Viral Nation

by Grimes, Shaunta

  “No one is stealing anything from you. Please, calm down.”

  “I’m calm!” She was sitting, wasn’t she? She hadn’t moved.

  “I really must insist that you lower your voice.”

  “I’m not yelling.”

  “When you are calm, I would like to talk to you about your options.”

  She threw her hands up and the end of Mango’s lead landed in her lap. She’d been clutching it so hard that the leather left an itchy impression across her palm. “I’m calm, Mr. Kingston.”

  Kingston looked over her shoulder at the door, like he thought he might need to call the old comb-over guy for backup. Clover waited to hear what he had to say. Not that it would matter. He couldn’t take back her acceptance.

  “My decision is final,” he said, like he’d read her mind. He looked to her like he might have a heart attack any minute.

  “Are you okay?”

  He sat back in his chair and wiped his forehead again. “What? Yes, I’m fine.”

  “Because you look a little sick.” Clover leaned forward and peered at him. “Do you always sweat that much?”

  “Really, Miss Donovan. I’m perfectly fine.” Kingston opened a desk drawer and pulled out another folder. This one was deep blue with white piping around the edges. The Company colors. “Your exam scores were extraordinary, as I told you.”

  “But you don’t want me here.”

  “Getting along socially is an important part of the Academy experience. Autistics have a history of difficulty fitting in and being successful.”

  “Then maybe you need to change the way things are done here. Starting with not letting in cheating—”

  Kingston inhaled, slowly, through his nose. His grip on the blue and white folder bent the edges. “I would like you to go see Mr. Langston Bennett this afternoon.”

  “Who is Mr. Langston Bennett?”

  “You can find him at the Waverly-Stead building. He’ll make you aware of the situation when you arrive.”

  “You’re sending me to the Company? Now?”

  Kingston darted his shifty gaze around the room, landing on the closed door more than once. Clover looked back there, too, but didn’t see what he found so interesting. “The Company has laxer rules than the Academy, Miss Donovan. They are better equipped to handle differences.”

  Differences. “But I’m not being discriminated against?”

  “You’re being offered an opportunity that, I promise you, nearly every student in that ballroom would jump at.”

  “So offer it to Heather Sweeney. That way I won’t have to room with her.”

  “You’re making this difficult.”

  He was taking away her education. Was she supposed to make it easy? “Do I have a choice?”

  “If you don’t attend training, you have to work, Miss Donovan. That’s how we maintain order in our city. And people have an obligation to do the work they are best suited for.”

  “Then let me come to school. I’ll do my best to get along with Heather, as long as she leaves me alone and I don’t have to share a room with her. And I can have Mango with me.”

  Kingston took an envelope from the folder. The same kind of rich envelope her acceptance letter had come in. He reached across his desk to hand it to her. “This is for the best.”

  “The best for who?” The envelope had Langston Bennett written across the front.

  “The best for all concerned, Miss Donovan.”

  “I don’t want to do this.”

  Kingston pushed his hair back and settled his hyperactive eyes on the door for a moment before he looked at her. “Your brother is a day laborer on the cantaloupe farm, isn’t he?”

  Clover nodded slowly.

  “I’m sure you could go pick with him. Every job’s important.”

  Clover took the letter and barely resisted the urge to crumple it into a ball and bounce it off Kingston’s sweaty forehead. “This isn’t fair.”

  “Life isn’t fair, Miss Donovan. Ask your brother. West Donovan scored nearly as well as you did on his exams.”

  “That isn’t true. He didn’t pass.”

  Kingston looked at her another long moment, then reached under his desk with one hand. Within seconds, the office door opened and the man with the comb-over was standing there. “Ms. Donovan needs an escort to the Company building.”

  “I don’t need an escort,” she said. The man who’d walked her into Kingston’s office had seemed kind of feeble. Now his eyes had gone steely and his jaw was set in a hard line. Clover shrank back from him a little bit.

  “I’m glad to hear that.” Kingston reached to shake her hand. She pulled away from the visibly moist palm and walked out of his office, Mango following at her side. “You’re expected within the hour.”

  chapter 4

  To those of you who received honors, awards, and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students, I say: you, too, can be president of the United States.

  —GEORGE W. BUSH, ACCEPTANCE SPEECH FOR YALE UNIVERSITY HONORARY DOCTORATE, MAY 21, 2001

  Clover weighed her options.

  She could walk the remaining mile or so down Virginia Street to the Waverly-Stead building in the toe-pinching torture shoes. Or she could take them off and walk barefoot, the soles of her feet touching God only knew what as the concrete scrubbed against her skin.

  She left her shoes on and promised herself she was setting them on fire when she got home. Her sneakers went everywhere with her from now on.

  Angry wouldn’t cover West’s reaction when he found out she went to the Company alone. Or that she’d been sent there at all. Not voluntarily, either, even though Kingston let her walk out by herself.

  She should go home and wait to talk to West, but she didn’t want to. He’d go all big brother on the situation. He’d insist on confronting Kingston, for one thing. And Clover wasn’t sure she wanted that.

  Now that she’d caught her breath, she wasn’t sure being sent to the Company was so bad. She hadn’t anticipated the Academy would be a replay of primary school. Besides, if she was expected within the hour, then she was supposed to go without her brother, who still had three more hours of work.

  In the end she decided it would be best to have all the information before she talked to West. And to follow the rules. Anyway, she was annoyed with her brother and embarrassed that it never even crossed her mind to question his test scores. She needed time to figure this all out before she talked to him.

  The one thing she did know was that whoever Langston Bennett was, he’d better let her keep her dog with her. Her father gave Mango to her when she was eleven. He’d been trained at the prison. It helped for the detainees to have worthwhile work, her father said. It gave them a purpose and helped them remember how to be good citizens.

  She wasn’t going to do this without her dog.

  Mango stopped when Clover did, at the front door to the Waverly-Stead building. Doors weren’t exactly Clover’s thing. Especially if she didn’t know what was on the other side. She closed her eyes and steeled herself against the possibility that it would be loud in there, or that it might smell bad. Or have the same flickering, garish overhead lights as the primary school building.

  Thousands of people worked for the Company. If a lot of them were on the other side of this door, it was going to be bad. Very bad. Clover already felt the crush of them like a tightness in her chest that kept her lungs from fully expanding.

  She pushed the door open, slowly, and inhaled when she saw a softly lit room with a very tall ceiling. Two women and a man sat together in plush chairs off to one side of the cavernous lobby, talking quietly to each other. Otherwise, the only sounds as she entered were her leather-soled shoes and Mango’s toes clicking on the marble floor as they approached the big receptionist desk.

  The receptionist was maybe as old as West and had dark hair with a bleached streak in the front. White like Mrs. Finch’s. She was considerably prettier than Mrs. Finch, though. Mostly because she
was so much younger and young people were usually considered prettier just by virtue of their youth. Mrs. Finch might have been as pretty as she was when she was twenty. In fact, for an old lady, before her stroke Mrs. Finch wasn’t bad-looking. After her stroke, Mrs. Finch’s eyes—

  The receptionist was staring at Clover’s chest. When Clover looked down, she saw the sticky chocolate-and-cherry stain and covered it with her hand. “Heather Sweeney did that,” she said.

  The receptionist raised her eyebrows delicately. “May I help you?”

  “Yes, you may help me.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then, “How may I help you?”

  Clover cleared her throat and held up the envelope Kingston had given her. “I have this letter.”

  She pulled the envelope back before it could be taken from her. The girl tilted her head and read the name on the envelope without reaching for it again. “Mr. Bennett. Is he expecting you?”

  What if he wasn’t? She wouldn’t have the Academy or the Company, then. “I think he is.”

  “Okay. Well, why don’t I check?”

  She smiled, but her face looked frozen that way, so Clover wasn’t sure whether she would call Bennett or security.

  Turned out she didn’t say anything into the phone except for “Yes, sir,” twice, before she hung up.

  “Mr. Bennett will meet you at the elevator bank to the left.” She pointed at Mango with her chin. “He said to keep the leash on the dog, okay?”

  Clover tightened her hold on the envelope as she turned to her left, toward a wall of brass double doors. She’d read about elevators, and West told her that the Bazaar had some and had told her about riding them, but she’d never even seen one in person before. She looked back down the hall at the receptionist, who waggled her fingers before turning her attention back to her computer.

  Clover watched a digital counter above the elevator door start at eighteen and count down to one, her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides. Finally, one of the sets of double doors opened and a tall man in navy blue pinstriped slacks and a white button-up shirt stepped out.

  Langston Bennett was about the same age as Clover’s father. Maybe forty, then. His hair was dark on top, going gray on the sides, and cut very short. His most distinctive feature, though, was a series of deep virus scars on either side of his face. Much worse than West’s, or any others that Clover had seen. She couldn’t imagine the kind of sores that left scars like that.

  His eyes drifted to her stained dress, but he didn’t say anything about it. “You must be Miss Donovan.”

  His voice ricocheted down the cold, marble hallway. Clover took a step back from it. Mango picked up on her anxiety and pressed against her legs. The pressure helped. The man came toward her and Clover forced a breath through her nose.

  “Miss Donovan?” He reached for her, and she stepped back again.

  “Yes,” she said. This had to be Langston Bennett. And he was looking at her like she was crazy. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Bennett.”

  His tight posture relaxed when she said his name. Her brain insisted that she step closer and offer to shake his hand, but her body would not obey. He closed the gap instead and put a hand on her shoulder, to turn her toward the elevator. She barely held back the instinct to yank away from him.

  “Right this way,” he said, sweeping his other hand toward the open elevator door.

  Clover exhaled slowly through her nose and peered through the open doors. So, an elevator was a box swinging by cables over dead air. So what? She could do this.

  “How high are we going?” she asked, after Bennett was in the elevator, while she still stood outside it.

  Bennett put a hand out to stop the door from closing and leaving her behind. “What’s that?”

  “Which floor is your office on?”

  “The eighteenth floor,” Bennett said. “You can see the whole city from my window. Even beyond the wall.”

  Eighteen floors. At twelve feet a floor, that was more than two hundred feet above ground level. She stepped into the box.

  The elevator wasn’t as bad as she was afraid it would be. The car was big enough to hold fifteen or twenty people. The walls were mirrored, even on the backs of the doors. Dozens of Clovers in yellow dresses with gory red stains and Langston Bennetts in pinstripes stood in infinite rows, riding more than two hundred feet up a narrow shaft, pulled by cables.

  What were the chances that the virus had spared someone properly trained to maintain the intricate system of pulleys and brakes that kept them from plummeting to their deaths?

  The red digital numbers above the panel of buttons registered each floor. It took less than a minute to reach eighteen. And then the door opened again and it was over. Mango walked beside her as she followed Bennett into a long, silent hallway.

  She’d never been higher up than the third floor of the primary school building. Until she stood on solid ground, Clover didn’t realize that she expected to feel a swaying or some kind of instability at this elevation.

  On either side of the hallway, large windows looked into offices that in another lifetime had been hotel rooms. The hallway was lit from above and nearly all the offices had lamps and overhead lights blazing.

  “You use a lot of energy in this place,” she said. She and West got only two hours a day. And even that was just enough to run the water heater and a couple of lamps.

  Bennett kept moving as he answered. “We do important work at Waverly-Stead. Energy is precious; we have to allocate it to the places it will do the most good.”

  “All work is important,” she said, mostly to herself. Bennett stopped walking, but when Clover turned back to him he just started up again and didn’t say anything.

  The wall to Clover’s left opened to another elevator bank. She glanced up at a chandelier, bigger than she was with at least a hundred lit bulbs. Bennett followed her gaze.

  “How much do you know about Waverly-Stead, Miss Donovan?” Bennett asked as he guided her through the door into office 1812.

  Clover guessed she knew as much as anyone did about the Company. They’d taught her some in primary school. She’d studied in the library for the entrance exams. “Edward Waverly and Jonathon Stead started the Company to manufacture and distribute the suppressant.”

  May eighth was a day of celebration for the whole country. That day, Waverly and Stead released the suppressant. Three weeks earlier, on Clover’s birthday, Ned Waverly stumbled into a portal deep in the ancient waters of Lake Tahoe—a doorway between present day and exactly two years in the future. When Waverly came through it, he found that a drug had been developed that cured the virus and kept healthy people from being infected. He got his hands on a sample, brought it back to his own time, and found the chemist, Jon Stead, who had developed it. With Waverly’s help, the suppressant was discovered two years early and ended the Bad Times eighteen months ahead of schedule.

  They saved millions of lives. According to the histories, fewer than twenty thousand people were left in the United States when the suppressant was developed in the original time line. Waverly and Stead were able to save almost that many just in Nevada by developing it early.

  They won the last Nobel Prize in medicine, or any discipline, ever granted. People all over the world practically worshipped them. They were heroes. After the Bad Times, once the virus was controlled, their Company privatized nearly every part of what remained of the United States of America.

  They worked with the government to build a wall around a single city in each state to create safe places for survivors to grieve and start to live again. Clover had no idea what was outside the walls of Reno now. When she thought about it, she pictured a jungle, growing wild and overtaking whatever human-made things might have gotten in their way over the past sixteen years.

  She knew from reading the classified ads that some of the walled cities thrived; others struggled. But it had never occurred to her to want to venture outside her city. The idea that
she’d see beyond the walls today erased any last bits of guilt she felt over not going home before meeting with Bennett. If she’d waited for West to come home and then argued with him, there might not have been enough light to really see.

  “Well, you do know something about Waverly-Stead,” Bennett said, stopping her in the middle of wondering out loud how the absence of people had affected the black bear population in the Sierra Nevada. He held out his hand and Clover hesitated before letting go of Mango’s leash to shake it.

  Bennett pulled his hand back and wiped it on his slacks. “I believe that letter is for me?”

  “Oh.” She passed the envelope, now hopelessly crushed, to Bennett. “It’s from Mr. Kingston at the Academy.”

  “Yes.” Bennett led her into his office, already lit with three lamps even though it was empty before they walked in, and offered her a seat before he opened the letter and read it. Took his time, too, making Clover sit, squirming in her chair, for what felt like an hour but was probably only five minutes. Too bad his curtains were drawn. What a waste of energy, using electric lights when the sun was shining. And leaving those lights on when no one was even in the room?

  “Very interesting, Clover,” Bennett said as he set the letter on his desk.

  The switch from Miss Donovan to her first name probably meant something. “What’s interesting?”

  “Your entrance exams were extraordinary.”

  “I know. You’d think Kingston would want me there, wouldn’t you?” Clover rested her hand on Mango’s head, and he propped his chin on her knee. “My dog does not bite, by the way. Mango is very well behaved. And no one would want to room with Heather Sweeney. Have you ever met her? She’s really awful. I mean—”

  “No. No, I haven’t met her. I may know her father, though.” Bennett leaned back in his seat. “And unlike the Academy, we work with service dogs quite often here at Waverly-Stead.”

  “You do?”

  “Absolutely. There are skills we need to continue to ensure the health and safety of this country’s citizens, Clover. We don’t let anything get in the way of developing and making use of those skills.”