A Savage Generation

by David Tallerman

  Kyle’s skin prickles. His heartbeat, suddenly, is thunderous. He should go back. But he can still hear the current of Ben and Nando’s argument, murkily penetrating the underbrush. This will be another thing for them to fight over, and in the meantime Kyle could be helping. He can see now that the figures are a man and a woman, and that the man is crouched in front of the woman, who is resting with her back to a tree and probably hurt.

  Kyle edges closer, flinching at every rustle of the foliage around his feet. By the time he’s drawn near the edge of the clearing, rain is beginning to fall. Fat drops rattle among the treetops and spatter unregarded upon the man’s jacket. Yes, the woman is hurt, and the man is kneeling, trying to help her.

  Then Kyle realizes, as if the image has refocused: that isn’t it at all. The girl is in her late teens, wearing a white strapped top and jeans. Much of the left side of her face is smeared across the tree, a mulch of fractured bark and crusted gobs of red and pink. The man is just staring at her, his face adjacent to hers.

  Hearing Kyle, he looks up. “She made me crash,” he says. “And the crazy bitch bit me. Can you believe that?” He holds up his arm to display the lacerated meat between his elbow and wrist. “It doesn’t hurt. You’d think it would hurt.”

  Kyle starts to back away.

  The man stands up. “Did you see my wife? Is my wife okay?” He pauses, scrutinizing his own hands.

  Kyle takes another backward step, another.

  The man doesn’t move to follow. “She was making such a fucking noise,” he says, “and…I think, maybe I….” The man holds his bloodied hands toward Kyle, as though in supplication.

  Then the shots ring out. Six, in rapid succession.

  Kyle turns and bolts.

  The man – not a man, sick, he’s sick – is running as well. Kyle can’t see him, but he doesn’t need to.

  “Dad!” he screams. “Get inside!”

  The words come out garbled. They’re incomprehensible, even to him. Kyle breaks through the edge of the trees. His dad isn’t getting into the ambulance. He’s standing there, staring. Nando, beside him, is first to spot the man. In an instant, he’s pointed his gun and pulled the trigger, and even from a distance, Kyle distinctly perceives its stubborn click. Kyle can distinguish the line of neatly spaced bullet holes in the side of the ambulance, where Nando has expended an entire cartridge.

  As he flings himself up the embankment, Kyle is certain the man must be right behind him, ready to drag him back. But seconds later he’s on the road, and when he looks round, the man has stopped, arrested awkwardly in mid-motion in a way that makes him appear more animal than human.

  Then Ben has Kyle’s arm and is dragging him, almost lifting him, and before he knows it he’s in the cab of the ambulance, being shoved into a seat like luggage. Carlita is beside him, and she’s shouting, though he can’t pick out words. As if he’s been deaf and the deafness has abruptly passed, other sounds flood in. He hears the slam of the driver’s door and the choke of the ignition. In a moment they’re moving, gravel churning beneath their wheels.

  But something’s wrong. His dad is yelling; even now, his dad’s yelling. Kyle doesn’t want to look, can’t not. The clamor seems to clutch his head and wrench it.

  He can’t fathom what he sees at first. Ben is flailing, still shouting, and there are too many limbs. Then Kyle understands.

  The Sicker has hooked his arm inside the open window. His forearm is wedged into the opening. And his hand is clamped around Ben’s wrist.

  Chapter Eight

  Doyle lets himself out through Aaronovich’s front office, without saying goodbye to the doctor. He feels uncertain, aimless. His routine has been disrupted, first by Rachel’s arrival, then by trying to find somewhere to lodge his son and the encounter with Plan John. And his routine is broken enough. These days, now that he’s only playacting the role of prison guard, it takes all of Doyle’s strength of will not to abandon the part altogether, as the others have.

  There are shadows in the yard and the sky has clouded over, reducing the heat of earlier to warmth that clings around the buildings and to the concrete beneath his feet. The weights pile has been abandoned, Houseman has given up his perch on the administrative wing roof, and Doyle is glad to note that Plan John isn’t on his balcony. A couple of the Latinos are smoking at the far end of the cellblock. He can’t make out their faces, but he guesses it will be Torres and Soto, since, despite Plan John’s regime, they rarely seem to have much better to do.

  Doyle heads for the south tower, the one overlooking the gate. He spends all the time he can there; of everything he could be doing, being on watch still feels useful. If there’s trouble in the yard or near the cellblock entrance then he wants to know, even if he’s helpless to intervene. And if anyone or anything should threaten Funland from the outside, Doyle wants to know that too. The fact that he has no real reason to fear such a threat does nothing to diminish the way the worry gnaws at him.

  Doyle lets himself into the tower and climbs the steps. The air is definitely cooling. When he gets up to the deck, the sky is painted mostly in oppressive shades of gray and dirtied white. The stripe of blue just above the treetops looks artificial and excessively bright. The forest itself is a single block of darkness, trimmed into untidy outlines by a careless hand.

  Then Doyle notices the bloom of dust there, followed a moment later by a glint of silver or white where the road is visible briefly through the forest.

  Is it possible Rachel is coming back? That she’s changed her mind? Perhaps, but it’s not likely. Yet no one has come near White Cliff in days, and what are the odds of two visitors in such close succession?

  Doyle picks up his radio, which he’d left on the parapet. He thumbs the switch and says, “This is Johnson. I’m up in the tower. Anybody waiting on visitors?”

  The response is silence, layered upon queasy static. What had he expected? Is anyone else even still using the radios?

  The vehicle finally breaks free of the forest edge, and Doyle recognizes that it’s an ambulance. Why would an ambulance be coming here? As the driver approaches the gate, they’re picking up speed. And they’re all over the road, travelling a snake’s path between the edges, even clipping the dirt beyond the graveled surface. What the hell do they think they’re doing?

  Then Doyle sees.

  He thumbs the radio button, roars into it, “I need help at the gate.”

  No answer. Doyle flings the useless radio aside, catches up his shotgun, and throws himself down the short flight of steps. The ambulance had already crossed half the distance from the forest edge; Doyle takes mere seconds to get down the stairs and out, but by then the vehicle has halved the remaining distance again. It isn’t slowing even slightly, and still the driver is hurling it from side to side, trying to dislodge the man clinging to the passenger-side door.

  Doyle hesitates. Should he open the gate? But there’s no time.

  The driver swerves again, yet harder. An explosion rends the air, so loud and unanticipated that at first Doyle supposes it’s a gunshot and catches himself ducking. Then he comprehends. Not a gunshot. A tire. The ambulance, travelling at an impossible angle in defiance of its own wheels, heaves over like some dying prehistoric beast. It covers the final distance on its side, with a roar of grating metal. When it strikes the wall, Doyle feels the transmitted impact via the soles of his feet.

  The ambulance had left the road at the last, or else it would probably have sundered the gate from its frame. Doyle can see it through the wire, through the driving rain. The vehicle lies felled on one side, warped and buckled, smoke belching from its crumpled engine.

  No way is anyone walking out of that.

  Almost as the thought crosses his mind, the driver’s door jerks open. The man who struggles to clamber free is wearing a cop’s uniform. He hasn’t spied Doyle. Having wedged himself in the door casing
, he’s reaching back into the cab, presumably to help someone else.

  Doyle hurries to unlock the gatehouse booth, dashes inside, and jabs the button for the gate. By the time he’s outside again, the gate is half-open and the cop has someone else up there with him, both of them perched on the side – now the top – of the overturned ambulance cab.

  Oh hell, Doyle thinks. Oh hell no.

  To the woman he calls, “Jump down. I’ll catch you.” He lays the shotgun against the exposed roof of the ambulance and reaches toward her.

  She’s evidently afraid, of him or conceivably of everything. “It’s okay,” the cop tells her. He seems remarkably calm.

  The woman slides to sit on the edge of the cab and, when she’s persuaded herself that Doyle really means to catch her, pushes off and into his arms. She’s light; he catches her effortlessly. When her feet first touch the ground, she staggers slightly. Doyle holds her arm until she’s steady and then lets go.

  To the cop he shouts up, “I have to get her inside, do you understand? Before she’s seen. Before anyone sees her. Do you understand?”

  The rain is coming hard, driven by a wind that has risen out of nowhere. The cop looks like he hasn’t heard. Then his expression focuses. “I understand. But just wait.”

  The cop reaches for someone else, bending half double to thrust his arms back into the cab. When he straightens, he’s hauling a boy, a skinny white kid in jeans and a cotton shirt. Blood is pouring freely from a wide cut in the boy’s forehead, and one arm of the shirt is dark with blackish red. The kid is very pale, and his eyes are huge. He’s mouthing words at the cop but Doyle can’t catch them.

  “Pass him down,” Doyle calls against the wind and the rain.

  The cop says something to the kid and he edges over. When he swings his legs round, Doyle catches hold of them and lifts him down, taking care not to knock the bloodied arm. His mind is working fast. There’s no one in the yard yet. Perhaps the storm has masked the sound of the crash. Perhaps the rain will be enough to keep everyone else inside, maybe even Plan John. But Doyle can’t take that chance. He has to get them into the administrative wing, and it has to be now.

  “Your turn,” he tells the cop.

  “No. There’s another. He’s trapped.”

  “I’ll come back,” Doyle yells. Then to the woman and boy, “Can you run?”

  She nods. After a moment’s hesitation, the boy does too.

  “All right. Stay with me.”

  Not even pausing to be sure that they’re with him, Doyle turns and sprints toward the distant entrance.

  * * *

  “Oh god, Johnson, don’t tell me….”

  Aaronovich has had only a second to register what’s happening, no opportunity at all to prepare herself. One minute she’d been working at her desk, distracted by the drum of the rain. The next her door was being dashed open, Johnson was shouting her name, and there he is with a woman and child, two strangers, both of them scratched and bloody.

  Aaronovich can’t quite explain the terror that’s choking her, but if anything it’s growing worse, threatening to strangle her breathing.

  “Not now,” Johnson tells her. To the woman and child he says, “You’ll be safe here.”

  “Did anybody see them?” A calm part of Aaronovich is assessing their injuries: in the woman’s case, nothing except a few nicks and bruises; in the boy’s, a head wound, bleeding plentifully but not deep – though it might mean a concussion – and an injury to his left arm, potentially a fracture. “If someone saw….”

  “No one saw.”

  “If someone did.” She wants to grab Johnson and shake him. Why is he refusing to recognize what’s so plainly apparent? “That woman? Here? Look at her!”

  The dangerous sense of calm that Johnson has, Aaronovich has never witnessed it so focused. “These are injured people,” he tells her, and each word seems immovable.

  “And I’ll treat them, obviously, but you can’t be thinking—”

  “Doctor.” He steps up to her, holds her shoulder with one hand. “Settle down. Do your job.”

  He’s right. Of course he’s right. She’s a doctor; these people need her help. All of her training, all her years of experience, returns like air exploding into a vacuum. Yet she knows, also, that he’s absolutely wrong. Not because he’s brought these people here, but because of what’s going to come next.

  He wants her to treat them, but this won’t end there. She glimpsed the truth in his eyes, from the moment the three of them burst through the door. When she’s patched them up, when the time comes to send them out into the world, Doyle Johnson will not do it.

  He’s already gone. The door is slamming at his back. He’s made this problem hers, and the tiny window she had in which to change that fate is closed.

  “Come on,” Aaronovich tells the woman and the boy, her mind still oscillating between seeing them as two hurt human beings and as the terrible dilemma they represent. “Hurry, we have to get you hidden.”

  * * *

  He has been partly thinking, partly trying not to think. He’s been staring at the wall as though staring could make it dissolve. Austin has never felt homesick before, but now that ache is a knot in his stomach, cold as a stone. Then the door bursts open, the doctor is rushing in, and behind her – to his astonishment – follow a woman, and a boy about his own age.

  “What’s going on?” Austin asks. The words come out choked.

  The doctor shakes her head. “I’ve no idea. An accident, I imagine.”

  The woman is Latina, not tall, younger than his dad and not old enough, Austin decides, to be the boy’s mother. She’s strikingly attractive. Even with her face scratched and bruised, even with her eyes wide and bright with fear, Austin finds it hard for an instant to look at anything else.

  Then she glances his way, and shyness drives Austin’s gaze to the boy instead. The boy is covered in blood. His face is bleeding and terribly pale, the same artificial white as the furnishings. One arm is bleeding too, and he’s carrying it with the other. When he moves slightly, blood patters from his fingers to the tiles.

  “Where’s my dad?” Austin says. He isn’t even certain why he wants to know.

  The look the doctor gives him conveys that she has better and infinitely more important things to be dealing with in this moment. “Outside,” she says.

  She leads the boy to a gurney and helps him climb onto it. The woman, hovering close, is unsure, almost skittish. With the doctor’s attention focused elsewhere, she seems peculiarly helpless. Austin thinks she might start crying, but she only watches as the doctor begins to cut the boy’s shirt away.

  Austin gets up, trying to move quietly. They’ve hardly noticed him; he’d rather not draw their attention. He can’t be here. He can’t rationalize his instincts further than that. It’s as if his loneliness and his isolation have reached a critical threshold, beyond which he’s helpless. Every muscle in his body insists he has to get out.

  He knows there’s nowhere to go, that his home and his friends and anything that mattered have been severed from him forever. He knows that what’s left to him is this place and these terrified, terrifying people. He knows his father can’t help.

  Yet he’s all Austin has now, and nothing could be worse than this white-walled, blood-spattered cell.

  Chapter Nine

  “I can’t move,” Ben tells Nando, for what feels like the twentieth time.

  Ben remembers each moment: getting into the ambulance; the grip on his arm, so tight that it seemed the fingers were welded in a ring of flesh and bone; the way he couldn’t tear free, no matter how he wrestled, no matter how crazily Nando flung the ambulance back and forth. Then the explosion – a gunshot? And the world had canted, its angles abruptly wrong.

  After that comes a patch he doesn’t remember, a sliver of unconsciousness. It can only have
been a sliver because, the next he knew, Kyle was being hauled out and was calling for him, calling for his dad.

  That was when Ben had tried to move his legs and discovered he couldn’t.

  Now everything is clear: very clear and very bright. Despite the storm clouds above, despite the rain slanting through the open driver’s door above him, he can see every detail of the cab precisely, as though its edges have been emphasized with luminous paint. Except he can’t figure out why he can’t move.

  He isn’t hurt, that he can tell, or not badly. A dozen parts of him ache and stab and shiver with pain, but nothing refuses to work. He can flex his fingers and toes. What he can’t do is get his legs free. With the passenger door beneath his right side and flat to the ground, the sole way out is upward, through the cab. An easy climb, if his body would comply.

  Ben attempts to explain this to Nando: “I can’t move.” He repeats the words patiently, though a part of him doubts whether Nando is hearing him at all. Ben tries to raise his voice, but his chest is one of the parts that aches most, and the effort sets him choking. “I can’t move,” he whispers, willing Nando to understand.

  Perhaps, finally, Nando does. For he vanishes from view, and moments later Ben detects the scrabble of boots descending the cab roof behind his head, the sound fuzzed by the thrash of the rain. Ben begins to panic then, fearful that Nando might simply be leaving – can he hate him that much? – but seconds later he reappears, now before the windshield. He’s holding something in his hand, a torn-off side mirror. From Ben’s perspective, Nando seems giant, elongated by the angle. The rain is churning off his head and uniform, which it has dyed a slick black shade.

  Nando wields the side mirror like brass knuckles, twining his fingers in its shattered innards. He brings it down on the windshield, already a labyrinth of cracks. Afraid the glass will shatter over him, Ben drags an arm up to shield himself.