Free The Garden of Darkness by Gillian Murray Kendall

perimeter of the grounds.
    He wanted to kill something.
    The Cured hooted softly. It was a lonely sound.
    When the Cure had started to go terribly wrong, he had feared that the unfortunate recipients of it might band together, but that didn’t seem to be happening.
    And one Cured, well, one Cured he could hunt down.
     
     
    T HE NEXT DAY, he and Britta took the truck that had been sitting, keys in the ignition, in the long drive of the estate. They didn’t go to Clarion; he didn’t want Britta reminded of the past. He would build society from the ground up, and that meant leaving the past behind.
    So they went to Sennet, where there were very few bodies in the streets. Most people, it seemed, had been content to die at home. He kept watch for the Cured, baseball bat in hand, while Britta checked out stores and restaurants.
    They finally found a warehouse of food. Britta spilled over with joy. He was less satisfied. The cartons all contained cans of soup—tomato, minestrone, beef with barley, mushroom. He didn’t plan on feeding himself and the children on soup alone. The mansion needed luxuries, luxuries for the young children—candy bars and licorice and gum—and luxuries for himself and the older ones—caviar, paté, smoked oysters. His world needed to be enticing. Soup might get them through the winter, but soup wasn’t interesting. And he wanted live animals to raise for food; he wanted chickens, pigs, sheep. He didn’t fear butchering them; if there was anything he knew how to do well, it was how to wield a knife. And he knew anatomy.
    The mansion had already been well stocked. He and Britta made trip after trip until the storeroom was full.
    “We’ll go back to Sennet tomorrow,” he said to Britta.
    “Don’t we have enough for the winter already?” she asked.
    “Are you doubting me?”
    Britta hung her head.
    “No, sir.”
    “It’s all right,” he said after a moment. “There is enough for us. But I think that soon there’ll be more. More children.”
    That was the day that they found the farm. It stank of dead animals—they saw the carcasses of sheep and the bodies of two horses, now bloated and flyblown. But there were still chickens and ducks foraging in the farmyard, and it was Britta who spotted some sheep and a cow in a far meadow.
    “They made it through,” she said.
    “We can get the chickens and ducks to settle in closer to home,” he said. He looked at the stalls where the horses lay. “We need to get all the live animals away from this open graveyard. There’s potential contagion here.”
    “Can’t we bury the dead ones?” Britta asked.
    “No.”
    “My parents didn’t get buried.” Britta seemed to wait for him to say something, but he was silent. “They’re still in my house in Clarion. When they died, there was no one to call. I don’t suppose—”
    “No.” He turned his back to her. Thinking ahead was the only way to survive. He supposed it must be hard for her to think of her parents rotting away, but they would as soon rot underground. As for the psychological trauma unburied parents might elicit, well, there weren’t any more psychiatrists in the world. Britta would just have to get over it.
    When they returned to the mansion, she somehow slipped away from him. The light was fading, and he was listening for the sound of the Cured when he realized that she was gone. He knew she wouldn’t have left the grounds, but he was angry. Solitude was, in the world he was going to build, a luxury for the very few.
    He found her in the grounds sitting on the edge of an old fountain. In the center of the basin, a naiad with a fish woven around her stood frozen, pouty lips open where the jet of water was meant to emerge.
    “You shouldn’t go out alone,” he said. He was careful to sound calm. Reasonable.
    “Let’s go back to the house,” she said quickly, and he tried to let it go.
    But the anger remained. It needed an outlet.
    That night he went hunting for the Cured