Where the Gardens Aren't Watered

Rita’s throat burns. She sits slumped back against a low brick wall of someone’s front garden, her exhausted legs stretched out on the pavement. This area of the city is unfamiliar, though what matters is the skyscrapers are long behind her. Here the roads are lined with terraced houses and well-groomed but small gardens, designed to house families that need to commute to offices further in. Once, there might have been the sounds of wildlife, but it is a relief that today there is not even the wind. The silence means she is alone.

The t-shirt she wears is sticky with sweat but the dizzying, unrelenting heat of the day is still better than nightfall. The sun is a shining beacon above the buildings and she probably has another six hours of light left. She will need to move on soon.

She knocks her feet together, willing some energy into her legs. The once sparkling white trainers are coated in a sheen of bronze dirt. They’d been a surprise for her birthday and her heart aches when she thinks of her two smiling housemates. How could it be only weeks ago they’d been celebrating? They’d gone back to an old club from their student days, dancing and laughing and drinking with careless abandon as they re-lived the freedom of university. She’d drunkenly cried when a fellow dancer had thrown up on her new shoes. It seemed absurd now. Michelle had laughed hysterically while Hana cooed and wiped them up as best she could. Those had always been their roles - Michelle the wild, shining life of the party who could always laugh through anything, while Hana was the fixer, the mediator. That had been stripped away the last time she saw them. They had been lost.

Rita caught herself, pushing her housemates’ black, soulless eyes onto a shelf to be dealt with at a later date. No time to think. Today she’d been the one vomiting, but there had been no tears. Perhaps she was too dehydrated, or perhaps she was numb. She wondered how full the shelf could get before things started to fall off.

As she poured the last drops of the water bottle into her mouth, Rita heaved herself to her feet. She had found the bottle early this morning, tiptoeing through a stranger’s open front door. Her ears had strained against the silence, listening over the sound of her beating heart. The now familiar putrid smell indicated she would be safe, but the logic had failed her before. She had crept down the stranger’s hall, hardly breathing, hardly coping. She had wanted to collapse right there, scream and shout and draw the danger right to her. She didn’t want to feel the paralysing adrenaline slowly eat away her sanity. But she was a fighter. Or maybe, a coward. So she’d very gently pushed open the door to the kitchen.

Rita had felt sick with relief when she saw the bodies, and then sick at the fact she was relieved to see them. The man and women were an entangled mess of limbs, lying in a reddish brown bed of smattered clots against the tiles. Rita had allowed herself to suck in a breath of stale air through her teeth; there would be no predator waiting for her here - the people had killed each other. It was only when she saw the toddler, still in a high chair, missing a face, that her knees had buckled and she had vomited. The bile stung her throat. It wasn’t the first time that week.

Her reward had been a fully stocked fridge and Rita had taken what she wanted outside to eat, unable to face the scene in the kitchen longer than necessary.

The water had lasted most of the morning but she will need to face another scavenger hunt again soon. She drops the empty plastic to the ground, flinching at the bright bouncing sounds it makes as it comes to a halt. It doesn’t matter. She is alone, she is sure.

Rita strides down the street, weaving around empty cars that have been left with keys still in the ignition, the drivers either in pieces or long gone. She tells herself some of them have made it out of the city. She needs this journey to have been done before. If others have made it, so can she.

Her footsteps are the only sound but the curling tentacles of fear still linger, their touch driving her forward, driving her out of the infected zone. She must be only a day away now, maybe less if she’s lucky. She fingers the heart shaped locket around her throat and then quickly drops it. The habit is no longer comforting - the three housemates once had matching ones.

The road ends in a fork and Rita pauses. Every extra minute in this city is a minute too long. She can’t look up the route - her phone is long dead, not that there is anyone to message anymore. Everyone she knew is gone, the disease stealing away the humans’ humanity so that even those that are still alive are no longer friends but threats.

Rita takes the left road. She walks for hours in the sun, beads of sweat dripping down the back of her neck. The grass in the front gardens has begun to look unruly, as if days and days of rain means a cut is now long overdue. But there has been barely any rain, and instead there is a strange contrast between the overgrown grass and the weaker, hanging basket plants that are starting to shrivel. The houses are getting bigger, becoming semi-detached, some even detached. The edge of the city must be getting closer.

Her previously tired feet have started to move of their volition, the pull of safety bigger than her exhaustion. Rita has been travelling for five days, hiding for fourteen. A radio told her of the safety outside the city, playing out of an abandoned car. Healthy people have been setting up camp in the countryside beyond, away from the disease and away from the danger. The radios don’t play anymore; the cars have run their batteries flat.

She thinks of her parents. She thinks of Michelle, of Hana. Hana would have loved to live here in the suburbs, in the pretty houses with flowers growing up the walls. The bodies on the road are now as much a part of the scenery as those flowers.

A sudden noise shocks Rita back to the present. A gravelly, scraping sound that jerks her adrenaline back into action.

When did she last see a living person? Yesterday? Before? Stress has warped her memories. She crawls between two cars and slowly peers around to see the source of the noise. It is a boy, no older than eight, sitting cross-legged on the pavement, raking a stick back and forth along the ground. The weight of the world is on his shaking shoulders. Huge, wet tears drip to the pavement but Rita steels herself against them. A healthy person would not be making this much noise. She knows if he sees her, if his black eyes look in her direction, he will no longer be this desperate child and she will no longer be living. Even if she can outrun him, someone else will hear. Someone else will come to fill their stomach.

She tries to back away as silently as she came, but her foot hits a stone and she is not quiet enough. The boy looks up. She gasps. His eyes are not black but blue; blue and clear and uninfected. Rita reaches out towards him but before she can speak, before she can tell him to stop, to tell him there is still hope, that he can leave the city with her, a man has appeared. He is leaping over cars and charging towards them, his black, predatory eyes focused on the boy, and within seconds he is there, within seconds the boy is an indistinguishable mush of meat and bone.

Rita is frozen in horror. Her arm is still outstretched. She does not move. She does not breathe. She prays the man did not see her, prays he will not be distracted from his feasting. He is gorging himself, the horrible slurping and smacking of his lips echoing in the deserted street. Soon, he will be done. She needs to hide.

Agonisingly, she pulls her eyes away to look behind her. She must not make the same mistake again. Rita crawls back around the car and pushes herself straight against the front passenger side wheel, pulling her arms and legs up to her chest. Her palms have stolen the remaining moisture from her tongue and the tiny hairs on her skin stand to attention. If she keeps her eyes closed then no one can see her. She is small. She is nothing.

Time stretches and bends until finally the gruesome soundtrack slows and then stops. She hears the man lope away, down the street. But still she is frozen, unable to release the shield she has created with her arms. The sun continues to move across the sky, now starting to brush the top of the buildings. If she doesn’t start walking, she will face another night outside alone. Rita cannot bare it: her fifth night outside in the city. The silence contains monsters in the dark; tiny slivers of noise become far worse in her imagination than anything her eyes could see. Slowly, slowly, she unravels, twists back towards the car, and stands. The man is gone, leaving the carcass behind.

Rita edges away until her walk gradually morphs back into a march. As the pavement passes beneath her feet and her confidence returns, the march turns to a slow jog in a race against the sun. She can’t do another night outside. Her ears remain pricked and she peers against the fading light, covering a distance she once thought not possible. She knows now that desperation makes everything possible, that she has done incredible, insane things in the last fourteen days. It does not feel real.

Innumerable houses go by, blurring into the landscape in a disjointed haze of haste and wild determination. Rita’s pace eventually fades into a staggering walk; she has not eaten since the morning. The dusk teases her, taunts her exhaustion as her feet now hit the pavement louder than they should. She is ready for it be over. Whatever the ending, someone will find her soon.

But then, as the houses spread out, there, in among the trees, is a camp. People are sat around a fire. It is much closer to the city than she expected, but in her delirious, lightheaded elation this is not a concern. Tears finally appear in her eyes as the blessed glow of safety encompasses her, the feeling of joy and relief that will come only briefly before the demons of survivor’s guilt.

‘Hey,’ Rita whispers, as loud as she dares, waving her arms. “Hey!” She is laughing, stumbling, crying. She cannot believe she has made it. It has taken an eternity to reach them; an eternity of terror. Now, she can breathe. Riding on the giddy wave of exhilaration, she propels herself to the tree-line, no longer caring at the snap of twigs beneath her feet.

The campers turn to look as she approaches.

They have black eyes.