The Garden of Darkness

KELLY HAD SAID Dante was timid, but that someday he would do some great good, and Kelly was his mother so she should know. Dante’s father probably hadn’t even noticed that his son was timid. He had moved away from Kansas, and he lived with a pretty woman Dante didn’t like. His father probably knew what circle of Hell Dante—the Italian poet, not his eleven-year-old boy—condemned the forgetful to, but he forgot Dante’s birthday anyway. His son’s birthday. Not the poet’s.

When Pest blossomed, his father didn’t call them. Perhaps he was dead; perhaps he was busy nursing the pretty woman. Dante tried to call his father when Kelly got sick, but there was no answer. Kelly was too sick to drive, and the phone at the hospital was busy, so Dante walked across town to get there, fearing that he would return to find Kelly dead.

Lawrence, Kansas was dying in a civilized fashion. There had been no looters, as there had been in other areas, and people had diligently painted large X’s on their doors when they had come down with Pest. As he walked, Dante passed X after X after X, and he wondered if there were still people walled up in the houses, or if they had finally run away, or if they had died, and, if they had died, if it had hurt.

It seemed to be hurting his mother. When Kelly could sleep, she moaned.

At the hospital, Dante couldn’t even get in the front doors. People were milling around the main entrance; they looked the way lepers looked in the movies. They looked like Kelly.

When he got back home, Kelly died, and he sat and waited for something to happen. Then he sat some more and cried for a while. He ate crackers for dinner and wondered what he was supposed to do with his mother’s body. He tried the telephone, but there was no longer any dial tone. All the television stations were off the air except for one that was broadcasting a rainbow pattern with the words PLEASE STAND BY on it.

Then he got up and went to the basement and got out an old radio that Kelly had given him when they spent one summer at the beach. He tuned to station after station, but all was static. He turned the volume way up, but there was still nothing. He was about to put it down when suddenly a station came in. It was so loud that he dropped the radio and cried out. Then he sat down and listened.

The broadcast he heard was on some kind of loop, and it was issuing an invitation—an invitation from a grownup who said he was master-of-the-situation. The man sounded calm.

Dante didn’t think ahead when he made the decision; he didn’t get a sleeping bag or tent, and he didn’t load up on food. He figured, rather vaguely, that there would be a lot of well-stocked houses between Lawrence, Kansas and his destination. He unpinned his map of the United States from the wall in his room and prepared to set off down the street towards the road that led to the highway. The states looked small on the map, but he had a feeling he had a long way to go.

Dante went out the front door of his brick house and then turned around and locked it. He didn’t miss his father, but he knew that he was locking Kelly away. Forever and ever and ever.

Then he set his foot upon the road.





Roger and Trey





TREY’S COLD WAS worse and they were out of DayQuil. It was that kind of morning.

And the snow kept blowing off the road. It was that kind of morning, too.

Trey wiped his nose on his parka. His mother would have hated that.

He stood on the road, worried about the snow. It had come early to Bailey, Colorado—but not in quantity enough to snowmobile down to the lower altitudes. As Trey watched, bare patches of black road emerged from the snow and then, as the wind became stronger, were covered up again. A snowmobile might hit the tarmac and flip without any warning at all.

Trey’s nose wouldn’t stop running. Usually he and Roger got colds at the same time, but this time Roger had been spared.

Trey was the older of the twins by twelve minutes. Roger had always been smaller and more vulnerable. He spent all his time reading or playing against himself at chess, but Trey never teased him. Trey admired the way his brother could concentrate, and he had been proud when Roger played chess in a national competition. Roger had quietly and efficiently put away almost all of his opponents. He had finally lost to a kid named Jem Clearey. The Clearey kid won the next few rounds, and then he lost too. Trey had been sorry. He felt that a kid who beat his brother should at least be the best in the nation.

Now Bailey, Colorado was like a mortuary; Colorado was given over to the Cured; it appeared that the whole nation was dead. This was no place for vulnerable people anymore—Trey was going to have to get Roger and himself out of the mess they were in.

When he opened the door to the house, the first thing he noticed was the warmth, the second was the smell of food.