Virulent: The Release by Shelbi Wescott

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