The Garden of Darkness

Mirri had never said a word because she would not, could not, betray her mother.

With a terrible strength Mirri’s mother knocked over Darian and clawed at his face before locking her hands around his throat. The tip of something was protruding from the back of her dress, and Clare saw blood splattering Darian’s shirt. But it wasn’t his blood. Still the woman would not relinquish her grip. As Clare watched, unable to move, blood permeated the back of the blue dress in ring after pulsing ring, all emanating from the tip of what Clare now realized was Darian’s knife.

But Mirri’s mother didn’t let go, not even when Darian ceased moving. Only when he had been still for a long time did she roll away and lie on her side, her breath noisy and strange, as if she were choking. Before Jem could reach her, her breathing stopped, and all that was left to hear was the sudden raucous noise of crows taking to the air.

“Mama.” Mirri ran to her mother. After a time, Clare pulled Mirri away from her mother’s side and took her into her arms.

“It’s all right,” she said, knowing that it would never be all right.

Jem pulled the knife out of Mirri’s mother and managed to close her eyes. In death, she looked calm. Sane even. Clare thought that maybe she had been living just long enough to take care of her daughter one last time.

“She saved me,” said Mirri.

“Of course she did,” said Jem. “She gave you life twice.” Clare just held Mirri close; she smelled like blood and fear. Bear nuzzled both of them. For the first time, he let Mirri stroke him.

Jem was checking Darian’s body for a pulse, which they both knew he wouldn’t find. Then he sat back, startled.

“Look,” he said.

Leaning over Mirri’s head, Clare looked. Jem had pulled away Darian’s shirt, and she could see that there were pustules on his throat—very small ones, low down on his neck so that they hadn’t been visible before. And behind his ear was a small orange patch with the tiny marking ‘SYLVER’ on it.

So, thought Clare, this was why he kept his hair over his collar. He was covering up the unmistakable marks of Pest. He was a Cured all along.

“We let him sleep in the house,” said Clare.

“It doesn’t bear thinking about,” said Jem. Then he gently lifted the hair of the Cured-in-a-blue-dress so that Clare could see the patch behind her ear too.

“I thought the Cure was some kind of injection,” said Clare. “But it’s the patch-thing that keeps the disease from killing them.”

“And that makes them crazy,” said Jem.

“She never had a chance.”

“Let’s go. Sarai’s waiting.”

Mirri looked from Jem to Clare.

“Don’t worry, honey,” said Clare. “We’ll come back. We’ll bury the—your mother.”

“Her name was Dinah,” said Mirri.

“We’ll bury Dinah,” said Clare.

They walked back to the farmhouse slowly.

“Even after the Cure,” said Mirri, “my mother didn’t go bad.”

And Clare thought for more than a moment of how Dinah must have struggled to hang on to that small vestige of sanity that said to her ‘my child,’ that small vestige of self, salvaged from the very brink of death and madness.





WILL, HANNAH, DANTE, TREY, ROGER





IN CALIFORNIA, IN the Great Northwest, in the Heartland, in New England, in points North, in points South, the ones who had not died of Pest, the very few children left in the world, woke up as if from a dream—and looked around—and some of them found a space to survive, and very many of them did not.





Will





IN LOVELL, POPULATION 1,257, only small children and the elderly were exempt from building the Wall. Will kept his distance from the Wall but tried to help by cooking dinner in the evening. The work exhausted his parents, so Will put together the meal for his mother and father and his baby sister, Jean. Jean was easy to feed—she would eat any kind of Gerber’s as long as he started by feeding her the yellow smashed peaches. Will thought the yellow smashed peaches looked like something that came out of her diaper, but Jean slurped them up and left stains all over her bib. And his parents weren’t picky about what he put on the table. They were just happy to find the food there at the end of the day.

No one worked anymore, except on the Wall. And at night the people of Lovell took turns acting as sentries. Those who lived outside the Wall had been given a choice at the very beginning—move in to the center of Lovell, or stay out for good. The sentries had orders to challenge anyone approaching; they were to turn back all strangers with one warning. After the warning, they were to shoot. If the person approaching were a neighbor, an old friend, a relative, he or she got three warnings instead of one. The sentries were posted in pairs.

“The Calder woman is one of the sentries tonight,” said Will’s father. He bit into a sandwich. “I can’t picture her shooting anyone.”