CHAPTER TWELVE: PARADISE LOST

Mr. Randall Crane, before the outbreak, didn't have much to his name. A steady job gardening in the Kew temperate house, a comfy flat, and an engagement for which he had emptied his wallet to buy the ring.In his eyes, it was worth it. His fiancée was lovely in a salt-of-the-earth sort of way, even if she didn't show it all the time, and Crane was happy to bear the fruit of their relationship. Of course, there were issues. Crane's money was missing. The Baileys' bottles were piling up in the bin each month. But he was sure he could work around them.In retrospect, Mr. Crane realized how naive he was. He didn't notice the postman who always left his house right before he got home from work. It was two months after the wedding, and Suzanne's gut was getting bigger each week. Then came the alimony—Suzanne knew that Crane knew something was awry and wanted to cut her losses.Crane now had to share a flat with an old friend—leaving his nice Hampstead Heath house behind for a one-bedroom in Stonebridge. All he had left was his job. That had been two years ago now, just weeks before everything hit the fan. When it did, Crane found himself fighting off blighters with nothing but a shovel. He didn't have time to realize that these were, at one point, people. In his fuzzy, adrenaline-blurred state, they were just gray blobs that needed fixing.By the time he had snapped back into the swing of things, he was alone in Kew, with nothing but the exotic plants for company. He imagined that they listened to his plight when he talked to himself at work.Now, all they heard was the strangled sobs of a man clinging to his shovel for dear life. All these things that slipped into his subconscious as he was caving in heads were now starting to surface. Twenty-three killed, Randall. Suzanne's gone, Randall, and you loved her. The kid's gone too, Randall, but then again, he isn't your kid, is he? No, so you needn't worry about it, Randall.What he felt from then on was a sort of seething dread—rage at the world for all that had happened to him, visceral fear of how it could only get worse. But it never did. Things only stagnated, getting bad and staying that way.Crane felt this stagnation, saw it everywhere he looked. On his excursion outside of Kew's greenery, all he saw was gray, bleak, unending suffering. Bandits waging war on one another, the victors eaten by blighters. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In comparison, Kew Gardens was beginning to look like the Garden of Eden. Nothing was wrong in Kew. Food was plentiful, and the water was clean. The screams of those being devoured were barely audible among the sounds of nature's beauty.Few blighters came to bother Crane in his garden. Those who did were met with the point of his shovel between the eyes, cracking the cranium with a single thrust. He kept a detailed log of these incidents. He wrote on the back of any paper he could find. It noted where the blighter was from, its direction, its clothes, and its possessions.There was a grim satisfaction to be had in the process, affording the thing a quick death before using the remains to feed the plants. Crane felt it especially when one lad in a ragged Royal Mail uniform staggered his way. The thing's features were too heavily wounded for Crane to make them out—but he had a strange sort of certainty as to who it was.Sure, they were people, but it was all in self-defense, Randall. It's not like they know what they're doing, right? No, so give that one a crack on his head and move on.Few survivors came to bother Crane, either. He had met the odd scavenger - but only a few had ever stood out to him. His most consistent visitor was a rather unassuming man who went by Piers. He didn't dress in much armor, like other survivors, only conventional clothes. A parka, waistcoat, and shirt - navy, black, white. Sometimes he'd wear extra - a pair of work gloves, goggles, stuff Crane would see someone wearing in an engineering workshop. It didn't matter much to him, though. Nobody cared about clothes - it seemed that people had reverted back to practicality, leaving fashion in the dust.Not Piers, though. He was probably the closest thing to dapper Crane had seen since the outbreak. Even with the other stuff on, he wore it like it was his skin. He seemed too comfortable, even when Crane watched him dispatch a blighter with nothing but his rubber-covered hands.The cheerful way he started a conversation with Crane right after doing it was too calm, well. It must have been well over a year ago, but he could remember it word for word if he wanted to. The first conversation between him and Piers wasn't of note apart from that, though—just a polite, reserved, even, how-do-you-do. Bare introductions, all that mundaneness Crane thought he had left behind before the outbreak. It was strangely comforting, having such a positively normal conversation. Piers had a presence that took away from that; despite only being 5'10", there was something larger than life about him. It was like he was lurking despite everything about him being in plain sight—looming despite being shorter than Crane.Re could only liken the man to a rainforest frog, banal, simple, yet still somehow frightfully volatile. It wasn't like Piers was a ticking time bomb—rather, a bomb that wanted to wait until there were lots of people around him to explode. A picky bomb, if there ever was one.Now, Crane was in the temperate house—tending to the plants that hadn't wilted or perished. It was still sweltering in there, but he was used to it.He prized one plant above all else: the corpse plant. Its foul stench attracted blighters, who seemed to trust their numbers. He thought the smell would trick them into thinking the plant was, in fact, one of their own.He had no proof, but he was fairly sure it was true. It was why he kept his shovel on his back at all times, just in case. He had made several adjustments to it, mostly to do with the handle and grip, but one had to do with the blade of it. He had gone out of his way to sharpen the shovel; dragging it this way and that, back and forth, over a smooth enough concrete path. It was surprisingly effective - the shovel penetrated undead skulls with substantially more ease now. God gave the Angel at heaven's gate a sword of fire - Crane had a sharpened shovel to protect his garden. He was sure he could do it, though. By simply maintaining Kew Gardens, he had created a paradise for himself. Soon, he hoped, it would become one for man as well.The silence was almost peaceful, broken only by the occasional groan from beyond the walls. Crane's grip on his shovel tightened, a familiar comfort in a world gone mad.