Viral Nation (Short Story): Broken Nation by Shaunta Grimes Page A
Authors: Shaunta Grimes
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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.
The government commandeered a gated neighborhood built just as the housing bubble was bursting. Rows of houses no one had ever moved in to. A ghost neighborhood. Each 3,000-square-foot micro-mansion with granite countertops and renewable bamboo floors would be filled with orphans and the children of people who were needed to work rebuilding society.
“No,” Mrs. Finch said. She kissed Clover’s forehead and the baby arched back, her face red with an impending squeal. “I wouldn’t have that.”
Two months ago, the world had made sense. Now there weren’t enough people to manage the farms and ranches that fed the country. There were whispers that even if there were, the land wasn’t producing. Those who had survived were prostrate with grief and largely unskilled in the tasks of making a first-world nation run.
The United States of America was no longer a first-world nation, anyway. The virus had leveled the playing field.
There was talk about some kind of portal under Lake Tahoe. Submarines and time travel, a science-fiction fantasy reported by breathless radio voices that captured the imagination the way that Seabiscuit and James J. Braddock had during the Great Depression.
Two months ago, most everyone believed the Bad Times were temporary. Hard, scary, but not lasting. Not forever.
James didn’t think anyone believed that anymore.
Chapter 1
So far as the colleges go, the sideshows are swallowing up the circus.
—Woodrow Wilson, June 3, 1909, Presidential Address at St. Paul’s School
Sixteen Years Later
Walled City of Reno, Nevada
Clover centered the envelope, which was the first personal mail she had ever received, against the bottom edge of a worn, woven place mat that was centered against the edge of the kitchen table.
Rectangle on rectangle on rectangle.
Delivery stamp on the right, the Waverly-Stead Reno Academy’s return address on the left. Her own name and address front and center, written with thick blue ink in a sharply slanted script. Miss Clover Jane Donovan . She liked that. It made her feel important.
It was a skinny letter, feather light in her hand. Whatever the Reno Academy had to say to her could be said on a single sheet of paper. She was pretty sure whatever it said, what it meant was that she had tested well enough to qualify for higher education. Waverly-Stead, the Company that was the center of every aspect of life in Reno and all of the fifty walled American cities, wanted to train her for some useful profession beyond farming or learning to work a sewing machine in the clothing factory.
Maybe she’d learn to be a researcher in the massive downtown library that was the center of everything good that happened in her life. She touched the edge of the envelope. It felt substantial. Expensive. Like the shoe box filled with her mother’s old letters, worn smooth and soft with a thousand readings, stashed in the trunk at the foot of her bed.
Not at all like the flimsy recycled paper West sometimes brought home from the Bazaar. They rationed that paper like it was dipped in gold.
She liked the way the envelope felt almost like cloth as she ran her finger from the top left corner to the right, again and again.
She closed her eyes and rocked as her finger rasped against the grain
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.
The government commandeered a gated neighborhood built just as the housing bubble was bursting. Rows of houses no one had ever moved in to. A ghost neighborhood. Each 3,000-square-foot micro-mansion with granite countertops and renewable bamboo floors would be filled with orphans and the children of people who were needed to work rebuilding society.
“No,” Mrs. Finch said. She kissed Clover’s forehead and the baby arched back, her face red with an impending squeal. “I wouldn’t have that.”
Two months ago, the world had made sense. Now there weren’t enough people to manage the farms and ranches that fed the country. There were whispers that even if there were, the land wasn’t producing. Those who had survived were prostrate with grief and largely unskilled in the tasks of making a first-world nation run.
The United States of America was no longer a first-world nation, anyway. The virus had leveled the playing field.
There was talk about some kind of portal under Lake Tahoe. Submarines and time travel, a science-fiction fantasy reported by breathless radio voices that captured the imagination the way that Seabiscuit and James J. Braddock had during the Great Depression.
Two months ago, most everyone believed the Bad Times were temporary. Hard, scary, but not lasting. Not forever.
James didn’t think anyone believed that anymore.
Chapter 1
So far as the colleges go, the sideshows are swallowing up the circus.
—Woodrow Wilson, June 3, 1909, Presidential Address at St. Paul’s School
Sixteen Years Later
Walled City of Reno, Nevada
Clover centered the envelope, which was the first personal mail she had ever received, against the bottom edge of a worn, woven place mat that was centered against the edge of the kitchen table.
Rectangle on rectangle on rectangle.
Delivery stamp on the right, the Waverly-Stead Reno Academy’s return address on the left. Her own name and address front and center, written with thick blue ink in a sharply slanted script. Miss Clover Jane Donovan . She liked that. It made her feel important.
It was a skinny letter, feather light in her hand. Whatever the Reno Academy had to say to her could be said on a single sheet of paper. She was pretty sure whatever it said, what it meant was that she had tested well enough to qualify for higher education. Waverly-Stead, the Company that was the center of every aspect of life in Reno and all of the fifty walled American cities, wanted to train her for some useful profession beyond farming or learning to work a sewing machine in the clothing factory.
Maybe she’d learn to be a researcher in the massive downtown library that was the center of everything good that happened in her life. She touched the edge of the envelope. It felt substantial. Expensive. Like the shoe box filled with her mother’s old letters, worn smooth and soft with a thousand readings, stashed in the trunk at the foot of her bed.
Not at all like the flimsy recycled paper West sometimes brought home from the Bazaar. They rationed that paper like it was dipped in gold.
She liked the way the envelope felt almost like cloth as she ran her finger from the top left corner to the right, again and again.
She closed her eyes and rocked as her finger rasped against the grain
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