The Garden of Darkness (2 page)

Robin would not have been afraid. Clare knew that, back in the city, when the time had come, Robin would have faced whatever it was that took her down. Pest; an End-of-the-Worlder; a Cured; someone hungry.

When they reached Fallon, they were only two miles from their little country house. By then her father’s face was a strange and deep crimson. His cheeks and lips and eyes were slightly swollen, and his smile, when he tried to be encouraging, was lop-sided and forced. His lower lip was grayish and sagged on the left side. He had allowed Marie to drive the last stretch, which Clare did not take as a good sign.

Marie wanted him to rest for a while in Fallon.

“You gave me a scare, Paul,” Marie said. “But now you look better.” Clare looked at Marie, astonished by the magnitude of the lie.

It was Clare’s father who wanted to push on, but Clare knew that it didn’t make any difference anymore. Not for him. She loved her father dearly, and she would have loved to sink back into the comfort of denial. But Marie had already taken that route, and somebody needed to be vigilant and to cook the food and to try and keep the living alive. And, of course, to be prepared for the Cured, if any had left the rich scavenging of the city. Marie was not up to those things.

In the end, they spent the early afternoon in Fallon rather than moving on to their country house. Clare put together the kind of lunch she thought her father could stomach, while Chupi, on her shoulder, occasionally tugged at her hair. She was glad she had brought him.

“The two of you will come back to Fallon and search for supplies once we’ve settled in,” said her father. “I want to get to the house. We can rest there. There shouldn’t be any Cured this far from the city.” The words came out with effort.

“Daddy,” said Clare. She hadn’t called him Daddy in years.

He looked at her steadily. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to duck out on you, Clare,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Marie. “You’ll be fine.”

They walked. By the time they reached the house, even Marie didn’t try to deny the facts.

Her father had Pest. There was no mistaking it; his eyes were swollen almost shut, and he was flushed with fever. His Pest rash had bubbled up into ridges of blisters, and there was blood in the corner of his mouth. Marie quickly made up the double bed so that he could lie down.

“He can be all right if we’re careful,” said Marie when he was settled in the bedroom, and she and Clare had gone to the living room to talk.

“But there’s nothing we can do,” said Clare.

“Rest, liquids, aspirin. That’s what he needs,” her stepmother said.

“And then he’ll die anyway.” Clare wanted to shake Marie.

“Don’t you say that,” said Marie. “Just don’t you say that.”

“They all die,” said Clare flatly.

Marie slapped her.

“There’s always been a hard streak in you,” Marie said. With the slap, Chupi had flown across the room. Now he returned to Clare’s shoulder. The slap stung, but it occurred to Clare that time might reveal something rather different inside her. Not a hard streak. Not a hard streak at all.

“I would love to wring that bird’s neck,” said Marie.

“You don’t have the guts,” said Clare.

On the second day that he had full-blown Pest, her father managed to get out of bed and walk to a chair. Marie looked almost cheerful at that, but, as he leaned on Marie’s shoulder and staggered towards the chair, Clare saw that her father’s face was a welter of ropy lines, a perverse road map towards death.

Clare remembered when they had all been hopeful, when, encouraged by television and radio broadcasts, they had been invited to believe that a cure for Pest existed. It had been early days then. It wasn’t long before everyone knew that the Cure didn’t work. Most who received it died anyway, and even when the Cure did arrest the progress of Pest, it turned humans into something monstrous. The Cure drove them mad.

The Emergency Broadcasting System didn’t mention monsters when the word went out not to take the Cure. The Emergency Broadcasting System referred to ‘unfortunate side effects’ and ‘possible instability.’ By then, Clare and her best friend Robin knew the truth: the Cured were violently insane. They would kill the living and eat the dead. Despite a certain amount of exaggeration, by the time all the texting and Tweeting and Skyping and Facebooking and YouTubing came to a halt, everyone was pretty well informed.

Once he was in his chair, Clare’s father looked up at her. The skin around his eyes and mouth still looked swollen, but the flush of fever was gone.

“I feel better,” he said. And Clare thought that maybe it really would turn out all right. Maybe he would be the one person in the whole world to beat Pest. Then he pulled her close.

“I think that maybe you’re going to be the one to make it,” he said to Clare. “Get supplies. Dig in when winter comes.”

“What about me?” asked Marie.

“I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “But Clare will care for you at the end.”

It was clear from Marie’s face that this was not what she had expected.

“What a thing to say,” she said. Clare wondered which part had offended Marie. She also realized that it was true—if it came to it, she would care for her stepmother.

An hour later, her father collapsed. Supported by Marie, he staggered to his bed. His skin looked papery and febrile; he began raving in a low and desperate tone. Marie stood and stared. It was Clare who pulled up the covers and put a cool wet compress on her father’s head.

Clare was struck by the colossal indifference of the disease. Pest didn’t care that her father was a famous writer. Clare remembered that he used to joke that being famous meant that he could, finally, put a comma anywhere he damn well pleased. But commas didn’t matter anymore. And Clare thought it would probably be a long time before she read a new book.

Her father never got up again; he was too weak to move. Sometime during the afternoon the pustules from the Pest rash burst, and Clare mopped up the red and yellow fluid without saying anything. Near the end, Clare tried to spoon a little chicken bouillon between her father’s chapped lips. He gave her a wrecked smile. Then he died.

Marie stood in the doorway, weeping, which annoyed Clare.

“We should bury him,” Clare said, but she doubted they had the strength. And when Clare looked up at her stepmother, she noticed the beginning of a rosy glow on her face.

“We’ll cope,” said Marie. “We’ll get through this. Right, Clare?” As she spoke, Clare saw swollen lips and eyelids. The Pest rash had crept up Marie’s neck and deepened to an angry red. There were blisters on her throat.

They weren’t going to be able to cope at all. Clare knew better. Marie probably had no more than three days. People generally didn’t last longer than that.

Her father’s body remained on the bed; a fetid smell filled the room, but Clare didn’t have the strength or the time to do anything about it—open the windows, try to move the body. Marie needed her right away. Clare unfolded the sofa bed in the living room, covered it with the only clean sheet she could find—one with a pattern of bluebells and roses—and helped her stepmother lie down. The cheerful sheet seemed to mock them both.

Clare tended her stepmother as best she knew how, as if her ministrations could make up for all the dull anger she had felt towards Marie after the marriage to her father. She put wet washcloths on Marie’s wrists and neck; she brought her stepmother water and aspirin and more water and more aspirin. Lesions began to streak Marie’s face and more pustules began to form on her neck. At the end of the second day she got up and, without a word, lurched into the bedroom where Clare’s father lay. Marie lay down next to her husband, oblivious to the smell in the room, and so Clare tended her there. Unlike her husband, Marie was never entirely lucid again.

On the evening of the third day, she died.

She died with her eyes wide open. Clare tried to shut those staring eyes by passing her hand over Marie’s face the way people did in movies, but it didn’t work.

Then Clare curled up at the foot of their bed; she waited in the bedroom for a long time for someone to come. Because that’s what happened when you were a kid—even when you were a fifteen-year-old kid. When your parents died, someone came.

Later, on Sander’s Hill, Clare blinked in the strong light as Chupi pecked at the ground around her. She wondered if there was a lot of dying going on in the city that day. Clare knew that she was infected with Pest—the rash was enough to prove that. She knew that she was going to die of it, too. Eventually. She might even have a couple of years left, but, according to the scientists, she wasn’t going to live to adulthood. That’s what they had all said, all those scientists who were now dead. Those scientists had called delayed-onset of the disease the ‘Pest Syndrome.’ Syndrome. On a triple word score in Scrabble, it was seriously useful vocabulary.

In its own weird way, Clare thought the link between Pest and adolescence sounded logical. Adolescence had always been a bag of goodies: complexion problems, mood swings, unrequited love and now, Pest.

Her thoughts came back to the problems at hand. It was high summer. Not a good time to keep dead bodies above ground.

And if Clare couldn’t bury them—and she was sure the task was beyond her—she was going to have to go elsewhere. She was going to have to leave her father and Marie to the forces of time and nature, both of which, it seemed, were sublimely indifferent to Clare’s emotional state.

But it seemed to Clare now that she could deal with the grandeur of indifference, the blind workings of the universe. This was not the time for petty gods or the Thunder-roarer; death was insidious, irrational, arbitrary; now was the time of the beetle and the worm. And, for better or for worse, because there was no one else, it was her time too.

PEDIATRICS

I
N THOSE LAST
days, before it all broke down, he left his lab to work in the wards. They all thought he was a great humanitarian, but the truth was, he enjoyed watching SitkaAZ13 close-up. The disease, under a microscope, looked plump and innocent—right before it would enter a red blood cell and, in the metaphor his mind constructed, scatter the cell’s constituent limbs while feeding off its bloody heart.

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.