The Garden of Darkness (19 page)

The unicorn pen that Mirri thought she had lost. One of the tortoiseshell combs that Clare sometimes used to control her hair. Jem’s pocket flashlight. She saw that there were other things there as well. Toys, bits of cloth, a pocketknife, a silver ring Clare thought she had misplaced.

“She was looking out for all of us,” said Clare. “Not just Mirri. All of us.”

They stood, mute.

Then, quietly, Mirri gathered up the little objects; Clare helped her. They walked back to the house.

Behind them the barn loomed like a cathedral.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

MOOSE

I
T SNOWED IN
the night, but not enough to keep them from leaving. In the morning, Mirri put some more rocks on her mother’s grave. Jem carved all their initials on the inside of the front door. Clare caught Sarai putting some more books into her backpack, which were going to add substantially to the weight, but she said nothing, instead transferring them to her own when Sarai wasn’t looking.

Right before they set out, Jem emptied Mirri’s pack to see if anything could be discarded. He had worried that her pack was too heavy. What he discovered was that the bottom of Mirri’s pack was filled with Pretty Ponies, her favorite unicorn footie pajamas, a copy of
The Secret Garden,
a seashell jigsaw puzzle and the Old Maid playing cards. Clare watched from the doorway, wondering how this was going to play out.

“Mirri,” Jem said. “You know better. That space could be used for food.”

“Don’t you want me to have
any
stuff?”

Clare watched Jem debate with himself.

“All right,” he said finally. “All right for now.”

“Wuss,” whispered Clare as he came over to her.

“You try saying ‘no’ to Mirri.”

“Well,” Clare said. “At least we have enough food to get to the next stop.”

“I just hope we find fresh supplies along the way. I don’t want us to get beriberi.”

“You worry about everything.”

“Or rickets.”

“I
like
rickets,” said Mirri. “They chirp like hoarse birds.”

“That’s
crickets
,” said Sarai. “Rickets makes your legs fall off.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Jem. “Quit stalling and let’s go.”

Jem took the lead. At the end of the long driveway, he stood for a moment before turning left. They would pass through Fallon and then resupply themselves in the city, where it would be easy enough to pick up the I-80 to Herne Wood.

As they stepped onto the road, Jem abruptly laughed and said, “Well. Now we’re off to see the Wizard.”

“I just hope that he isn’t a little man behind a big curtain,” said Clare.

“The Master has to have the cure,” said Jem. “Why wouldn’t he have the cure?” Clare was going to respond lightly, and then she saw the grim resolution in Jem’s dark green eyes.

Bear suddenly ran out ahead of them, snuffed at the air, and then fell back to Clare.

They passed the skeletonized remains of the Cured that Mirri’s mother had killed. Now they were at the farthest point of their scavenging area.

They walked.

Shadows began to creep down the road in front of them, and when they found a house set back from the road and with no dead smell to it, they stopped for the night. Clare and Jem searched the house for signs of other occupants, but the place was empty. No dead. No Cured. No living children.

They made a big nest in the living room out of comforters and blankets, and, before the light was entirely gone, Clare got a fire going in the woodstove. She looked at their nest and suddenly felt bone-tired. Mirri looked unhappy.

“How’re the feet?” Clare asked.

“Don’t know,” said Mirri. “I can’t get my shoes off.”

“That’s not good.” She saw that Mirri’s ankles were swollen. “Does it hurt?”

“Yes,” said Mirri. “It hurts like a
dog
.”

Clare elevated Mirri’s feet and massaged her ankles until the swelling started to dissipate.

The next morning, Mirri’s feet showed minimal signs of swelling. They stopped early for lunch at a place where the road was bordered by trees. Under their shade, a light coating of snow covered the ground, and Clare thought she could make out deer tracks.

Bear went to investigate.

Jem shook out a tarp for them to sit on, set up the tiny camping stove and started heating up some Spam. Mirri lay on her back with her ankles in the air, just in case. Sarai read one of her precious books. Clare sat with Jem.

“You know what’s weird?” she asked.

“What’s weird?” He used his pocketknife to cut the Spam into small blocks.

“They’re out there. Kids. If we survived, there have to be others. But where are they?”

Jem looked at her seriously. “They’re hiding. Or making their way to the Master. Or maybe a lot of them just couldn’t make it in the post-Pest world. Accidents happen all the time, and there aren’t any more doctors.”

Clare leaned against Jem. He was warm.

“God, I hate Spam,” she said.

Bear loped towards them, and Clare started as she saw the trail of bright red blood he left in the snow. When he reached her, she searched through his fur for an open wound, but found nothing. His muzzle, however, was covered with clots of blood and tissue.

“It’s not his blood,” Jem said.

“Is he all
right
?” Mirri asked.

“He probably killed something,” said Clare. “He has to eat, too.”

“It looks like he killed something big,” said Jem.

“Maybe a deer?” asked Clare.

“Maybe.”

“I bet he couldn’t eat a
whole deer
,” said Mirri.

Clare and Jem looked at each other.

“Fresh meat,” said Clare.

After putting away the food, they followed Bear’s trail, the dots of bright blood stark against the white of the snow. Where the snow had melted, it was harder to follow the trail, but the further they got, the more blood marked the ground. Bear quietly followed Clare, who kept him close.

Soon they found the carcass. Bear had pulled out the entrails and gorged on the soft parts of the animal. The animal’s fur was grey, and it had outlandish, peculiar antlers.

“What
is
that?” asked Mirri.

“It’s a moose,” said Jem. “And I have no idea how Bear brought it down.”

“It’s enormous,” said Sarai.

“I suppose now we drag it with us,” said Mirri. “But it seems kind of
big
.”

“It’s too big,” said Jem. “We’ll have to cut it up and take part of it. I brought a knife, but it’s not very sharp.” Jem studied the moose, and Bear watched him with his yellow diamond eyes.

“How do we get at the
steaks
?” Mirri asked.

“We need to pull back the pelt to get at the meat underneath,” said Jem.

Clare looked at him as if he were speaking Esperanto.

“But first,” he added. “We need to cut its throat to drain out any blood that might be pooling. Clare, why don’t you take Mirri and Sarai someplace?”

“You’ve got to be
kidding
,” said Mirri.

“I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” said Sarai.

“How do you know how to do all this?” asked Clare.

“I went hunting with my brother. Hated it. At the time, I wanted to throw up while he was dressing the kill. But this time it’s different.
I’m
different.”

Michael had always said that the school chess players, championships or no, were nerds, and that nerds didn’t do anything physical. Like play football.

Clare wished Michael were here now to see this.

And then she realized, with some confusion, that this was a very different way of wanting Michael than anything she had felt before.

After he slit the throat of the moose, Jem slipped the knife between the pelt and the body.

“Now we all pull,” he said, and, with some effort, the pelt began to peel away. When they were finally done, they had two haunches of moose and a slab of fatty meat from its chest. Crows watched them from the trees.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Jem. “I want to be settled in somewhere before dark.”

The meat was heavy and bloody, and soon they were bloody too. Mirri pushed a strand of hair from her face and left a smear. Jem’s shirt was soaked through, a solid red, and his hands were covered with drying blood. He tried to wipe them in the patches of snow, but that made them quickly numb and cold. Clare tried to warm his hands with her own, but it did nothing except smear the blood onto hers.

“There’s something Lady Macbeth-ish about this,” said Jem.

“Ninth grade is kind of young for
Macbeth
,” said Clare. “I’m surprised.”

“My mother used to read Shakespeare aloud to me at night when I was very small. She thought it would improve my mind.”

“That must have been pretty dreary.”

“It was absolutely terrifying. After
Macbeth
I slept under my bed for a week. I mean it.”

“I was wondering,” said Mirri. She stopped. She looked at what they had culled of the carcass as the others waited for her to go on. “Once
people
are dead, do they still
count
? Or are they just lost in a pile of bodies, in the thousands of bodies, in the millions of bodies?”

They stared at her.

“What I mean,” she said, “is that we buried my mother and we remember her. But what about all the others? Are they just
nothing
?”

“I don’t like the question,” said Sarai.

“Nobody’s nothing,” said Clare. “Nobody. I mean it.”

“How do you
know
?” asked Mirri.

“I just know.”

As they were trudging back to the camp with the meat, they saw, half covered by leaf litter, the partially skeletonized body of a man. Clare stopped long enough to make a tiny cairn out of pebbles.

“Your thoughts?” asked Jem.

“That I could almost weep over the amount of meat we had to leave behind,” said Clare, turning away from the cairn.

“I meant about the body.” Jem seemed disturbed. “Because that’s all it is. Just another body. Mirri’s right. In the end, we’re nobody.” Clare put a hand on his shoulder, but it was Mirri who had the last word.

“I don’t think that anymore,” said Mirri. “You’re forgetting, Jem. Clare said that
everybody
counts. Everybody. And Clare would know. Because she’s Somebody.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

VISITORS

T
HE HOUSE WAS
small and cozy. Outside, pumpkins rotted in the remains of a large garden, the black rinds caved in. Brown stalks of corn rustled in the rising wind. Mirri found one perfect cherry tomato that must have escaped the frost by being buried in leaves. She gave it to Sarai, who gave it to Jem, who gave it to Clare, who gave it back to Mirri, who popped it in her mouth.

This time they picked the smallest bedroom for their nest.

The other bedroom was occupied, but before they unpacked, Clare and Jem rolled the body into sheets, took it out back and sprinkled dirt on it. The ground was too hard for any real digging.

“It’s too much like taking out the trash,” Jem said.

“We can have a funeral,” said Clare. “Mirri will love it.”

And so they did. Mirri made up some tributes. Clare thought that it was not unlike allowing a small child to make a ceremony out of flushing a goldfish, but she kept those thoughts to herself. She had been the one to say it as they were walking through the woods: that body was Somebody.

Later that evening they had the moose steaks, and the steaks did not disappoint. They were gamey and strong, tough but delicious, and challenged the mouth in a way that food from a can never would.

“It’s like eating Mother Nature,” said Mirri.

“That’s a really disturbing image,” said Jem.

“I kind of know what she means,” Clare said.

“Can I have some more?” asked Sarai.

Later that evening, Jem found a chess set. The board was outsized with large pawns and knights and kings and queens—pieces that fit nicely in the hand. The bishops all wore different frowns. The castles were many-turreted.

Jem challenged Clare. She sat down to play with great misgivings—Jem was, after all, on the chess team; he had almost won at the nationals and she doubted she could give him a good game. But when she moved her first piece, he looked up at her, startled and happy.