First published 2014 by Ravenstone
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.ravenstone.com
ISBN: 978-1-84997-762-3
Copyright 2014 Gillian Murray Kendall
Cover art by Luke Preece
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night;
Nor for the arrow that flieth by day;
Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness.
Psalm 91
For Rob
and for Sasha and Gabriel (of course)
After They Left the City
THE PANDEMIC BURNED through the population until only a few children remained. The adults died quickly. When SitkaAZ13, which everyone called Pest, first began to bloom, Clare and her father and stepmother, Marie, listened to the experts on the television—those desperately mortal scientists with multiple initials behind their names. And then one by one the experts had dropped away, taken by the pandemic they so eagerly described.
But not before they’d made it clear: while a very few children might prove resistant to the disease until they reached late adolescence, all of the adults were going to die. All of them.
Clare had found it hard to watch her father and Marie, still vital, still healthy, and know that the two of them would soon be dead. She supposed she would be dead too before long. The odds weren’t great that she would prove to be one of the few who lived into their late adolescence. Her father and Marie simply tried not to talk about death. Not until her father’s words at the very end.
NOW IT WAS over, and Clare, a temporary survivor after all, stood on Sander’s Hill looking down at the giant necropolis that stretched out below her—the city of the dead and dying. The city of crows.
Clare was fifteen years old. And it astonished her that she was still alive. Everything that told her who she was—the intricate web of friendships and family that had cradled her—was gone. She could be anyone.
CHAPTER ONE
SCENES FROM A PANDEMIC
CLARE AND HER father and stepmother survived long enough to leave the dying city in their neighbor’s small Toyota. The family SUV was too clunky and hard to maneuver, and their neighbor, decaying in his bed, offered no objections when they took his more fuel-efficient car. Their departure was hurried and late in the day—they had spent most of the day waiting for Clare’s best friend, Robin, to join them. But Robin never came. They daren’t stay any longer; the Cured now ruled the city at night.
Clare knew that once they left the city, there was no possibility she would ever see Robin again. While Clare had loved Michael, still loved Michael, would always love Michael, her friendship with Robin was inviolate. Which was why Clare knew that if Robin could have made the rendezvous, she would have. They might wait a thousand years, but Robin would not come. Clare did not doubt that someone—or something—had gotten her.
On that fresh summer day, as the shadows began to creep out from under the trees, and the strange hooting of the Cured began to fill the night, Clare was under the illusion that she had nothing more to lose. She had, after all, even lost herself—she had been a cheerleader; she had been popular; she had been a nice person. And under that exterior was something more convoluted and complicated, something that made her wakeful and watchful, that made her devour books as the house slept. But none of that mattered anymore. Her cheerleading skills were not needed. And there was nothing to be wakeful about anyway: the monster under the bed had been Pest all along.
THEY WERE TAKING all the supplies they could fit into the car, but they were not taking Clare’s parakeet, Chupi. Marie talked about freeing the bird, but Clare knew that Chupi would not last a winter. She knew that Marie knew it, too. When it was almost time to go, Clare got into the Toyota listlessly, fitting her body around backpacks and cartons of food and loads of bedding and enough bandages and bottles of antibiotics to stock a small pharmacy.
Then she got out again. Her father and Marie were arguing heatedly about who was going to drive as she slipped into the house. “No, Paul,” Marie said in her patented Marie-tone, “I’m a better driver on the freeway.”
Clare went straight to Chupi’s cage. They had never had a cat or a dog. Marie was allergic to both. That left fish or something avian. It was a choice that wasn’t a choice—Clare wasn’t about to bond with a guppy or deal with ick—so they bought her a birthday parakeet. And, eventually, Clare found that Chupi charmed her. The parakeet would hop around Clare’s books while she studied. Occasionally, he would stop and peck at the margins of the pages until they were an amalgam of little holes, as if Chupi had mapped out an elaborate, unbreakable code in Braille.
Chupi’s release was to come right before they left. Her father, Paul, didn’t have the heart to wring the bird’s neck—Clare knew that Chupi had charmed him, too. Marie’s delicate sensibilities made her a non-starter for the task, although Clare thought that, actually, Marie might turn out to be rather good at neck-wringing. They didn’t ask Clare.
When Clare got to Chupi’s cage, she opened the door and pressed gently on the parakeet’s feet so that he would pick up first one foot and then the other until he was perched on her finger. Then she transferred him to a smaller cage. The car was packed tightly, but there was a Robin-size gap in it now, and she had suddenly determined that Chupi, with his bright blue wings and white throat, was coming with her. He was going to be all she had of the old world.
She returned to the car. The argument between Marie and her father had apparently been settled, and her father said nothing when he saw Clare and Chupi. When Marie opened her mouth in protest, he said, “Never mind.”
Clare leaned forward to wedge the cage next to a sleeping bag. She wore a low-cut T-shirt and Michael’s Varsity jacket, unsnapped, and she looked down for a moment at the pink speckles sprinkled across her chest: the Pest rash. It was like a pointillist tattoo done in red. They all had the Pest rash, but so far they hadn’t become ill.
As they began the drive, her father and stepmother scanned the roads for wreckage. Marie had a tire iron in her hand.
“What’s that for?” asked Clare.
“Just in case,” said Marie.
Clare tried and failed to picture Marie wielding a tire iron against one of the Cured. Marie was a runner.
They were retreating to their house in the rolling countryside.
They drove until they came to a place where the highway was blocked by four cars and a tractor-trailer. When her father left the car to explore the collision, Clare was sure he wouldn’t return.
“Be careful, Paul,” yelled out Marie, alerting all the Cured in the area. Clare pictured hands reaching out of the wreck and pulling him in like something out of a zombie movie; she pictured faces sagging with Pest leering out of the windows.
But he came back to report that the vehicles were empty. There was a basket of clean laundry in one of the cars, and they rummaged through it and took a blanket from the bottom of the hamper. He had found some pills in the glove compartment of the tractor-trailer. He took those, too.
There was no way to maneuver around the wreckage, so they filled their backpacks with as much food as they could carry and left the car.
“Once we get clear of this mess,” said her father
, “we’ll look for another car.”
“I didn’t know you could hot-wire cars,” said Clare, impressed.
“We’re going to look for a car with keys in the ignition.”
“Oh.” Clare poked holes in a shoebox and, after putting Chupi in it, placed him at the top of her pack. She jammed him solidly between a bunch of fresh bananas and a can of baked beans. It was when they started moving on foot that Clare noticed that her father’s face was flushed. She stopped walking, and the cans in her pack pressed against her back as she stared at him. She was suddenly afraid of all that the angry patches on her father’s cheeks and forehead might mean. Then—
“We have to go on,” he said to her. “No matter what.”
They found a car late that afternoon—an abandoned Dodge Avenger with the keys dangling from the ignition.
It took them three long days to get to Fallon. Both Marie and Clare’s father were too tired to drive all night, so they stopped and made camp and engaged in the pretense of sleeping. Two would huddle together under the sleeping bags while the third stood watch. Mostly Clare found herself lying awake back-to-back with Marie while her father sat against a tree and stared into the dark. She wondered if the sour damp smell she detected were coming from Marie or from her. She knew that smell. It was fear.
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.
The Garden of Darkness Page 1
