Viral Nation (Short Story): Broken Nation

by Shaunta Grimes

  Alex starts the car, then finally stops for a second and looks at me. “Are you ready?”

  “So ready.”

  • • •

  I’ve been so wrapped up in school and learning how to live without my leg that until I find myself in the center of the city, I don’t realize how tense things have become. There are no other cars on the road. People move in and out of the downtown buildings with purpose, no loitering.

  We pull into the parking lot of a building that used to be a casino but now holds the giant farmer’s market where Alex picks up our weekly food rations. He calls it the Bazaar. As Alex cuts the engine, I’m struck by how easy it is to accept change when there is no choice.

  Alex takes my chair from the trunk of the car and puts me in it, then puts my backpack and his bag in my lap and moves at such a fast pace away from the car that Maggie has to jog to keep up. I take her bag from her.

  We go through the main doors into the Bazaar. The slot machines are still there, lined up in neat rows, but no one is playing them. A few people are working on them, though, and it seems ridiculous to me that of all the things to get working again, slot machines would be anywhere near the top of the list.

  We have to move slower now, so that Alex can find the ramps that let him push me up and around the casino floor toward a back exit. People are staring. I hate that I can’t walk far enough yet with my fake leg. It makes me feel weak and useless, and there is no room right now for weak and useless.

  Frank is behind the casino, at a loading dock, with his massive eighteen-wheeler truck. Alex told me that’s he’s been driving it his entire adult life—he inherited it from his father. The two of them speak to each other, low and far enough away that I can’t hear what they say.

  “It’s time,” Alex finally says. He has to lift Maggie up into the truck, she’s too small to manage it on her own. She scrambles back to the part of the cab that’s hidden by a curtain. I imagine that’s where Frank lives when he’s on the road.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Frank says to me. I look at him for the first time. He’s my mom’s age, somewhere in his late thirties or early forties, with brown hair that’s just starting to go gray above his ears. He looks like a nice man, and as hard as I try to keep my guard up, I feel comfortable with him. “I’ll get you where you need to go.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I guess subversion is in my blood. My parents fought the system back in the sixties.” He looks over to the casino. “Walled cities. They wouldn’t have bought it. I guess I don’t either. Not completely, anyway.”

  “Your turn,” Alex says after he’s put our bags into the truck with Maggie. He puts an arm around me, to lift me, and I push him away.

  “I can do it.” I can walk to the truck anyway, and I stand up on my own and do that. My progress is slow and both men stand watching me. I can feel them wanting to help.

  It takes ten seconds of standing at the open door to the truck cab to realize that there is not a chance I can climb in on my own. Not on the first try anyway, and not without embarrassing myself even more than being lifted in like Maggie was.

  Alex lifts me into the truck without a problem. I’ve lost weight and he’s gotten stronger. He wrangles my folded chair into the back with Maggie, then sits next to me as Frank climbs behind the wheel.

  • • •

  Even jumping off a bridge can seem like a good idea before you hit the ground.

  I have a strong memory of my mother’s favorite bit of advice as Frank slows the truck to a brake-screeching stop. We’ve made it to the interstate on-ramp.

  “Get in the back,” Frank hisses without turning his eyes from the two men who stopped him. They’re standing in the road, waving both arms above their heads.

  “Why do we have to—”

  Alex throws himself to the back of the cab and leans back over the bench seat to grab me by the shoulders. “Does it matter? Come on.”

  For a terrifying minute, he tries to pull me back and I can’t bend myself properly to help him. My fake leg won’t let me and the harder we try, the more it hurts until I finally hiss at him, “Let me go.”

  “Too late.” Frank pushes Alex back and closes the curtains just as one of the men knocks on his door.

  He opens it and the man standing outside isn’t nearly as intimidating up close as he was when he was blocking the road. “Glad we caught you. I’m Guy Watson, that there is Roddy Ellis. We picked up orders to take the truck from here. There’s another shipment. Special one I guess. They need you to deliver that one all the way to the East Coast somewhere.”

  “East Coast?” Frank drums his fingers against the steering wheel. “What’s going there?”

  “No idea. But you’re the one they want driving it. No one else has cross-country experience.”

  “This is my truck.”

  Frank’s voice is tight and to me it sounds nervous, but the other man must think he’s just upset about letting someone else drive his truck, because he says, “I know, man. I’ll be careful with her, I promise.”

  Frank looks at me, but his expression is unreadable. Neither of us even glance at the curtain hiding Alex and Maggie.

  “Fine,” Frank says, turning back to the other driver. “Meet you back at the loading dock.”

  “Ellis’ll take you in our car. No point wasting gas driving this monster all the way back.”

  My heart slams against my rib cage like it wants out. So far Guy Watson seems to understand Frank’s hesitation. If we make a break for it, that will end. I’m too afraid to move.

  “Okay, give me a minute,” Frank says.

  It feels like a year between hearing his voice and seeing Watson step back. Frank closes the door and turns to me. He takes my hand, low on the seat where no one can see.

  “Don’t open the curtain,” he says, to Alex, not me. “We have to get out. Try to stay hidden. Get out in Salt Lake City.”

  “Leanne,” Maggie says, her voice barely a whisper.

  “She’ll be okay. I promise. Alex, you keep that girl safe. There’s water back there. Stay quiet. I don’t think he’ll open the curtain.” Maybe that would be like going into someone’s house, I think. I feel like I’m losing my mind. “If he does, just tell them your folks are in Denver and you hid in the truck to get a ride to them.”

  “I need my chair,” I say. I’m almost desperate to see Alex and Maggie, to kiss them and say good-bye. I want to crawl back there with them, go where they go. We belong together.

  “You can’t have it.” Frank tilts his head toward the two men waiting outside. “We can’t risk opening the curtain.”

  “She needs it,” Alex says.

  “Can you walk?” Frank is looking me directly in the face. We have to hurry. A long conversation will make them suspicious. “Can you walk, Leanne?”

  “I can walk.”

  “You’re going to have to. Do you understand?”

  I’ve sweat through my T-shirt, my armpits are sticky and wet. I’m having trouble breathing. “Are they going to be okay?”

  Frank doesn’t answer and I realize that I expected him to reassure me. It’s Alex who says, “We’ll be okay.”

  It hits me that I might never see his face again and Frank has to tighten his grip on my hand to keep me from ripping the curtain open. “We have to go. Right now.”

  I look out the windshield and see Watson and Ellis starting to lose patience.

  “Please don’t go, Leanne!” Maggie is crying and it sends her voice, barely a whisper, an octave higher. “Please!”

  “You keep her quiet,” Frank says. He opens his door. “I’ll come around to help you down, but you’re going to have to walk to the other car on your own. We don’t want them looking for your chair for you, right?”

  And then he’s gone. I have maybe thirty seconds while Frank shakes hands with the other men. “This is bad,” I say. “I can’t do this.”

  “You can,” Alex says “And we’ll be fine. They
aren’t the police. Worst happens, they think we’re some kind of stowaways. I’ll be back for you in a few days.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise you.” Frank is coming around now and it takes every ounce of my self-control not to scream. “I love you, Leanne.”

  “I love you, too,” Maggie says.

  The door beside me opens before I can answer. Frank steps up and nods at me. He gets me on my feet, outside the truck. I feel hollow, which is maybe good because I don’t even feel like I have tears inside me. Frank keeps a hand on my back and I take one slow step. I focus on the next one, and then the next, while Watson gets inside the truck and Ellis goes to open his car.

  I’ve never walked more than a half dozen steps on my prosthetic without Alex there to help me, but somehow, I make it to the car. Frank puts me in the front seat and closes the door. Maybe it just looks like old-fashioned chivalry to Ellis, because he doesn’t seem fazed by how much help I need. I watch out the window as Watson waves at us, then drives past us, onto the interstate.

  “I didn’t tell them that I love them.” I can hear the hysteria in my own voice.

  Frank takes my hand again and squeezes it. “They know.”

  • • •

  I have a small stack of letters. Most are written by Alex, but there are pictures that Maggie drew. It’s been a year since Frank drove me away back to Reno. A year since I watched the eighteen-wheeler drive away with my family hidden in it.

  I finished the school year, studying geography and criminal justice, and spent the summer working at the Veronica’s dock on Lake Tahoe. I’ve learned to use my leg, which is a good thing since I never got another wheelchair.

  It’s been a year and Alex wants to come for me. He’s wanted to come for me for six months.

  I know something that he doesn’t. I know that two years from now, I’m still in Reno. I’m still working for the Company, still in the Mariner program.

  I know because part of my internship included working with Travelers—people who ride the Veronica through a time portal deep in the lake. They pop up two years in the future, and I meet them there. Or an older version of me does.

  I can’t leave the city. I can’t leave the Company. If I do, I’ll be putting myself and everyone I love in danger.

  “Leanne?”

  I look up. Frank is waiting for me to hand him a letter to get to Alex and Maggie. I just shake my head. “I need you to promise me something.”

  “What is it?”

  “You won’t help him come here for me. Promise me, Frank.” Alex might come anyway. But he might not, if I hurt him enough. If I stop writing back. If I disappear.

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” Frank leans against the door of his truck. “I could get you to him. We could leave now.”

  I know already that I won’t leave. In a way it is a relief. This is what I am supposed to be doing. This is how I can do the most good. “I’m sure.”

  Sixteen years later, the Company finds a new, very special recruit in sixteen-year-old Clover Donovan. Brilliant but autistic, she’ll have help navigating her new role in the secretive organization from a true-hearted mentor named Leanne . . .

  Keep reading for an excerpt

  from Viral Nation!

  Prologue

  I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making.

  —Franklin D. Roosevelt, radio address on Brotherhood Day, February 23, 1936

  “Keep her away from me.”

  James walked toward his wife with their newborn daughter sleeping against his chest, her body a warm spot through a shirt he hadn’t changed in three days. He smelled rank, but didn’t care. “You don’t mean that, Janie.”

  “I don’t want her near me.” Jane’s features were swollen almost beyond recognition. Sores, seeping and open, covered skin that was a source of vanity—more his than hers—only a week ago. Talking caused the corners of her mouth to crack.

  His own skin ached to the muscle in sympathy with hers. Like they shared the same body. And he was so angry. So goddamned bent.

  They were supposed to be safe here, in the mountains where the fleas that carried the virus couldn’t live. The president told them so.

  Told the whole country, so that desperate and already sick people stampeded to higher elevations. Nothing could hold them back. They came like a revival of the Gold Rush, blinded by the need to move westward and upward into the Sierras.

  “Hold her, Jane. It’s too . . .” late anyway. He couldn’t bring himself to say it. He wished to God it wasn’t true.

  His wife brought the virus home from the hospital along with their new baby. Clover, they’d named her. Jane said it was a good name for a baby born in spring.

  It was nothing more than bad luck that the virus came to the hospital at the same time their Clover did, but Jane blamed herself all the same.

  She’d rear-ended a pickup truck on the way to the supermarket. Her water broke and Clover was born two weeks early. If the baby had come on time, in the first part of May instead of the middle of April, they would have known better than to go to the hospital.

  Ten days ago the virus was something that happened somewhere else. Obscene but distant, like reading in the Reno Gazette-Journal about a hurricane in Florida or a tornado in Kansas. Closer than an earthquake in Haiti, but still not their worry.

  Not something that could touch them beyond a general grief for the suffering of fellow human beings and an uptick in gasoline or food costs.

  Now it was everywhere. It was in their living room, on the narrow bed he’d moved down from their son’s room for Jane when she couldn’t climb the stairs anymore.

  Their son West, only three years old, was already feverish, his lymph nodes swollen and hot. It would come for Clover next. And James, too. Maybe even tonight.

  Except Jane’s body filled Clover’s with immunities that could keep her healthy longer than him.

  The thought that he might die before Clover did made it difficult for James to breathe. It made him want to do something reckless and unthinkable. He had to be healthy enough to care for his baby or she’d be left to die alone.

  He wouldn’t let that happen.

  Jane moaned, low in her throat. Her skin decomposed, even as he watched.

  His wife didn’t deserve this shredding of her body while her mind refused to blunt. She’d find no relief, not even in dementia, until she was dead.

  For the first time since they were seventeen, there was nothing he could do to protect her.

  The world had collapsed around them while they told each other everything would be okay. The virus was only the icing on a cake made of layers of energy crisis, climate change, recession, xenophobia, and a short but vicious civil war between the Midwestern and Southwestern states over the need for illegal migrant workers on the farms and the desire to keep them out of the border states.

  The media called that cake the Bad Times.

  Until Jane got sick—was it just three days ago? Yes, just three days ago, when the air wasn’t thick with the scent of her dying flesh. Until the first sores came, James, like everyone he knew, assumed that a return to good times was coming.

  “Please, take her out, James. It’s not too late. It’s not.”

  But it was. Jane would die tonight, if there was any mercy left in the universe. His boy had maybe two days. By morning, West would be wracked with pain, just like his mother. Within a week, it would be over for all four of them, one way or another.

  James kissed the top of Clover’s head, felt her feathery dark wisps of hair against his lips. She smelled new, when the rest of the house stank of a B-grade slasher movie.

  “It’s time, isn’t it?” he whispered to Jane.

  Her eyes, wildly green in her ravaged face, filled with tears. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Not your fault, baby. It’s not your fault.” He lay Clover against Jane’s body. His wife was too weak to fight, so she wrapped a fragile
arm around the tiny bundle and curled protectively against the baby, like an oyster around a pearl.

  A crusted-over sore above Jane’s elbow broke open and stained Clover’s soft yellow blanket with a smear of pus and almost-black blood.

  How could Jane have lost so much weight so quickly? Under a worn nightgown, her ribs felt like splintery artifacts against the back of his hand.

  The doctor who told them that Jane had the virus wore a full-body hazmat suit and something that looked like a cross between an astronaut’s helmet and the gas mask James had been issued in Iraq before West was born. She sent them home from the clinic with what she called a “pain kit.”

  Prescription painkillers, and a bottle of liquid narcotics for the children. And a box of pre-filled syringes.

  “For when the pills stop working,” she said.

  She had a case full of the kits and a box of red plastic quarantine ribbons on the floor of her examination room.

  They went home, stunned, with one of each and no follow-up appointment. Everyone knew, no one survived the virus.

  All that remained was managing the pain and praying for a miracle. They were left to take care of each other because no one would risk infection to care for them.

  Jane had not stopped praying, the words falling off her lips and, as far as James could tell, on deaf ears. Still, he couldn’t stop himself from doing it himself now. God, give me the strength to do this.

  He shook a dozen small white pills from the bottle. She wouldn’t be able to swallow them, her throat hardly let sips of water through. So he crushed the pills into a fine powder with a gray stone mortar and pestle that they’d bought on their honeymoon in Cuernavaca.

  They’d ridden horses there. Jane learned to balance on her knees across a pony’s bare back, arms thrown wide to the wind. She had no fear then. She wanted to do everything, try everything.

  James found applesauce to stir the powder into.

  Jane held the sleeping baby and murmured to her between bitter spoonfuls. After taking the last bite, her throat still worked, maybe trying to speak to him or say good-bye to Clover. Maybe just reacting to the agony of so much swallowing.