Viral Nation

by Grimes, Shaunta

  writing on the wall

  She knew what she was looking at as soon as she saw it. She closed her eyes and wished it away, but when she opened them again, she still held a dispatch flyer with West’s face on it.

  Was it a joke? Some kind of elaborate, awful prank? The picture of West was current; it looked like it had been taken from above as he was leaving the Bazaar.

  West James Donovan, age 19

  Height: 6 feet

  Weight: 165 pounds

  Dark brown hair, green eyes. Virus scars on the face and thighs.

  Subject is wanted for the murder of Bridget Hannah Kingston.

  Murder? The absurdity of it made her wonder again if this was some kind of prank. The idea that West would kill the headmaster’s daughter was so impossible, she couldn’t imagine it.

  Until it struck her that of course he wouldn’t kill her or anyone else. The report of Bridget’s death would show up in the databases before it happened. A dispatch flyer would be distributed—this dispatch flyer—and stop the crime before it was committed.

  They’d stop it by putting her brother in front of a firing squad. Not their father’s squad, of course; that would be too cruel. But West would be executed.

  viral nation

  shaunta grimes

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  Copyright © 2013 by Shaunta Grimes.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or

  electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted

  materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-101-60995-8

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Grimes, Shaunta.

  Viral nation / Shaunta Grimes.—Berkley trade paperback edition

  pages cm.

  ISBN 978-0-425-26513-0 (pbk.)

  1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Corporate power—United States—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3607.R55685V57 2013

  813.6—dc23 2013007612

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / July 2013

  Cover art by Blake Morrow.

  Cover design by Diana Kolsky.

  Interior text design by Kristin del Rosario.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for

  author or third-party websites or their content.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  prologue

  I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making.

  —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, RADIO ADDRESS ON BROTHERHOOD DAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1936

  “Keep her away from me.”

  James walked toward his wife with their newborn daughter sleeping against his chest, her body a warm spot through a shirt he hadn’t changed in three days. “You don’t mean that, Janie.”

  “I don’t want her near me.” Jane’s features were swollen almost beyond recognition. Sores, seeping and open, covered skin that had been a source of vanity—more his than hers—only a week ago. Talking caused the corners of her mouth to crack.

  His own skin ached to the muscle in sympathy with hers. Like they shared the same body. And he was so angry. So goddamned bent.

  They were supposed to be safe here, in the mountains where the fleas that carried the virus couldn’t live. The president had told them so.

  Told the whole country, so that desperate and already sick people stampeded to higher elevations. Nothing could hold them back. They came like a revival of the Gold Rush, blinded by the need to move westward and upward into the Sierras.

  “Hold her, Jane. It’s too…” Late anyway. He couldn’t bring himself to say it. He wished to God it weren’t true.

  His wife had brought the virus home from the hospital along with their new baby. Clover, they’d named her. Jane said it was a good name for a baby born in spring.

  It was nothing more than bad luck that the virus came to the hospital at the same time their Clover did, but Jane blamed herself all the same.

  She’d rear-ended a pickup truck on the way to the supermarket. Her water broke and Clover was born two weeks early. If the baby had come on time, in the first part of May instead of middle April, they would have known better than to go to the hospital.

  Ten days ago the virus was something that happened somewhere else. Obscene but distant, like reading in the Reno Gazette-Journal about a hurricane in Florida or a tornado in Kansas. Closer than an earthquake in Haiti, but still not their worry.

  Not something that could touch them beyond a general grief for the suffering of fellow human beings and an uptick in gasoline or food costs.

  Now it was everywhere. It was in their living room, on the narrow bed he’d moved down from their son’s room for Jane when she couldn’t climb the stairs anymore.

  Their son West, only three years old, was already feverish, his lymph nodes swollen and hot. It would come for Clover next. And James, too. Maybe even tonight.

  Except Jane’s body had filled Clover’s with immunities that could keep her healthy longer than him.

  The thought that he might die before Clover did made it difficult for James to breathe. It made him want to do something reckless and unthinkable. He had to be healthy enough to care for his baby or she’d be left to die alone.

  He wouldn’t let that happen.

  Jane moaned, low in her throat. Her skin decomposed, even as he watched.

  His wife didn’t deserve this shredding of her body while her mind refused to blunt. She’d find no relief, not even in dementia, until she was dead.

  For the first time since they were seventeen, there was nothing he could do to protect her.

  The world had collapsed around them while they told each other everything would be okay. The virus was only the icing on a cake with layers of energy crisis, climate change, recession, xenophobia, and a short but vicious civil war between the midwestern and southwestern states over the need for illegal migrant workers on the farms and the desire to keep them ou
t of the border states.

  The media called that cake the Bad Times.

  Until Jane got sick—was it just three days ago? Yes, just three days ago, when the air wasn’t thick with the scent of her dying flesh. Until the first sores came, James, like everyone he knew, assumed that a return to good times was coming.

  “Please, take her out, James. It’s not too late. It’s not.”

  But it was. Jane would die tonight, if there was any mercy left in the universe. His boy had maybe two days. By morning, West would be wracked with pain, just like his mother. Within a week, it would be over for all four of them, one way or another.

  James kissed the top of Clover’s head, felt her feathery dark wisps of hair against his lips. She smelled new, when the rest of the house stank of a B-grade slasher movie.

  “It’s time, isn’t it?” he whispered to Jane.

  Her eyes, wildly green in her ravaged face, filled with tears. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Not your fault, baby. It’s not your fault.” He laid Clover against Jane’s body. His wife was too weak to fight, so she wrapped a fragile arm around the tiny bundle and curled protectively against the baby, like an oyster around a pearl.

  How could Jane have lost so much weight so quickly? Under a worn nightgown, her rib bones felt like splintery artifacts against the back of his hand.

  The doctor who’d told them that Jane had the virus wore a full-body hazmat suit and something that looked like a cross between an astronaut’s helmet and the gas mask James had been issued in Iraq before West was born. She sent them home from the clinic with what she called a “pain kit.”

  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 thic
k 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.