The Garden of Darkness

Whoever he was, he had made big promises.

Clare watched the mists rising from the city below until Bear nuzzled her, asking for more attention. She stroked him for a while and then stood up and carefully folded the piece of paper with Michael’s name on it.

“Let’s go,” she said to Bear. She wanted to go into Fallon to look for supplies and then get back to the cabin before nightfall—even if the night were probably still safe. Her father had thought the Cured would stay in the cities for a long time.

Clare had already broken into some of the other places near the cabin to look for supplies, and she had found some food, a couple of hurricane lamps, more candles, a camping stove. But she also found, inevitably, bodies. In one small house, a body had decayed into the bed it lay on; fluids leaked into the sheets leaving a grisly outline. In another house, two bodies on a sofa clutched each other, while another, almost skeletonized, lay on the floor.

And everything stank.

Every time she emerged from a Pest house, she felt darkness and stench clinging to her, penetrating her clothes, infecting her breath with death.

The houses in Fallon belonged largely to people who came to the hills only for the summer. Clare hoped that these houses might be empty of bodies and full of stored food. And Fallon had a grocery store, a gas station, and a general store that stocked everything from toys to linens to camping equipment. It also had a yarn store and a basket outlet. Even before Pest, Clare had never understood the phenomenon of the basket outlet. But the other places—even the Yarn Barn—had potential.

There were animals everywhere in that sunlit morning. Clare thought that maybe there had never been so many wild animals in the world, or that soon enough that would be true. There were rustlings in the unmown lawns, and she startled three deer that were lying in the grass nearby—they bounded away, white tails held high like absurd semaphores. Bear left her side to pursue the deer, and, although she called him, although he stopped and looked back at her for a moment, a second later he was crashing through the fields after them. A startled fox ran in front of her and a covey of partridges burst into the sky. And everywhere there were rabbits—nibbling at the verge of a meadow, lying in the shade of the bushes. They would freeze until she was almost on them and then lollop, casually, into the deeper grass.

The world was thriving. And she felt pretty good. Not great. But pretty good.

She pulled her little wagon around the turn that led into the road that went into Fallon, that, she thought, stretched back and back until it joined the road to the city and back some more until it reached the place where they had abandoned the Toyota and taken the Dodge Avenger (what a stupid name) and even farther back into the doomed city itself.

She felt her mood darken; she had reached the entrance to the town, and there was a body in the middle of the road. She wished the person hadn’t died in the road. The smell, even outdoors, made her think of meat gone bad in a closed and broken freezer. The lips had drawn back from the corpse’s teeth, and the eyes were gone. She supposed the birds had plucked them out.

She wished Bear would return from chasing deer.

Once she had passed the body, she was on the main street of Fallon. Old newspapers scudded down the street. Clare dropped the handle of the wagon and caught one. It was wrinkled with water and stained with rusty blotches. The headline was ‘SitkaAZ13: The Disease and the Cured.’ The article was short, as if the reporter had been working against a demanding deadline, and it occurred to her that he had probably been working against the most demanding deadline of all. The piece mentioned the violence of the Cured. Clare looked down to the bottom of the article to see if this reporter had anything new to say, and, indeed, the very last line was the most telling of all:

Please come and get my baby daughter, Gwennie. I’m dying, but she only has the rash from SitkaAZ13. 1123 West Spring Street.

Clare looked at the date.

If no one had gone to find Gwennie, then Gwennie was dead.

Obviously, it had not been business-as-usual at the paper. It had not been business-as-usual anywhere. Clare noticed typographical errors, and she saw that the paper was blank on the other side. No mention of the man she had begun thinking of as the master-of-the-situation.

Perhaps the reporter alone had written and printed the last, the final, the evening edition.

In front of her, a few crows squabbled over carrion. One pecked at something ropy in the street; the other birds jockeyed with each other, waiting for their chance to get at what looked like a long string of rotting meat. Abruptly, the first bird swallowed the dangling lump. There was excited cawing, and then the birds flew off.