The Garden of Darkness

Then the woman’s place was taken by people with lesions on their faces, parading through the streets in a macabre farewell to the world.

“It’s more than time to go,” Clare’s father said as they watched. Shortly after that, the streets were curiously empty. It was as if, in the face of disease, people had finally retreated into their houses, to hide out until they died.





FNALLY CLARE DID dig a latrine, but she did so only to then realize that she was eventually going to run out of food. When she had found the cans and preserves in the root cellar she had thought she could never run out. She had also found gardening tools, packets of seed, bags of dry corn, gallons of water, a bow and some arrows. The bow must have been Mr. Loskey’s; it was too taut for her to pull back.

It was as if the Loskeys had been preparing for some kind of apocalypse (and when it had come they had missed it). Clare, on the other hand, had survived the initial onslaught of Pest and now she had a choice: scavenge, clean up, shape up and brush her teeth. Or give up on life and just go to bed and die.

But her death would mean the death of Chupi, too, which didn’t seem fair. She went to change Chupi’s water, and she saw he wasn’t in his cage. He didn’t seem to be in the house, either. She opened the front door, just in case he had somehow flown to the porch as she had left for Sander’s Hill. As she stood in the doorway, he flew out of the living room and over her head. He perched on the tree in front of the cabin. He had been inside the whole time.

“Chupi.”

She went to the tree.

“Chupi.”

He behaved as if he couldn’t hear her. He flew to the copse of trees by the driveway. She followed, calling him, until he flew well beyond her. And then she simply stood and called and watched as Chupi flew from tree to tree until finally she stopped calling, and then she could no longer see him, and he was just something more that had moved beyond her horizon. And so the old world was gone.





CHAPTER FIVE





ON THE PASSENGER PIGEON





SOMETIMES CLARE SAT on the porch with a pair of binoculars and scanned the trees for Chupi. She didn’t expect to see him; it was just comforting to look. Clare thought she was learning an essential lesson about life: post-Pest, one’s world just got smaller and smaller. Everything one loved went away.

At least she had the garden. In the garden where she had seen the stag, there were pumpkins the size of basketballs, monstrous zucchini and magic wands of summer squash. There were cornstalks and cabbages, a yellowing vine of cherry tomatoes and a batch of sprawling cucumbers. Every day she did a little work in the garden, and it was the only time she came close to feeling fine. She wasn’t sick. She wasn’t well. But at least the Pest rash wasn’t spreading.

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.