Viral Nation (Short Story): Broken Nation Read Online Free PDF Page A

let me go, his arms tighten around me, like he’s afraid to let me leave him before he leaves me. I fight for another moment, but then I realize I’m more afraid that he’ll let me go than I am of letting him hold me there. I relax into his arms and I cry. I feel his tears dampen my hair.
     
    • • •
     
    I wake up the next morning in our bedroom, mine and Alex’s. The one with my things in the closet but that until now I have never slept in. I’m still wearing my clothes from the day before, and Alex is so close that I’m not sure how I managed to sleep at all. I push back against him, and he shifts, so that his weight is off me and I can breathe.
    Before we finally slept the night before, he wrote a letter back to Pablo. He wrote that I lost my leg, as if I’ve misplaced it and might be able to find it and screw it back on. He won’t leave me until I have my prosthetic and can manage on my own. He made sure to add that he will come back for me when I’m well enough to leave Reno.
    He told Pablo that he needs a month, and then he’ll come with Maggie. In one month, I will be alone. Just me and my fake leg. I try not to think about where the leg will come from. Is there a warehouse full of them somewhere? There must be some way for me to have a prosthetic that doesn’t involve taking it off of a dead person. When I let myself think about it, I wonder if this is how people who need new body parts feel when they’re waiting for someone to get in a car accident or something so that a heart or liver or kidney becomes available.
    Then I wonder if there is even a doctor left who can perform transplant surgery, and I back out of that rabbit hole as quickly as possible.
    I don’t have to wait for an accident. Almost everyone is already dead. The radio doesn’t talk about percentages or numbers for the country as a whole. Instead they talk about how many people are in each city. Nearly 100,000 in Sacramento, twice that many in New York City. Only 500 in Wichita, Kansas, until they relocated some more people there.
    I know how many people lived in Nevada before, and I know that 15,000 left in my state means that almost everyone is already dead.
    “Don’t tell her yet,” I say to Alex when he and I are sitting at a dead family’s kitchen table, drinking coffee from their pantry out of their mugs. “It’ll only upset her.”
    He nods, and looks at me long enough that I start to get uncomfortable.
    “What?” I ask, running a hand through my hair.
    “Will you sleep with me again tonight?”
    I think about saying no. Some things are hardwired in and don’t care if a war and a virus collided and changed everything. Not wanting him to think that getting me into bed with him will be easy is one of those things for me. But I will be alone in a month. So alone. In the end, I lift my mug with both hands, even though it burns my palms, and say, “Yeah, sure.”
    My hesitation does something to Alex. His face flushes and he fumbles with his coffee, splashing some on the table. “You don’t have to.”
    This whole situation is so tragic that the only thing left to do is laugh. Laugh because in a month he’s going to leave and take Maggie with him, and there is nothing I can do about it. Laugh because I love them both, and this moment comes in a close second to the one where the vice principal of my school told me my mother was dead. Laugh because, what else can I do when my body and my heart have both been broken beyond real repair?
    He looks up at me, his dark eyes narrowed. He thinks I’m laughing at him.
    I want to ease the worry from his face. “Where else would I be?”
    He looks down at his cup and goes on quickly, as if he’s afraid lingering on the subject will give me time to change my mind. “There’s a guy on my crew. I think—I think after, you know—he’ll help you get settled into a dorm on campus.”
    “Okay.” I don’t want to talk about it. Not yet.
    “I’ll invite him over. To meet