A Savage Generation

by David Tallerman

  Ben considers suggesting that Landser check upstairs on his own. One look at his face cuts the words off in Ben’s throat. It isn’t fear he sees there, exactly, Landser probably couldn’t appear frightened if he wanted to, but there’s definite unease in his eyes.

  So they search together, not speaking, falling unconsciously into a rhythm, Ben tapping doors open and peeking in while Landser keeps watch. It’s apparent after a couple of rooms that they won’t uncover anything of value; each is as shabby as the hallway. Ben keeps going partly from morbid curiosity, partly from a refusal to admit how wrong he’d been about coming here.

  They go through the downstairs more quickly. It’s much the same. The living room is particularly destitute, nothing in there but an ancient television and a settee with fat gobs of stuffing slopping from tears in the age-grayed fabric. A stink like warmed garbage hastens Ben’s steps. They go on via a dining room into the kitchen, to find the cupboards stripped bare.

  They leave the house by another door off the kitchen, also left open. A strip of what was once a vegetable garden is hemmed by a low, tumbledown fence. Ben’s first thought is optimistic. Again it occurs to him that they’ll unearth some supplies for the farm: fertilizer, pesticide, any prize to redeem this extra effort. But it’s something else that gives Ben pause and keeps him staring at the small plot, though initially he can’t say what.

  Then he realizes. Overturned dirt. Patches have been dug through recently, rifled for subterranean produce. Animals, he thinks. Wild dogs. There must be dogs all over, armies of them. Yet that doesn’t explain the quiet. Ben hadn’t noticed before, not in the house or the front yard, but there’s a stillness in the air that doesn’t feel normal. There are trees off to their right, and shouldn’t there be birdsong? All he can hear is the sough of the wind and a distant, repetitive creak, a loose window or the front screen door, maybe. Ben glances at Landser. Does he feel it, that wrongness? But Landser only seems impatient.

  Ben leads the way around the side of the house. The ground is overgrown there, the grass and nettles waist-high in places, up to where they wash like a sea against the flank of the metal shed. The path of cracked earth is already half overwhelmed.

  The house hides the truck and Houseman until Ben and Landser are almost at its corner. Houseman is standing guard, as he said he would. However, even from a distance, his face is visibly stricken. Houseman isn’t looking at them. Yet he must have heard their advance; he releases the shotgun’s stock and ushers them forward. He’s looking at the metal shed, at its front. Ben’s angle of approach cuts it off from his view. Since Houseman is staring intently, Ben can’t resist looking too, waiting for that moment when his perspective shifts. Moving so slowly – because Houseman is moving slowly – is like floating through a nightmare.

  Then Ben is past the corner and can see, obliquely. The shed’s twin doors of corrugated iron are open. Ben can’t remember if they were open when they got here. The space beyond is lightless, blotted with shadow.

  It’s dark enough to hide whatever lies within, but not the figure standing inside the entrance.

  Chapter Twenty

  He should be doing something. There must be something he can do that isn’t sitting here, tying himself into knots.

  Day by day, Doyle finds it more difficult to know what his function is. Things are expected of him, he feels. But he can’t – or maybe simply doesn’t want to – say what they are. He doubts he can meet anyone’s expectations, even his own. It’s growing harder and harder just to get out the door.

  If Doyle had imagined Plan John’s death would end his pariah status within Funland, then he’d have been disappointed. Not that he had; such a thought had never crossed his mind. Looking back, Doyle questions if any had, or if he’d only acted, putting one foot in front of the other until suddenly he was ankle deep in blood. That’s how he remembers that night. It’s the sole way he can arrange the memories that withstands the test of logic.

  There were those who’d supposed he would try and run the place. But it had taken Doyle a day to recognize even that. Throughout that time, he’d distantly anticipated them coming for him, without knowing for certain who they were. Surely someone had been loyal enough to Plan John to avenge his death. If not, Foster had ample reason to want Doyle out of the picture. Doyle had used what he’d assumed to be his last day to make sure Carlita was safe and might stay safe, and to hunt for his son, uselessly. The prospect of death hadn’t frightened him. He’d been exhausted, eyes raw from sleeplessness, brain raw from all that he wasn’t ready to contemplate, and fear had been beyond him.

  It had been Foster who’d tracked him down, late in the evening, as Doyle was eating in what had been the guards’ canteen. This is it, Doyle had thought dully, and wondered if, when the moment came, he would find the will to fight back.

  “Someone needs to sort Plan John’s things,” Foster had said without preamble. “All those files of his, whatever else. And I’m busy, frankly, keeping this shitstorm you’ve made from ripping the roof off. So I was thinking that person should be you.”

  Therefore, Doyle had gone through Plan John’s possessions. The personal files he had burned without reading, glancing at them just long enough to appreciate how comprehensive they were. The only ones that gave him pause were Aaronovich’s and his own. In the end, he’d thrown them into the flames with the rest. Everything else Doyle had catalogued, in so much as he could comprehend it. There’d been two file cabinets full of paper records, as well as various notebooks, and the codified logbook he’d discovered with the two-way radio in Plan John’s bedroom. There was also a laptop computer, but it had little on its hard drive besides pornography. Plan John’s record keeping had been deeply old-fashioned and utterly obsessive; it was an insight into the man Doyle had neither wished for nor been able to fathom.

  Determined to do a thorough job, not because he’d expected anything to come of it but because he urgently needed the distraction, Doyle had spent the better part of a week scrutinizing all that he’d excavated. After the first day, he had opened the windows and patio doors, hauled out Plan John’s bed, dumped it over the balcony, and dragged up his own wire-frame bed from the guardroom. Doyle hadn’t paused to examine how crazy doing so might seem, or what message he sent when from then on he slept in the apartment. He hadn’t stopped to ask what it said about him that he was inclined to sleep mere feet from where he’d put a bullet in Plan John’s head.

  Through Foster, Doyle had called a meeting, and he’d given his report, as if they were the directors of some corporation instead of ex-cons mixed up with their former guards, readying to brave their first winter in this new and infinitely hostile world. No one had cared, of course; no one had cared about any of it. Only Silensky’s kid had shown the slightest interest, and then only in the coded logbook, like it was something out of a spy story. They hadn’t even found the situation funny, though surely it was. Doyle had realized belatedly just how afraid everyone was, even the hardest of them. No one had liked Plan John, but, as his name implied, he had been prepared for the worst, he’d made the tough calls, and now – thanks to Doyle Johnson – he was gone.

  Afterward, Doyle had stayed where he was. Foster had been making the administrative wing his headquarters, and somehow Doyle didn’t feel right being there. Again, he’d resisted considering why it did feel right for him to be in Plan John’s old rooms, of all places. Doyle had told himself, sometimes, that he was trying to understand, to tease out the shape of Howard’s scheme, and whatever had made him so certain they could endure here when the rest of the world, conceivably, was gone. Doyle had read over and over files, records, logbooks, and lists. But none of it made sense.

  If he’d had a real motive, perhaps that came into focus a week later. He’d begun to explore the Big House, which, true to its name, seemed to contain more rooms than was reasonable, and so few of them used. Many were entirely empty. Others contained piled cha
irs and beds. One was full of moldering uniforms and fluttering clouds of moths. Then Doyle had found the apartments. There were three, surfaces thick with dust, each with its own small washroom and now-defunct shower. Probably they’d been intended for guests, though the idea of anyone visiting White Cliff in anything but its formal capacity struck Doyle as hard to reconcile.

  That night, under cover of darkness, he’d moved Carlita into one of them.

  When she’d first seen the room, she’d wept. Doyle had stood awkwardly, watching her relief and pain well out in floods. When she’d quieted finally, he’d said, “You’ll be safer here.”

  “Oh my god, Doyle.” She’d sounded almost delirious.

  “I’ve blacked out the windows. All the same, use the candles sparingly. If you want daylight, you’ll have to leave the door to the corridor open. There’s a second door that closes off this whole section; between here and there, you can go anywhere you like.”

  Her expression had been childlike, gratitude stripped of pretense. It had only made him more uncomfortable.

  “I’ve got to go,” he’d said. In truth, he’d had nowhere to go and nothing at all to do. “I’ll come back tomorrow to check on you. You should have everything you need to get through the night.”

  “Thank you,” she’d whispered.

  So much meaning in those two words. The weight of her emotion had seemed like a physical force, pressing upon Doyle as he paced out of the room. It disturbed him, for it was disproportionate to such a small kindness, exceeding anything he might have earned.

  Nevertheless, he had returned the next day, and the next. Doyle had gone every day, some days twice. He is thinking, in fact, of going now, though it’s light outside and so theoretically more risky. But even freed of the infirmary, Carlita still gets bored, crazy bored. She’d be glad of the company.

  And there’s little real danger of being seen, less of questions being asked when no one cares what he does. Aside from Aaronovich, Doyle has told only Ben Silensky and his boy, Kyle. Contreras, he reasons, doesn’t need to know. Doyle doesn’t blame him for his failure to resist Plan John, but not blaming is a different thing from risking another such moment of weakness.

  Contreras. Damn it. Yes, there is something Doyle needs to do. Orders from Foster the day before last: “Johnson, you’ve got to talk to that useless shitsack Contreras. If you want him running the stores then he needs to run them, not just let everyone take whatever the fuck they like.”

  Doyle hadn’t wanted Contreras running the stores that he remembers. However, he does want Contreras safe, and Foster knows that. Putting someone Doyle is willing to protect in that position makes it halfway to being Doyle’s responsibility.

  So he’ll go to Contreras and listen to his news. It will be bad, because there’s no other kind. Perhaps Doyle will offer advice he doesn’t believe himself. Perhaps even that will be beyond him. Either way, he’ll get it over with.

  And then – Carlita? Yes, maybe then.

  * * *

  “What’re you doing?”

  Kyle starts so hard that he drops the pencil he’s been busily spinning in his fingers. It clatters from the edge of the desk.

  Austin has come up behind him without a sound. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of baggy blue prison trousers, sizes too big, tied at the waist with string and tucked up around the ankles. His head is shaved to the skull, a job so messy that Kyle suspects he did it himself. This is closer than they’ve been to each other in weeks, and Kyle can’t help noticing, with a thrill of awe, how muscled Austin’s arms and torso have become. There can’t be more than a year between them, and yet Austin, with his wiry frame and the studied blankness in his face, now looks far older.

  Kyle struggles to keep a quaver out of his voice. “You remember how your dad found that radio set in Plan John’s rooms?”

  Austin shakes his head, with no apparent interest.

  “After he….” After he shot Plan John. “He found a two-way radio. For if the phone lines ever got cut off. Turns out Plan John had been keeping it in his rooms. This” – he indicates the book spread on the desk with a tilt of his head – “was there with it.”

  Austin’s expression hasn’t changed one iota during anything Kyle has said. To Kyle, the thought that there might be someone out there, someone they could talk to and maybe meet, even kids his own age, sends a shiver through him every time. If he’s honest, he knows that what he’s imagining is his old life, the world before, yet that knowledge does nothing to make the feeling go away.

  “So what’re you doing with it?” Austin asks.

  “It’s in this weird code,” Kyle explains. “Your dad told me I can try and figure it out.”

  “Why?”

  Kyle considers. “I guess because no one else cares.”

  “No,” Austin says, with abrupt and disproportionate irritation, “I mean, why do you want to do that?”

  The reality would take too long to explain, and Kyle is sure Austin isn’t interested anyway. Kyle is the only one who’s shown any curiosity regarding the coded logbook, and even the prospect of other survivors. He settles for the most simplified version. “Just bored, I suppose.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Austin’s face cracks for the first time, the briefest glimpse that a mental process is occurring. “If you’re that bored, why don’t you come with me?”

  Kyle’s heart jolts. Since his arrival at Funland, he and Austin have scarcely spoken, as though some intangible conflict sprang up between them at the outset. For a while it didn’t seem to matter, but as the days and months have slipped by, as his dad has grown more distant, as he’s come to comprehend the scope of his aloneness, Kyle has begun to wonder: how would it be if he and Austin were friends? Is such a thing possible? He barely recalls what having a friend is like.

  “Okay,” Kyle says. “Where are we going?”

  “I’ll show you,” Austin tells him, already turning to leave.

  Kyle gives the logbook one more quick look, marveling as he always does at the neat, unintelligible rows of text. Then he snaps it shut, slips it into a pocket, and falls in behind Austin.

  * * *

  On her third attempt, Aaronovich gets as far as the outer door before she turns back.

  Each time she’s promised herself she will go outside. She’ll find someone to help, something to do. There must be ways in which she could be useful. And each time she’s faced the same conclusion: Funland has only one place for her, and this is it.

  Indecisiveness isn’t like her. Neither is cowardice. Nor is the sudden upwelling of frustration that makes her slam her office door far harder than she needs to. Aaronovich sinks into a chair, releasing the sigh that’s been building within her. She understands her own turmoil and these bursts of useless energy that propel her nowhere. But understanding doesn’t help.

  The truth is that she misses Carlita.

  Through every moment, her presence felt like a weight around Aaronovich’s neck. Knowing the woman was down there, literally beneath her feet and yet beyond her ability to help, had corrupted her perception of herself by slow degrees. For, even after everything – Micha’s death, the trial, the gray months of total numbness that could reductively be described as grief – she had clung to the belief that, above all else, she was someone who helped people. Doctor had never been merely a title to her. As far back as medical school, it had seemed a part of who she was, essential as a first love.

  Now Carlita is gone and Aaronovich misses her. Or perhaps not Carlita herself; how can she miss someone she hardly spoke to? Their entire association had been conducted in the briefest of snatches, and whenever they’d spoken, the gulf between them had been vast. No, what Aaronovich misses and all she misses is the sense of worth Carlita’s presence gave her. The absence of having a patient of sorts is actually worse than the insi
dious guilt that Carlita’s irremediable helplessness forced upon her.

  Now there’s nothing. Aaronovich has one job to do and she can’t do it. She’s come close to requesting that Doyle Johnson allocate her a new role, but after Plan John’s death and the conversation that followed she feels less and less sure she can trust him, or that she wants to. She’s thought of speaking to Foster, but she’s never found anything to like about the man. And what would be the point? Her age, her gender, everything about her keeps her apart from the wider world of Funland. Fortunate, really, that her function makes her invaluable, or the price of her current uselessness might be infinitely more severe.

  But oh, how she hates being useless. Few torments could injure her so deeply. There are times when it’s all she can do not to pray to a god she long ago relinquished any faith in: Make them sick, make them hurt each other, just give me something I can do. Blasphemous thoughts if she still believed, mere ugly fantasies since she doesn’t.

  Aaronovich’s mind turns then, as it frequently does, to the one person in Funland she could have truly helped.

  She wishes she’d tried harder to get through to Doyle’s boy, Austin. And she asks herself why she’s already rendered that possibility into the past tense. Is he so beyond her aid? Or his father’s, for that matter? But she almost never sees him; he’s become a ghost. Anyway, Aaronovich is no psychiatrist. She can do no more than anyone else could.

  Except, perhaps, that she would care. Aaronovich reflects on why she hasn’t at least tried, and doesn’t at all like where the question threatens to lead her. Maybe it’s not too late, she thinks – knowing that of course it is. For if Austin had been so damaged when he came here, what must the boy be like now?

  * * *

  Austin doesn’t speak as they cross the yard.

  He’s said more consecutive words in one day than he has in the last month, or so it seems. The effort is exhausting. He resents it, and resents Kyle for making it necessary. He resents his own need.