A Savage Generation

by David Tallerman

  “I reckon they’re sick, Holland.” The store woman is practically wailing.

  “We’re not sick. Nobody’s sick.” To Ben and Kyle, Nando hisses, “Come on.”

  “You don’t think we’ve seen enough of it?” There’s a new note in the man’s voice, an edge of desperation.

  Ben starts walking backward, in step with Nando. Kyle keeps close. The tip of the rifle barrel clings to them like an angry insect.

  “You don’t think we’ve had enough?” asks the man.

  “We’re sorry,” Fernando tells him. “I’m sorry.” As they pass the woman, Louisa, she retreats into the doorway of her store, as if their very proximity is a threat.

  Finally, the man lowers the rifle. He gets down on his knees, oblivious of the store woman. He lays the rifle on the asphalt and puts his forearms up over his face. His shoulders begin to heave.

  It might be a symptom of the sickness. But Kyle’s pretty sure that he’s just crying.

  Chapter Six

  He’s striving to hold onto the anger. If he isn’t angry then he’ll be scared, and Austin isn’t willing to be scared. He can feel the fear waiting, lapping like dark water. If he lets that current rise, even for a moment, it might drown him.

  Anyway, the anger is still coming freely. First his mother dumps him here, choosing Martin over him once and for all. Then his father can’t be around him for more than ten minutes without rushing away. It seems to Austin that everything he needs to know about his life can be found right there, between the poles of two parents who can’t so much as tolerate his existence.

  Now he’s alone with this nurse, doctor, or whatever she is, and he can tell that she’s trying to be kind. But it doesn’t come easily to her, and in any case, Austin isn’t ready to trust her. She has the edge of a strange accent: something European, Russian perhaps. She looks old, with her gaunt face and stark white hair, but she doesn’t handle herself like an old woman or talk like one. She’s brought him coffee from another room that leads off her office, and is staying close, as though afraid he might run.

  As Austin sips the coffee, she attempts a few hesitant inquiries.

  “Did it take you long to get here?”

  He shrugs.

  “You had to travel by night?”

  No, they’d stayed in a motel. Austin had lain awake, at first listening through the wall to the angry-animal noises that counted in his stepfather’s case for passion, and then, in the silence afterward, observing the merciless passage of his own racing thoughts. “Yeah,” he says.

  “Is it bad out there? As bad as they’ve been claiming?”

  Austin hears a note of trepidation in her voice, but also genuine curiosity. It’s pretty bad, he almost says. He remembers things he saw on the way here. People fighting, over anything or nothing. Some of them visibly sick, many not. Rather than answer, he nods instead.

  The doctor asks him no more after that. Austin has finished his coffee, and the silence between them has stretched tight like shrink-wrap by the time his father returns. His face, too, is taut.

  “Will you give us a minute, Austin,” his father says, not phrasing it as a question.

  Is this how it’s going to be? Pushed out of every conversation, even when it’s about him? “No,” Austin replies.

  His father looks at him then, the first proper attention he’s shown since entering the office. “No?”

  “I’ve a right to know what’s going on.”

  Austin thinks his father will argue. But all Doyle says is, “Fine.” He turns back to the doctor, dismissing Austin from existence. “It’s settled. For the moment.”

  The doctor considers him doubtfully. “Settled?”

  “For the moment,” Doyle repeats.

  The doctor’s response is to glance at Austin out of the corner of her eye, as though calculating how much she can say with him there.

  Austin wants to tell her, You can just talk. There’s no need for this bullshit. He gets that his dad went to speak to the man on the balcony about him, and that he’s made some kind of a deal, one that perhaps puts his dad in danger. Austin should be grateful, yet their evasiveness makes that impossible. A part of him longs to trust these people, the parent he barely knows and the strange doctor, stern and considerate both at once. Only they won’t trust him, so he can’t.

  “What did you promise?” the doctor asks finally.

  “Nothing,” his father says. “Nothing he hasn’t got already.”

  “That doesn’t sound like him,” she notes.

  “I guess not.”

  The doctor sighs. “I hope you haven’t done anything you’ll regret.”

  “If I have, I suppose I’ll find out soon enough,” Austin’s father says, and there’s something in his voice that makes a lie out of that if.

  * * *

  There is, for today at least, just one problem left to deal with.

  You faced down Plan John, Doyle tells himself. Surely you can talk to your own son.

  Yet somehow, Austin frightens him more than Plan John does. Doyle can feel the anger coming off the boy, a radiation that taints the air. He has no argument to oppose it; he knows that it’s earned. He has let his son down. Whatever the reasons why Doyle’s marriage failed, so entirely and so mercilessly, they don’t matter in Austin’s eyes. Austin thinks his father abandoned him, and he’s right.

  So much damage to undo. Too much, maybe. But Doyle has to start somewhere. “Come on,” he says to Austin, “I’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping.”

  Doyle leads the way through the door to the infirmary stairwell, and Austin falls in grudgingly. As Doyle discussed with Aaronovich, the infirmary was designed to double as a safe room in case of trouble; injured prison guards would make for easy hostages. The upper door is a solid, windowless slab of metal. The stairwell walls are a grimy yellow, a color intimate with sickness.

  The door at the bottom – this one merely plastic – does have a window, of frosted glass. The room beyond is tiled to waist height and scathingly white under the fluorescent striplights. There are three gurney beds, an operating table against one wall, and locked cabinets for instruments and drugs. A lift like a coffin-length dumbwaiter is set into the far wall, there for moving patients. The infirmary hasn’t been used in weeks, but Aaronovich has kept it scrupulously clean. As a living space, that’s about all there is to recommend it.

  “I’ll bring you down a mattress from the guardroom,” Doyle promises. “Some books and magazines. And a lamp.”

  “Great.” Austin is considering the room with frank disgust. “It’ll be exactly like home.”

  His reaction is understandable. Given the limitations of what Doyle has to offer, small gestures can’t hope to penetrate the shell of Austin’s antagonism. Perhaps Doyle was wrong to push the boy out of his conversation with Aaronovich.

  “The man you saw before,” he says, “the man I went to talk to just now, his name is John Howard. He runs this place, and he’s dangerous. I needed to make sure he isn’t going to try and hurt you.”

  The look Austin gives him suggests grave doubt that anything Plan John threatens could be worse than this.

  You have no idea, Doyle thinks. But all he says is, “Hopefully I’ve fixed things so that he’ll leave you alone.”

  Something darts through Austin’s expression then, a flicker of meaning that Doyle can’t parse. “Did you make a deal?” Austin asks.

  It seems to Doyle that there’s a specific answer his son wants, but he hasn’t a clue what that might be. “No,” he says. “Not really.”

  Austin pulls up a chair and sits, looking away, as if to indicate that any slight interest he’s had in the conversation is over.

  Doyle fights back a sigh of frustration. I don’t know how to do this. Even when he and Rachel had been together, fatherhood had not come easily or naturally, but th
e Austin he remembers from then was nothing like this taciturn, anger-filled adolescent. In desperation, Doyle says, “I’m going to go do my rounds. Why don’t you come with me? I’ll give you a tour of the place.”

  “I’m fine here,” Austin mutters, in a tone that makes clear that he isn’t, and how could anyone be?

  “Okay.” What can Doyle do, force the boy? Still, he feels like a coward as he says, “You settle in. I’ll be back to check on you in a while.”

  Chapter Seven

  Nando drives for a couple more hours. No one says a word, not even when it starts to get dark and they’re still on the road. Just as the last light is failing, Kyle points out a barn, half tumbled down and obviously derelict. Without a discussion, Nando pulls off the road, into the long grass.

  Kyle is glad to be out of the ambulance. He thinks he’s never been so glad of anything. The sounds from the back are getting worse. Mixed in with the banging and yelling there have been other noises: sobs, retching, for a while laughter that seemed like it was never going to stop. And he aches all over, all through; he hasn’t ever been on a journey this long. Then there’s the atmosphere. Since the town, it’s felt as if a storm was about to break in the cramped cab. Kyle can’t even say why. What happened had been scary, but they’d got out okay, hadn’t they?

  Kyle scales an intervening fence and heads for the barn, wanting to be first to reach it. The double doors are standing open; one of them is rotted half off its hinges. Inside, the back wall is caved in, and most of the roof. The space is empty besides a little damp straw in one corner. At least they’ll be out of the wind, though, and not sleeping in the open.

  Carlita comes next. She gives Kyle a fragile smile, but he doesn’t miss the revulsion she’s trying to hide, the tension in her features that says, So this is how we live now? Nando enters after her, and Carlita gives him the smile too. “It’s just one night, right?”

  When Kyle’s dad follows behind Nando, he doesn’t bother to look around, and no one except Kyle looks at him. Ben sits on his own, in the far corner near the doors, and closes his eyes as if he’s settling down to sleep.

  Nando begins gathering scraps of wood, breaking off planks that appear rotten, and Kyle joins in. Carlita, who still smokes occasionally despite having quit the year before, produces a lighter from her purse, and with it Nando manages to get a fire burning. The three of them sit about the small blaze, sharing the last of the bottled water and the few remaining cookies. Kyle wants to know why his dad doesn’t come over, and why neither Carlita nor Nando invite him to, but somehow he doesn’t dare put either question into words.

  “Are we safe here?” Carlita asks.

  “No reason we shouldn’t be,” Nando says. He’d dragged the heavy doors closed while he was gathering their firewood.

  “And how far do we have left to go?”

  “I’m not sure,” Nando admits. “Maybe another five hours, if the roads are clear.”

  “Do we have enough gas left?”

  Even Kyle has noticed how the needle is drifting steadily toward the red. But all Nando says is, “Maybe.” Abruptly, with no apparent break in the conversation, he gets to his feet. He paces halfway to where Kyle’s dad is sitting and spits, “So what did you take?”

  Ben looks up, and there’s resentment in his eyes. Kyle wants to say something, to defend his father. Tell him he’s wrong, he thinks, willing the assertion into his dad’s mouth.

  Then Ben empties out his left-hand pocket. There are eight candy bars, crumpled and broken within their wrappers. He lays them out on the dirt before him. “Best I could do.”

  “I should have let him shoot you,” Nando says. Disregarding Ben, he returns to the fire.

  Ben grins at Kyle and holds up two of the candy bars. Kyle returns the grin, though hesitantly. He doesn’t fully get why Nando is so mad. Sure, stealing is bad, but they’re hungry, and the woman in the store had refused to sell to them, so doesn’t that make it practically okay? He climbs to his feet and goes over to his father. Ben piles up six of the bars and tips them into Kyle’s hands. “Share them with Carlita and your Uncle Nando, okay?”

  Kyle carries the bars back with care and proffers his cupped hands to Carlita, who plucks two from the heap. He continues to Nando and offers him half of the remainder.

  Nando looks as if he’ll refuse. Instead, he takes the bars, puts one in his pocket, and starts to unwrap the other. “One of these days, you selfish son of a bitch,” he says, not looking at Ben but loud enough that he can’t fail to hear, “you are going to get somebody killed.”

  * * *

  They set out earlier than Ben would like.

  Still numbed and exhausted from Brody’s screw-up attempt at a liquor store robbery, his head smarting from where the cop slugged him, he would have slept half the day if they’d let him. But he has no say. The first time Nando tries to wake him, Ben ignores it, rolling over on the hard-packed earth. The second time, Nando shoves him with a foot, and there’s no ignoring that. Ben bites down on his anger. The way things are going, he and Nando are going to have words and perhaps worse, but there’ll be a right moment and now isn’t it.

  There’s scant comfort in the fact that the others haven’t had much rest either, that none of them have anything to eat. Though Nando starts out driving, he looks exhausted, and when at one point a back wheel clips the edge of the road, Carlita insists she take over. By then, the sun is fully up. After an hour, even with the air-con on full and the windows open, it’s getting clammy inside the cab. The heat seems to rile the Sickers behind them to new heights of frenzy – or maybe it’s only that they, too, are fed up with being hungry.

  They pass through the first town around noon. There are two bodies in the street. One is lying face down, half on and half off the sidewalk, in a pool of caked blood. The other is crumpled in a doorway. There has been a fire, half a dozen houses reduced to chitinous wreckage; those on the edges are still smoldering. There are no signs of life.

  Soon after, the road begins to climb. Nando, poring over his maps, says they’re not far off. The day gets hotter.

  The second town is larger. There are indications of an ordered evacuation: all the vehicles gone and no bodies to be seen. Ben spies one person, a man, white, not young. He’s at the end of a side street, head tilted forward, barely looking their way. He takes a few half-running steps toward the ambulance and then darts for an alley. Something in the manner in which he moves leaves no doubt in Ben’s mind that he’s sick.

  Eventually they turn onto a narrow road marked with ‘PRIVATE’ signs that winds up into the hills. Nando says that this is it. The worst of the day’s heat has finally retreated, masked by clouds whose graying borders hint at impending rain. The road is not well maintained. The forest is thicker than elsewhere, dense and unwelcoming.

  Twenty or so minutes after they turn onto the private road, they come across the SUV. The vehicle must have been coming from the other direction and has crashed into a tree, hard enough that the trunk has shorn off much of the right side of its hood. To Ben, the accident appears recent. A woman is lying in the road, except for one leg that’s snagged inside the passenger door. Her face is bloody, what’s visible of it.

  “We have to stop,” Carlita says.

  “I don’t think we should,” Ben tells her.

  “We have to.”

  Nando offers no opinion. But as they pass the shattered SUV, he slows further, and then pulls up a little way beyond.

  The decision has been made. Once again, Ben has no say.

  * * *

  Kyle has never been near a dead body before.

  The woman looks as if she’d been trying to climb out of the car, or perhaps as if she was dragged out. Her leg is snared, but he can’t see what by. Nor can he see her face, and for that he’s glad. There’s blood sprayed in a loose star, across the asphalt and up the wheel arch of the SUV
. It seems to Kyle that someone must have done that to her, hammered her face into the road like that.

  Nando is already crouching beside the woman’s body. He stays that way for a few seconds, eyes roving, absorbing details.

  Ben is leaning against the back of the ambulance, heedless of the blows from its inside. “Come on,” he says to Nando. “I don’t like this.”

  Kyle moves nearer. It isn’t as though he wants to see the body, and yet he feels drawn, as if here is something he needs to observe whether he wishes to or not.

  Nando raises his gaze to inspect the interior of the SUV. “I think her neck’s broken,” he says.

  “So what?” Ben asks. Then, hastily, “I mean…okay, her neck’s broken. I’m sorry. But this isn’t on us.”

  Nando doesn’t look at him. “Someone could be hurt.” He stands. “She was the passenger, and there’s no sign of the driver. The keys are still in the ignition. We should have a hunt around.”

  “I’ll look,” Kyle proposes. But he says it softly, and neither of them pays him any notice.

  “If you’re going to get us into someone else’s problem,” Ben tells Nando, “we ought to deal with our own first.” He has pushed away from the ambulance and is indicating its flank with one outstretched hand.

  “Deal with it?” Nando’s tone is cold, though not quite hostile. For once he sounds unsure.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m going to go check,” Kyle says. He expects someone to contradict him, but Ben’s and Nando’s attention is entirely on each other, and Carlita is watching them too.

  Kyle trips down the shallow embankment, breaching the edge of the forest. He’s tense, frustrated. The sight of the dead woman has rattled him badly. And then there’s this conflict between his dad and Nando, which makes no sense to him and seems to have no end. Why can’t they put their selfish bullshit aside? He feels less alone here in the dark beneath the trees than he had with them.

  Kyle pauses to let his eyes adjust. The sky above is darkening fast. The air is weighty and pregnant. What light filters through has a greasy, vague quality. It’s a long while before he makes out the two figures in the clearing ahead.