SARAI SHOWED THEM the direction Darian had gone, and they followed his tracks and, more easily, those of the pig through the high grass in the meadow. When they came to the fence, the swath of broken plants widened and Clare made out a small footprint.
“Mirri,” Clare said. “I’ll bet she came here on her way back from a walk. I’ll bet she was sitting here on the fence just in time for him to find her.”
Neither of them spoke of why Darian might have taken her. In fact, that was a point on which they were never to be fully satisfied.
“Maybe,” said Jem, “we should have listened to Sarai and brought a gun from town.”
“It would’ve taken too long,” said Clare. “And we don’t know how to use a gun.”
“I know how to use a gun,” said Jem.
“No way.”
They were over the fence now and casting about in the grass for signs of Darian, Mirri or the pig. It should have been easy, but the grass was tamped down in all directions.
It was Bear who found the way out of the tangle at the base of the fence.
For a while they followed the trail in silence. Clare was the first to break it. She had been trying to picture Jem with a gun.
“How do you know how to use a gun?”
“One of my brothers liked target shooting.”
“Guns didn’t help anyone against Pest.”
“Darian isn’t Pest.”
“He’s part of the post-Pest world, though,” she said. “Your brother’s world, the old world, where people used microwaves and cell phones and computers, is gone.”
“Guns aren’t gone. Although truthfully, I hate them.” Jem smiled grimly. “I was never really much into what Sarai calls that nacho stuff.”
It was hard going through the thick underbrush at the edge of the woods. Even Bear found negotiating the trail difficult.
They finally found Darian and Mirri in the late afternoon, in a small clearing ringed by a copse of trees. They weren’t far from the road. Mirri lay by a small fire, her ankles bound. She was trying to crawl away from Darian, who stood over her. Her arms were scratched and her shirt was torn. She cried in a steady monotonous tone, as if she had been doing so for some time. When she managed to squirm a small distance from Darian, he reached down and pulled her back by the ankles. Her hair was snarled.
As Jem and Clare inched closer, Clare felt her stomach turn. The area before them looked and smelled like an abattoir. Blood spatter painted Darian’s face and shirt. His hands were caked with blood. He held a long knife. On the edge of the camp, the pig’s head, perched on a high tree stump, presided over the macabre scene. Off to one side was its body, gutted; organs and twisted intestines were heaped in a glistening, slick mass. For no reason that Clare could imagine, Darian had stabbed the rear of the pig again and again.
“It looks like Hell, Clare,” whispered Jem.
“It looks like Lord of the Flies.”
“Worse.”
Jem moved forward, out from under the trees. “We’ve come for Mirri, Darian,” he said. “You can keep the pig.”
Darian was startled by the sound.
“There’s nothing that you can do to me,” Darian snorted. “If you try, I’ll kill you. Better yet, I’ll kill her.” He yanked Mirri towards him by the rope and put a knife to her throat. Bear growled and Clare had to throw herself on him to stop him from going for Darian.
“Wait,” she said. “Just wait.”
“That’s right,” said Darian. “Keep the dog away, or I cut Mirri’s throat, and we all get to watch her bleed out.”
“And then Bear will take you down before your next breath,” said Clare.
“I believe you,” Darian said. “And you would be left with two bodies. Just leave us alone, and I’ll leave you alone. You can have part of your pig, if that’s what you’re after.” He seemed to think for a moment. “But I’ll pick which part.”
“We want Mirri,” said Jem.
“Which part?” Darian waved the knife at them.
Clare sucked in her breath. Jem looked angrier than she had ever seen him.
“Just let her go,” said Clare. “She’ll only slow you down.”
“I’m not planning on making her a traveling companion for long. If you like, I’ll send her back to you in a few days.”
For a moment there was no sound except that of Mirri weeping.
Then Clare saw Mirri look up and beyond Jem. Clare turned and did the same and saw that there was a terrible figure amongst the trees: a woman, her face convulsing uncontrollably. It was, unmistakably, the Cured-in-the-blue-dress, and she was coming up behind Jem.
“Jem!” Clare called, but he paid her no heed. All of his concentration was on Darian. Clare measured the distance between herself and the Cured-in-the-blue-dress, but before she could do anything, before she could hurl herself at this new threat, she saw Mirri’s face transformed. She saw Mirri holding out her arms, not to her, not to Jem—but to the Cured-in-a-blue-dress. Mirri cried out.
“Mama!”
And the Cured-in-the-blue-dress left the shelter of the trees and threw herself, not at Jem, not at Clare, but at Darian.
When Mirri said “Mama,” it all came together for Clare. Mirri stealing food. Mirri in the distance, meeting with the Cured-in-the-blue-dress. She remembered Mirri’s survival story, as told by Jem: Mirri’s mother had gone to the hospital, but she had never returned; Mirri’s mother had become one of the Cured. She must have come back home to search for her daughter, found her with Sarai and Jem, and followed her ever since.
Mirri had never said a word because she would not, could not, betray her mother.
With a terrible strength Mirri’s mother knocked over Darian and clawed at his face before locking her hands around his throat. The tip of something was protruding from the back of her dress, and Clare saw blood splattering Darian’s shirt. But it wasn’t his blood. Still the woman would not relinquish her grip. As Clare watched, unable to move, blood permeated the back of the blue dress in ring after pulsing ring, all emanating from the tip of what Clare now realized was Darian’s knife.
But Mirri’s mother didn’t let go, not even when Darian ceased moving. Only when he had been still for a long time did she roll away and lie on her side, her breath noisy and strange, as if she were choking. Before Jem could reach her, her breathing stopped, and all that was left to hear was the sudden raucous noise of crows taking to the air.
“Mama.” Mirri ran to her mother. After a time, Clare pulled Mirri away from her mother’s side and took her into her arms.
“It’s all right,” she said, knowing that it would never be all right.
Jem pulled the knife out of Mirri’s mother and managed to close her eyes. In death, she looked calm. Sane even. Clare thought that maybe she had been living just long enough to take care of her daughter one last time.
“She saved me,” said Mirri.
“Of course she did,” said Jem. “She gave you life twice.” Clare just held Mirri close; she smelled like blood and fear. Bear nuzzled both of them. For the first time, he let Mirri stroke him.
Jem was checking Darian’s body for a pulse, which they both knew he wouldn’t find. Then he sat back, startled.
“Look,” he said.
Leaning over Mirri’s head, Clare looked. Jem had pulled away Darian’s shirt, and she could see that there were pustules on his throat—very small ones, low down on his neck so that they hadn’t been visible before. And behind his ear was a small orange patch with the tiny marking ‘SYLVER’ on it.
So, thought Clare, this was why he kept his hair over his collar. He was covering up the unmistakable marks of Pest. He was a Cured all along.
“We let him sleep in the house,” said Clare.
“It doesn’t bear thinking about,” said Jem. Then he gently lifted the hair of the Cured-in-a-blue-dress so that Clare could see the patch behind her ear too.
“I thought the Cure was some kind of injection,” said Clare. “But i
t’s the patch-thing that keeps the disease from killing them.”
“And that makes them crazy,” said Jem.
“She never had a chance.”
“Let’s go. Sarai’s waiting.”
Mirri looked from Jem to Clare.
“Don’t worry, honey,” said Clare. “We’ll come back. We’ll bury the—your mother.”
“Her name was Dinah,” said Mirri.
“We’ll bury Dinah,” said Clare.
They walked back to the farmhouse slowly.
“Even after the Cure,” said Mirri, “my mother didn’t go bad.”
And Clare thought for more than a moment of how Dinah must have struggled to hang on to that small vestige of sanity that said to her ‘my child,’ that small vestige of self, salvaged from the very brink of death and madness.
WILL, HANNAH, DANTE, TREY, ROGER
IN CALIFORNIA, IN the Great Northwest, in the Heartland, in New England, in points North, in points South, the ones who had not died of Pest, the very few children left in the world, woke up as if from a dream—and looked around—and some of them found a space to survive, and very many of them did not.
Will
IN LOVELL, POPULATION 1,257, only small children and the elderly were exempt from building the Wall. Will kept his distance from the Wall but tried to help by cooking dinner in the evening. The work exhausted his parents, so Will put together the meal for his mother and father and his baby sister, Jean. Jean was easy to feed—she would eat any kind of Gerber’s as long as he started by feeding her the yellow smashed peaches. Will thought the yellow smashed peaches looked like something that came out of her diaper, but Jean slurped them up and left stains all over her bib. And his parents weren’t picky about what he put on the table. They were just happy to find the food there at the end of the day.
No one worked anymore, except on the Wall. And at night the people of Lovell took turns acting as sentries. Those who lived outside the Wall had been given a choice at the very beginning—move in to the center of Lovell, or stay out for good. The sentries had orders to challenge anyone approaching; they were to turn back all strangers with one warning. After the warning, they were to shoot. If the person approaching were a neighbor, an old friend, a relative, he or she got three warnings instead of one. The sentries were posted in pairs.
“The Calder woman is one of the sentries tonight,” said Will’s father. He bit into a sandwich. “I can’t picture her shooting anyone.”
“You should see her at PTA meetings.” Will’s mother was picking the lettuce out of her sandwich.
Will hesitated; he didn’t want to interrupt his parents, but they didn’t seem to notice that Jean was falling asleep in her chair.
“I need some help,” he said finally. “Because Jean needs to go to bed, and I can’t lift her over the crib.”
“I’ll get her,” said his father.
His mother gave Will a peculiar look.
“If something happens—” she started.
“I’ll take care of Jean,” said Will, not wanting to hear the rest of what she was going to say.
AS WILL 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.
JEAN 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
THEY 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
KELLY 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 phon
e 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.
The Garden of Darkness Page 12
