The Garden of Darkness (5 page)

Clare was weeding the garden when she first heard the noise. It was a low sound, a snuffling sound, a growling sound. The kind of sound a large animal might make. The absurd thought that it was Pest itself, somehow embodied, took hold of her. She was overcome with terror.

The thing making the sound was big, that was certain. Very big.

The sound was coming from the area of the garden where the cabbages were starting to go to seed. She started to relax.
The stag
, she thought.
It’s a deer
. Deer liked cabbages.

That’s when she saw the dog—a dog big as a bear, steel blue, almost black, like the color of the gun her father had kept in his safe. For just a moment, they stared at each other across the wide expanse of green. Clare realized that, given the size of the dog, it made absolutely no difference that it was on the other side of the garden. She would never be able to outrun it.

It never even occurred to her to placate the animal by saying something like, “Good doggie! Good doggie!” The animal’s face was running with pus or foam, and it looked like it had never had an owner’s care in its life. It didn’t have a collar.

Clare knew the dog would kill her. She wondered, for a moment, how much it would hurt.

Clare ran.

She had once been on a nature hike with her cheerleading friends and a shy naturalist who explained with great seriousness that one should never run from a bear. Clare now strongly suspected the same thing applied to dogs, but it made absolutely no difference, and, besides, she almost made it to the cabin. But Clare made the mistake of slowing enough to turn and look over her shoulder. The dog was as enormous as she had thought and was coming for her with teeth bared.

Clare kept running. She was almost to the door.

Then she fell, heavily.

The dog pulled itself up, as if in surprise. Then it came on. The animal was heavier and bigger than she was—there was no chance that she would be able to overpower it. Clare was just starting to put a hand up to defend herself when it leapt at her. Its breath was rank, as if it had fed on corpses, and she felt teeth closing on her arm.

She stared up into the dog’s yellow eyes, eyes running with mucus, and at that moment she found herself thinking—strange as it was—about the stag she had seen in the honey light of a morning that now seemed long ago.

Without thinking, she blew into the dog’s nostrils.

“Bad dog,” she said.

One of her arms was trapped under the dog while its teeth were buried in the flesh of the arm that covered her throat. She had blown all the air out of her lungs with those two words, and now she couldn’t breathe in.

She felt the animal pause. Clare managed to free her pinned arm, and she used it to beat the dog on the side of the head. The dog shifted his weight, and suddenly she could take a breath.

“Bad dog,” she said again.

For a moment, Clare could feel the dog’s anger and hunger, and then, as if he felt her thoughts tangling up with his, the anger began to dissipate into confusion.

They stared into each other’s eyes. The dog lowered his eyes first. Then it slowly crept back off of Clare’s chest, whining. She gasped, gulping up air, and sat up.

“Dog,” she said. “I’m the boss of you.” It didn’t seem to matter that they were kindergarten words. She gave him a final cuff. The giant animal sat back on its haunches and then leaned forward and began to lick the wounds it had inflicted on her arm.

She was no longer afraid. She wanted to put her arms around his neck, but she knew it wasn’t time for that yet. Right now they were busy determining what their relationship would be now and forever.

Clare started to get to her feet, but the dog, with gentle enthusiasm, knocked her over in order to lick her hurt arm more thoroughly. Clare found herself wiping away the mucus from its eyes and mouth. The mouth that a moment before had been about to take her throat out. She was, suddenly, surprisingly, overcome by tenderness.

And she realized that it wasn’t just that she had found something instead of losing something more; she had done one better than that. She had been found.

C
LARE AND
R
OBIN
, in preparation for the trip to the country house, put freeze-dried food and other essentials in four knapsacks. If something happened to the car, they wanted to be able to keep on the move.

But sometime in the night, while Clare slept, Robin disappeared. In the morning, she was simply gone. Long after it was time to go, they waited for her, helplessly. Around them, the city seemed to be asleep; old newspapers and litter blew across their yard. Mrs. Hennie’s body still lay in the street.

But Clare knew, after the first hour, that Robin must be dead.

Later Clare was to think that she should have done or said something more as they left without Robin. Certainly she should have somehow known that the last seconds of her childhood were coming to an end, and that she would spend the rest of her life making up for her desertion.

A
STRING OF
saliva fell from the dog’s mouth onto Clare’s forehead.

“Yuck,” she said, as he drooled on her some more. “I thought you were rabid, but you’re just a mess.” She wondered where the dog had come from. Certainly it was larger than any city dog had a right to be. Perhaps his owners had lived in Fallon. The giant dog nosed at her again and then lay back to expose his belly.

“You’re like a bear,” she said. And that’s what she called him:
Bear
. She looked into his yellow diamond eyes, and she realized that he was going to be there for her at the end—though of what, she couldn’t yet say.

She walked from the garden back to the cabin with her hand on Bear’s neck. He had dog breath, she decided. Not corpse breath. After giving him a can of Spam, which he ate dubiously, she pulled all the burrs and briars and ticks out of his fur. He almost purred with pleasure. And she realized that she couldn’t help it—she loved this killer dog. More than that, something had passed between them. This killer dog loved her.

Then she thought of all those people who were probably dead. Robin. Mrs. Scherer, her piano teacher. Caroline and Maggie and Heather. Miss Hill, the most popular teacher in school, whose husband had died in the Vietnam war. Gail, at the art gallery. Larry Garr, her father’s editor. Mr. Highfil, the biology teacher, who went on and on about the importance of hand washing.

Hand washing had done nothing to stop Pest.

She thought about Michael. He had confided in her about everything. He was proud of her gymnastic abilities as a cheerleader. He was even proud of her straight A report card, which he seemed to find inexplicable.

But he hadn’t been in love with her. He had loved Laura Sparks, with her Angelina Jolie lips and her C+ report card and her Cliff Notes and her pep, which was always on tap.

Clare looked at Bear, who was dozing at her feet, and she thought about Robin’s Plan B. The man on the television. A master of the situation. A man with a real cure.

It might be worth living, if there were a real cure.

How many people needed to be left for there to be an actual human race anymore?

Clare had read in school about passenger pigeons, about the way they had darkened the sky for days at a time and made slick the earth with their guano. There had been billions of them. Billions. Then, when their populations had declined beyond the tipping point (and that was when there were still millions of them), Clare read that their numbers had simply dwindled until they had become extinct. She supposed it was like that with humans, too. Pest might have tipped them over the edge. There might be others like her, but there would be no more cities or schools, or, finally, people to think thoughts about passenger pigeons. The world would pass into another age.

Clare felt she should write some things down, maybe just because, as her father used to say, that’s what human beings did. So, with Bear walking beside her like an enormous mythical creature, she went slowly back to her own house where the paper was, where the pens were, where her father’s study waited.

Along the way, she picked some flowers.

When she got to the house, the stench wasn’t as bad as she had thought it would be. She left the flowers in front of her parents’ closed bedroom door. In her father’s study, she found a block of paper and a pen. Bear lay at her feet, and she rested her toes on him. Clare looked at her father’s prizes and degrees—he had always kept them in the country house and not in the city, although she wasn’t sure why. And then, with all her father’s diplomas hanging on the walls around her, with his Pulitzer Prize gleaming at her from his desk, she tried to write. About the Cured. About the stink that rose from the dead city. About the pandemic—she liked the word ‘pandemic’—that had thrown her into adulthood. Then she scratched everything out and started again.

She knew that whatever she wrote would be inadequate for the occasion, but she also knew that, anyway, there wouldn’t be any more Pulitzer Prizes given out anytime soon. So she just wrote what had been on her mind. She wrote in small print letters:

The last passenger pigeon was named Martha. She died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, and, after that, there weren’t any passenger pigeons ever again.

CHAPTER SIX

THE MOMENT THAT DETERMINED

T
HE NIGHTS WERE
getting colder. She and Bear sat on Sander’s Hill companionably, her arm around the great dog. She opened a new block of paper and started a fresh page with the heading, ‘Getting Ready For Winter.’ She was preparing to go into Fallon, but she wanted the trip to be as fast and efficient as possible. “A surgical strike,” Michael would have called it. A few leaves drifted into her hair as she prepared to write ‘gloves,’ but the pen remained poised above the page. She was deeply uninterested in gloves, or scarves, or boots, or going into Fallon. A few rogue leaves might have been falling, but winter still seemed far away. Maybe she was fooling herself, but it was hard to think ahead. The light was a syrupy golden morning glow that highlighted Bear’s black fur. In the long grass, blue cornflowers and tattered Queen Anne’s Lace still held sway. Instead of writing ‘gloves,’ she started to doodle.

She found herself writing Michael’s name, and soon it curled down the margin, dark and important, underlined, shaded. Delicate tendrils of climbing vines wound up onto the page from the ‘h’ and the ‘l,’ while Clare pictured Michael going ahead of her into the darkness, scouting out the black territories, finding a final haven where it would matter how much she had loved him. Where they could be together forever. Together Forever. And then she found she couldn’t really invest much in the fantasy. It was too much like Barbie and Ken in heaven.

Besides, her father had taught her that there was no afterlife, an idea he had tried to dress up by talking about becoming one with the universe and scattering one’s atoms back into primal matter. But Clare had seen a lot of rotting bodies since Pest had taken over, and she now recognized that he had been a romantic. Scattering atoms back into primal matter was a nasty business.

She remembered her father at his computer, writing
Bridge Out Ahead
. She remembered pizza night for the cheerleading squad. Reading
Mrs. Dalloway
at two in the morning. Michael, slightly drunk, kissing her after the Spring Dance—where she had been elected Princess by those who probably didn’t realize such things usually went by blood. The kiss had surprised her. The Princess status had not. She was, after all, the only cheerleader who could do decent back flips. And when she did enough of them, she could, finally, stop thinking—as the blood roared in her ears, as she became nothing more than her body.

She thought of Michael and Robin and Chupi and of Mrs. Hennie, lying dead in the street. And then she thought of Plan B—of the man who had called himself the master-of-the-situation.

Whoever he was, he had made big promises.

Clare watched the mists rising from the city below until Bear nuzzled her, asking for more attention. She stroked him for a while and then stood up and carefully folded the piece of paper with Michael’s name on it.

“Let’s go,” she said to Bear. She wanted to go into Fallon to look for supplies and then get back to the cabin before nightfall—even if the night were probably still safe. Her father had thought the Cured would stay in the cities for a long time.

Clare had already broken into some of the other places near the cabin to look for supplies, and she had found some food, a couple of hurricane lamps, more candles, a camping stove. But she also found, inevitably, bodies. In one small house, a body had decayed into the bed it lay on; fluids leaked into the sheets leaving a grisly outline. In another house, two bodies on a sofa clutched each other, while another, almost skeletonized, lay on the floor.

And everything stank.

Every time she emerged from a Pest house, she felt darkness and stench clinging to her, penetrating her clothes, infecting her breath with death.