Viral Nation (3 page)

“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.

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 placemat 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 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 fingerprint rasped against the grain of the paper.

“Aren’t you going to open that?”

Clover’s heart lurched once, then settled as she took a breath out of order and it caught in her throat. She ignored the question.

West tossed his pack to the floor and sat in a chair across from her, already dressed for the day in blue jeans and a light blue shirt that buttoned down the front, the collar of a white T-shirt peeking out at the neck.

Every other day of the week, he wore brown. For the dirt slingers, he’d said before his first day of work at the cantaloupe farm nearly three years ago.

She started to rock again, to bring herself back into balance, humming this time.

“Clover,” West said. And then, when she opened her eyes, “Don’t glare at me.”

She reached back and yanked her collar inside out, abruptly ending an angry exchange between the back of her neck and a stiff, itchy tag. “I need the scissors.”

Who came up with the bright idea to put tags in clothing anyway?
Sock seams, too. How hard could seamless socks be to make? She wiggled her toes and rocked a little faster.

“Scissors,” she said again, holding out her other hand to her brother.

West pushed his chair back, the metal legs scraping across the tile floor, and across her eardrums, too. She twitched against the sensation and held the tag farther from her skin as West cut it off.

Something soft and heavy pressed itself against her shins under the table. Clover reached down to pat Mango on his cream-colored head. The bulldog rubbed his broad forehead against her jeans, then propped his jowly chin on her knee.

Her rocking slowed and then stopped.

West reached for the letter. “Do you want me to read it first?”

Clover put her palm down on it. “Not likely.”

She lifted the envelope and tapped one end against the table, then tore away the edge and shook the letter out.

The letter was signed
Adam Kingston, Headmaster
.

Scrawled across the bottom was a handwritten note.
Your entrance exam scores were extraordinary, Miss Donovan. I look forward to having such a bright student enrolled in the upcoming semester.
Signed with the initials
A.K.

Clover read the letter through twice. It didn’t surprise her. She graduated primary school at the top of her class. Adam Kingston would have been an idiot not to accept her.

It was good to know he wasn’t an idiot.

“I’m sorry, Clover,” West said.

“Sorry about what?” She petted Mango’s head. The dog lapped his broad, slobbery tongue over the top of her hand and pressed his weight more firmly against her legs. That was part of his job. The pressure helped her focus.

West sat in the chair next to hers. “I know how much you wanted this.”

She handed him the letter. “I got in.”

“Are you kidding me?” He grabbed the paper and read it. “You even got accepted into the boarding program. Come on, Clover. Smile at least!”

“I’m happy.” She showed her teeth to prove it.

Most everyone graduated from primary school and went to work for the government. They worked on the farms, like West, or at the Bazaar handing out rations. They preserved food for the winter, or so it could be sent to the other cities that couldn’t produce enough to feed themselves. Or they worked for the Company doing menial labor like guarding the gate or rocking babies in the Company nurseries.

Now that the children who’d survived the virus were older, there were far more babies than there used to be.

The Academy was for people whose tests showed an aptitude for research or medicine or leadership. Engineers who worked with water treatment and electricity were Academy trained. Travelers—Time Mariners and Messengers—were as well. That was the most coveted, and most elusive, track. Doctors and other scientists were Academy trained, too. Even artists came through the Academy, although Clover was pretty sure she’d flunked that part of the exams.

“Do you know how hard it is to get into the Academy?”

“They didn’t take you,” she said. West’s face fell, and Clover wished she could take the words back. Not because they weren’t true, though. “No one is good at everything.”

“No, they aren’t.” He looked for a minute like he wanted to strangle her, and then like he wanted to hug her. She was happy when he just leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m proud of you.”

“I know.” She pushed her chair back. “I need to go to the library today.”

Maybe she really would be a librarian when she left the Academy. She loved the library more than any other place in the city.

West studied her for another long moment. “Come on, then.”

When Clover stood next to West, she came up to his shoulder, same as she did their father. West had the same habit James Donovan did of yanking his hand through his dark brown hair until it stood up like a porcupine asleep on his head.

Would their father ever find out she’d been accepted into the Academy?

Clover grabbed her pack, already full of books, and followed West to the back door.

“You need to comb your hair.”

West shot her a quick salute and opened the door for her.

She clipped Mango’s lead to his harness with her free hand and went out into the heat.

“There you are!”

West stopped and made a low clucking noise with his teeth and tongue so that Mango would notice and stop Clover, too. She’d say she could go alone to the library, but West needed to see her turn down the road toward the big building on Center Street.

In a month his little sister would be in boarding school, and he wasn’t sure what he’d do with all that freedom. Swim in it, maybe.

Their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Finch, was in her seventies. She had looked after West and Clover since their father was recruited
to the crews, soon after the virus took their mother. Her grandson was West’s best friend. Isaiah was denied entrance to the Academy and joined Waverly-Stead’s guard training program at sixteen. His grandmother had a stroke a week after he moved into the training barracks. Now West looked after Mrs. Finch.

She reached a palsied, soil-covered hand into the pocket of the kind of front-snapped cotton dress that old women had worn forever. Her small stack of ration coupons were bent and tattered paper rectangles the city used and reused until their print was worn completely off. Each was worth a pound of produce or meat or grain. She also had one for the tiny bit of oil, sugar, and salt she’d be allotted for the week.

“I was beginning to think you weren’t coming this morning, West.” Her face screwed up to the right when she spoke. At least she could speak now. And the nearly constant drooling from the first year had passed. West was relieved when she started to look like their Mrs. Finch again. He knew Clover was, too. Mrs. Finch was the only mother his sister had ever known.

Every Wednesday since he turned eighteen and was old enough to get into the Bazaar, West picked up Mrs. Finch’s rations with his own. He wasn’t late this morning. He’d never been late, but Mrs. Finch still acted like he was going to let her starve every week.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Finch,” he said as he took her coupons and slipped them into his own pocket. “I’ll be around with your rations this afternoon.”

She knelt back on a small cushion, lurching to the right and then finding her balance, in front of a bed of lettuce. “I’ll have some cabbage soup for you and Clover. Maybe some bread, too, if I get myself inside to get it rising.”

Even though she’d had a stroke, Mrs. Finch’s front yard was a jungle of produce. Pumpkin vines twined around stalks of corn and beanpoles; sunflowers lined one side of her house. She fed the
seed-filled heads to the chickens that pecked in a fenced area under an apple tree. It was too early for ripe apples, but West and Clover would eat themselves sick on them in the fall.

Her garden made the neglected patch in West and Clover’s backyard look pathetic. Her contributions to their food stocks kept them from being more than skin and bones.

“Let’s go,” Clover said from beside him.

“Good morning, Miss Clover,” Mrs. Finch said to her. Loud and slow. “And how are we today?”

Clover was easily three times as smart and ten times as well read as anyone West knew. Mrs. Finch included. Maybe Mrs. Finch especially, since she still greeted Clover the same way, every time she saw her.

Clover said, just as loud and slow, “We’re fine.”

Mrs. Finch blinked at her, then looked at West, who shrugged one shoulder. The old woman had practically raised Clover. If she didn’t know the girl by now, she never would.

“I was just telling West I’ll have cabbage soup for the two of you this afternoon.”

“My brother doesn’t like cabbage soup.” Clover shifted her weight from one foot to the other and flapped her free hand two or three times. “I’m late for the library.”

“Clover.” West looked at Mrs. Finch, whose nearly black eyes bulged out of her coffee-colored face enough to look painful. “Thank you, Mrs. Finch.”

He took Mango by the collar and walked away, knowing Clover would follow. Hopefully before she made some comment about how Mrs. Finch’s eyeballs looked like boiled eggs.

“Slow down,” Clover called, practically running to keep up. “Let go of my dog!”

West let Mango go and shortened his steps. They walked together for a while in silence.

Their street was lined with brick houses, each sitting on about an acre of land. This neighborhood had once been more densely populated. The crews, in the old days, tore down houses to give more land to those that remained. Before the reconstruction there were two neighbors between them and the Finches. With something like fifteen thousand people living in a city built for ten or twelve times as many, there was room to spread out.