Viral Nation (Short Story): Broken Nation (6 page)

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.

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 uprooted 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.