Viral Nation (Short Story): Broken Nation Read Free Page A

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.
    “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