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
THE 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.
The houses in Fallon belonged largely to people who came to the hills only for the summer. Clare hoped that these houses might be empty of bodies and full of stored food. And Fallon had a grocery store, a gas station, and a general store that stocked everything from toys to linens to camping equipment. It also had a yarn store and a basket outlet. Even before Pest, Clare had never understood the phenomenon of the basket outlet. But the other places—even the Yarn Barn—had potential.
There were animals everywhere in that sunlit morning. Clare thought that maybe there had never been so many wild animals in the world, or that soon enough that would be true. There were rustlings in the unmown lawns, and she startled three deer that were lying in the grass nearby—they bounded away, white tails held high like absurd semaphores. Bear left her side to pursue the deer, and, although she called him, although he stopped and looked back at her for a moment, a second later he was crashing through the fields after them. A startled fox ran in front of her and a covey of partridges burst into the sky. And everywhere there were rabbits—nibbling at the verge of a meadow, lying in the shade of the bushes. They would freeze until she was almost on them and then lollop, casually, into the deeper grass.
The world was thriving. And she felt pretty good. Not great. But pretty good.
She pulled her little wagon around the turn that led into the road that went into Fallon, that, she thought, stretched back and back until it joined the road to the city and back some more until it reached the place where they had abandoned the Toyota and taken the Dodge Avenger (what a stupid name) and even farther back into the doomed city itself.
She felt her mood darken; she had reached the entrance to the town, and there was a body in the middle of the road. She wished the person hadn’t died in the road. The smell, even outdoors, made her think of meat gone bad in a closed and broken freezer. The lips had drawn back from the corpse’s teeth, and the eyes were gone. She supposed the birds had plucked them out.
Once she had passed the body, she was on the main street of Fallon. Old newspapers scudded down the street. Clare dropped the handle of the wagon and caught one. It was wrinkled with water and stained with rusty blotches. The headline was ‘SitkaAZ13: The Disease and the Cured.’ The article was short, as if the reporter had been working against a demanding deadline, and it occurred to her that he had probably been working against the most demanding deadline of all. The piece mentioned the violence of the Cured. Clare looked down to the bottom of the article to see if this reporter had anything new to say, and, indeed, the very last line was the most telling of all:
Please come and get my baby daughter, Gwennie. I’m dying, but she only has the rash from SitkaAZ13. 1123 West Spring Street.
Clare looked at the date.
If no one had gone to find Gwennie, then Gwennie was dead.
Obviously, it had not been business-as-usual at the paper. It had not been business-as-usual anywhere. Clare noticed typographical errors, and she saw that the paper was blank on the other side. No mention of the man she had begun thinking of as the master-of-the-situation.
Perhaps the reporter alone had written and printed the last, the final, the evening edition.
In front of her, a few crows squabbled over carrion. One pecked at something ropy in the street; the other birds jockeyed with each other, waiting for their chance to get at what looked like a long string of rotting meat. Abruptly, the first bird swallowed the dangling lump. There was excited cawing, and then the birds flew off.
Everything was silent. After the noises of the brush and the hay field, the silence was oppressive. Clare wasted no time—she went into the grocery store, which, for the most part, had been stripped.
After a careful search, she loaded up the little wagon with two sacks of rice and some cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli she found in the back room. She hadn’t realized that Chef Boyardee was still a going concern, but the expiration dates were years away.
She had a new appreciation for preservatives.
A more careful canvass of the store yielded SpaghettiOs, stewed canned tomatoes, chicken soup, bottles of water, and a few packages of pasta shaped like bow ties.
She went back out into the light and sat on the stoop; she opened a package of Yum-Yums she had found near the cash register. They were past their expiration date, but they weren’t nearly as old as the KreamKakes. Clare wolfed them down. She followed them with three Slim Jims and a piece of beef jerky, waited for nausea that didn’t come, and then, despite their age, ate the KreamKakes too. She had always loved that creamy filling.
The sun was low in the sky by the time she pulled the wagon over to the big Fallon General Store, and she hesitated at the door.
She suddenly wasn’t sure it was that silent anymore.
Clare stood still at the entrance. There was a quality to the silence that she did not like. The light inside the store was terribly dim. She had never realized how few windows most stores had, as if scenery might compete with the desire to shop.
She wished, again, that Bear hadn’t gone off after the deer.
Clare stepped into the store, and when the floor creaked under her, she almost turned back. But then she caught sight of a section devoted to camping. She had left her flashlight at the cabin, so the first thing she picked up was a long heavy flashlight that took large batteries, which she found hanging in containers by the checkout. Then she walked through the store, bewildered by the number of things she was going to have to come back for—things that surely wouldn’t fit in her little wagon: a tent, a backpack, dozens of packets of freeze-dried food, blankets and sweaters and warm clothes.
Just in case, she located the back door to the store. It was to the side of the changing room, and in the light of her flashlight she read the sign next to it: ‘Emergency Exit—Alarm Will Sound.’
Clare thought not.
She put down the flashlight so she could use both hands, and soon she had the back door ajar.
In the clothing section, hurrying now, she pulled on a pair of jeans to see if they fit, listening to her surroundings all the time.
She had dropped a size. No surprise there.
From the corner of her eye, in the crepuscular light, she saw movement. She turned towards the front door and gripped her flashlight like a club.
She heard the sound of clothes whispering against each other, hangers clattering together. It was a casual, almost domestic sound, as if a shopper were sorting through the sale rack.
Clare’s instinct was to stay low. She dared not call attention to herself by running for the back door. She began, as quietly as she could, to inch towards the front—only for her foot to slip on a blouse that was lying on the floor. She tried to catch herself as she went down by grabbing onto one of the clothes racks. The hangers above her jangled together merrily.
From her prone position Clare saw movement to her left. She scrambled to her feet. There was no more time to think—a figure with a pale blot of a face loomed up beside her. She swung the flashlight up over her head and brought it down as hard as she could.
“Ow!”
The ‘ow’ made her hesitate. Maybe she just wasn’t all that eager to kill. There would be time to ponder the moment, the moment that was to determine the course of her entire life.
Instead of striking again, she lowered the flashlight and turned it on, thinking she could at least momentarily blind her adversary.
“Go away,” she whispered. “Whatever you are—go away.”
But she found she was facing a boy, a boy younger than she. He carried no marks of Pest. His face was deathly pale, his hair and eyebrows dark. He was squinting. Clare slowly lowered the flashlight.
“I’m just a kid,” he said. And although he was still squinting, still partially blinded by the light, she thought she saw recognition dawn on his face.
“You’re Clare Bodine,” he said.
She nodded, incredulous; a moment later his name came to her.
“You’re Jem Clearey,” she said. “Ninth grade.”
“You’re the cheerleader,” he said. There was disbelief in his voice. “You do those back flips.”
“Chess club, right?”
“Right.”
They looked at each other. Then, in the gathering gloom of the store, as the shadows outside grew longer, and the wind stirred up dust on the empty streets, fifteen-year-old Clare Bodine, the cheerleader, reached out and pulled thirteen-year-old Jem Clearey, member of the chess club, into her arms.
CHAPTER SEVEN
OLYMPIC GOLD
“I THOUGHT YOU were going to kill me,” Clare said once they had disentangled themselves.
“Um. Me?” said Jem. “I don’t have enough status to talk to you, much less kill you.”
“Oh,” said Clare. “That.”
Clare pulled Michael’s Varsity jacket closer around her.
“That,” said Jem.
“I don’t think any of that matters anymore.” Clare remembered now that Jem’s name had been in the newspaper when he had won the local chess tournament, and that he had gone on to some sort of national tournament. She remembered little else. Once she had run into him in the school hallway and had noticed his strange face, pale and thoughtful. Otherwise, he was a shadow in the background.
“You were a good cheerleader,” Jem said. He was looking at her eyes.
“It’s not a very helpful skill now, I guess.” said Clare, looking down, embarrassed.
“I know what you mean. But I’m still carrying around a travel chess set.”
“Just now I thought you were a Cured. That’s why I tried to bash your head in.”
“I’m really glad you missed.”
“I bet your shoulder hurts.”
“Yes.”
Clare felt awkward. “I’m sorry I never knew you in school.”
“The high school didn’t have much time for ninth graders,” said Jem. “And we
didn’t have much time for you, either, I guess. But it’s hard not to remember a cheerleader.”
“They made me a cheerleader because I can do back flips,” she said. “But I read real good, too.”
Jem laughed. “You’re different close up.”
She had liked being a cheerleader, though. It felt good to hurtle through the air. And, besides, her back flips made Laura Sparks—whose cartwheels were pitiful—so very jealous. Laura had once dropped her on purpose when they did the pyramid formation. After she had found out about all the phone calls from Michael.
And now all of that high school intrigue was over forever. All Clare had left of those intertwined relationships was Michael’s jacket.
“What happened to you during Pest?” Jem asked.
“Everything.”
“Yeah,” said Jem. “Me, too.”
They left the store, and Clare found herself blinking in the light. The town was no longer silent. Clare could hear laughter.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“That’s Mirri,” said Jem. “She’s at the playground. She’s with me. So’s Sarai—they’re both little girls.”
“I didn’t know if there would be others or not,” said Clare. “I only knew for sure that the Cured were out there somewhere.”
“One of the Cured follows us sometimes,” said Jem. “But she seems to be okay. Insane, yes, but not violent. We haven’t seen any others. I try to be vigilant. You know. Watchful.”
“I know what ‘vigilant’ means.”
Jem looked embarrassed. “I forgot you read real good.”
In the playground, Clare could see the two little girls. Two. Suddenly it was as if the whole world had been repopulated.
“The one pushing the swing,” said Jem, “is Sarai. She’s nine. Mirri’s the little one with the bad haircut. She tried to do it herself. She’s seven.”
The older girl pushed the swing; the younger pumped her legs and yelled “Higher! Higher!” and laughed her uncanny laugh.
The Garden of Darkness Page 4