Viral Nation (Short Story): Broken Nation (3 page)

“Don’t they need you?” I ask, forcing myself to be reasonable, to think about the others.

Alex looks at Maggie, who looks absolutely miserable, and then at me. I’m pretty sure I don’t look any better. “I need you,” he says, so quietly that I almost miss it.

I should keep fighting. If our friends are trying to build something outside of an official city, then they need Alex. There aren’t enough of them to lose even one person. But I don’t want to fight. I don’t have any fight left inside me. I can barely bring myself to think about him leaving me again.

When he takes my hand and leans toward me, I turn my face to him and force myself to make one more effort at reason. “This is selfish.”

“They’ll be fine,” he says. “They will. And we’ll figure out a way to get to them. It will just take longer. You can’t travel yet anyway.”

I let myself believe him, because it feels so good. He threads his fingers through my hair at the back of my head and draws my face to his. He kisses me and doesn’t stop until Maggie starts to giggle.

• • •

“So, I got offered a job this morning,” he says a week later.

“What kind of job?” Maggie wants to know. I do, too.

“They need people to help—”

“To help what?” I ask when he doesn’t go on.

He licks his bottom lip and shrugs slightly. “To help sanitize the city.”

Get rid of the bodies. That’s what he means. I cover my mouth and nose with my hand. Thinking about him going into houses and pulling those poor people out, their bodies decomposing and rotten with the Virus, makes my stomach turn over. “Alex.”

“Someone has to do it.”

“Do what?” Maggie asks. “What are you talking about?”

“Someone has to make the city ready for people to live in it.” Alex reaches out and tugs on the end of her ponytail. “They’ll give me a house, so you can come live with me. I told them that I had a little sister.”

“Did you tell them that Leanne was your sister, too?”

He shakes his head and looks at me long enough for me to start to squirm under the scrutiny. “Then what?”

“I told them we were married.”

The air goes out of me in one whoosh of an exhale, and I misfire when I try to draw in another breath. “You did what?”

“What else could I do? They’re putting the kids that don’t have parents in these houses, like foster homes. Would you rather go there?”

Maggie shakes her head, emphatically. “No.”

“No,” I say. No, of course not. “But I’m still in high school. I’m only seventeen. They won’t believe you.”

“There are no more high schools. Do you think they have time or energy to think about how old we are? They need another body to work. They need to do something with the two of you while you’re healing. They believed me.”

I set aside what he’s said for now and focus on something else. “When do you start your job?”

“Tonight. The crews are working round the clock. They’re going to build a wall right around the city. They say it’ll keep the Virus out. It’ll protect us.” His voice drips with sarcasm.

“Are there still sick people?”

He shakes his head and lowers his voice. “There are so few left, period. It’s bad, Leanne.”

“But some people are still sick?”

“I don’t think so.”

The wall isn’t to keep the Virus out, if there aren’t any sick people left. The wall is to keep the people who are left corralled. Like animals. Like the camps. Guilt stabs me, sharp and raw, in my chest. I tighten my hand around Alex’s and make myself say, “You don’t have to stay. You shouldn’t . . . we can . . .”

“I won’t leave you,” he says. “Not ever again.”

Now that I have a place to go, it only takes two more days for my doctor to release me from the hospital. No one questions my sudden change in marital status. And Alex is right, no one seems to care at all about my age.

• • •

Alex is twenty. He was taken from his sophomore year at the University of Nevada to the camp. My mother would have thought he was too old for me. We both seem ridiculously young to me as we drive away from the hospital with Maggie in the backseat. The doctor has given me a list of instructions for caring for my leg, and I have to go back to see him in two days, but I don’t have to be in the hospital anymore. Maggie was well enough to leave weeks ago, but they let her stay with me. There were no rules anymore. The hospital staff was too sick, too tired, too overwhelmed to worry about one little girl who didn’t cause them any problems.

It’s not like they had people lining up for her bed, or insurance companies to worry about.

“It took me forever to get this car,” Alex said. “They’re getting rid of most of them.”

There aren’t many others on the street. “Why would they do that?”

“Conserving resources for the Company and the government.”

There is something in his voice that gives away how sketchy he finds this proposition. “Where did you get this one?”

“I told them the truth. My wife lost her leg to the Virus and I need a car to get her back and forth from the hospital.” He shoots me a look.

“Not the whole truth then.”

“Truth enough.”

“Are you really married?” Maggie asks. The idea makes her happy. She’s talked to me about it, daydreaming about being my flower girl and the dresses we’d wear if Alex and I really did get married. Mine is white and makes me look like a mermaid. Hers is yellow, with ruffles and a big bow in the back. She’s planned it down to the flavor of cake and the song for the first dance.

She knows the answer to her own question, but I answer anyway. “No.”

Alex says “Yes” at the same moment. “They have to believe it or we’ll be separated. It won’t help to have Maggie slip up and say something different. You either.”

I nod once, but I don’t tell Maggie that it’s true. This doesn’t feel like pretend. It feels too real, and the only way I can deal with it is to just let it go for now.

The house they gave Alex for us to live in is small, just two bedrooms and maybe a thousand square feet. It’s old and made of brick, and near the university. Alex says they’re starting up classes there soon and he thinks I can get in. I won’t be able to do much more than sit at a desk, not until I have a prosthetic and know how to use it anyway.

He opens the car door and I wrap my arms around his neck so he can lift me into the wheelchair he’s already set up near Maggie. He carries me past her though and up to the house.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I turn back to see Maggie bouncing on her toes in excitement. “Put me down.”

“You gonna hop in on one leg?”

I whip my head back around to look up at him and he bends at the same time to kiss me as he carries me into the house. He walks up a ramp to do it, and I realize that his lie got us a house already set up for my chair. This feels unreal, but not unpleasant. Like playing house.

“You’re crazy,” I say after he sits me down on the sofa, but there are tiny bits of happiness bubbling around inside me, and I want to hold on to them, so I change the subject. “Where did you get this furniture?”

Alex runs a hand over the back of his neck, then goes back to the door to take my wheelchair from Maggie. “It was here already.”

This house belonged to people who died. Maybe someone died right on the sofa I’m sitting on. I look around, and those bubbles of happiness burst and make me sick.

• • •

For a while, everything is okay. Maggie and I share the double bed in one room and Alex sleeps alone in the other one. I know he’d rather have me with him, but he doesn’t push. He doesn’t even bring it up.

No matter if what is left of the whole world thinks I’m married, this is all too weird for me. I’m holding on tight to whatever remains of the old me, and I’m afraid that getting into bed with Alex will steal the last of it.

Weird or not, we settle into a family routine. During the day at least. They already have school going for the younger kids and Maggie is so desperate for normal, she slides right in like she’s been there her whole life.

Alex was right about the university. He drives me there to take some tests, and I score well enough to be admitted to the first class when it starts in the fall. There are dorms, for students who don’t have parents and might otherwise be living in the foster home. The relief that I don’t have to live in them is strong enough to expose the lies I tell myself about not wanting to be married to Alex.

So we do the things that have to be done. Alex picks up our rations at one of the casinos every week. He works and I heal. We cook together and eat together and tell stories to Maggie at night. In the morning, Alex heads out to sanitize the city. For a while, it feels like we’re going to be all right.

And then a letter comes. Somehow Pablo got a truck driver named Frank, who delivers food between Sacramento and Denver, through Reno and Salt Lake City, to bring it to Alex.

“Oh, God,” Alex says several times as he reads it. He goes pale under the deep color he’s picked up working in the sun all summer. “Oh, my God.”

“What is it?” I ask. Maggie had been on her way to our room and she stops halfway, looking from one of us to the other.

“They found the compound.”

“What happened? Is everyone okay?” I feel like I’m coming out of my skin. Like if he doesn’t say something that means something, I’m going to scream. “Who found it?”

“The Company.”

“What company?” Maggie asks.

“
The
Company,” Alex says. “The Waverly-Stead Company. That’s the only one there is now.”

Waverly-Stead. The company that makes the suppressant we stand in line for every day.

“So they found the compound,” I say, feeling myself already trying to minimize. To make it okay, even though I still don’t know what happened. “Is that so bad?”

“They tried to take everyone to Denver. When they wouldn’t go, they were arrested.”

“Why wasn’t Pablo with them?”

“He says he was out looking for supplies.”

“Then how does he know they were arrested?”

Alex holds up the letter. “I don’t know, Leanne. He just does.”

“The Waverly-Stead Company can’t really arrest people, can they?”

Alex shoves the letter into my hand. “I guess they can.”

Maggie slips to the floor, sitting crisscross-applesauce all at once like the strength has just run out of her. Maybe, once upon a time, she was the kind of kid who asked a thousand questions, but now she is so quiet that it worries me.

“There’s more,” Alex says.

He waits for me to open the letter and read the more. I can’t do it, and after a minute he takes it back. I have a strong urge to put my fingers in my ears, and as I sit as silent as Maggie, I realize that I’ve changed, too. I’ve gotten used to bad things happening, compliant enough to just sit and wait for them. That idea upsets me enough that I force myself to ask, “What is it?”

“The truck driver, Frank.”

“What about him?”

“He said that when he comes back through, on his way east again, he’ll bring a letter back to Pablo if we want him to.”

“Just a letter?”

Alex seems to wrestle with himself for a moment, but then finally must decide on honesty, because he says, “He said he could bring us out of the city. If that’s what we want.”

“We’ve already talked about this.” My voice sounds old to my own ears. Like a mother lecturing her son. Or a wife frustrated with her husband.

“Frank’s son doesn’t get the shots. He had one, in the beginning, and had an allergic reaction to it.”

“Was his son sick?” I ask. That’s the most important question. “Where is he now?”

“His son wasn’t, but the woman who took him in was. She doesn’t get the suppressant, either. They’re outside Denver.”

Maggie makes a small noise now, and stands up to walk across the room and stand next to my wheelchair. “She didn’t get sick again without the shots?”

Alex shakes his head. “Frank said not.”

“Maybe just not yet,” I say. “Can I read the letter?”

He hands it back to me, but hesitates a little too long. It only takes reading a few lines to figure out why. As I read, I become more and more acutely aware that I’m sitting in a wheelchair. That, while there are times when my leg that isn’t even there hurts enough to make me cry, it is still missing.

I need you here.
Pablo is alone, outside a city. The work they’ve done, planting and preparing this compound, is already lost. His chances of getting the others back out of Denver alone are slim.

“He doesn’t know who else is alive,” I say, mostly to myself. Maggie slips her hand into mine.

“We have to go, don’t we?” she asks, then quieter, like she’s afraid to admit it, “I miss them.”

“I do, too.”

I finally make eye contact with Alex. We both know that I can’t leave Reno.

• • •

We eat dinner and help Maggie with her homework and play Yahtzee and we don’t talk about the letter again. Maggie asks a few questions, but stops when she only gets one- or two-word answers. She asks if she can go to bed an hour early, which is a sure sign that the routine-as-always that we’re aiming for has fallen way short.

I sit in a corner of the sofa, my good leg stretched along the seam where the back meets the seat, and my half leg propped on a pillow. My fingers tap around the edges of the scar line; the light pressure eases the achy pain and somehow convinces my mind for a while that a leg that’s rotting in a landfill can’t hurt. Alex comes to sit by me. I slide away from the sofa arm so that he can sit there and I can lean back against him.

My head rests perfectly against his shoulder and he kisses my temple. I tip my face up, and he kisses my mouth hard, with a desperation that I don’t like. He kisses me like he’s never going to see me again, and I pull away. “Don’t do that.”

“Don’t kiss you?” He’s hurt. I can see it in his eyes.

“Not like that. Not like you’re saying good-bye already.”

“I have to go.” His voice is so soft, I barely hear him.

I want to remind him that he promised not to leave me again. I want to point out that, as far as anyone else in Reno is concerned, we’re married. Even if I am still sleeping in Maggie’s room. I want to do something to transfer to him some of the pain that is slowly engulfing me, but I can feel the tension in his body, and I know he’s already hurting at least as much as I am. “I know.”