The Garden of Darkness (16 page)

“I’m telling you, he peed right in front of me,” said Sarai. “Right there by the door. I saw his
thing
. He already had the pig; he told me to stay in the barn while he left; he told me to count to a hundred before telling, but I only got to seventy before I lost track.”

“He only dared because he thinks we’re kids,” said Jem.

“We
are
kids,” Clare said.

“Not in the post-Pest world,” said Jem. “Not anymore.”

“This isn’t going to be easy,” said Clare. “He has a head start. And he’s strong.”

“The pig will slow him down,” said Jem.

“And you’re our secret weapon, Clare,” said Sarai. “Right?” Clare could not help but smile, and Jem laughed.

“Let’s get our pig back,” he said.

“Darian thinks he’s a nacho man,” said Sarai. “But he’s
not
.”

“Macho,” murmured Clare. There was something emphatic about Sarai’s words that reminded her of Mirri. And that’s when she noticed that Mirri wasn’t with them.

Mirri didn’t come when they called. They looked in the bedroom to see if she were still sleeping, but her bed was empty.

“This isn’t good,” said Clare.

“I didn’t see her when I came out,” said Sarai. “I only saw the pig. And Darian. And his thing.”

“Mirri goes into the meadow some mornings,” said Jem. “She likes looking at the rabbits.”

“Darian might have run into her,” said Clare, “when he left with the pig.”

“But I can’t believe he’d hurt her,” said Jem. “Or steal her away. She wouldn’t go, for one thing.”

Clare said nothing, but her thoughts were dark and bitter. Mirri would have trusted Darian because they had all trusted Darian. For her part, Clare had been making assumptions because Darian had looked so much like Michael. And it occurred to her that on some level she had assumed, too, that Pest had killed all the bad people—that they had only the Cured to fear. She had not imagined evil children. But she had been naïve; surely bad people had survived too. Bad
children
. Distorted children.

Clare had never realized how fragile, how tenuous her new life was.

Still. At any second Mirri might come up the path to the door of the house.

They searched the house and the barn.

Clare remembered Mirri saying “I’m his favorite,” and, in looking back, she remembered Darian’s hand touching Mirri’s hair.

Clare remembered the vision of blood on Darian’s shirt. Somehow she had got it all wrong. Darian wasn’t the one to worry about; it was Mirri. They had to get her back.

Jem pulled his coat closely around him.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Bring Bear.”

“Of course.”

“And Sarai—go get the rope we used to bring the pig home.”

Sarai came running back with the lead.

“Are you going to kill him?” Sarai asked.

Jem opened his mouth, but Clare forestalled him.

“No,” she said.

“What if he’s hurt Mirri?” asked Sarai.

“That would change things,” said Clare.

“What about a gun?” asked Sarai. They both looked at her. Jem hesitated.

Then Clare spoke. “We don’t need one.”

S
ARAI 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 it’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

I
N
C
ALIFORNIA, 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

I
N
L
OVELL, 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.