Viral Nation

by Grimes, Shaunta

  “Reading by candlelight isn’t good for your eyes, you know,” he said.

  “Just get some, okay?”

  He didn’t answer. He had exactly zero control over what the machines gave him. Some weeks he came home with so much he could barely carry it, others with nothing more than their basic rations.

  Clover waved over her shoulder as she turned with Mango toward the library. From behind, she looked more like twelve than sixteen. Her black hair was cut short, in chunky layers. She had a habit of hacking at it with scissors when it started to bother her. She wore their mother’s red Converse high-tops and blue jeans cuffed at the ankle with a standard-issue white T-shirt.

  She was so thin. He hoped for some meat, instead of the candles she wanted. The virus, which many expected to affect the chicken population, had jumped from humans to cows instead. They were endangered now and pampered like pets on dairy farms. It was hard for West to imagine that once upon a time people ate them. A pound of lamb or pork would go a long way, though.

  West watched until his sister was out of sight, then walked the other way, toward the Bazaar.

  There were two things he could count on every Wednesday morning. An unpleasant twinge of resentment when he traded a backbreaking week of hard labor for barely enough food and energy to take care of his sister. And passing by the Kingston Estate on his way to the Bazaar, where he knew Bridget Kingston would be somewhere near the gate.

  The Kingston Estate was as big and grand as its name implied. A large white house and a smaller guest house sat on maybe two acres of land with stables between them. The estate had housed the current headmaster since the Academy opened fifteen years ago. First a man named Norton, and for the last four years Adam Kingston and his daughter.

  A trio of horses looked up from where they ate alfalfa in a front pasture when West walked by. Beyond the buildings, the land dropped off into a ravine, leaving a backdrop of city below and mountains beyond.

  The house was well kept, with walls repainted bright white by government workers every third spring and set off by the deep blue shutters and a red front door. Very patriotic. A wide porch wrapped around the front and both sides of the house.

  As West came close, Bridget stood up from the bench swing that hung from the porch rafters near the front door. She wore her honey-colored hair swept away from her face and pulled into a high ponytail. The curled ends of it brushed the back of her neck.

  Passing on his way to the Bazaar was the only time West saw Bridget since he’d graduated primary school and become a dirt slinger three springs ago. They rarely said more than “good morning” or “hello” to each other. There was more caught in the space between them, but it stayed there. West convinced himself he was fine with the slow progression. He’d be about forty before he was in a position to offer Bridget anything more than a simple greeting.

  It hadn’t always been that way. Before Adam Kingston was headmaster, he was just a teacher and West’s father was a guard. A guard’s son could be with a teacher’s daughter. This guard’s son had time to fall in love with that teacher’s daughter, in fact, before things changed. Bridget moved with her father into the estate and that was that.

  “Morning,” she said. She wore a pair of Academy gray pants that she’d cut off and neatly hemmed into shorts, and a white T-shirt that set off her long, golden limbs.

  “Morning,” he answered. God, he was an idiot. She was the headmaster’s daughter. He smelled, constantly, of manure and rotting melon. He buried his hands in his pockets and quickened his pace.

  “Are you headed for the Bazaar?” she asked as he passed by.

  “Yes.” He stopped walking but didn’t know what else to say. He looked for something anyway. Anything to draw out this moment. “You, too?”

  “I don’t get my own rations until November.”

  Of course. He knew that she was seventeen. Her father would pick up her rations along with his, and those of anyone else he supported. He would never let his daughter near the Bazaar. West didn’t blame him.

  “Have a good day, Bridget.” He liked saying her name. It felt sweet on his tongue. It always had.

  She smiled, her cheeks flushed just a little, and he walked away.

  “You’re in a good mood.”

  West turned and smiled when he saw Isaiah walking toward him. “What are you doing here?”

  “Got the day off and thought I’d get my grandma’s rations for her.”

  “I’m just on my way to the Bazaar.” West balanced himself back on a garden wall, his thick-soled boots making it difficult, and reached into his pocket for Mrs. Finch’s ration coupons.

  Isaiah took them, then pushed West’s shoulder until he lost balance again. “Saw you talking to Bridget Kingston. She why you’re so smiley today?”

  He hopped back on the wall and walked backward a few steps. “Just saying hello.”

  “Watch yourself, West. That girl is way out of your league.”

  “Don’t worry. That’s not why I’m happy today.” Not mostly, anyway.

  “No?”

  “Clover got accepted into the Academy. Boarding and all.”

  Isaiah stopped walking, and West did, too, after a few more steps. “So you going to join the Company?”

  There were only two things to do in Reno. Work for the Waverly-Stead Company, or work for the government. Company work for people as young as West required living in the barracks, at least for training. He couldn’t leave Clover, so West worked for the government raising cantaloupe to be sent by train to feed people in other states.

  Are you going to join the Company? wasn’t a real question. All West had ever wanted was to work for Waverly-Stead, just like his father.

  “As soon as she’s settled in, I can apply,” he said.

  Isaiah ran a hand over the stubble growing on top of his head. “School starts in what, a month?”

  “About.”

  “You could start training the next day.”

  West’s stomach tightened. He could start the process now. Today. That letter was for Clover, but it sure changed his life, too. He’d been taking care of her since he was sixteen and she was thirteen. Since their father was promoted from guard to executioner, part of one of the five-person firing squads that were the center of the most efficient law enforcement system in the history of the country. People convicted of future capital crimes were brought from every state’s walled city to Reno so that their sentences could be carried out. Executioners were required to live in the Company barracks, and promotions within the Company weren’t something anyone could turn down easily. Their father signed guardianship to Mrs. Finch, but it was West who had taken care of not only himself and his sister, but their guardian as well, until Clover’s care passed to him officially when he turned eighteen.

  “You’ve waited long enough,” Isaiah said.

  Hell, yes, he had.

  West received a similar letter to Clover’s from the Academy a few months after he convinced his father he could take care of his sister. By then it was clear that, official documents aside, Mrs. Finch couldn’t even care for herself. He declined the invitation. What else could he do? Foster City was supposed to be a perfect system, allowing children to be cared for so their parents could do the work of recivilization. Somehow he’d known that system wouldn’t work for them. Foster City would have chewed his sister up and spit her out. But now that she was accepted into the Academy herself, he had his life back.

  chapter 2

  She got to go to heaven four days early.

  —BILL CLINTON, ON HIS MOTHER’S TRIP TO LAS VEGAS FOUR DAYS BEFORE HER DEATH.

  A man at least as old as Mrs. Finch stood, ramrod straight, just inside the big library building. Clover stopped in front of him, as she had a thousand times.

  “Morning, Clover,” he said. “Help you find anything today?”

  A large whiteboard stood next to him, and someone had written that day’s class offerings on it. “Any good classes today?” />
  “One on preserving meat. Another on making soap.”

  She’d taken those already. More than once. “Looks like the first-aid class has a new teacher.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  Clover wandered off, holding Mango’s lead in her right hand. At the last minute, she remembered and turned back. “Thank you, Tom.”

  The old man’s wrinkled face softened into a smile. “Pleasure.”

  Clover inhaled as she walked among the shelves of books. The library’s scent of dust and old paper filtered through her as she lifted her free hand and let her fingers trail along the spines of a row of art books. The world changed just as she was born. It had shrunk to the size of the city. But these books let her see what it used to be.

  She picked one full of prints of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work. Cow skulls and desert landscapes. Clover traced the petals of a huge flower that held secrets she didn’t quite understand. Then she slid the book back into its spot, where she knew she could find it anytime she wanted it, and went to look for books on beekeeping. If West couldn’t get her candles, maybe she could make her own.

  The Waverly-Stead building and the Bazaar sat across four lanes of Virginia Street from each other. A huge arched sign, declaring Reno The Biggest Little City in the World, bridged the road. Back in the day, the buildings must have used as much energy between them every day as the whole rest of the city combined did now.

  West passed with Isaiah under the sign and through the heavy double doors into the Company’s headquarters. The artificial cool inside gave him goose bumps as they walked along the marble entrance to a large wooden desk.

  The woman behind the desk stopped typing when they approached, her fingers curved like claws over the keyboard. “How can I help you?”

  “I’m here to apply for guard training,” West said. “Please.”

  The receptionist was maybe forty. Her light brown hair was teased and fluffed to an arrangement that didn’t move when she turned her head. Pitted scars on her cheeks meant the Company had saved her life.

  West had the scars, too. He rarely thought about them, but they marked him as a survivor. The woman glanced from his eyes to his right cheek and back.

  “Take the elevator to the third floor, honey, make a left and then a right, and you’ll see the recruitment offices at the end of the hall,” she said.

  West and Isaiah walked toward the elevator together. The Bazaar had a bank of them, too. No other building in Reno except for the hospital had enough energy reserve to save people from walking up stairs.

  “You’ll get a packet to fill out, and they’ll want a start date,” Isaiah said as the doors slipped closed.

  Just like that, the long wait to start his life was over. He pressed the button for the third floor and rocked on his toes as the elevator lurched upward.

  He looked at Isaiah in the mirrored elevator door. His friend wore guard uniform pants, mottled with shades of green and brown, and a white T-shirt the same as West’s.

  All work was important. Without farmers, no one ate. But West was so ready to do something really interesting, he could barely hold it in.

  They found the recruitment office easily enough. Isaiah had been there before, of course, three years ago. West hesitated before opening the door, feeling like he was crossing some sort of threshold, but when he did, he found just a room. A table inside the door held a stack of dark blue and white folders.

  “Take one,” a man behind a desk said without looking up from his work. He flicked his wrist toward some chairs a few feet away. “Sit there and fill it out.”

  The packet inside the top folder was thick, with a couple dozen pages stapled inside. “Can I bring this back?” West asked. “My sister is waiting for me in the library, and I still have to get to the Bazaar—”

  The man held up a hand, and West swallowed the rest of his rambling.

  “Fill out the first page. We’ll set an appointment for your interview. You can bring the balance of the application two days before that date.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The old man’s sharp blue eyes darted back to the work West had interrupted with his question.

  The short form asked for West’s vital statistics and had a statement for him to sign that notified him that his name would be run through the Company database. If it came up attached to any violent crime that would happen in the next two years, he’d be punished swiftly and justly. He filled the page out quickly, signed it, and brought it back to the officer.

  The old man made him wait several minutes before taking the page and asking, “And what date are you available to begin training?”

  West took a deep breath. This is it. “September seventh.” The day after his sister started classes at the Academy.

  “Okay. You’ll come for your interview on the—” The man tapped the eraser end of a pencil against his desk as he flipped through the pages of a calendar. “Third at one thirty in the afternoon, and bring your full and complete application anytime on or before the first. We will run your name through the database during your interview, do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you.” West turned to leave and nearly plowed into Isaiah standing behind him.

  “A late start,” Isaiah said as they exited the elevator a few minutes later. “But you’re finally becoming a man, my friend.”

  After they’d made their way out of the building, they stopped at the median, in the center of four lanes of blacktop, to let a group of little kids on bicycles and their teacher pass. “What’s the training like?”

  “The hardest thing you’ve ever done,” Isaiah said. “You’ll want to die before it’s over.”

  Isaiah entered training at sixteen, directly out of primary school. West was nearly twenty and had been working a farm for three years. “I think I’ll survive.”

  “Remember that when you’re running ten miles on an empty stomach at four in the morning after two hours’ sleep.”

  “In my bare feet, through the snow?”

  Isaiah laughed.

  They made their way to the Bazaar’s entrance and West pushed the dark glass door open. Carnival music, full of organs and horns, blared loud enough to compete with the noise of thousands of gamblers. The machines whirred and clanked, and when someone won a leg of lamb or a pair of wool socks, bells and sirens went off.

  This was why he’d given up the Academy. Clover would never be able to walk through the door to the Bazaar to pick up her own rations.

  Primary school classrooms had overstimulated his sister to the point of catatonia some days. On a good day, he’d come home to find her curled in a corner of the couch, humming frantically to herself with her face buried in a book. Other days, he’d find her rocking and banging the heel of her hand into her forehead.

  The noise, the crush of people, the smells of the Bazaar would incapacitate her. He didn’t have to worry about that now. For the next four years, all of Clover’s needs would be taken care of.

  West and Isaiah passed by glassy-eyed people frantically yanking on the slot machine arms and went to stand in line at the cage to turn their extra tickets in for gambling tokens.

  “Let’s play craps,” Isaiah said.

  “It takes too long.”

  “Clover got you on a curfew?” Isaiah bumped him with his shoulder, and West pushed him away.

  He did feel lucky today. “Fine. One game. But then I’m already late.”

  Isaiah walked to the cage window when the man in front of them left with his handful of tokens. “We both know your sister could spend the rest of her life in the library and be perfectly happy.”

  “In the library, yes. Sitting outside waiting for me? Not so much.” West cashed in the six tickets he’d received the day before. Three earned, three for his day off. As a general rule, he played his tokens as he got them. He was trying to feed himself, Clover, and a large dog on what amounted to about enough to feed one person. If he won a loaf of bread or a pound of carrots, they needed
it as soon as possible.

  Isaiah had a week’s worth of extra tickets for himself, plus the fourteen his grandmother received as an old-age pension from the city each week. Living in the barracks, he didn’t draw food rations.

  “I can’t wait around for you to play all those,” West said.

  “No worries.”

  West shoved his tokens into his pocket and followed Isaiah to the oblong table, lined on three sides with people, their faces red and slick with sweat as they cheered on the shooter and then followed the dice down the table with their eyes. Isaiah elbowed his way to the front, and West followed in his wake.

  The dealer across the table from them was dressed in fishnet stockings and a pink satin leotard cut over her round hips to her narrow waist on the sides and nearly down to her belly button in front, barely containing her cleavage.

  The dice bounced off the rail and rolled partway back before stopping. The dealer’s bleached-blond curls bobbed as she called, “Shooter rolls eight the hard way!”

  Some groans, one whoop from somewhere near the head of the table. The dealer at the center of the table, a man wearing a jester’s hat with bells on the tips and a skintight, slightly obscene metallic purple jumpsuit, raked in the dice while the fishnet girl and another wearing shiny black shorts and a red tasseled bra mucked up the bets.

  The jester used his stick to push the dice toward the next shooter, but flipped his hook and took them back when the music changed and the lights in the room dimmed before one bright beam shot down from the ceiling.

  The deafening noise that defined the Bazaar’s gambling floor dulled, and everyone at the table craned their heads back to look up. West included.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” A deep, rumbling voice boomed over the speaker system. “Overhead, for your viewing pleasure, the Flying Phoenix!”

  The room stayed silent for a moment as a girl in crimson velvet encrusted with crystal stones unfurled from a wide, white silk ribbon. She dropped from the ceiling with dizzying speed, then caught herself with a wrist trapped in the silk and spun in a wide circle over them.