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

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