The Garden of Darkness (17 page)

A
S
W
ILL WENT
to sleep that night—late, later than his parents, late enough that the moon had set—he thought about the Pest Wall. It was supposed to keep them safe. Walls kept things out. But his nine-year-old brain moved on a different plane than that of his parents: he knew about monsters under the bed; he knew about creatures with long fingers that lurked in the closet. He knew that there was no point in building a wall if the Thing were already inside. He knew, as he drifted into sleep, that it was already too late.

J
EAN DIED LAST
. Will had heard that most young children died directly of Pest, that very few were delayed onset. He held her and tried to feed her smashed peaches, but she wouldn’t eat. Her face was no longer soft and round, but had been twisted by the torc of Pest into the face of a stranger. She died in his arms. He buried her in the back yard, next to the grave of Rosie, their dog. He scraped his hand on the handle of the shovel as he broke into the hard dirt, and for the first time in his life, he used a swear word.

His parents were too big and heavy to bury.

Now an orphan, Will wandered from house to house, eating what he could find, avoiding the places where the smell was too bad. Lovell was a ghost town. He was afraid almost all of the time—of the dead, of the black crows that seemed to be everywhere. He feared the silence of the night, and he feared the strange noises he occasionally heard. The scrape on his hand began to throb, and he felt it keeping time with his heart.

Eight days later, as he lay dying, feverish, his hand three times its normal size, he thought that Jean was snuggled in his arms, and that she wanted her smashed peaches. Her face was normal again, and he reached out to stroke it.

Hannah

T
HEY TOOK HER
to the hospital when she first showed signs of Pest. There were about twenty other people in the waiting room. She couldn’t tell what was wrong with most of them, but one man in a white T-shirt had blackened blood down his front, and a woman wearing pink glitter eye shadow held her arm at a strange angle. The nurse hurried Hannah deeper into the hospital right away when she saw the lesions on her face.

“You’re lucky,” said the doctor. “We just got the Cure in today. I’ve already treated over thirty people. I don’t think we’re going to have enough patches, but folks can always go to the city.”

Once home, her parents tucked Hannah into bed. She rubbed the patch behind her ear thoughtfully.

“I think I feel better,” she said.

“Don’t touch the patch,” said her mother. “Leave it alone.”

Time passed, and the great dying began. Apparently, the Cure didn’t work for most people. Hannah’s parents went to the hospital for their own patches, but even with the patches, her father died two days after he first spiked a fever. Her mother had seemed all right, and then, a week after the death of Hannah’s father, she came down to breakfast flushed and feverish. She insisted on cooking something for Hannah.

Hannah watched television and saw the stations turn to snow, one by one.

As she did, Hannah heard something fall in the kitchen. It might have been a pot or a pan, but the sound was really too soft and low for that.

Her attention was arrested by the television. One station was left, and it showed a man who claimed to have a different kind of cure. He was inviting children to go and see him.

Her mother hadn’t made a noise since Hannah had heard the sound in the kitchen.

Maybe Hannah would go and get the new cure. This one was making her feel strange.

Later, she went into the kitchen.

Her mother was on the floor and didn’t get up, and Hannah’s world became even more crooked. Time passed. She couldn’t remember things. Once Hannah woke up enough to look down at the food she was holding in her hands. Meat. Meat was good, but this was raw. Provenance unknown. She liked that word—provenance. It had been the hardest word on the last spelling test. But she didn’t think there would ever be any more spelling tests.

One day she realized what it was she was feeling. It was a sensation of sinking back into herself, although what she found there was odd. She had not known herself, it seemed, at all. Now, pain was like an armchair. Hate, like a comfortable pillow.

Hannah was Cured.

Dante

K
ELLY 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

T
REY’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.

“I found a can of Dinty Moore,” said Roger from the kitchen.

“Thanks,” said Trey. “There’s still not enough snow on the road to get out of here.” No need to speak. The silence was long. Then—

“We could ski,” said Roger.

Trey walked into the kitchen, disconcerted.

“What about supplies?” asked Trey. “And wood? And sleeping bags and a tent? We can’t just waltz down to Denver.”

“Maybe we can.”

“I’m the big brother. And I say we can’t.”

But they both knew that Trey, as always, would give way to Roger.

The first day they skied for six hours until the dark was on them, and they took shelter in an old lean-to that, at some point, had probably sheltered a horse. They doubled the sleeping bags and shared the warmth. Trey’s cold was worse, and by midnight he started in with chills and fever.

“We’ve got to get off the mountain,” said Roger. He had his arm around his brother, trying to stop him from shaking with cold.

They didn’t ski far the next day. One moment they were careening down a steep hill, the next, Trey took a spectacular fall and lay shivering in the snow. His arm was broken; a tip of the bone poked through the skin.

Roger wrapped up the arm while Trey lay in a delirium of fever and pain.

“I can’t move,” said Trey.

“You can,” said Roger. Roger half-dragged, half-walked his twin to a stand of pines that offered a little shelter. He put down sprays of fir to keep the sleeping bags off the ground.

Sometime in the night, Trey died.

Roger held Trey as Trey grew cold. The chill wind was coming in off the mountain. Roger decided to stay with Trey until sunrise, but when the sun had cleared the trees, Roger still hadn’t left the sleeping bag. He was cold. The wind was bitter now. He was very cold.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE LEAVING

D
ARK NIGHTS, AND
a little snow. Winter coming. Time to move on. They were eating the last of the cans of Chef Boyardee that Clare had scavenged what seemed like years before. Nobody minded the idea of leaving anymore: Darian had poisoned the house, the meadow.

Still, inertia reigned. Finally Jem, with Clare’s help, gathered all the backpacks and little wagons in the living room. But the packing effort was, at least at first, wildly unsuccessful. Sarai kept trying to hide a great heap of her books in her little pack. Jem would find them and fish some of them out. While Sarai took this like a stoic, Mirri became weepy when she found she couldn’t take all of her Pretty Ponies and her Breyer horses and her unicorns. She wanted her whole collection.

“We have too much stuff holding us back as it is,” said Jem reasonably.

“I love my stuff,” said Mirri.

Clare watched the negotiations with Mirri and Sarai from a distance. They were still, when it came right down to it, Jem’s little girls. Clare stared at the flames in the fireplace, and in the fire she saw one of her old dreams unfolding. She saw a young girl walking towards her out of the woods.