Viral Nation (Short Story): Broken Nation

by Shaunta Grimes

  Somehow, he’d expected an instant end to her pain. It didn’t happen that way. Her breaths started to come in hitching hiccups, so far apart that between each he was sure she was gone. Her body rattled as her blood pressure plummeted. Her system was nearly empty, but released anyway, adding to the sick-house stench.

  But she didn’t die. He’d made her pain worse.

  He fumbled for the box that held the syringes, his heart pounding and hands shaking. The needle went through the skin of her upper arm before he could think about what he was doing.

  He didn’t even know what he’d given her. Morphine, maybe. Some stronger relief than the pills. Did she need more? He picked up another syringe, noticing for the first time that the doctor had given him four.

  Enough for a quick, semi-sanctioned death for his wife and children. For him. Law & Order reruns called a man who did what James could see no way around doing a family annihilator.

  Jane gasped another breath, then one more.

  And then her eyes closed, the green dulling before they did, and James panicked. “Jane!”

  The quiet in the house was shattered by a pounding on their front door that made his heart thud hard enough to send a wave of nausea over him. Clover screamed as she was startled out of sleep.

  He put the used needle down and grabbed the baby, because he didn’t want her disturbing Jane.

  She’s dead. I killed my wife.

  She might wake at any moment, maybe from the pain caused by the sores, or because her swollen throat wouldn’t let her take a breath.

  She’s dead. Oh, God. Forgive me.

  He’d lost his mind, sometime in the past minute. Was that all it took? One minute?

  “Who is it?” he called, unwilling to look through the peephole and see someone he knew covered in open sores.

  “Dr. Hamilton.”

  He opened the door just as the doctor jerked away the plastic quarantine ribbon from the jamb and let it bounce down the front steps. When she turned back to him, he saw an oozing bandage in the hollow of her right cheek. She wore blue jeans and a pink T-shirt instead of a hazmat suit. Without her mask, she looked ill and exhausted.

  Beyond the doorway, the street teemed with people and noise he’d somehow missed until now. Car horns honked. Children banged wooden spoons into pots and pans, like they were scaring off evil spirits on New Year’s Eve.

  “What’s happening?” He felt dim. Like he’d already half followed his wife to wherever she’d gone when her eyes closed. Somehow he’d completely forgotten there was a world outside this house.

  Jane believed in heaven. Said God believed in him, even if he wasn’t sure he believed in God. He wanted to go to her.

  No.

  Not before the children. Them, and then him, and they’d all be together again.

  The doctor came into the house when James took a step back.

  “You can’t be here,” he said.

  The doctor reached into her bag and pulled out a hypodermic needle. “It’s over. It’s finally all over.”

  She removed the plastic cover from the point and walked to the bed where Jane lay. The applesauce dish and used needle sat on the table next to her.

  It didn’t take long for the doctor to realize it was too late. James couldn’t make his throat work to get out a confession before the doctor felt for a pulse and let out a sad sigh.

  “Oh, James,” she said.

  He was going to prison. He knew it immediately. But, whatever was in that syringe might help West. It looked like the kind of implement a cartoon doctor might wield: oversized and filled with an icy blue substance. “West is sick.”

  James, still holding his daughter, started up the stairs to where West lay listless in his bed. The boy’s sweet, small face was already marked with sores on his fever-flushed cheeks.

  The doctor swabbed West’s arm with antiseptic and pushed the sharp point of the wicked-looking needle into his skin. The boy didn’t even whimper, a sign of how deeply the virus had invaded his body already.

  “It’ll take a while,” the doctor said. “And he’ll need a shot every day. You all will. I’ll leave enough for you to inject until he’s well enough to come to the clinic. Let’s call it a week, okay?”

  “A shot every day? For a week?”

  The doctor had lost her glimmer of joy. She’d meant to save the life of a young mother. James felt numb.

  “The drug is a suppressant. It’ll keep the symptoms away and stop healthy people from contracting the virus. But everyone needs a shot every day. Forever.”

  The doctor stuck James in the hip. The suppressant burned like hot tar as it worked its way through his veins. “Oh, my God.”

  “You’ll get used to it.” The doctor rubbed the spot she’d injected, encouraging the medicine to move more quickly, and then used a third needle on Clover’s fat little thigh. The thick substance formed a bubble under the baby’s skin, too viscous to move easily.

  Clover startled, her arms and legs opening wide, and her mouth twisted in a silent screech before sound finally escaped in a high-pitched wail.

  “I’ll send someone for Jane,” the doctor said quietly. “I’m so sorry.”

  • • •

  “No, Daddy,” West moaned when James sat on his bed two days later to administer the boy’s third shot. The sores were in the creases of West’s groin now and one had started in the crook of his right elbow in the night.

  James tortured his dying son with jelly-thick medicine that seared as it pushed through a needle as thick as a juice box straw. Before Dr. Hamilton showed up, James was ready to move West and Clover on to whatever came next in order to save them from pain.

  Now he shoved needles and medicine that burned like acid into them, all because someone had given him a glimmer of hope.

  “It’s making you better, buddy. I know it hurts, but you need it.”

  West’s thin arms were bruised where the first two shots had gone in. Like a miniature junkie. Would the treatments be less painful in the boy’s thigh? Maybe James should try his hip?

  In the end, he was afraid to deviate from what the doctor had shown him.

  How could West’s little body endure this day after day? James gave his son a stuffed koala bear to squeeze, then pushed the needle into his skin and depressed the plunger.

  West cried and James reminded himself that the first night his son had been too ill to notice how unpleasant the suppressant was.

  • • •

  By the end of the week, West’s skin was healing, his lymph nodes were smaller, and he began to have a spark of energy again.

  For the next month, James and his children spent hours every day in line at the clinic for their suppressant doses. And James prepared himself for his inevitable arrest. He’d murdered Jane with his inability to withstand her pain. He deserved to be punished.

  There was no one else to take care of West and Clover. He and Jane were both only children. Their parents were all gone, either dead or deserted. Probably all dead, now.

  Most of every day was spent trying to figure out how to take his next breath without his wife. He didn’t go to work. He didn’t even bother to find out if he still had a job.

  Day after day, no one came to arrest him. Maybe there were too many dead to focus on the actual cause of death for virus victims. Too many changes happening all at once to spend any time noticing one mercy killing.

  Maybe there were so many mercy killings that arresting all the guilty survivors was impractical.

  Whatever the reason, no one came, and he couldn’t find the courage to turn himself in.

  His children needed him, he told himself. There was no one else.

  News trickled in over the radio. Two scientists, Ned Waverly and Jon Stead, had developed the suppressant. In order to administer it to those who had survived the virus, each state gathered its residents into a central city.

  In Nevada, that city was Reno, where James, West, and Clover already lived, so they weren’t upr
ooted the way the survivors who traveled in caravans from the southern and eastern parts of the state were.

  They didn’t have to move into the home of a dead family. Sleep in their beds, eat their food at their tables. The process of bringing in the displaced was quick and efficient. There were so few left, less than twenty thousand in Nevada, and nearly half of those younger than twelve. The virus had scared both the fight and the flight out of all of those old enough to think about either one.

  “We had it better than most states,” his only surviving neighbor said as she cooed over Clover. His daughter didn’t like to be held, she stiffened like a hard-limbed baby doll, but Mrs. Finch didn’t seem to care. “The mountain states all had it better.”

  She was right. The drought-devastated plains states, which had already badly lost their war, had been nearly depopulated. In some states, less than one percent survived. The states where staple crops were easily grown were hit the hardest, the radio announcers said. Not just by the virus, but by the fallout of the war fought on the country’s best soil.

  James heard, six weeks after Jane died, that crews were picking through Reno, removing dead bodies, sanitizing houses, making a place for the surviving Nevadans who’d stayed in the state. Five thousand fled, according to the radio. They went back to where they came from. Some were shuttled to the states that didn’t have enough people left even to populate one city.

  “A recruiter came yesterday,” James said to his neighbor. “They want me to join the crews.”

  Alba Finch had lost her husband, her children, and all but one grandchild to the virus. Isaiah was West’s age. The two boys played in the place on the living room floor where Jane had died.

  “I’ll mind the children,” Mrs. Finch said without looking at him. Not for the first time, James wondered if she had her own secrets.

  The government was building a wall around part of the city. The better to monitor daily suppressant dosing, the mayor said. The better to ensure that no one went out and brought back the virus. Martial law, the president said. Just until things settled down.

  “I can’t stand to think of them in the foster houses,” James said.

  The government commandeered a gated neighborhood built just as the housing bubble was bursting. Rows of houses no one had ever moved in to. A ghost neighborhood. Each 3,000-square-foot micro-mansion with granite countertops and renewable bamboo floors would be filled with orphans and the children of people who were needed to work rebuilding society.

  “No,” Mrs. Finch said. She kissed Clover’s forehead and the baby arched back, her face red with an impending squeal. “I wouldn’t have that.”

  Two months ago, the world had made sense. Now there weren’t enough people to manage the farms and ranches that fed the country. There were whispers that even if there were, the land wasn’t producing. Those who had survived were prostrate with grief and largely unskilled in the tasks of making a first-world nation run.

  The United States of America was no longer a first-world nation, anyway. The virus had leveled the playing field.

  There was talk about some kind of portal under Lake Tahoe. Submarines and time travel, a science-fiction fantasy reported by breathless radio voices that captured the imagination the way that Seabiscuit and James J. Braddock had during the Great Depression.

  Two months ago, most everyone believed the Bad Times were temporary. Hard, scary, but not lasting. Not forever.

  James didn’t think anyone believed that anymore.

  Chapter 1

  So far as the colleges go, the sideshows are swallowing up the circus.

  —Woodrow Wilson, June 3, 1909, Presidential Address at St. Paul’s School

  Sixteen Years Later

  Walled City of Reno, Nevada

  Clover centered the envelope, which was the first personal mail she had ever received, against the bottom edge of a worn, woven place mat that was centered against the edge of the kitchen table.

  Rectangle on rectangle on rectangle.

  Delivery stamp on the right, the Waverly-Stead Reno Academy’s return address on the left. Her own name and address front and center, written with thick blue ink in a sharply slanted script. Miss Clover Jane Donovan. She liked that. It made her feel important.

  It was a skinny letter, feather light in her hand. Whatever the Reno Academy had to say to her could be said on a single sheet of paper. She was pretty sure whatever it said, what it meant was that she had tested well enough to qualify for higher education. Waverly-Stead, the Company that was the center of every aspect of life in Reno and all of the fifty walled American cities, wanted to train her for some useful profession beyond farming or learning to work a sewing machine in the clothing factory.

  Maybe she’d learn to be a researcher in the massive downtown library that was the center of everything good that happened in her life. She touched the edge of the envelope. It felt substantial. Expensive. Like the shoe box filled with her mother’s old letters, worn smooth and soft with a thousand readings, stashed in the trunk at the foot of her bed.

  Not at all like the flimsy recycled paper West sometimes brought home from the Bazaar. They rationed that paper like it was dipped in gold.

  She liked the way the envelope felt almost like cloth as she ran her finger from the top left corner to the right, again and again.

  She closed her eyes and rocked as her finger rasped against the grain of the paper.

  “Aren’t you going to open that?”

  Clover’s heart lurched once, then settled as she took a breath out of order and it caught in her throat. She ignored the question.

  West tossed his pack to the floor and sat in a chair across from her, already dressed for the day in blue jeans and a light blue shirt that buttoned down the front. The collar of a white T-shirt peeked out at the neck.

  Every other day of the week, he wore brown. For the dirt slingers, he’d said before his first day of work at the cantaloupe farm nearly three years ago.

  She started to rock again, to bring herself back into balance, humming this time.

  “Clover,” West said. And then, when she opened her eyes, “Don’t glare at me.”

  She reached back and yanked her collar inside out, abruptly ending an angry exchange between the back of her neck and a stiff, itchy tag. “I need the scissors.”

  Who came up with the bright idea to put tags in clothing anyway? Sock seams, too. How hard could seamless socks be to make, anyway? She wiggled her toes and rocked a little faster.

  “Scissors,” she said again, holding out her other hand to her brother.

  West pushed his chair back, the metal legs scraping across the tile floor, and across her eardrums, too. She twitched against the sensation and held the tag farther from her skin as West cut it off.

  Something soft and heavy pressed itself against her shins under the table. Clover reached down to pat Mango on his cream-colored head. The bulldog rubbed his broad forehead against her jeans, and then propped his jowly chin on her knee.

  Her rocking slowed and then stopped.

  West reached for the letter. “Do you want me to read it first?”

  Clover put her palm down on it. “Not likely.”

  She lifted the envelope and tapped one end against the table, then tore away the edge and shook the letter out.

  We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted to the Waverly-Stead Reno Academy’s fall term. We have reserved a bed for you in the Girls’ Dormitory. An orientation and registration interview are scheduled for Monday, August third, at eleven in the morning. Please attend.

  The letter was signed Adam Kingston, Head Master.

  Scrawled across the bottom was a handwritten note. Your entrance exam scores were extraordinary, Miss Donovan. I look forward to having such a bright student enrolled in the next semester. Signed with the initials A.K.

  Clover read the letter through twice. It didn’t surprise her. She graduated primary school at the top of her class. Adam Kingston would have been a
n idiot not to accept her.

  It was good to know he wasn’t an idiot.

  “I’m sorry, Clover,” West said.

  “Sorry about what?” She pet Mango’s head. The dog lapped his broad, slobbery tongue over the top of her hand and pressed his weight more firmly against her legs. That was part of his job. The pressure helped her focus.

  West sat in the chair next to hers. “I know how much you wanted this.”

  She handed him the letter. “I got in.”

  “Are you kidding me?” He grabbed the paper and read it. “You even got accepted into the boarding program. Come on, Clover. Smile at least!”

  “I’m happy.” She showed her teeth to prove it.

  Most everyone graduated from primary school and went to work for the government. They worked on the farms, like West, or at the Bazaar handing out rations. They preserved food for the winter, or so it could be sent to the other cities that couldn’t produce enough to feed themselves. Or they worked for the Company doing menial labor like guarding the gate or rocking babies in the Company nurseries.

  Now that the children who’d survived the virus were older, there were far more babies than there used to be.

  The academy was for people whose tests showed an aptitude for research or medicine or leadership. Engineers that worked with water treatment and electricity were academy trained. Travelers—Time Mariners and Messengers—did as well. That was the most coveted, and most elusive, track. Doctors and other scientists were academy trained, too. Even artists came through the academy, although Clover was pretty sure she’d flunked that part of the exams.

  “Do you know how hard it is to get into the academy?”

  “They didn’t take you,” she said. West’s face fell, and Clover wished she could take the words back. Not because they weren’t true, though. “No one is good at everything.”

  “No, they aren’t.” He looked for a minute like he wanted to strangle her, and then like he wanted to hug her. She was happy when he just leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m proud of you.”