing…and he’s intuitive,” Darla stopped and swallowed. “And he is alive because of your brother. We are alive because of your brother.” She picked the boy up and he wrapped his legs around her middle and placed his head on her shoulder.

“Mama,” Teddy whispered loudly. “What’s the girl’s name?”

“Lucy,” she answered. “Her name is Lucy. She’s Ethan’s sister, sweetie. Go ahead, say hello.”

“Hello,” Teddy said and then he buried his head into his mother’s shoulder, shielding his eyes. Then he lifted his head again and smiled, displaying a neat, straight row of perfect baby teeth, before burying his head again.

The child was around the same age as Harper. Lucy crossed her arms and smiled at the boy, her lip trembling. Then Lucy turned to Grant and she looked at him apologetically.

“I’m sorry, but can everyone just give me a moment with Ethan? Alone.”

She waited until Grant had risen from his seat and wandered off with Darla before she turned her attention back to her brother. The discharged duo followed Teddy up the stairs, their footsteps echoing overhead. It amused Lucy that this was the quietest she had ever heard her house. She kept waiting for the rowdy shouting from her brothers, the crashing and tumbling, or Harper’s whining that someone stole her toys.

“What’s going on?” Lucy’s voice was on edge. She took a giant step toward Ethan. “What the hell is going on here?”

“I don’t know how any of this must appear to you…” Ethan started and then frowned.

“Let’s start with this vaccine. With our siblings’ names on them? Can we start with that, please?”

“Okay.”

She gulped. “Okay, what? Just tell me what you know. Tell me everything.”

“I can’t. It won’t work like that. I don’t think you’d believe me.”

“Then what am I supposed to do? Wait until you feel like filling me in?”

Upstairs, Teddy dumped out what sounded like a crate of blocks.

“I’m really glad you’re home and that you’re okay. You don’t know how much I worried that I would lose you forever.”

“Darla said that I was safe. Are we safe?”

“From the virus, yes. We were already vaccinated.”

“When?”

“You don’t remember being vaccinated lately?” Ethan asked with his eyebrows raised. When Lucy’s stare remained blank, he sighed, and then added, “For our vacation. Our injections.”

“The ones for the trip? But…” she lowered her eyes and her head began to hurt. Her father had been the one to supply them with their inoculations and, at the time, it seemed reasonable and normal—par for the course of living in their household. After a rant about lobbyists and health-care costs, their dad had convinced their mother that he could talk his co-workers into providing him with the vaccines on the cheap. Lucy was starting to gather the facts, but still there was a shadow over what those facts implied.

“The vials we gave Spencer were back-ups. A precaution. A safeguard.”

“Where did our vials go then? The Ethan and Lucy vials?”

Ethan looked to the ceiling. Darla and Teddy’s voices drifted downstairs.

“Oh.”

“I couldn’t—” he struggled with his words. “She helped me. And Teddy is so young.”

“Of course.” The decision seemed reasonable. There was no way Ethan could have predicted Salem and Grant surviving to Day Six. While she wanted to respect Ethan’s compassion toward these strangers—especially a child—she fought the instinct to be angry with him for giving away the only way she could help her friends. It was too late for Salem, but she felt so impotent and lost with Grant, upstairs, just waiting to die. The power to stop that death was in Ethan’s control and he squandered it.

“You should have kept some back,” Lucy said.

“We had no way of knowing.”

“That isn’t the point!” She felt her cheeks blush. Arguing with Ethan always felt so personal.

“Spencer wasn’t going to let you go. There were talks happening with Darla before he even got you to the front office. Don’t you think we tried everything? You don’t know what it would’ve taken to get you out of there. And besides…how was I supposed to know about the boy?”

“Grant.”

“Grant. Right.”

“He’s going to die and we could have saved him.”

“That isn’t my fault,” Ethan said to her, his voice rising.

Lucy threw her hands up in the air. “Then whose fault is it?”

Ethan shook his head. “Lucy. Just stop. It hasn’t been a picnic for me either. Can we stop? Let’s back-up.” Whisking away the throw blanket from his legs, Ethan exposed the broken, beaten, and bloodied mess that lay beneath. His left leg dangled unmoving to the side; there was a swollen mass above the knee that seemed to float to the side, which defied Lucy’s understanding of human anatomy. The skin was yellow and black like someone had attempted to paint him into an exotic animal.

Recoiling at first and then moving her body closer to inspect the injury, Lucy held out a tender hand and it hovered above the wreckage.

“This looks horrific,” she said. “Ethan…what happened?”

He took a breath and then launched into his story. He had gone to the airport looking for their family and encountered Darla and Teddy there. It was the boy that Ethan encountered first; the child was calm, but rattled, and Ethan wanted to get him somewhere safe. Compelled, in the absence of his siblings and his mother, to do something good amidst the disaster, Ethan convinced Darla that he could offer them shelter.

“She wasn’t convinced at first. But as soon as we got out of the airport and to a side street, this truck comes out of nowhere, barreling toward me. The driver…impaired by the virus…is—”

“Dying?” Lucy asked, interrupting, and the question drew Ethan out of his storytelling daze.

“Or dead already.”

“He hit you.”

“Pi

Lucy gasped and looked down at his legs, imagining her brother stuck between two vehicles, scared and facing the realization that there was no one there who could help him. “You could have died.”

“I should have. Darla…she had to pull the dead man out of the truck and put the car in reverse to get me out. But my legs were broken. Shattered, I suppose. Not like we could just call 911 and hightail it to the ER, right? And poor Teddy. Just standing there…so concerned. But so brave too. That’s a brave little dude.”

Lucy waited for him to continue.

“Good Samaritans brought me home eventually. Some couple in their forties, driving a minivan. Carting people around obstacles like some sort of taxi service. By that time, I think Darla figured she was stuck with me. She really did save my life though, by helping unpin me, flagging down the van. And then everything she did afterward to get me medicine. I was in shock. I should have died, but she just, I don’t know, made it a priority to get me better and she didn’t have to. She didn’t know me.”

“You owed her.”

“Yes.”

“And now she owes you?”

“Maybe she sees it like that, but I don’t know. It was…” Ethan paused, “it was awful out there…Lucy…everything about this. And I feel so…I felt like I couldn’t help you…” Ethan began to cry. He collapsed forward and buried his head in his hands. She had never really seen Ethan cry before and it took her by surprise. “I just keep thanking God that you’re alive,” he said after he composed himself. “After everything…Mom’s phone messages, the house…”