Viral Nation (5 page)

They found the recruitment office easily enough. Isaiah had been there before, of course, three years ago. West hesitated before opening the door, feeling like he was crossing some sort of threshold, but when he did, he found just a room. A table inside the door held a stack of dark blue and white folders.

“Take one,” a man behind a desk said without looking up from his work. He flicked his wrist toward some chairs a few feet away. “Sit there and fill it out.”

The packet inside the top folder was thick, with a couple dozen pages stapled inside. “Can I bring this back?” West asked. “My sister is waiting for me in the library, and I still have to get to the Bazaar—”

The man held up a hand, and West swallowed the rest of his rambling.

“Fill out the first page. We’ll set an appointment for your interview. You can bring the balance of the application two days before that date.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The old man’s sharp blue eyes darted back to the work West had interrupted with his question.

The short form asked for West’s vital statistics and had a statement for him to sign that notified him that his name would be run through the Company database. If it came up attached to any violent crime that would happen in the next two years, he’d be punished swiftly and justly. He filled the page out quickly, signed it, and brought it back to the officer.

The old man made him wait several minutes before taking the page and asking, “And what date are you available to begin training?”

West took a deep breath.
This is it.
“September seventh.” The day after his sister started classes at the Academy.

“Okay. You’ll come for your interview on the—” The man tapped the eraser end of a pencil against his desk as he flipped through the pages of a calendar. “Third at one thirty in the afternoon, and bring your full and complete application anytime on or before the first. We will run your name through the database during your interview, do you understand?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.” West turned to leave and nearly plowed into Isaiah standing behind him.

“A late start,” Isaiah said as they exited the elevator a few minutes later. “But you’re finally becoming a man, my friend.”

After they’d made their way out of the building, they stopped at the median, in the center of four lanes of blacktop, to let a group of little kids on bicycles and their teacher pass. “What’s the training like?”

“The hardest thing you’ve ever done,” Isaiah said. “You’ll want to die before it’s over.”

Isaiah entered training at sixteen, directly out of primary school. West was nearly twenty and had been working a farm for three years. “I think I’ll survive.”

“Remember that when you’re running ten miles on an empty stomach at four in the morning after two hours’ sleep.”

“In my bare feet, through the snow?”

Isaiah laughed.

They made their way to the Bazaar’s entrance and West pushed the dark glass door open. Carnival music, full of organs and horns, blared loud enough to compete with the noise of thousands of gamblers. The machines whirred and clanked, and when someone won a leg of lamb or a pair of wool socks, bells and sirens went off.

This was why he’d given up the Academy. Clover would never be able to walk through the door to the Bazaar to pick up her own rations.

Primary school classrooms had overstimulated his sister to the point of catatonia some days. On a good day, he’d come home to find her curled in a corner of the couch, humming frantically to herself with her face buried in a book. Other days, he’d find her rocking and banging the heel of her hand into her forehead.

The noise, the crush of people, the smells of the Bazaar would incapacitate her. He didn’t have to worry about that now. For the next four years, all of Clover’s needs would be taken care of.

West and Isaiah passed by glassy-eyed people frantically yanking on the slot machine arms and went to stand in line at the cage to turn their extra tickets in for gambling tokens.

“Let’s play craps,” Isaiah said.

“It takes too long.”

“Clover got you on a curfew?” Isaiah bumped him with his shoulder, and West pushed him away.

He did feel lucky today. “Fine. One game. But then I’m already late.”

Isaiah walked to the cage window when the man in front of them left with his handful of tokens. “We both know your sister could spend the rest of her life in the library and be perfectly happy.”

“In the library, yes. Sitting outside waiting for me? Not so much.” West cashed in the six tickets he’d received the day before. Three earned, three for his day off. As a general rule, he played his tokens as he got them. He was trying to feed himself, Clover, and a large dog on what amounted to about enough to feed one person. If he won a loaf of bread or a pound of carrots, they needed it as soon as possible.

Isaiah had a week’s worth of extra tickets for himself, plus the fourteen his grandmother received as an old-age pension from the city each week. Living in the barracks, he didn’t draw food rations.

“I can’t wait around for you to play all those,” West said.

“No worries.”

West shoved his tokens into his pocket and followed Isaiah to the oblong table, lined on three sides with people, their faces red and slick with sweat as they cheered on the shooter and then followed the dice down the table with their eyes. Isaiah elbowed his way to the front, and West followed in his wake.

The dealer across the table from them was dressed in fishnet stockings and a pink satin leotard cut over her round hips to her narrow waist on the sides and nearly down to her belly button in front, barely containing her cleavage.

The dice bounced off the rail and rolled partway back before stopping. The dealer’s bleached-blond curls bobbed as she called, “Shooter rolls eight the hard way!”

Some groans, one whoop from somewhere near the head of the table. The dealer at the center of the table, a man wearing a jester’s hat with bells on the tips and a skintight, slightly obscene metallic
purple jumpsuit, raked in the dice while the fishnet girl and another wearing shiny black shorts and a red tasseled bra mucked up the bets.

The jester used his stick to push the dice toward the next shooter, but flipped his hook and took them back when the music changed and the lights in the room dimmed before one bright beam shot down from the ceiling.

The deafening noise that defined the Bazaar’s gambling floor dulled, and everyone at the table craned their heads back to look up. West included.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” A deep, rumbling voice boomed over the speaker system. “Overhead, for your viewing pleasure, the Flying Phoenix!”

The room stayed silent for a moment as a girl in crimson velvet encrusted with crystal stones unfurled from a wide, white silk ribbon. She dropped from the ceiling with dizzying speed, then caught herself with a wrist trapped in the silk and spun in a wide circle over them.

“Christ,” Isaiah said. “Look at those legs.”

They were long and flexible, each one tipped with a satin slipper. Clear stones on the velvet caught the lights and her dark hair cascaded around her as she spun.

The show was over in five minutes, and West knew another one would happen every half hour. Maybe another aerial show. Maybe jugglers on stilts making their way between the machines, or trained poodles jumping through hoops in the circus ring that rose from the center of the main floor.

Anyone who had an entertaining talent could earn a few extra tickets by performing at the Bazaar.

When the lights and music came back up, the shooter who’d rolled the eight handed the dealer back the coupon he’d been given for his win and took another token.

“Just a pound of mutton,” he said to the woman next to him. “We can do better.”

“I’m going to the machines,” West said to Isaiah.

“Come on, I’m the next shooter. Then you. Then we’ll go tug the bandits, okay?”

Isaiah smiled and laid a token down without waiting for West to answer. The shooter threw something that made everyone at the table groan and the female dealers lean precariously over the table to collect the house wins.

“Okay, okay, okay.” Isaiah moved into position and placed a bet as the jester slid the dice to him. “Daddy needs a new pair of shoes.”

He picked up the red cubes, tossed them around in his palms, blew on them, and sent them flying. The dealer in front of West, the girl with the huge breasts, winked a heavily made-up eye at him, then looked back at the bets in front of her.

“Hot damn!” Isaiah smacked the heel of his hand on the wooden rim of the table, sending an empty glass balanced there tumbling to the floor.

The winking dealer handed him a coupon, her fingers lingering a little longer than necessary. Isaiah slid his long brown fingers down the length of the girl’s hand, palming the slip of paper. He waved it at West after he read it. “Sweet!”

Ten units of energy
, West read before Isaiah slipped it into his pocket and placed another bet. Ten hours of power to one sixty-watt bulb.

His run lasted two more rolls, and then it was West’s turn. He placed his first bet of the night on the Don’t Pass line because he needed to get out of there. He tossed the dice without Isaiah’s fanfare. They landed on snake eyes. Everyone else at the table had bet the Pass line and grumbled as the dealer handed him a ticket for a pound of potatoes.

He left his bet and waited while more Pass line bets were placed, then rolled again. The dice tumbled, bounced off the far side of the table, and landed on snake eyes again. The dealer in the center reached for them with his stick, lifting his eyebrows as he slid them back and West took another ticket, for a loaf of bread this time.

“Sure you don’t want to go for the Pass line?” Isaiah whispered in his ear. “You aren’t going to pull that out again.”

West ignored him and threw the dice. He nearly came out of his skin when a lighted siren blared and twirled over their heads. Some of the other players had switched their bets to the Don’t Pass line. The man who’d turned in his pound of mutton wasn’t one of them, and he lost his last token.

“Winner, winner, chicken dinner!” the jester called out, and handed West a card from his breast pocket.

One live chicken
, it read.

Isaiah elbowed West in the ribs. “Good eats at your house tonight, right?”

Not without his rations. West threw the dice again and finally lost his token.

“Okay,” he said to Isaiah. “It’s been fun, but I really need to get out of here.”

Isaiah looked back over his shoulder at the dealer who’d been flirting with him. He turned back to West with a grin on his face. “Do me a favor, man?”

West sighed and held out his hand. Isaiah reached into his pocket and put his grandmother’s stack of ration cards into it.

“I owe you one.”

He owed him at least a hundred, but who was counting? “What about her extras?”

“Oh.” Isaiah tore his eyes from the dealer who looked like she belonged between the pages of one of the magazines they sold in a dimly lit store at the back corner of the sixth floor. “Right.”

He reached into his other pocket and handed West the energy coupon, one for a length of the homespun cotton cloth made in a factory in Ohio and shipped to the Bazaar by train, and one for a cantaloupe. Great. “Just give her these.”

And then he was gone, pushing his way back to the craps table.

He would probably have a chance with the dealer, too, West thought. Girls had always liked Isaiah. He watched his friend bend his dark head toward the woman and saw her smile, ignoring the table until the jester goosed her.

He walked to the nearest bank of machines and put a token in one. The reels spun, and when they landed on nothing special four times, West went to the elevator. An operator, dressed in a tuxedo complete with top hat, grinned at him when he entered through a set of wide golden doors.

“What floor?”

“Produce.” West would go to the second floor, walk from room to room, and gather the fruits and vegetables that were the bulk of their diet, and then the third for the couple of pounds of meat that were supposed to feed them for the next week.

There should have been plenty. The farm West worked on grew enough cantaloupe to keep the whole city fat and happy. But the Bad Times had ruined the country’s farm belt, and whatever food could be produced in each state was distributed by steam train to help feed the cities that couldn’t support themselves.

Isaiah thought the live chicken was funny. But a laying hen would add to the two they already had and give him and Clover some extra protein each week. Mrs. Finch had a rooster. If he could pick a broody hen this time, they’d be able to raise some meat as well.

Or maybe they’d just roast this one up. They’d never had an extra chicken to butcher, but he thought he could figure out how it was done.

Mango lifted his head and woofed when West turned
the corner and came walking toward the library, his pack full and heavy on his back. Clover closed her book and stuffed it into her own pack.

West lifted a small metal cage toward her and the chicken inside it squawked. It was small and brown, with a black head. “Is it an egg chicken or a meat one?” she asked.