Viral Nation Read Online Free

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 beanpoles; sunflowers lined one side of her house. She fed theseed-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 had 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.
    “Reading by candlelight isn’t good for your eyes, 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,