Garden : A Dystopian Horror Novel

by Carol James Marshall

  She did this often: counted the many ways she was blessed. This kept her sane when everything she had loved had slowly vanished from her life. She had believed joy was never in her reach again. Mrs. Ortiz still believed that. There was no escaping her truth.

  When the world of YUM had come close to The Hills and life became nothing but struggle, Mrs. Ortiz’s life had begun a descent to survival mode and nothing more. Once, the thunder of little feet running from the backyard garden to the kitchen had filled her home. Daily, her home roared with music and laughter.

  The little feet had grown and grown, like her garden, and before Mrs. Ortiz was ready for it, her children became adults and left home. At first, they visited often, but soon, they returned little at all. One day, Mrs. Ortiz looked up from her book to realize her home had been silent for days. Not a call. Not a knock. No one asking, “What’s for dinner?” or “How was work today, Mami?”

  Mrs. Ortiz had felt a hole in her heart grow, stretch. This hole of silence would soon swallow her, gnaw her to nothing. Soon, fear expanded the hole, fear that her children had fallen under the spell of YUM. She had fed them fresh food, most of it from her garden, their entire lives. Surely, they wouldn’t…

  The rumors started to reach The Hills, rumors of Madam and her Nutri-Corp empire, taking over town after town, county after county, state after state. Rumors, too, of strange and debilitating side effects of YUM. But her children would never…

  Well-paying jobs in The Hills were scarce, and Madam paid her workers well, offered opportunities to rise in the corporation, provided housing, and, of course, an unlimited supply of YUM. Her children would never be tempted by easy money, though. Would they?

  The day came when a neighbor told Mrs. Ortiz that she had seen her children in a place called Old Town. The neighbor’s description of their movements—heads twisting on necks, bodies swaying, arms and legs jerking—had made Mrs. Ortiz vomit right on her front porch.

  Mrs. Ortiz had cleaned the vomit away with bucket after bucket of soapy water. After five buckets, she knew the porch was clean, but she had poured another bucket and another and another anyway. Mrs. Ortiz had scrubbed and scrubbed, but her front porch was ruined for her. She paid it no mind anymore except for an occasional sweeping.

  Mrs. Ortiz was ruined as well. After the news of her children, she spent her days wrapped in blankets, weeping, wishing for death, wishing for life. Hoping that enlightenment would come even though she had no will to search for it. Enlightenment never came, but distraction did. The same neighbor who had told her such terrible things about her children knocked on her door to ask Mrs. Ortiz if she would mind the local library.

  The people of The Hills spent their days guarding their town and their lives from Madam. No one had time to care for the books, but, as the neighbor pointed out, Mrs. Ortiz seemed to have time, and the neighbor remembered Mrs. Ortiz always loved books.

  Shedding her cocoon of blankets, Mrs. Ortiz had said yes and spent the days after they handed her the keys to the library bringing it back to life. She had dusted bookshelves. She had vacuumed the carpet. She had filled the library with flowers and plants from her garden.

  Mrs. Ortiz had breathed life back into the library and herself. The town noticed, and a trickle of townsfolk wandered in every day the library was open. That was when Mrs. Ortiz started to really notice and count her blessings: having a town pantry that could feed everyone, despite the struggle against Nutri-Corp; the books; a neighbor who’d brought Mrs. Ortiz such awful news but innocently healed her soul without trying.

  Tonight, Mrs. Ortiz was thankful for Suzy. The blessing of having a child in her home even if only for a day or two was like nothing else for her.

  She loved children, always had. Always would.

  Chandler felt her nerves twitch up and down her legs. She ignored them, telling herself that those nerves, those ideas and fear that shut her down would not win tonight. This was a night for doing, for finally showing herself that she could and would follow through with the thoughts in her head.

  The thoughts of winning. The thoughts of living a life without the fear of being kidnapped and eaten.

  She had chosen this truck on purpose. This was the group headed to Madam’s home. Their plan was to take her back to The Hills to a trial that would find her guilty and sentence her to an appropriate punishment. Even so, that sounded like a lynching to Chandler. She couldn’t allow that. She needed to kill Madam herself. She had to.

  As the truck whizzed through the streets of Nutri-Corp City, Chandler also ignored the chaos she saw. Nutri-Corp elite, even officers, running about, their tics adding to the comedy of the situation. She wanted to smile, but she didn’t. She focused on the fact this car headed for the outskirts of the city where Madam kept her home. Chandler turned and snuck a look at BD.

  He stood on the running board, hanging onto the wall of the truck, wind slapping his cheeks to a neon red, yet he smiled. He wanted this as much as she did.

  Chandler sat up straighter in her seat when someone said they’d reached Madam’s street. Closing her eyes, Chandler focused on the feel of the Shaky in her hands and what she hoped to do with it.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Hey, Pendejo

  Joe—no more Sir—had always been capable of violence. The kind of violence that would make people cringe with discomfort and fear if depicted in a movie or television show. The monster of violence within him could bite off two heads at once. He had always cherished that about himself and knew when to let the monster loose and when to tighten the chains on the cage.

  This tendency for extreme violence was something Joe reserved for special occasions. Like now.

  In one swoop, Joe had taken Madam by her hair, dragged her to the sofa and tossed her like a rag doll onto it. Leaning down, he mercilessly punched her stomach, his smile growing wider with every punch. The endorphins of letting his sadistic quality out to play elated him, as did Madam’s screams. She screamed at every punch, but Joe knew no one would come. He’d sent all the troops, all the guards, to visit the Gardener camp. Those who remained were in his pocket and hated Madam as much as he did.

  When Madam’s screams turned to choking sobs he stopped. He took her by the hair again and dragged her to a chair, tossing her onto it so hard it almost tipped over. Dazed, confused, in pain, Madam vomited all over herself.

  Joe enjoyed watching the vomit with streaks of blood dribble down her oh-so-expensive dress.

  Two of her long nails were broken, ragged, and on other nails the polish was chipped. Joe liked the look of the broken nails, chipped polish. He had waited so long for this.

  Year after year of plotting the perfect time to end Madam, of smiling at her, of making love to a woman he neither loved nor liked but hated. So many times, he’d thought simply to turn her over to what was left of the U.S. government, but as time went on, Joe changed. Wealth and power erased the best of his intentions. That had all led to this, and he’d waited, like a snake in the grass, for his time. His time was now.

  The vomit slid from the dress and plopped down on the expensive rug, and Joe thought of his daughter Dolly, born from the creature Madam. He had never really bonded with the baby. That wasn’t the baby’s fault. His distaste for the child was because of the vessel in which she was created.

  “Now, my darling,” Joe said, still smiling, “nothing but truth.” He pulled her up from where she sat slumped, covered in the muck of her own vomit. Her sobs had become heaving. Joe was losing patience with her dramatics.

  “Why must Dolly never be let out?” Joe asked, pulling up a chair to sit across from Madam…no, Megan. She was the high-and-mighty Madam no more. He watched her, counting the seconds before he’d strike her again if she did not give him a response. She’d always had the prettiest smile. He’d make sure her front teeth would go next.

  A deep breath and Megan looked at Joe. Anything she might have ever felt for him was gone. She had never loved him, this he knew, but he suspected
she was fond of him, like you would be of a favorite dog.

  “Some children have a side effect from YUM,” she muttered, blood mixed with vomit drooling from her mouth as she spoke.

  Impatiently, Joe replied, “Yes, I know people have tics. They jerk, jump, whatever. I know this.”

  Megan shook her head, her eyes bloodshot from her sobs. “No, not that. This is different. It happens to some children only. Their eyes turn white. They become aggressive.”

  That piqued his interest. “Aggressive?”

  Megan seemed to have regained some of her composure, some part of being Madam. Raising herself in the chair, she closed her legs, smoothed her dress, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “Are you angry because it’s Dolly?” she asked.

  Joe smiled; she still had not figured it out. “No,” he responded leaning back in the chair. “Not at all. Dolly is of no consequence to me. I wish her well.”

  Megan’s face crumbled, not in pain from the beating but from the realization that Dolly’s father did not love her and wouldn’t save her, from the realization that every hug, kiss, bedtime story had been false.

  “Dear, darling, sweetheart... What other endearments have I called you throughout these years? Whatever. I’m shocked that such a brilliant mind could also be so stupid. You don’t get it. I was planted here.”

  Joe stood up to make himself another martini. He paused and gave Megan a tight shoulder squeeze, like the squeezes Madam sneakily gave Dolly when she thought no one was looking.

  She attempted to stand, but Joe shoved her back down.

  “Don’t get up,” he told her. “I wouldn’t want you to exert yourself. You’ll need all your strength for what is about to come.”

  As Lola walked through the maternity ward, she heard thumping from the other side of the ward’s door, but the ward itself was silent. Lola could hear the muffled sounds of the people of The Hills pillaging the lower floors. Lola was the only one to reach this level.

  Shouldn’t there be the sound of babies? Shouldn’t there be the hushed voices of nurses protecting, soothing the babies?

  The thumping made Lola uneasy. She would open that door. She would look inside, but she did not want to. She had to.

  Hand on the doorknob, Lola cracked the door open for whatever thumped. Lola would loudly storm forward or letting herself be known. Lola could only see the foot of a hospital bed. the covers were lumpy, and someone’s feet rested under those blankets. She strained to hear. Nothing. Silence. Lola frowned and gathered her nerves to open the door halfway.

  Lola peek around the door and saw a woman lying on her side, eyes open. She looked at Lola.

  “They took the baby...” the woman said, shooing Lola away with a flapping hand. “It was the third one.” The woman pushed up on one elbow. Pale, thin, the woman looked like a bag of bones. “Tell Madam I won’t do it again. I don’t care what she does to me,” she said. She lay back down with a thud, eyes still on Lola. The look on her face was one of concentration, not anguish.

  “Where do they take the babies?” Lola asked, not expecting a response.

  The woman gave Lola a slight head shake, her expression as if she indulged someone ignorant. She rolled her eyes and responded, “The morgue. Where else would you take a dead baby?” The woman laughed, laughed hard, slapping her hand against the bed. “Or maybe to Madam’s dinner table. You know, a starter, an appetizer. Is there a party tonight? Am I invited?” The woman laughed even harder, rolling from side to side, as if she’d told the world’s best joke. She stopped abruptly and panted, hardly able to catch her breath. Lola couldn’t tell if she did so from weakness or laughing too hard.

  The woman stared hard at Lola, a stare full of contempt, but Lola could not help but linger.

  “You should put a chair or something against the door when I close it,” Lola said and paused unable to find the words. She swallowed to try and lubricate her dry throat. “They’ll come upstairs. They will kill you.”

  When Lola said “kill you” she closed the door quickly and hustled away. An icy shiver ran up her spine. She knew where she had to go next.

  Morgue wasn’t a real word to Lola. It was a word she had heard but never experienced. There was no morgue at the Gardner camp. People died there, to be sure, and Lola had seen plenty of Poppers buried in Robert’s Popper graveyard. But still, the word morgue was surreal. Something she couldn’t process as a reality, like the word aliens.

  The idea that bodies, dead bodies were housed somewhere, kept and not immediately disposed of. That was something Lola had trouble understanding.

  Yet, before she realized how she’d arrived, here she was in the bowels of the hospital. She stood in a hallway so poorly lit, it was the perfect setting for any slasher movie made. Ahead of her was a door with the not-real word “morgue” stenciled on it in thick, bold, red letters. Did that not-real word mean everything she was about to see in the morgue wasn’t real? If she didn’t believe in its meaning, could it be real?

  Before opening the door, Lola listened to determine if The Hills people were headed this way. Silence, and for that Lola was pissed. She kicked the wall, a soft thud amplified by the narrow hallway. She had wanted an excuse not to go into the morgue. If there were sounds of a struggle nearby, that would be an excuse to leave, to not follow her intuition.

  Hand on door, Lola pushed. In fact, she shoved the door as if it was a bothersome person in her way. Inside, Lola waited and listened again, hoping for someone to tell her to go away, someone to say, “You don’t belong here. Where’s your badge?”

  Again, silence. Again, Lola was disappointed.

  As Lola stepped into the morgue, she wished Suzy was at her side, Suzy with her incessant chattering and dirty fingernails and floppy skirts. Suzy would soothe whatever horror Lola was about to see.

  Past the empty desks, break room, waiting room, Lola spied another door, a metal one, looking like a door to a restaurant’s walk-in freezer. It wasn’t marked, but she knew what it was.

  That is where they are kept, she told herself, that is what I have to see.

  All she knew was she had to go in, but she didn’t know why. No, she did. She had to bear witness to whatever was behind that door, and at that moment she wished she had Jen with her, not Suzy.

  Jen would stand firmly by her sister, not questioning why they had to know this mystery. Jen would open the door and step in first, sparing her sister the pain.

  Alone, Lola felt the absence of both Suzy and Jen like a lost limb. No, Suzy was like losing her left hand. Jen was like losing her right hand.

  Lola told herself that she still had feet, eyes, and...

  Her hand slapped the large, round button on the wall beside the door, and it opened inward, a wave of cool air emerging and condensing to mist at her feet.

  Again, Lola waited for someone to tell her to leave immediately, that she wasn’t authorized to be here, but again, no one came.

  Lola walked past two steel tables in the room. They were so clean, sparkling, sanitized, nothing like the Gardener camp where everything, even things that should be clean were not.

  She ran her hand along the cool surface of one table. She thought of resting her face on it, to rest on the smooth metal and have the cold refresh her. She remembered, though, what those tables were for, she snatched her hand away, and the next memory was what Madam did with dead bodies.

  From Chandler, Lola knew that Madam kept her cannibal dinners in the cages, but would Madam bring them to a morgue to be butchered?

  Even if Madam didn’t use the morgue as a butcher’s shop, the tables were still a sobering reminder that Lola was in Nutri-Corp City, essentially all alone. The group she’d come here with had likely moved on… To fresh victims.

  Lola didn’t know how to get back to The Hills. If the city didn’t fall and if the others had left her…

  Past the tables was another opening for a door and a room beyond. The buzz of the refrigeration cabinets in that room
seemed to take Lola by the ears and drag her inside. She opened one drawer. Empty. Another. Empty.

  Lola’s hand hovered inches away from the handle on the third drawer, afraid to open it. She wanted to open it but...

  She looked away and noticed an enormous steel door at the other end of the room. Again, it reminded her of what you’d see in a restaurant’s kitchen.

  “A walk-in cooler,” Lola murmured. But the drawers here were where bodies were stored. What could be behind that large door? What was its purpose?

  She left the third cabinet alone; the cooler was where she needed to go.

  Megan lay like a lump on the floor. Nothing but a sack of guts now. Joe had beaten every password, pin code, secret keyword, and any other info he could out of her. But, she wasn’t dead. Yet.

  Checking his watch, Joe did some math. The Nutri-Corp police were told to have a good time at the Gardener camp but to be back by dusk. He had several hours to go until then.

  Several hours to enjoy killing Madam and sending her to the butcher for one last feast before he took over. Joe smiled. When he was first sent to Nutri-Corp City, he was determined to ruin Madam and rid the world of YUM, but over time he’d changed his mind.

  He’d tell the masses that Madam had fled the country for her own safety and left him at the helm. Most of the police force was on his side, and those that weren’t... Well, those he could easily dispose of.

  Megan let out a sorrowful moan. More like a moan of disgrace, Joe thought. No, seeing the evident swelling of her face, Joe changed his mind. Her moan was one of pain.

  Good. He smiled; Joe, the mere security guard. Madam had transformed him into Sir. Today, he’d returned the favor and restored her to being mere Megan.