Viral Nation (31 page)

Phire sat on the floor with Emmy softly crying in his lap when the dosing was done. “Why would the old guy give us houses? How do we know he won’t just let us catch the virus and die now that we’re out of doses?”

“Not everyone is out to get you,” West said. Clover thought the real question was how they were going to get back to their lives, now that they’d all officially missed a dose.

Phire let Emmy go when she wanted to sit up. “Maybe that’s how
your
life has gone. Not mine. Not any of ours, except maybe yours and your sister’s, and the rich—”

“No, West’s right,” Jude said. “We need to stay calm. We weren’t dragged here; we agreed to come. Waverly is a weird dude, but he hasn’t done anything to make anyone uncomfortable, has he?”

Clover looked around the room, and one by one everyone shook their head, even Emmy.

“There’s only one of him and nine of us,” West said.

Geena looked around the room. “The Freaks.”

Marta pointed at Bridget. “Except her. She ain’t a freak.”

Clover expected West to defend Bridget and was surprised when the girl sat up straighter and said, “Like hell I’m not. If you don’t think being the headmaster’s daughter makes me a freak, you’re crazy.”

“Freaks,” West said. “All of us. Until we know more about Waverly and what’s going on here, we stay in pairs at least. Agreed? No one is alone, ever.”

Everyone nodded again.

There was a knock on the front door. Mango sat up at the sound and Clover scratched his ears as West went to let in Waverly, who carried a large silver tray in both hands. Nine syringes were lined up in a neat row on it. They were fitted with an attachment that would allow the suppressant to go into their ports.

“I’ve brought your suppressant,” he said.

“I can’t have mine until tonight,” Clover said. She lifted her chin toward the pile of empty syringes sitting on the table. “Everyone else is okay for today.”

Waverly froze for a second, like a deer caught in the headlights, staring at the syringes on his tray. Then he shook himself and made a loud honking noise that made Emmy giggle. “Wrong. The time
restraint was designed to make it easier for people to remember to be dosed, and to keep order and control at the bars.”

“She’ll be overdosed if you give it to her now,” West said.

That honk again, and this time the twins laughed out loud. “Wrong again. Any of you could have a dose every twelve hours without being overdosed.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You have to miss three doses before the withdrawal kicks in. I would be willing to place even odds that our own Miss Kingston here didn’t get sick until thirty-six hours after she missed her dosing time. I’m right, aren’t I?”

Bridget said, “Just about.”

“Aha! See? You missed three doses, not just one. One twelve hours after your last shot, one at the next regular dosing time, and one twelve hours later. Thirty-six hours is when your body starts craving it.” Waverly placed the tray on the table.

Clover stood up from where she sat on the arm of the couch. “You’re saying the suppressant is addictive?”

“West and Bridget really just had the shakes?” Christopher said. “Like my dad did, from booze. He got sick, had to start drinking again. Killed himself with the stuff he made.”

“Withdrawal. We’ll talk all about that, soon.” Waverly brought a chair around in front of him and bent over to pat the seat. “Let’s get you all on the same schedule, shall we?”

Clover and West looked at each other, and then Clover sat in the chair.

“Wait a minute,” Bridget said before Waverly could dose Clover. “It doesn’t look the same.”

“It’s not. But it’ll work, trust me.”

Clover leaned away from Waverly. “Why isn’t it the same?”

“Look, it doesn’t matter to me if you take the dose. You won’t
die if you’re never dosed again, although I’d be willing to bet you’ll wish you would.”

At some point they were going to have to trust someone, and they’d already decided to trust Waverly. She settled back in her seat again.

“What do you think?” he asked Clover.

“Everyone is going to have to take it eventually.”

“Very good.” He moved Clover’s hair away from her port. “These are a real travesty, you know. A real travesty.”

“The needle is too big to inject into our skin every day,” West said as Waverly pushed the syringe into Clover’s port.

“The drug wasn’t intended to be used this way, you know. It just wasn’t.”

“What are you talking about?” Phire asked. “The suppressant was a miracle. You’re the one who gave it to us.”

Waverly crossed his legs and his arms, the spent syringe dangling from his long fingers. He looked more somber than West had seen him so far. “Xanverimax was a miracle. A cure and an inoculation all in one.”

“Xanverimax.” West let the odd word roll around his mouth.

“That’s right. You probably received it as a baby. I can see that it saved you.”

West ran a hand over his scarred cheeks. “What are you saying, Dr. Waverly?”

“I’m saying that Xanverimax only needs one dosing. Once is enough for anyone. Forever.”

“I don’t understand,” Jude said.

“It started honestly enough. We weren’t sure how it worked. There was no time for the kind of testing drugs used to be subjected to before we started administering Xanverimax, which, by the way, is the biggest time loop of them all. We really did suspect it was a suppressant at first.”

“I told you he was cracked,” Geena whispered.

“My wife was dead, and my work became an obsession. I’m an anthropologist, you know. Not a virologist or chemist or even a medical doctor. I studied prehistoric things, like Lake Tahoe.”

They listened as he told them about going through the portal, finding it after fifteen years of looking. He nearly drowned, because his scuba gear stopped working. “I thought my car was stolen, when it wasn’t where I parked it. I had to walk ten miles toward Carson City before someone stopped to pick me up. It didn’t take long to realize that I wasn’t in my own time. The place was ravaged, but the people weren’t ill.”

“What did you do?” Bridget asked.

“I met a woman who told me about the suppressant. She must have thought I was out of my mind, not already knowing about it. She took me to a clinic. They were still injecting it the old-fashioned way, of course. I stole a syringe and brought a sample of Xanverimax back with me, contacted a chemist named Jon Stead, and the rest, as they say, is history. I spent years trying to figure out how to manipulate the portal, so that I could go back to my Veronica. It was no use. The portal is like a doorway. On one side is today and on the other is exactly two years from today.”

“But Jon Stead was the one who discovered the suppressant in the future,” Clover said. “That’s what I was taught in primary school. Jon Stead was already working on the suppressant when you brought him the sample of his own work.”

“I had to find someone who knew what to do with what I’d brought back with me. And fast. People were dying all around me. You have to understand.” Waverly’s voice took on a defensive tone. “We expected someone to come forward and say that they’d been working on the same formula, but they never did.”

“You stole the suppressant?” Clover looked a little off-balance to West. Like she couldn’t find her place. She kept shifting her position.

“Oh that, sweet girl, that was all ours, I’m sorry to say.”

“You aren’t making any sense,” Clover said.

“The world was in chaos. None of you are old enough to really remember. Most of you weren’t even born yet. There were so many dead. Almost everyone, just gone. So many that the continuation of the species was called into question. Can you imagine that?” Waverly shook his head and looked as off balance as Clover did. “Did you know that there were only two hundred people left in Kansas, and two-thirds of them were younger than twelve. We had to bring people in, just to fill Wichita enough to keep it viable.”

“We know the world was busted,” Christopher said. “It still ain’t so great for some of us.”

Waverly started nodding and then didn’t stop for a good minute. Like he was stuck. Long enough for Emmy to start fidgeting and Marta and Geena to make some noise about how they knew he was crazy, and now look at him. West leaned forward on the couch and watched him a little more closely.

“At first we really did think Xanverimax was a suppressant that had to be given daily. And as soon as we had the dosing organized, everything slid into place so quickly. It was like the country was starved for some way out of the chaos and dove at it when it showed itself. After we knew better, we thought—Jon convinced me—that we could help by giving people something to hold on to. That was the suppressant. Only we needed something to make the dosing itself less distressing, so we developed the port.”

“The shots really aren’t necessary?” West asked.

“Don’t you see? It worked so well. The suppressant kept people from turning into animals in the aftermath. It happens like that. Tragedy brings out the worst in people. And we managed to help keep order. Peace. They gave us the Nobel Prize, you know. The last one. I’m still not sure how that happened, because the system
for honors like that had disintegrated. No nominees or votes or anything. No reward, either. We got called to the White House, and after traveling for four days by train, the president gave it to us. He was the thirteenth in line for the office, you know. The secretary of housing and urban development. There were some who thought maybe that was a blessing in disguise.”

Jude rubbed at the back of his neck, just under his port. “So, what is the suppressant, then?”

“It’s a clone designed to look like and feel like Xanverimax. Only newborn babies get the real stuff, at birth, to protect against a new outbreak.”

“Why did Bridget and I get sick, then?” West asked.

“I’ve already told you. You’re addicted to the clone. All of you are. Everyone in the country is. Your body needs the clone and rebels after thirty-six hours without it.”

“The shakes,” Christopher said.

“That’s right.”

“You addicted the whole country?” Clover asked. “Why would you do that?”

“Why do you think?” Marta ran her palm over the stubble on top of her head. “He’s got this big old place and you can take it to the bank he ain’t living on rations.”

“No, it wasn’t that,” West said. “Was it, Dr. Waverly? It was power. The Company runs everything. Not just here, either. Everything, everywhere. Even in the places that pretend to be independent, because the Company supplies the suppressant. Waverly-Stead has more power than the government. More than any government has ever had. More than all of them combined now.”

Waverly looked at the ground while West spoke, his shoulders sagging. “In my defense, in our defense, ending the virus was its own reward at first. We started out on the right path.”

“We don’t need the shots?” Emmy asked. “I don’t like them.”

“You won’t like being sick, either,” Phire told her.

“I have enough of the clone here to keep you all dosed up for a while. A good long while. No one needs to go cold turkey. We ease you off the stuff. It’ll take a while, but you won’t get sick the way West and Bridget did.”

Geena stood up and looked around. “You’re all sitting at this guy’s feet taking every word he says like he can’t be lying.”

“Why would I lie to you, Geena?”

“Because you want to get a bunch of kids up here to keep you company? You like kids, don’t you, Waverly?”

“I love children. Veronica died before—”

“Oh, he
loves
children.”

“Geena,” Jude said. “Sit down.”

“This is Foster City all over again.”

“Foster City was necessary,” Waverly said. “There were too many orphans. So many. You can’t imagine. People managed to keep their children from being infected long enough for Xanverimax to save them, but the parents died. The crews found houses with starved children crying over their rotting parents. What else could we do?”

Geena’s hands fisted at her sides. “What else could you do? Do you
know
what happens in Foster City?”

Waverly looked around the room, and when no one else spoke, he said, “The intentions were good.”

“Your good intentions don’t mean shit,” Marta said. “The guard swoops up anyone who even thinks about murdering or raping a hoodie before the bastard even knows he was going to do anything wrong. But our house mother can kill our little sister and just bury her in the backyard? Where were the squads then? Screw your good intentions.”

That was the most West had ever heard Marta say at once.

Waverly stood and took a hard breath. “All I can do now is try to make it up to you. Lunch will be ready in the restaurant in an hour.”

He left the house, taking the suppressant with him. For a long time, the Freaks sat silently, trying to understand what Waverly had told them.

Clover sat with Jude in his house, which was very
much like the little house Waverly had given her and West. They sat on the couch in the main room downstairs. Waverly fed them a sort of vegetable pizza on a crust he made out of ground corn and pine nuts topped with cheese made from the milk of goats he kept on the ranch.

“I like it here,” Clover said. “Maybe I shouldn’t so soon. But I do.”

“Some of the others are having a hard time trusting Waverly. I had to convince Geena and Marta to eat this morning. They’re worried he’s going to poison us.”

“What do you think?”

Jude stretched his legs out, propping them on the table in front of the sofa. “I don’t know what to think. Geena’s article was right. The suppressant is a goddamned fraud. That’s like finding out the earth really is flat.”

“You think he’s lying?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know
how
to know.”