28. The Waiting Garden
THE WAITING GARDEN
GRANT
The first new person through the gate is the child with the stuffed animal.
She's small. Five, maybe six. The stuffed animal is a bear. Its fur's matted, one eye's missing, and its body's compressed by years of being held too tight. Her mother is behind her, one hand on the girl's shoulder. The hand is steady. The mother's face is not.
Nobody can fix this. Nobody can fix any of this. But the girl is through the gate.
Grace is at the turnstile, doing intake. "Name?" Grace asks the mother.
"Sara. This is Lily."
Grace writes SARA and LILY on the clipboard in red crayon. Underneath, she writes: has a bear. Not a real bear. A stuffy bear. No bites visible.
It's thorough, empathetic, utterly chaotic, and somehow the most effective triage process I've ever witnessed, including the ones I've used in veterinary emergency rooms.
"Are either of you bitten?" Grace asks.
Sara shakes her head.
"Sick? Fever? Any general feelings of wanting to eat people?"
"No."
"How do you feel about goats?"
Sara blinks. "What?"
"It's a standard question. We have a goat. His name is Kevin. He's complicated. Scale of one to ten, how comfortable are you with unsanctioned headbutting?"
Sara looks at her daughter. Lily's mouth moves. The precursor to a smile.
"I like goats," Lily says.
I watch from the fountain, which I've turned into a field station.
My veterinary bag is open on the fountain's stone rim.
Bandages, antiseptic, the remaining sedation supplies, the broad-spectrum antibiotics I keep for the animals that work on humans in a pinch because biology, at its core, is biology and a wound is a wound whether it belongs to a wallaby or a woman named Sara who hasn't slept in three days and has a laceration on her forearm.
"Sara," I say.
She turns.
I keep my voice at a frequency designed to communicate safety before the words do. "I'm Grant. I'm a veterinarian, which isn't the same as a doctor, but the bandages work the same way. Can I look at your arm?"
She hesitates. Then she looks at Lily, who's watching Grace attempt to explain Kevin's probation status to a man named Carl who appears to be reconsidering his decision to enter the park, and Sara pulls back her sleeve.
It's a deep cut. A few days old, starting to inflame at the edges. The angry pink of an infection getting comfortable.
"This needs cleaning," I say. "And antibiotics. I have both."
I clean the wound, apply antibiotic ointment, and bandage it.
Sara watches my hands. "You're gentle," she says.
"I work with animals. They don't give you a second chance if you're not."
Fourteen people. Diane, the point woman with the rifle and the cold-engine laugh.
Sara and Lily. Carl, who's tall and skeptical and has the bearing of someone who was in charge of something before the world ended and hasn't fully recalibrated.
A couple in their twenties who are holding hands and haven't let go since they walked through the turnstile and I don't think they're going to for a while, maybe ever.
A man named Tom who has a leg wound that I'll need to look at.
An older woman who's carrying a backpack that clinks with canned goods.
Two men who look like brothers and move in tandem, always aware of each other's position.
A teenage boy with a backpack held against his chest. Three others, quieter, staying close to the group, watching.
Grace processes them all.
"After the question room, you'll go to the waiting garden," Grace tells the group, gesturing toward the Sunrise Grill’s fenced terrace, which she and Joel designated as the quarantine zone.
It's stocked with blankets and water bottles. There's a hand-painted sign on it that Joel made in block letters that says: THE WAITING GARDEN. PLEASE STAY. WE PROMISE THIS PART ISN'T FOREVER.
Grace wrote the second sentence. Joel wrote the first.
"Twenty-four hours," Grace says. "Not because we don't trust you. Because the bitey thing has an incubation period and we'd rather know now than know later. Grant will check on everyone. Grant's a vet. Like an animal vet. But also a people vet now. He's branching out."
"Diversifying," I offer from the fountain.
"Diversifying! Grant is diversifying his medical portfolio. He's very good. He fixed Pepper, who's a wallaby. She's often in his jacket. Grant is basically a kangaroo pouch with a medical degree."
The guns are logged before anyone enters the waiting garden. Joel's rule. Grace's wording.
FIREARMS GO IN THE NAP BOX, she wrote on the clipboard, and Joel crossed out nap box and wrote SECURED WEAPON STORAGE underneath it, which means the sign now says both because democracy is complicated.
Diane keeps one rifle, unloaded, because her people are scared and because Joel, after three seconds of jaw math, allows one visible concession. Beck keeps the ammunition.
Nobody likes the arrangement. That's how I know it's probably the fairest one available.
The new people file into the waiting garden.
Diane positions herself at the edge of the group, rifle across her lap, eyes on the park.
Carl sits on a bench and crosses his arms and evaluates everything, deciding whether to trust this or not.
Lily sits on the ground and introduces her bear to an ant she found on the pavement.
It's messy. It's tense. It's eighteen people and a wallaby and a goat and a hawk and nobody knows the rules except Grace, who invented the rules twenty minutes ago. But the rules are somehow working.
Beck's on the perimeter. I can see him from here, circling the east gate. He's moving fast, checking trip wires, reinforcing weak points.
Joel's in the operations center, monitoring comms. The radio is live. The signal is out. The world, or what's left of it, knows WonderSphere exists. He's listening to the static for more voices, more survivors, more people watching the walls and wanting in.
We decided the thinking box is off-limits. The crime boat is home base. The captain's quarters belong to the four of us. The new people will have plenty of buildings.
"It's like a... bedroom," Grace said, trying to explain why strangers couldn't be in the thinking box. "It's a private... strategy... bedroom. A room where we... do strategy. Privately. In our bed. Not in a bed. There's no bed. There's a bench. The point is it's private."
"The thinking box is private," Joel said.
"Thank you."
"Because of the strategy bed."
"There's no strategy bed, Joel, I misspoke. The thinking box is private because it's ours and some things get to be just ours even when we're sharing everything else and this is one of those things and I'm drawing a crayon line around it."
She drew a literal crayon line on the map. A red circle around the crime boat. Inside the circle, in tiny letters: OURS. NOT YOURS. THIS MEANS YOU, NEW PEOPLE. (SORRY BUT ALSO NOT SORRY.)
The sun crosses the Solar Plaza. The new people settle into the waiting garden: some pace, some sleep, some eat, some stare at the walls. Grace brings food. Canned goods. Water. She trips bringing the water and two bottles roll across the pavement. She picks them up and doesn't stop moving.
Carl is organizing. The man who was in charge of something is becoming in charge of something again, sorting supplies, establishing a watch rotation among his group.
I'm rebandaging Tom's leg (sprained, not broken, the swelling is consistent with a lateral ligament injury, which I know from horses and is identical in humans because knees are knees) when the screaming starts.
Captain is screaming from the roof of the food room where I positioned him an hour ago, and Captain's scream means threat. I'm on my feet before the scream finishes its first syllable.
Slumped against the side of the fountain in the middle of Solar Plaza there's a WonderSphere character costume.
Wondie the Sphere, the mascot, a cartoon sphere wearing sunglasses, collapsed on the pavement.
We all walked past it. I walked past it and noted it the way you note debris: present, inanimate, irrelevant.
It's not inanimate anymore. The noise of fourteen new voices, the clatter of cans, the scrape of benches, all of it reaches whatever is left inside the costume.
The costume moves slowly. Wondie's oversized sunglasses tilt.
Its spherical body shifts. The stubby arms push against the pavement and it stands up in the middle of Solar Plaza, looking around with the vacant, hungry confusion of a mascot whose employee orientation has been replaced by a single directive: eat the guests.
Grace sees it. She's holding a snow globe. She picked it up this morning when she was reorganizing the bag and she's been holding it, absently, the way people hold objects that connect them to someone they're trying to reach.
Wondie lurches toward the waiting garden.
Grace is between Wondie and the waiting garden in four steps. She drives the snow globe into the black mesh behind one of Wondie's oversized sunglasses. It connects with the head inside the costume.
Wondie drops. The mascot costume crumples, collapsing onto the pavement of Solar Plaza.
The snow globe is cracked. Split down the middle. Glitter is everywhere. The little castle inside the globe is visible through the crack, tipped on its side, swimming in water and glitter in a world that just broke open.
Grace is standing over the body. Her arm still extended. Her face doing something I've never seen it do before, which is nothing. Absolute nothing.
"Four points!" Beck yells from across the plaza. Delighted by Grace's accidental violence. Then he sees Grace's face. The grin dies before it finishes forming.
Grace is staring at the snow globe. Glitter on her fingers. Water on her wrist. "I have to go shopping again," she says to nobody.
Beck checks the body and quietly finishes what the snow globe started.
I cross the plaza and stop beside her.
"That was Mom's," she says. "I got it for Mom. I was going to give it to her when... when the..." She looks at the cracked globe. "Now I have to go shopping again."
"You will," I say.
"The hoodie too. Look at the hoodie. It's been through so much. There's powdered sugar and…"
"You'll get a new one."
"She's going to be so sad about the snow globe," Grace says. "She had a whole shelf. The shelf had a system. The system was geographical. The WonderSphere one was going to go between Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. Now there's a gap. Mom hates gaps."
"Grace."
She stops and looks at me.
"I'm proud of you," I say.
The joke doesn't come.
"Thank you," she says.
Her hand finds mine. Small. Glitter-covered.
Kevin's on the churro cart. Kevin watches the new people in the waiting garden with the evaluative gaze of a goat who's just acquired fourteen additional targets for unsanctioned headbutting and is experiencing something that, in a less complicated animal, I'd call joy.
Grace squeezes my hand once. Then lets go. Then walks back toward the waiting garden, glitter trailing behind her like a comet's tail, and I watch her go.
The golden hour deepens. The park settles into something new, something bigger than four people that started when a woman with a strawberry purse jumped a turnstile and decided to stay.