A Savage Generation

by David Tallerman

  The last time Foster tried to delegate responsibility to him, Doyle’s job had been to talk to Nguyen about the generator. Nguyen, the young American-Vietnamese whose breadth of engineering knowledge and inexplicable presence in Funland baffle Doyle utterly, had ranted for an hour and more. The gist seemed to be that the generator had developed a fault, or would do so imminently, and that, when it went wrong, it would keep going wrong until it was beyond his ability to fix.

  “What can we do?” Doyle had asked in the end, when Nguyen’s verbal energy had finally unwound into sullen frustration.

  Nguyen had shrugged. “Fuck, I know. It’s entropy, man. Everything breaks eventually.”

  Obviously there’s an agenda in the tasks Foster doles out to Doyle, and it’s not one that’s difficult to see. Foster is creating an illusion in which they share authority for Funland’s survival, while pushing anything that can go wrong, that inescapably will go wrong, in Doyle’s direction. When the generator fails, that will be on Nguyen and on Doyle, but Foster’s hands will be spotless.

  Maybe that should bother Doyle more. Maybe it should bother him at all. He lets Foster order him because it’s easier than figuring things out for himself, and because he needs the diversion. Doyle doesn’t worry too much about the future; he believes less and less that there’ll be one. The generator will fail. The stores will run out. Or something else. There are any number of resources on which their survival depends that, sooner or later, will inevitably be exhausted, and there’s nothing that he, Doyle Johnson, can do about the fact. Perhaps a smarter man, a man like Plan John, but not him, and not Foster either.

  When Doyle knocks at the door of the storeroom, there’s a moment of silence, then Contreras’s thin voice replies, “Who is it?”

  “It’s Johnson.”

  A pad of footsteps, and the door swings open. Contreras is wearing just a pair of blue prison trousers, leaving his skinny chest exposed to the autumn chill. He looks concerned, though his expression has been set that way since his nephew’s death and it’s hard to determine if it’s grown any worse.

  “Good afternoon, Doyle.” Clearly he longs to say more, but the question never gets further than his eyes. What have I done? they entreat, with quiet desperation.

  “Are you busy?” Doyle asks. “I can come back.”

  “No, no. You want coffee?”

  “Sure,” says Doyle. “I can use coffee.”

  Bare soles whispering against the concrete floor, Contreras walks to the diminutive gas camp stove he keeps. He takes the tin pot resting there, pours some of its contents into a cracked mug, and hands the results to Doyle. Contreras’s coffee looks like molasses and smells like gas, but when Doyle takes a sip he immediately feels the cobwebs that have hung around him all day start to dissolve.

  Of course, the coffee and stove are luxuries Contreras has no particular right to, small abuses of his office. Doyle doesn’t begrudge him them, and no one else would be half as honest. No, that isn’t why he’s here.

  “I went over the last inventory,” he says. This isn’t true, but Foster has, and passed on to Doyle the relevant details as part of his abbreviated mission briefing.

  “Yes?” Contreras is already looking furtive.

  “We’re still going through supplies too fast. And not just a little. There’s hardly a sign of the rationing plan being used.”

  “No,” says Contreras, “I use the plan.”

  “Then where’s it all going, Tito?”

  “You know, Doyle. You must know how things are.”

  “Yeah.” Doyle shakes his head wearily. “I know. You let them in here and they take whatever they want.”

  “What can I do?” Contreras holds up his hands like a penitent. “They push me. They threaten. I have to go out sometimes. You tell me, what do I do?”

  “You give me names and I make it stop.” Doyle recognizes as he speaks the words that he means them. It’s the kind of job he’s ready for; not like this, not interrogating a weak and broken man.

  “Names?” Contreras says. “It’s everyone.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Everyone,” Contreras repeats. He shudders. “So what am I to do, Doyle, you tell me.” He crumples into a folding lawn chair beside the packing crate that bears his makeshift stove and cups his face in his hands.

  Doyle sips from his coffee, feeling distantly nauseated. Despite what he said, he doesn’t doubt Contreras’s version of events. They would all sooner starve in a few months than go hungry now. Except nobody is considering that far ahead, not Foster, not anyone. It’s like they still expect to wake one day and find everything returned to normal, the supply trucks rolling in again, the horror of taking responsibility for their own existence nothing but a memory.

  Doyle realizes Contreras is crying, thick sobs that travel visibly through his gaunt frame and bubble out against his hands. Doyle thinks about trying to comfort him, but he has no comfort to give. In a few months they’ll likely both be dead, at the end of a long, slow suicide.

  Doyle feels like he’s on a train chugging sluggishly toward a cliff edge. All he has to do is step off. Why can’t he do that? Just step off and walk away.

  Doyle thinks of Carlita, and then pushes the thought aside, barely.

  “I’ll figure something out,” he says. He drains the last of his molasses coffee and sets the cup on Contreras’s crate-cum-table. “Make sure you lock the door behind me.”

  But Doyle can’t judge whether Contreras hears through the muffled sounds of his own grief.

  * * *

  Only when Ben reaches the truck does it dawn on him that Houseman will have the key. His heart turns to stone in his chest. A perfectly clear image of him searching Houseman’s shattered remains slides into his mind, though how Ben would reach him with three Sickers in the way is beyond the scope of his imagination.

  However, when he squints within the cab, the key is already there in the ignition. Ben climbs inside, turns it, and for all that he’d been certain it wouldn’t, the engine rumbles into life on the first try. His instincts tell him to drive, as fast as he dares. Yet some small, contrary impulse drags his scrutiny from the dirt road, insisting he look behind. Ben anticipates the three Sickers finally turning their attention to him. Instead, his gaze is drawn to a shape, not much larger than a sack of potatoes, in the back of the truck.

  As he watches, it moves – turns its head.

  Hardly thinking, Ben climbs out of the cab. It’s the wrong thing to do, precisely the wrong thing. He knows without question, yet his body appears to have other ideas. Keeping his distance, Ben walks around to peer into the truck’s bed.

  The creature there looks back at him. A girl, stick-thin beneath a dress over sweatpants, both torn and black with dirt. She can’t be more than six or seven. Her hair was once blond, but now is darker and tangled into dreadlocks. She’s cowering, pushed up against the cab of the truck, cartons of rice and split peas leaking where her bare feet have trampled them. Her eyes are bright with fear; her cracked lips are curled about an animal snarl.

  “It’s okay,” Ben says.

  He doesn’t know what he means. Clearly nothing is okay. If he could drag her off and cast her aside and leap into the cab and drive away, he would. But if he does, she’ll struggle, and if she bites him, scratches him, spits at him even…. There’s blood on her dress, in crusted smudges, and if that blood somehow mixed with his own then it would all be over.

  Ben clambers back inside the cab. His mind is still providing nothing useful. Except that it occurs to him that the rear window will be toughened glass; he doubts she can break through.

  He releases the hand brake and sets off slowly, fearful of startling her. Five minutes later he’s on a proper road, and half an hour after that on a major highway, the one they followed down here. Ben hopes he can remember the route back. He imagines being
lost, and eventually running out of gas, with that creature so close behind him.

  The more he considers the girl, the more curious Ben grows. At first there had been small noises to remind him of her presence, scratching and the patter of her movements among their laboriously gathered supplies. Now she’s quietened, or else the sounds of her presence have been drowned by the drone of wheels on tarmac. Ben allows himself a few miles, until he finds a straight stretch. Then he slows to a crawl and glances over his shoulder.

  He’s half expecting the girl’s face to be pressed against the glass, jaws wide. Rather, she has curled up, almost out of view. It’s hard to tell, but he thinks she might be sleeping.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Evening is falling by the time Doyle leaves Contreras, the sun just beginning to tip beneath the rugged outline of the mountains to the west.

  He’d planned to go back to his room briefly and then continue to check on Carlita. It’s an urge he can’t place that carries Doyle’s feet to the south doors, the ones that open onto the yard. Maybe he has some unconscious thought of discussing with Foster what Contreras said. Or maybe his old instincts aren’t quite as dulled as he’s come to believe.

  The crowd isn’t big by the standards of a year ago. But given Funland’s current population, the gathering near the main gate is sizable, more than a dozen men huddled close together. They’re encircling the truck that went out early that morning. Tension hangs around them like midges about a stagnant pond, and yet, what’s strangest, no one is shouting, nor even speaking.

  In Funland, the vocabulary for expressing discontent isn’t wide or subtle. Certainly, silence has never figured into it. He’s had a headache building all day, though, and from the way the pain shudders to new and violent life the moment he sees that mute gathering, Doyle knows it signifies nothing good. The headaches are sufficiently regular now that he should have given up interpreting them as omens of trouble. Still, he does. There’s trouble enough in Funland to warrant the conviction.

  Doyle thinks about going back inside. Instead, he crosses the yard, not hurrying, trying to read the scene in the dimming light. But there are just the close-crowded bodies, a barricade concealing the near side of the truck. Doyle will have to join the end of the tail if he’s to learn what has them all transfixed, and so he does, sidling in beside a white con he recognizes as a man named Colton.

  Doyle looks at the truck. He observes Silensky, hunched in the cab, gripping the wheel as though he’s half set on driving straight back out again. He notes the boxes and bags of supplies piled haphazardly in the bed. And only then does he spy what he takes to be a canvas sack, until it turns wide eyes his way.

  “Shit,” Doyle says. He can’t believe it, he truly can’t. The child is like something from another world.

  “Shit is right,” mutters Colton from beside him.

  Then Doyle understands. This child is from another world. He can see her eyes more clearly now, the speckles of hematoma. “She’s sick,” he says.

  “Fuck yes she’s sick,” Colton concurs.

  Foster is nowhere in sight. Anger warms Doyle’s belly; isn’t that convenient? Foster is absent, and no one is doing anything. That means this falls to him.

  He doesn’t have his gun. Doyle never carries it on him, it’s back in Plan John’s apartment. Then he thinks, Could you shoot a child? And he’s shocked that is his second rather than his first thought.

  “Johnson.”

  Doyle starts. Aaronovich is standing beside him. He hadn’t noticed her approach. Her presence adds to the strangeness of the scene, for she so rarely leaves her office these days.

  “What is this?” she asks.

  The question doesn’t strike Doyle as requiring an answer. Nevertheless, he says, “A problem.”

  “That’s a child.” Her voice is hushed, full of wonder.

  Doyle rounds on her. “Don’t play stupid,” he snaps. “You know exactly what that is.”

  “Yes,” Aaronovich says calmly. “I just told you.”

  He catches her arm and drags her a few paces aside, not quite able to explain his behavior. Everyone can still hear, and all he’s doing is making a scene. “Listen to me. That thing is a menace. I’m going inside, I’m going to get a gun, and then—”

  “Johnson,” Aaronovich says, “don’t do this.”

  He freezes. Something in her manner has paralyzed him, tearing his thoughts asunder.

  “Don’t do it. Let me take her. It’s my responsibility. It will be on me.”

  “On you?” he says. He can’t make sense of her words. “What happens when she goes crazy? When you get sick? That will be on you?”

  “Yes,” Aaronovich says. Her composure is absolute. He can feel it pressing against his anger like the cool from an open freezer. “I’m the doctor here. This is my choice to make. That’s a child. Let me look after her.”

  Doyle stares at her in horror. She’s absolutely serious. Worse, she won’t back down. And he still doesn’t know if he can do what he said he’d do, if he’s capable of pointing a gun at that ragged creature and pulling the trigger.

  But Aaronovich is already taking the choice out of his hands. She’s edged closer to the rear of the truck, her palms out before her as though in supplication. She’s speaking softly, making gentle noises that sound to Doyle like nonsense. He tenses, readying for he knows not what. If the girl attacks then maybe, just maybe, he might move fast enough to restrain her in time.

  The girl makes a vibration at the bottom of her throat, a low trilling of fear and aggression. This is it, Doyle thinks. But Aaronovich doesn’t seem concerned. At the tailgate now, she lets it down, and stands once more with her hands out flat, perfectly passive and receptive.

  The girl moves. Yet her motion isn’t the rush Doyle’s been bracing for. She crawls clumsily to the middle of the truck bed, heedful to keep to the side away from the audience of gathered cons.

  “Back up,” Doyle says as quietly as he can. “Everyone. Get back.”

  They do as they’re told. He hadn’t thought they would but they do. These hard, dangerous men must look pretty funny, Doyle thinks distantly, shuffling to stay clear of a little girl.

  Aaronovich is retreating also, palms still flat, still murmuring wordlessly. The girl pauses in front of the tailgate, pushing up on her haunches to stare at the woman before her.

  Then she lollops down onto the concrete and begins to follow.

  * * *

  For all her brave words, Aaronovich doesn’t dare to touch the girl.

  She would like to lead her by the hand, to do something that might assuage her fear. The risk is too great. Fortunately, the child seems eager to accompany her. She walks in a curiously animal fashion, in sudden, jittery bursts, and her posture suggests that at any instant she might drop to all fours. She will only trail after Aaronovich; she’s careful not to go ahead. Aaronovich has to hold each door open so that they can slip through together. In those moments of proximity, she’s most conscious of the peril she’s brought upon herself. What would it take to tip this frightened creature into anger?

  When they get to the infirmary stairwell, the girl stalls. She sniffs the air and regards Aaronovich with unveiled suspicion. Then she backs off a few steps. Aaronovich’s heartbeat is thunderous, but the girl merely clambers onto the faded couch in the corner and scrunches herself small, as she had in the truck. She stares at Aaronovich, one eye peeking through the ropy tendrils of her hair.

  Aaronovich enters her apartment, which adjoins her workspace via a door in her office. By long-standing agreement, she is allowed to keep a limited stock of foodstuffs for use in her own small kitchen. Last night’s dinner was a crude attempt at chili; Aaronovich warms the leftovers, slops them into a bowl, and secretes beneath the surface two tablets from the emergency medical kit she keeps packed. She fills a glass of water and carries bowl and glass b
ack into the outer room.

  She had half expected the girl to have vanished, but she’s exactly as Aaronovich left her. Putting the water to one side, moving slowly, Aaronovich draws closer and proffers the bowl. The girl catches the odor first, before she sees. Her head jolts up and she makes a tremulous, throaty sound. With astonishing speed, she snatches the bowl from Aaronovich and scoots along the seat with it clutched in both hands. Only when she’s satisfied that Aaronovich isn’t about to pursue does she set to eating, scooping chili with one filthy hand and smearing it into her mouth.

  When she’s finished, she licks at the bowl and drops it to the floor. Aaronovich contemplates offering her the water, but by then it’s clear that the sedatives are beginning to take hold. It strikes Aaronovich that she needn’t have hidden the tablets. The girl would probably have eaten them anyway, so hungry was she and so apparently indifferent to what she was consuming.

  As soon as the girl is unconscious, Aaronovich pulls on latex gloves and carries her down to the infirmary. She seems almost weightless. Aaronovich lays her on the trolley bed that had been Carlita’s and sets to cutting off her clothing. The dirt has worn its way into the fibers and set like concrete, making them stiff and hardly recognizable as fabric. In places, Aaronovich barely needs to cut before the garments come apart, shredding in rotted tufts. Aaronovich bundles the discarded clothes into a scarlet biohazard bag and, because the smell is distracting, carries it upstairs and outside.

  Back in the infirmary, Aaronovich sets to cleaning the girl. She works methodically, treating cuts and abrasions – of which there are many – as she goes. The girl is terribly thin, her chest sunken, her ribs prominent. Aaronovich can easily circle fingers around her wrist and even her ankle. Yet while she’s certainly malnourished, in other ways she appears reasonably healthy. The swelling muscles of her arms and legs, for instance, show no signs of wastage.

  Aaronovich cuts the rat’s nest of her hair, hacking it away in snarled strands that go into another of the red biohazard bags. She shaves the remainder, sweeps up every scrap, and bags that too. The girl’s underarms and groin are hairless; Aaronovich decides that she can be no older than seven. She pares the girl’s nails, as close as she dares. Then, with extreme diligence, Aaronovich cleans her teeth. She’s grateful to find them in relatively good condition. Half a dozen are missing and a couple decayed, but given how the child must have been living for the last few months, she’d anticipated far worse.