The Garden of Darkness

So elegant. He wished he had developed it himself—the virus was a wonderful world-cleanser. He wondered if someone really had spliced it together, or if the virus were just a natural consequence of too many species sharing the same niches. A vampire bat sucked on a monkey and then shat on a coca fruit that was picked by a farmer. Or maybe it had gone down some other way. But it most certainly had gone down.

The patients came in a steady stream now, and most of the pediatric patients were referred to him. He liked to look at the nurses looking at him as he developed a rapport with his soon-to-be-dead young patients. His manner was perfect; he gained the children’s confidence and then he watched them die.

Some of them had lovely eyes.

The waste.

He had read the articles (and many of the articles he had written himself), and although the journals were now largely defunct, shut down by the pandemic, he knew a great deal about SitkaAZ13. Out there were pediatric patients who, although they had the Pest rash, resisted the onset of the full-blown disease. He wanted to find them. The world would soon be almost empty; it would be ripe for a new creation; that creation would come from those resistant child-patients.

He faced a girl called Jenny. She was obviously not resistant; lesions marked her throat and face.

“Hello, Jenny,” he said. “I don’t need to look at your file. I can see you’re a good girl, a caring daughter, just by looking in your eyes. I bet your parents are proud of you.”

“They’re dead.” Her voice was dull, flat. “My brothers too. I had to leave them in the house—no-one answered when I called for help. They’re turning more and more dead.”

“Admit her,” he said to a nurse. Then he turned to Jenny again. “We’ll see your parents and brothers are taken care of, but right now, we’re taking care of you. All right, honey? You’re not going to need to worry any more.”

She looked up at him with eyes of infinite trust. He was, after all, the doctor.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

The nurse was watching him closely, and he knew word about his humanitarian bedside manner would spread. Why not? All the more pediatric cases would be sent his way. And he would rifle through their folders looking for resistant ones. And among them there would be resistant ones with the elusive double recessive genes he was seeking.

His cause was scientific. Not, perhaps, in the sense that the old world understood science. But he would build a new world. He had already purchased the place he would take all the suitable survivors he could find.

Land was going cheap.

When the folders came in, however, and when he looked them over, he realized he might not be able to be picky: so far, there were no resistant children at all, not at his hospital. The world was engaged in a massive dying.

He took precautions against SitkaAZ13. He would need to be careful. They were saying now that his cure didn’t work, that the side-effects were overwhelming, but when he applied the cure to himself, he didn’t feel any side-effects at all. Odd. Maybe the side-effects were already part of his constitution.

The hospital stopped admitting patients. As he went to the pediatric ward, he had to step around gurneys with patients strapped to them. They were in the hallways, and when he went to the cafeteria for something to sustain him, he saw that it, too, had become a staging area for SitkaAZ13 patients. He went to the vending machine for a candy bar, and there were gurneys there too. Pressed right up against the place he wanted to insert his dollar bill.

He moved the gurney.

“Please,” said one of the patients. “Can you get me some water?”

He was trying to squash a George Washington into the machine’s bill receptor, and finally, after several tries, he got the machine to take it.

“Of course,” he said.

He picked up his Diet Coke and went back to the pediatric ward.

He examined child patients wherever he found them, and when he was done, really no matter how sick they were, he gave them a lollipop. Most of them smiled, even if they were too sick to enjoy the candy; it was a comforting gesture, one reminiscent of the pre-SitkaAZ13 world. Like giving Scooby-Doo bandaids to little ones.

Soon other doctors fled. As he indefatigably and patiently made his rounds, he became hospital legend.

And, again, why not?

Meanwhile, somewhere out there were the resistant ones. And surely among them—he tried not to be excited, but it was a thrilling thought—were his little blue-eyed girls.





CHAPTER TWO





THE OLD WORLD DIES





LOOKING BACK, IT seemed to Clare that the breakdown of high-tech devices should have given her the biggest clue that nothing was ever going to be the same again. Take away electricity, and one could light candles and, eventually, get a generator going. Take away Google, take away the contributors to Wikipedia, take away all that, and one was taking away the world as Clare knew it.