Viral Nation (Short Story): Broken Nation by Shaunta Grimes Page B
Authors: Shaunta Grimes
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I’ve ever seen. She doesn’t say a word until she has climbed into my bed, on my left side so she doesn’t hurt my leg, and curled against me. I pet her like a kitten.
“I thought you were dead,” she says. “I thought everyone was dead.”
My heart sinks. Tomas is gone then. He wouldn’t let her out of his sight if he was alive. “I’m sorry.” I brush my hand through her long, thick, dark hair, pulling a few strands off the bandage that covers her cheek. “I’m so sorry.”
She cries until she can’t cry anymore, her compact body shaking against me. Her sobs are quiet and internal, so they don’t attract Angelica or anyone else who might try to take her away from me. I feel guilty for not crying with her, but holding her, having her suddenly there, feels so good. Better than the pain hurts, deeper than the grief digs. For the first time in what feels like forever, for a few minutes I am truly happy.
“They left us here, didn’t they?” Maggie asks me.
“They didn’t have a choice.” This is true, and I try to convey that to her with my voice. “But they’ll come for us. They will.”
I believe that, too. With everything inside of me, I know that Alex and the others will come back for us.
When I arrived at the camp, I was so caught up in my own troubles. My mother had just died and I’d lost everything familiar to me. I had no one but my great-aunt, who was already in the camp when I got there. They could have sent me to the moon and I would have barely noticed.
It was a few weeks before everything turned to chaos. I’d come back to myself enough to build a few relationships in the camp. I knew Maggie’s older sister, Pamela, who was my age. I was drawn to Alex in the way a drowning person is drawn to a life preserver. The early efforts to keep us in some sort of school environment were never successful. Things fell apart too quickly.
By the time I’d been in the camp three months, there were only a handful of us left. The last guards loaded us in a van, regardless of whether or not we’d caught the Virus, and drove us through the night to the hospital in Reno. There were no doctors left in Las Vegas.
By the time they unloaded me onto a stretcher, I was too sick to be aware of anything that was happening more than a few inches from my own pain-wracked body. The only person who stayed in that very narrow circle was Alex. He didn’t let go of my hand until someone forced him to so that they could take me to surgery. I think he may have been afraid that someone might take me seriously when I begged to die.
He was there, still, when I woke up again. Narcotics widened my range of awareness but also blurred it and made it soft and unreliable. “Are you really here?” I asked him when I could coordinate everything required for speech.
“I’m here. But I have to go.” His words filtered through the pain and the medication that masked most of it, drawing me out of my dreams of the time before and back to the hospital room where he stood in front of the window. “Leanne, if I don’t go with them, I won’t know where they are. We’ll never find them again. Do you understand?”
I tried to nod, and I think I succeeded, because I remember seeing relief wash over his face. “I’m not leaving you,” he said. “Do you hear me? I’ll be back for you.”
• • •
Maggie won’t go back to her own room, and eventually Angelica stops trying to make her. She wheels a second bed next to mine instead.
Angelica finds us a DVD player somewhere and attaches it to our television. We sit together in my bed and watch the movies the hospital kept for sick kids back before. Mostly they’re Disney movies that I’ve seen a thousand times, but there is something comforting about the familiar songs and watching the stories I know by heart flick by with Maggie holding my hand and resting her head on my shoulder.
We have a radio, too. Mostly I leave it off, because I can’t take too much
“I thought you were dead,” she says. “I thought everyone was dead.”
My heart sinks. Tomas is gone then. He wouldn’t let her out of his sight if he was alive. “I’m sorry.” I brush my hand through her long, thick, dark hair, pulling a few strands off the bandage that covers her cheek. “I’m so sorry.”
She cries until she can’t cry anymore, her compact body shaking against me. Her sobs are quiet and internal, so they don’t attract Angelica or anyone else who might try to take her away from me. I feel guilty for not crying with her, but holding her, having her suddenly there, feels so good. Better than the pain hurts, deeper than the grief digs. For the first time in what feels like forever, for a few minutes I am truly happy.
“They left us here, didn’t they?” Maggie asks me.
“They didn’t have a choice.” This is true, and I try to convey that to her with my voice. “But they’ll come for us. They will.”
I believe that, too. With everything inside of me, I know that Alex and the others will come back for us.
When I arrived at the camp, I was so caught up in my own troubles. My mother had just died and I’d lost everything familiar to me. I had no one but my great-aunt, who was already in the camp when I got there. They could have sent me to the moon and I would have barely noticed.
It was a few weeks before everything turned to chaos. I’d come back to myself enough to build a few relationships in the camp. I knew Maggie’s older sister, Pamela, who was my age. I was drawn to Alex in the way a drowning person is drawn to a life preserver. The early efforts to keep us in some sort of school environment were never successful. Things fell apart too quickly.
By the time I’d been in the camp three months, there were only a handful of us left. The last guards loaded us in a van, regardless of whether or not we’d caught the Virus, and drove us through the night to the hospital in Reno. There were no doctors left in Las Vegas.
By the time they unloaded me onto a stretcher, I was too sick to be aware of anything that was happening more than a few inches from my own pain-wracked body. The only person who stayed in that very narrow circle was Alex. He didn’t let go of my hand until someone forced him to so that they could take me to surgery. I think he may have been afraid that someone might take me seriously when I begged to die.
He was there, still, when I woke up again. Narcotics widened my range of awareness but also blurred it and made it soft and unreliable. “Are you really here?” I asked him when I could coordinate everything required for speech.
“I’m here. But I have to go.” His words filtered through the pain and the medication that masked most of it, drawing me out of my dreams of the time before and back to the hospital room where he stood in front of the window. “Leanne, if I don’t go with them, I won’t know where they are. We’ll never find them again. Do you understand?”
I tried to nod, and I think I succeeded, because I remember seeing relief wash over his face. “I’m not leaving you,” he said. “Do you hear me? I’ll be back for you.”
• • •
Maggie won’t go back to her own room, and eventually Angelica stops trying to make her. She wheels a second bed next to mine instead.
Angelica finds us a DVD player somewhere and attaches it to our television. We sit together in my bed and watch the movies the hospital kept for sick kids back before. Mostly they’re Disney movies that I’ve seen a thousand times, but there is something comforting about the familiar songs and watching the stories I know by heart flick by with Maggie holding my hand and resting her head on my shoulder.
We have a radio, too. Mostly I leave it off, because I can’t take too much
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