The Garden of Darkness (4 page)

When she got back to the Loskey place, Clare sat for a moment while Chupi hopped about in his cage. She opened her shirt and looked down at her Pest rash. She was infected, and yet her father had bet on her survival.

She went to the kitchen and opened a jar of pickles and chewed, thoughtfully.

A
N HOUR BEFORE
the electricity cut out, a single broadcast came though on the television. Robin and Clare couldn’t know it, but this was the last television broadcast they were ever to see.

“I am master of the situation,” a man in a white lab coat said. “All the adults are going to die except me. But if you’re alive, then you’re probably a child, and I can help you. You don’t have to be taken by Pest, now or ever. I can cure you. Once all the sick are dead, I’ll reveal my location. Tune in to your radio.”

“What do you think?” asked Robin.

“You can’t possibly believe him,” said Clare.

“He’s still alive,” said Robin. “Why not believe him? What else do we have to believe?”

“We could believe that some adults are going to survive.”

“Everyone says all the adults are going to die, Clare,” said Robin. “My parents died. Example A.”

“My parents are fine,” said Clare.

Robin looked at Clare contemplatively.

“I think this master-of-the-situation should be part of our plan,” she said.

“We don’t have a plan,” said Clare. “Our plan is my father and Marie.”

“I just meant that he could be Plan B,” said Robin.

C
LARE RAN HER
hand lightly over her rash.

Plan B.

That night, the Loskey’s double bed looked too big and exposed. Clare slept in the closet, curled in Michael’s letter jacket, Chupi’s cage above her.

At first Clare couldn’t sleep. She realized that she would have to learn to be alone. Clare, not for the first time, missed Robin terribly. And she also knew with certainty that she was never, in the course of her life, going to find out what had happened to her.

As Clare finally began to doze, she wondered if all the wild animals had died, too. But the next morning, when she left the Loskey place for another trip back to the house of the dead, Clare saw, brilliant in the sunshine, an enormous stag browsing in the cabbage patch. He raised his head and seemed to look right through her, as if she weren’t there, as if she were no more than a ghost of the past.

CHAPTER FOUR

AND THE OLD WORLD WAS GONE

C
LARE SLEPT FOR
twelve hours, this time in the double bed, and when she woke, the covers were sweat-soaked and tangled around her. Her dreams had been terrifying, and she rubbed her face hard, checking to see if the marks of Pest had begun to manifest. They had not. She had to pee and discovered, much to her disgust, that there was a blockage in the toilet. The plunger was useless. She tried pouring a bucket of water into the tank and then flushing, but the toilet immediately overflowed. Clare fled the bathroom.

She went to the kitchen and ate a can of tuna fish. When she filled Chupi’s feed bowl, she noted that he looked listless. She took him out of the cage and put him on her shoulder, and he perked up a bit and pecked at her earring and then pulled at her hair. When she put him back, he immediately tucked his head under his wing. Chupi didn’t like change; Clare wished she could block out the world as easily. She sat at the rough table and started making lists of things to do. Lists kept her mind from the still forms under the bedclothes in the other house. And from the emptiness that was Robin’s absence. And from the thought of Michael dead. She wrote:

Food

Water

Things for winter

Fix toilet or

Dig Latrine

Then, with a sigh, she added ‘Tampons.’ And, after that, she added ‘Tylenol.’

That afternoon, Clare went to Sander’s Hill, the one place from which the city was clearly visible. She had taken
Jane Eyre
, and she also took Chupi, who liked to peck at the margins of the book, leaving behind holes that seemed full of meaning.

The city below her was rotting, but it wouldn’t rot forever. Clare pictured the days and weeks and months to come. She envisioned nature creeping through the streets and covering the buildings like a blanket.

When she got back to the Loskey’s, Clare left the door of the cage open, so Chupi could fly around the house if he chose.

Two days passed and Clare retrieved her list of things to do from behind some sour-smelling cans in the kitchen. Clare read it and put it back behind the cans.

She opened a jar of brown stuff that smelled nutritious but had lost its label and spread it on a stale cracker. Then Clare had a few spoonfuls of grape jelly from the preserves she found in the root cellar. She washed it down with two Cokes and went outside. The air around the shack was becoming rank, faintly skunky, and it occurred to Clare, as she went back inside, feeling slightly sick, that there were diseases other than Pest.

Her stepmother would have kept the cabin clean; her father would have dug a latrine right away. And it occurred to her that, perhaps, she had been a little spoiled in the life before Pest came.

Things had come easily to her. Clare had been hugely popular in high school—so popular that no one cared that she hung out with an oddball like Robin. They didn’t know that, really, she was an oddball too. She just knew how to play the game, and she played it because it was easier than walking around exposing what was within. She had been on the cheerleading squad; she had known what to wear and how to do her hair. Only Laura Sparks, beautiful and mean, was more popular. Now Clare was alone, and all her charm and her ability to do breathtaking back flips could do nothing to help her. Nor, she thought, could her steady habit of reading. Defoe’s
A Journal of the Plague Year
was like a joke in the face of Pest.

Clare found her list again and underlined ‘Dig Latrine,’ but she knew that underlining accomplished nothing. As the evening became chilly, she pulled Michael’s Varsity jacket tightly around her. Chupi seemed restless, and Clare thought that his new life must seem as strange to him as hers was to her.

As the light began to fade, she finally let herself think about Michael.

“W
E COULD BIKE
over to Michael’s and see if he’s back,” said Clare one evening.

“We could.”

Clare and Robin left the house at three in the morning. And it was like going out into Hell.

Fires burned in the street, and they heard howling and shrieking from somewhere in the city.

By the time they reached Michael’s, clouds covered the moon; a light drizzle had begun, and the bikes gleamed when Clare turned on her flashlight.

Michael’s house was dark. The door was open and hung at an angle. When they went inside, Robin just pointed. The body of Michael’s dog, Hammer, lay on the rug.

They found Michael in his room lying on his back, dead. Michael’s Varsity jacket was on the bed. Mindlessly, Clare picked it up and put it on.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said, blankly. “He and I were best friends.”

“You and I are best friends,” said Robin. “You and Michael were something else.”

Clare said nothing but pulled a sheet off Michael’s bed and covered his body. She wanted to embrace him, but Robin held her back.

“I’m always going to love him,” Clare said.

“Yeah,” said Robin. “But no hugs. He’s decaying. It’s like that story we read in English.”

“‘A Rose for Emily.’”

“Yeah. That.”

And at that moment, in the stinking apartment, with Michael dead in front of her, Clare had one of what Robin called her pretty-good-guesses (because neither of them believed in prescience). She saw herself in a garden, alone under a full moon, and someone was walking towards her.

C
LARE THOUGHT OF
the people behind boarded up windows, in the alleyways, in beds and on floors, lost to delirium in cars, all still engaged in the process of dying. By the time she had walked back to the cabin, it was dark. She hadn’t seen any Cured, but she locked down the cabin every night anyway.

It occurred to Clare that she could give up trying to make a life of it here: she could move from house to house, fouling them and then leaving when she had exhausted their larders. There was no one to care, no one to tell her to pull herself together.

She really needed to pull herself together.

Abruptly, Clare thought of her friend Mary. She, Robin and Mary had been close before Mary had moved to Canada. Clare wondered if perhaps Mary had lived, too. There was no reason in the world for Clare to think that she was the only one to have delayed-onset Pest. Maybe Mary was out there somewhere trying to get by, trying to survive.

Or maybe Mary had lived through Pest only to kill herself.

What an odd thought to have.

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE
they were all to leave for the country, Robin and Clare saw a lone woman walking the street in a long ball gown. She wore necklaces and bracelets and earrings that jangled and glittered in the moonlight. They watched her until she was gone.

Then the woman’s place was taken by people with lesions on their faces, parading through the streets in a macabre farewell to the world.

“It’s more than time to go,” Clare’s father said as they watched. Shortly after that, the streets were curiously empty. It was as if, in the face of disease, people had finally retreated into their houses, to hide out until they died.

F
NALLY
C
LARE DID
dig a latrine, but she did so only to then realize that she was eventually going to run out of food. When she had found the cans and preserves in the root cellar she had thought she could never run out. She had also found gardening tools, packets of seed, bags of dry corn, gallons of water, a bow and some arrows. The bow must have been Mr. Loskey’s; it was too taut for her to pull back.

It was as if the Loskeys had been preparing for some kind of apocalypse (and when it had come they had missed it). Clare, on the other hand, had survived the initial onslaught of Pest and now she had a choice: scavenge, clean up, shape up and brush her teeth. Or give up on life and just go to bed and die.

But her death would mean the death of Chupi, too, which didn’t seem fair. She went to change Chupi’s water, and she saw he wasn’t in his cage. He didn’t seem to be in the house, either. She opened the front door, just in case he had somehow flown to the porch as she had left for Sander’s Hill. As she stood in the doorway, he flew out of the living room and over her head. He perched on the tree in front of the cabin. He had been inside the whole time.

“Chupi.”

She went to the tree.

“Chupi.”

He behaved as if he couldn’t hear her. He flew to the copse of trees by the driveway. She followed, calling him, until he flew well beyond her. And then she simply stood and called and watched as Chupi flew from tree to tree until finally she stopped calling, and then she could no longer see him, and he was just something more that had moved beyond her horizon. And so the old world was gone.

CHAPTER FIVE

ON THE PASSENGER PIGEON

S
OMETIMES
C
LARE SAT
on the porch with a pair of binoculars and scanned the trees for Chupi. She didn’t expect to see him; it was just comforting to look. Clare thought she was learning an essential lesson about life: post-Pest, one’s world just got smaller and smaller. Everything one loved went away.

At least she had the garden. In the garden where she had seen the stag, there were pumpkins the size of basketballs, monstrous zucchini and magic wands of summer squash. There were cornstalks and cabbages, a yellowing vine of cherry tomatoes and a batch of sprawling cucumbers. Every day she did a little work in the garden, and it was the only time she came close to feeling fine. She wasn’t sick. She wasn’t well. But at least the Pest rash wasn’t spreading.