Viral Nation (2 page)

Prescription painkillers and a bottle of liquid narcotics for the children. And a box of prefilled syringes.

“For when the pills stop working,” she’d 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 that 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 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 she took 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 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?”

“And then he’ll be better?”

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 on 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, in the case of Jane’s father who had walked away when his daughter was twelve, 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 had been 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, fewer 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. 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 left the state, according to the radio. They went back to where they came from. Mostly, that meant California, since a decade’s worth of floods, courtesy of melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, had sent people streaming east over the mountains to Nevada. 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.

The government commandeered a gated community built just as the housing bubble was bursting. Rows of houses no one had ever moved into. A ghost neighborhood. Each three-thousand-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.