Viral Nation (Short Story): Broken Nation (2 page)

“They left us here, didn’t they?” Maggie asks me.

“They didn’t have a choice.” This is true, and I try to convey that to her with my voice. “But they’ll come for us. They will.”

I believe that, too. With everything inside of me, I know that Alex and the others will come back for us.

When I arrived at the camp, I was so caught up in my own troubles. My mother had just died and I’d lost everything familiar to me. I had no one but my great-aunt, who was already in the camp when I got there. They could have sent me to the moon and I would have barely noticed.

It was a few weeks before everything turned to chaos. I’d come back to myself enough to build a few relationships in the camp. I knew Maggie’s older sister, Pamela, who was my age. I was drawn to Alex in the way a drowning person is drawn to a life preserver. The early efforts to keep us in some sort of school environment were never successful. Things fell apart too quickly.

By the time I’d been in the camp three months, there were only a handful of us left. The last guards loaded us in a van, regardless of whether or not we’d caught the Virus, and drove us through the night to the hospital in Reno. There were no doctors left in Las Vegas.

By the time they unloaded me onto a stretcher, I was too sick to be aware of anything that was happening more than a few inches from my own pain-wracked body. The only person who stayed in that very narrow circle was Alex. He didn’t let go of my hand until someone forced him to so that they could take me to surgery. I think he may have been afraid that someone might take me seriously when I begged to die.

He was there, still, when I woke up again. Narcotics widened my range of awareness but also blurred it and made it soft and unreliable. “Are you really here?” I asked him when I could coordinate everything required for speech.

“I’m here. But I have to go.” His words filtered through the pain and the medication that masked most of it, drawing me out of my dreams of the time before and back to the hospital room where he stood in front of the window. “Leanne, if I don’t go with them, I won’t know where they are. We’ll never find them again. Do you understand?”

I tried to nod, and I think I succeeded, because I remember seeing relief wash over his face. “I’m not leaving you,” he said. “Do you hear me? I’ll be back for you.”

• • •

Maggie won’t go back to her own room, and eventually Angelica stops trying to make her. She wheels a second bed next to mine instead.

Angelica finds us a DVD player somewhere and attaches it to our television. We sit together in my bed and watch the movies the hospital kept for sick kids back before. Mostly they’re Disney movies that I’ve seen a thousand times, but there is something comforting about the familiar songs and watching the stories I know by heart flick by with Maggie holding my hand and resting her head on my shoulder.

We have a radio, too. Mostly I leave it off, because I can’t take too much of what it has to say. It’s a delicate balance, keeping my sanity minute by minute, and listening to broadcasts about the migrations, about the consolidation of each state into a single city—thinking about what that means for how few people are left is difficult.

I only hear Denver mentioned once. Someone talks about each state moving its people to higher altitudes, high enough that the fleas that carry the Virus can’t live.
Like Denver
, the woman says,
we should all be a mile high, like Denver.

Not every state has a higher altitude, of course. Those states were hit the worst and are struggling the hardest now. But it doesn’t really matter. The higher altitudes only make people feel better—they aren’t important anymore. The Virus went airborne—that’s why everyone is dead.

Alex wasn’t sick when he left the hospital. Dawn wasn’t sick the last time I can remember seeing her. Neither were Pablo or Nesto or Gloria, or the two guards who left the camp with us. Only Tomas, Maggie, and I had open sores that smelled like rotten meat.

We get the shots every day. They are unpleasant, but I remember being in the van on the long trip from Las Vegas to Reno and I never complain. Neither does Maggie. She has the same memories.

It isn’t until my own sleep is less drug-fueled and more natural that I realize Maggie cries at night. The first time I wake up to find that she’s climbed into my bed and is sobbing silently against my side, I wrap myself around her and wish, with everything inside of me, that we had never met. That her family was still healthy and alive on their side of town, and my mother was still with me in our little house on our side.

“You won’t leave me, will you?” she whispers.

“Never,” I tell her. “Never.” And I mean it.

• • •

We get so much attention from the doctors and nurses. Angelica seems to have been assigned just to us. I’m so used to being sick that I expect an infection or to catch some other catastrophic something. It never happens. Maybe because I’m getting such good care. Maybe because there is no one left to pass their germs to me.

There is also no physical therapy or any talk at all about a prosthetic. I don’t think there is a physical therapist left. That thought is startling, and I don’t ask because I don’t want to know for sure that it’s true.

Eventually Angelica helps me into a wheelchair and Maggie steers me—first up and down the hallways and then outside to the hospital’s courtyard. I like being outside. I like knowing that some things haven’t changed. The trees are starting to leaf. The temperature fluctuates by the minute between summer warm and winter cold. This is late spring in Nevada, although there should be more rain. And snow left on the mountains.

• • •

We’re outside when Alex comes back. He comes around the corner, then stops there frozen because he is as surprised to see us as I am to see him. I take a breath, and it is so deep and so satisfying that I realize I haven’t breathed easy for a very long time.

He’s alive. He didn’t get sick. He has no scars or scabs or bandages. He has all his limbs. Maggie runs at him, full speed, and he catches her when she jumps like a frog into his arms, wrapping herself around him. He holds her close and whispers something I can’t hear, and finally disentangles himself from her.

She comes back to me, towing him by the hand, her face bright with joy. “Alex is here.”

“I know.” As if I could have missed him. He kneels in front of me, and I’m suddenly very conscious of my wheelchair and hit with a deep need to stand up and show him that I’m not as broken as I look.

Only I am, and I can’t, and I hate that my cheeks burn with some mix of shame and embarrassment. I remember an old movie I used to watch with my mom every Christmas, about a woman who is in an accident on her way to meet a man at the top of the Empire State Building, and then can’t make herself tell him that she can’t walk. The memory makes things worse.

Alex brushes a hand across one cheek and then lets it rest on my half thigh, his fingertips barely touching the blanket covering my lap. “It doesn’t hurt as much,” I say. I want to be as strong as I can. I don’t want him to think he has to leave me here again.

“You’re still on antibiotics and pain medication,” he says. It’s not a question, not when we’ve wheeled the pump that delivers my medication out with us. It’s absurd, to be out there with all of this equipment and no supervision at all. A sign of how absurd everything has become.

“You can’t leave me again,” I say. Also not a question.

“I won’t.” He leans forward and kisses my forehead, the way he did before he left me the last time, and stands up.

“Was it hard to get into the city?” I ask. “Our nurse said no one is allowed in or out.”

“Not too hard, but not easy either.”

“What’s Denver like?”

He shakes his head. “We aren’t in Denver.”

He was right then. If he had stayed with me right after my surgery, we wouldn’t have found the others later. Something lets go in my chest, some resentment that I didn’t even know I was holding on to. “Where are you?”

I expect him to say Sacramento or Boise or Salt Lake City. Some city in some state. Instead, he says, “Outside Denver.”

“What do you mean outside Denver?” I look at Maggie, to see how much of this she’s taking in. She’s sitting next to Alex, wedged under his arm, as close as she can get without climbing into his lap. Her eyes are closed. “Are there two cities in Colorado?”

Alex shakes his head. “We’re not in a city.”

“What about the shots? How are they getting you the shots?”

Maggie flinches at the mention of the painful injections, and Alex soothes one hand down her arm. “We don’t take them.”

I’m so shocked by this statement that I don’t know how to respond. When I find my voice again, it’s tinged with anger. “Do you want to get sick? Do you want to lose a leg, too?”

Maggie sits up and looks between me and Alex. I take a breath and try to calm down.

“We aren’t getting sick,” he says. “None of us have been sick. We had the shots here, before we left. I don’t know why, but none of us are sick.”

Something about what he says tickles at the back of my mind, but whatever it is, it doesn’t come to me right away. “What’s the plan?” I ask.

“When you’re healthy enough to leave the hospital, we’ll go to the compound.”

He makes it sound so easy. It’s impossible not to believe him. “Compound? Really?”

He smiles, and that is enough for me for now.

“Where’s Tomas?” he asks. It’s the casualness of his voice, combined with the way that Maggie’s face crumbles as she turns to hide it in his shirt, that almost does me in. I open my mouth but I can’t find any words, so I just shake my head. I see the realization dawn on him, and he takes a breath and nods. “I’m so sorry, Maggie.”

“Are you staying here with us?” she asks.

“No, but I won’t be far.”

“I don’t want you to leave.”

I don’t want him to, either. When he says, “I’ll be back soon. I won’t leave the city without both of you,” I’m afraid that he’s making promises he can’t keep.

We make arrangements to meet at the same time the next day, and Maggie wheels me back toward the hospital doors just as Angelica opens them.

• • •

We see Alex every day. I think Angelica must be relieved that we’re willing to spend so much time outside without the need for her direct attention. She’s looking better, but still rough.

We head out right after the doctor has been by to see us in the late morning and we stay until Angelica comes to bring us in for his afternoon rounds. She brings us lunch, outside, and comes every hour or so to check my vitals. She never mentions Alex. She doesn’t even acknowledge that he’s there, and he doesn’t do anything to force her to.

The doctor looks even more shattered than Angelica. He has bags under his eyes and track marks inside his elbows from the thick suppressant needle that make him look like a junkie. I’m not sure why he’s injecting there and not in his hip, like Angelica does for me and Maggie, until I realize that he must be injecting himself.

It takes a week for what Alex said the first day to come back and start to make sense. Maggie had a particularly hard time with her shot that morning, and she won’t sit down now.

“None of you have ever been sick. That’s what you said, isn’t it?” I ask Alex. “I don’t mean a cold or the flu or anything, I mean—”

“I know what you mean.” Of course he does. Sick has a new meaning now. “No. None of us got sick.”

Angelica calls the medicine a suppressant. I have a foggy memory of her telling me early on that the suppressant doesn’t cure the Virus, it just keeps it tamped down. Like some hibernating monster just waiting to wake up again when the conditions are right.

“Are you okay, Leanne?” Maggie sounds like she’s on the other end of a mile-long tunnel, her voice barely reaching me. “Leanne?”

The only thing I see is Alex’s face, and he’s alarmed. “Are you going to faint? Put your head down.”

He does it for me, pushing on the back of my head until I see the ends of my dark, shoulder-length hair brushing what’s left of my leg. My heart alternates between pounding hard and fast and skipping a few beats. I try to calm down, in case Angelica looks out a window and comes to help me. I breathe. In and out, I say in my head, desperate. In and out. In and out.

“Jesus,” Alex says when I finally sit up again. “Are you okay?”

I shake my head, mostly to try to clear it, but he takes it as a no and puts pressure on my back to get me to bend down again. “No, no. God, let me go!”

“Then what was that?”

My head spins and I feel like I might throw up. I don’t want to give voice to my thought. I don’t want to make it real. But I look at Maggie, and I know I have to. “We can’t live outside a city.”

Alex looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “We have houses. It’s not like we’re living in tents or something. It’s fine, really.”

“You don’t understand.” I wish I didn’t understand either. “We need the suppressant. Angelica said we have to have it every day. For the rest of our lives.”

“The rest of us are fine without it. You will be, too. It’s just another way to keep us in prison. Like the camps!” Alex is up, pacing. I can almost see his brain working through what I’ve said. “Don’t you see that the cities are just like the camps?”

“I’m not blind,” I say. “I see that.”

“Then leave with me. We’ve planted, we even found some chickens and goats. They were looking for a milk cow when I left.”

“It isn’t the food that’s the problem.” Maggie clutches one of my hands and one of his, and my heart is breaking, inch by slow inch. “Me and Maggie are different. We’ve already been sick. If we don’t get the shots, it will come back.”

I see what I’m saying sink into him. His dark eyes search my face and then he looks at the ground between his feet, trying to work out some good argument against what I’ve told him. I’m searching for one myself, and there is nothing.

“So, I’ll stay with you.”

He says it like he means it, and I think he does. We could do this. Stay here. The city is already restructuring. It’s happening here even faster than anywhere else, because the company that makes the suppressant is here. Lake Tahoe with its weird magic is near here. Reno is the new, second capital of the United States.