The Garden of Darkness

The Garden of Darkness by Gillian Murray Kendall




Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night;

Nor for the arrow that flieth by day;

Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness.

Psalm 91





For Rob

and for Sasha and Gabriel (of course)





After They Left the City





THE PANDEMIC BURNED through the population until only a few children remained. The adults died quickly. When SitkaAZ13, which everyone called Pest, first began to bloom, Clare and her father and stepmother, Marie, listened to the experts on the television—those desperately mortal scientists with multiple initials behind their names. And then one by one the experts had dropped away, taken by the pandemic they so eagerly described.

But not before they’d made it clear: while a very few children might prove resistant to the disease until they reached late adolescence, all of the adults were going to die. All of them.

Clare had found it hard to watch her father and Marie, still vital, still healthy, and know that the two of them would soon be dead. She supposed she would be dead too before long. The odds weren’t great that she would prove to be one of the few who lived into their late adolescence. Her father and Marie simply tried not to talk about death. Not until her father’s words at the very end.





NOW IT WAS over, and Clare, a temporary survivor after all, stood on Sander’s Hill looking down at the giant necropolis that stretched out below her—the city of the dead and dying. The city of crows.

Clare was fifteen years old. And it astonished her that she was still alive. Everything that told her who she was—the intricate web of friendships and family that had cradled her—was gone. She could be anyone.





CHAPTER ONE





SCENES FROM A PANDEMIC





CLARE AND HER father and stepmother survived long enough to leave the dying city in their neighbor’s small Toyota. The family SUV was too clunky and hard to maneuver, and their neighbor, decaying in his bed, offered no objections when they took his more fuel-efficient car. Their departure was hurried and late in the day—they had spent most of the day waiting for Clare’s best friend, Robin, to join them. But Robin never came. They daren’t stay any longer; the Cured now ruled the city at night.

Clare knew that once they left the city, there was no possibility she would ever see Robin again. While Clare had loved Michael, still loved Michael, would always love Michael, her friendship with Robin was inviolate. Which was why Clare knew that if Robin could have made the rendezvous, she would have. They might wait a thousand years, but Robin would not come. Clare did not doubt that someone—or something—had gotten her.

On that fresh summer day, as the shadows began to creep out from under the trees, and the strange hooting of the Cured began to fill the night, Clare was under the illusion that she had nothing more to lose. She had, after all, even lost herself—she had been a cheerleader; she had been popular; she had been a nice person. And under that exterior was something more convoluted and complicated, something that made her wakeful and watchful, that made her devour books as the house slept. But none of that mattered anymore. Her cheerleading skills were not needed. And there was nothing to be wakeful about anyway: the monster under the bed had been Pest all along.





THEY WERE TAKING all the supplies they could fit into the car, but they were not taking Clare’s parakeet, Chupi. Marie talked about freeing the bird, but Clare knew that Chupi would not last a winter. She knew that Marie knew it, too. When it was almost time to go, Clare got into the Toyota listlessly, fitting her body around backpacks and cartons of food and loads of bedding and enough bandages and bottles of antibiotics to stock a small pharmacy.

Then she got out again. Her father and Marie were arguing heatedly about who was going to drive as she slipped into the house. “No, Paul,” Marie said in her patented Marie-tone, “I’m a better driver on the freeway.”

Clare went straight to Chupi’s cage. They had never had a cat or a dog. Marie was allergic to both. That left fish or something avian. It was a choice that wasn’t a choice—Clare wasn’t about to bond with a guppy or deal with ick—so they bought her a birthday parakeet. And, eventually, Clare found that Chupi charmed her. The parakeet would hop around Clare’s books while she studied. Occasionally, he would stop and peck at the margins of the pages until they were an amalgam of little holes, as if Chupi had mapped out an elaborate, unbreakable code in Braille.