Viral Nation (Short Story): Broken Nation
Page 6
“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 three weeks 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 bean poles, 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 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.
And need for the room, because the government rations alone weren’t enough to feed a person. Everyone grew some produce. Some people kept backyard chickens and even dairy goats, if they were lucky enough to win a pair in the Bazaar. West and Clover had two laying hens in a pen in their backyard.
“Are you going to the Bazaar while I’m at the library?” she asked every week. The answer was always the same, but she still asked.
“Just to pick up our rations and Mrs. Finch’s.”
“We need candles,” she said.
He had thirty-five chances each week to win extras. Twenty-one he earned working at the cantaloupe farm, plus Clover’s minor ration of fourteen. Each ticket was traded for a token that he gambled for candles, toilet paper, soap, a butchered chicken. Maybe if he was lucky, some extra energy for the week. Anything above and beyond their bare-bones food rations. On Wednesdays, he pulled for Mrs. Finch’s fourteen elder ration extras, too.
“It isn’t good for your eyes to read by candles, you know,” he said.
“Just get some, okay?”
He didn’t answer. He had exactly zero control over what the machines gave him. Some weeks he came home with so much he could barely carry it, others with nothing more than their bare-bones rations.
Clover waved over her shoulder as she turned with Mango toward the library. From behind, she looked more like twelve than sixteen. Her black hair was cut short, in chunky layers. She had a habit of hacking at it with scissors when it started to bother her. She wore their mother’s red Converse high-tops and blue jeans cuffed at the ankle with a standard-issue white T-shirt.
She was so thin. He hoped for some meat, instead of the candles she wanted. The virus, which many expected to affect the chicken population, had jumped from humans to cows instead. They were endangered now and pampered like pets on dairy farms. It was hard for West to imagine that once upon a time people ate them. A pound of lamb or pork would go a long way, though.
West watched until his sister was out of sight, and then walked the other way, toward the Bazaar.
There were two things he could count on every Wednesday morning. An unpleasant twinge of resentment when he traded a back-breaking week of hard labor for barely enough food and energy to take care of his sister. And passing by the Kingston Estate on his way to the Bazaar, where he knew Bridget Kingston would be somewhere near the gate.
The Kingston Estate was as big and grand as its name implied. A large white house and a smaller guest house sat on maybe two acres of land with stables between them. The estat
e had housed the current headmaster since the academy opened fifteen years ago. First a man named Norton, and for the last four years Adam Kingston and his daughter.
A trio of horses looked up from where they ate alfalfa in a front pasture when West walked by. Beyond the buildings, the land dropped off into a ravine leaving a backdrop of city below and mountains beyond.
The house was well kept, with walls repainted bright white by government workers every third spring set off by the deep blue shutters and a red front door. Very patriotic. A wide porch wrapped around the front and both sides of the house.
As West came close, Bridget stood up from the bench swing that hung from the porch rafters near the front door. She wore her honey-colored hair swept away from her face and pulled into a high ponytail. The curled ends of it brushed the back of her neck.
This was the only time West saw Bridget, since he graduated primary school and became a dirt slinger three springs ago. They rarely said more than “good morning” or “hello” to each other. There was more caught in the space between them, but it stayed there. West convinced himself he was fine with the slow progression. He’d be about forty before he was in a position to offer Bridget anything more than a simple greeting.
It hadn’t always been that way. Before Adam Kingston was headmaster, he was just a teacher and West’s father was a guard. A guard’s son could be with a teacher’s daughter. This guard’s son had time to fall in love with that teacher’s daughter, in fact, before things changed. Bridget moved with her father into the estate and that was that.
“Morning,” she said. She wore a pair of academy gray pants she’d cut off and neatly hemmed into shorts, and a white T-shirt that set off her long, golden limbs.
“Morning,” he answered. God, he was an idiot. She was the headmaster’s daughter. He smelled, constantly, of manure and rotting melon. He buried his hands in his pockets and quickened his pace.
“Are you headed for the Bazaar?” she asked as he passed by.
“Yes.” He stopped walking, but didn’t know what else to say. He looked for something anyway. Anything to draw out this moment. “You, too?”
“I don’t get my own rations until November.”
Of course. He knew that she was seventeen. Her father would pick up her rations along with his, and anyone else he supported. He would never let his daughter near the Bazaar. West didn’t blame him.
“Have a good day, Bridget.” He liked saying her name. It felt sweet on his tongue. It always had.
She smiled, her cheeks flushed just a little, and he walked away.
• • •
“You’re in a good mood.”
West turned and smiled when he saw Isaiah walking toward him. “What are you doing here?”
“Got the afternoon off and thought I’d get my grandma’s rations for her.”
“I’m just on my way to the Bazaar.” West balanced himself back on a garden wall, his thick-soled boots making it difficult, and reached into his pocket for Mrs. Finch’s ration coupons.
Isaiah took them, and then pushed West’s shoulder until he lost balance again. “Saw you talking to Bridget Kingston. She why you’re so smiley today?”
He hopped back on the wall and walked backward a few steps. “Just saying hello.”
“Watch yourself, West. That girl is way out of your league.”
“Don’t worry. That’s not why I’m happy today.” Not mostly, anyway.
“No?”
“Clover got accepted into the academy. Boarding and all.”
Isaiah stopped walking, and West did, too, after a few more steps. “So you going to join the Company?”
There were only two things to do in Reno. Work for the Waverly-Stead Company, or work for the government. Company work for people as young as West required living in the barracks, at least for training. He couldn’t leave Clover, so West worked for the government raising cantaloupe to send by train to feed people in other states.
Are you going to join the Company? wasn’t a real question. All West had ever wanted was to work for Waverly-Stead, just like his father.
“As soon as she’s settled in, I can apply,” he said.
Isaiah ran a hand over the stubble growing on top of his head. “School starts in what, a month?”
“About.”
“You could start training the next day.”
West’s stomach tightened. He could start the process now. Today. That letter was for Clover, but it sure changed his life, too. He’d been taking care of her since he was sixteen and she was thirteen. Since their father was promoted from guard to executioner, part of one of the five-person firing squads that were the center of the most efficient law enforcement system in the history of the country. Executioners were required to live in the Company barracks and promotions within the Company weren’t something anyone could turn down easily. Their father signed guardianship to Mrs. Finch, but it was West who had taken care of not only himself and his sister, but their guardian as well, until Clover’s care passed to him officially when he turned eighteen.
“You’ve waited long enough,” Isaiah said.
Hell, yes, he had.
West received a similar letter to Clover’s from the academy a few months after his grand gesture. By then it was clear that, official documents aside, Mrs. Finch couldn’t even care for herself. He declined the invitation. What else could he do? Foster City was supposed to be a perfect system, allowing children to be cared for so their parents could do the work of recivilization. Somehow he’d known that system wouldn’t work for them. Foster City would have chewed his sister up and spit her out. But now that she was accepted into the academy herself, he had his life back.
Books by Shaunta Grimes
Viral Nation
Rebel Nation
About the Author
Shaunta Grimes has worked as a substitute teacher, a newspaper reporter, a drug court counselor, and a vintage clothing seller. No matter which direction she strays, however, she always comes back to storytelling. She lives in Reno with her family, where she writes, teaches, and perpetually studies at the University of Nevada.
Contents
Cover
Broken Nation
Title Page
Copyright
Broken Nation
Excerpt from Viral Nation
Books by Shaunta Grimes
About the Author
Table of Contents
Cover
Broken Nation
Title Page
Copyright
Broken Nation
Excerpt from Viral Nation
Books by Shaunta Grimes
About the Author