When he lowers his arm, the windshield is still intact, and someone is standing behind Nando.
And they’re sick. Ben knows it in the instant he sees them. From the deeply bloodshot eyes, the gaunt face, and the filthy clothes, but mostly from the wound – the bullet wound – in their shoulder. It has torn muscle and splintered bone, half severing the left arm, yet they’re moving as if it’s nothing.
That injury, and the man’s obliviousness, tells Ben all he needs to know. That this is one of the Sickers they brought from the city. That he survived the hail of bullets Nando fired into the ambulance’s side. That the doors have not endured the crash; maybe a hinge popped, maybe the clumsy welding didn’t do its job. That he’s angry. That he’s mad.
Perhaps Nando follows Ben’s gaze, because he’s turning his head when the man catches hold of it. Nando has a moment in which to resist, which he wastes reaching for an empty gun, before the Sicker drives his face into the windshield.
He draws Nando back, as though he’s weightless. Nando’s nose is smashed almost flat, split at its tip and pumping blood. His mouth is open so wide that it’s like he’s yawning. His eyes are frantic.
Then the man does it again. Again, again, again.
Ben watches Nando, dying blow by blow. His face, already unrecognizable, is coming apart a little more with each impact. Still the Sicker beats his head against the window, over and over, seemingly tireless.
Ben wants this slow murder to stop. He knows that if it does, he’ll be next. Knowing that, he wills it to continue, hates himself. Hates his fear. Hates the Sicker. Most of all hates Nando, for not diverting him longer.
The Sicker gets bored so suddenly that it’s like a switch has been flicked. He shoves Nando aside, lets him flop in the dirt. He squats to stare into the cab. He’s smiling, a crooked twist of the lips. He mouths something, but if it’s words, Ben can’t hear them. Then he bunches his fists and starts hammering the glass, at the weakened point, the spot where Nando’s face ruptured.
There’s a roar, a blast of light so bright that Ben is certain he can feel the heat of it. When he can see again, the Sicker is gone. The windshield is misted and dripping with red.
Another figure ducks into view, distorted by the smears of blood and brain matter filthying the window, smoke still coiling around the barrel of his shotgun. A black man in dark trousers and gray shirt, not a cop though; remembering where they are, Ben distinguishes the prison guard uniform. The guard raises his shotgun and brings the butt down hard on the cobwebbed, blood-smeared windshield, once, twice, three times, until at last it comes loose from its frame. He lays down the shotgun and sets to pulling the entire pane loose.
Ben does what he can from his side. Somehow, unexpectedly, he works a leg free, and with that done, the other comes. He applies both feet to a corner and exerts all his strength. With a creak, the buckled windshield tears from its frame.
The guard reaches in, catches hold of Ben’s forearm, and draws him upward. “Come on,” he says, his voice a drawl that seems channeled down to Ben by walls of pain, “let’s get you on your feet.”
* * *
The room is distant. Ever since the doctor gave him the injection, Kyle has been somewhere else, though never far away. He’s conscious of her presence nearby. He comprehends that she’s been working on his injuries, for he’s suffered through brief fever dreams of spiders spinning webs on and in his flesh, their touch no more than a whisper.
Now he’s partly awake. He’s in a room, a white room. The striplights are unpleasantly bright. He wishes he could move an arm to shade his eyes. He wishes he could move at all. His body is heavy with a weight of lassitude, yet at the same time buoyant, like he’s floating. But already both the heaviness and the buoyancy are starting to evaporate, and with their passing his mind is growing clearer.
Kyle manages to tilt his head. The light is less dazzling, or else he’s growing accustomed to it. Shapes resolve into people. A man lies on a gurney against the opposite wall, and Kyle sees that it’s his father, asleep or unconscious. His head is bandaged, and Kyle is afraid, until he realizes Ben’s chest is rising and falling. That insight steadies him. His father is alive at least.
Kyle’s scrutiny roves on. Carlita is sitting in a plastic chair, and she’s crying, racking sobs that shake her like little earthquakes. There’s a man beside her, the prison guard who led them here, and she’s leaning her head on his chest, his body muffling the sounds she’s making. He has his arm around her shoulders, and Carlita’s right arm is curled across her body. Her fingers are clasped upon her own left shoulder, the guard’s large hand cupped over her smaller one.
It’s that which Kyle can’t bear. The rest he can accept, but that – there’s something in the way their hands connect that makes him want to scream.
Leave her alone, he thinks. Leave her alone! The second time he means to say it, but no words come.
Kyle closes his eyes. When he opens them again, his head is clear and his body his own once more. The man, the guard, is gone. Carlita is sitting near to Ben’s bedside, watching him as he sleeps. She seems composed now.
But I saw what I saw, Kyle thinks. It had been real. And though he didn’t entirely understand it, he won’t easily forget.
* * *
Austin has no idea how long he’s been up on the guard tower.
The rain is starting to slacken, rigid beams of sunlight breaking the crust of the cloud. However, his clothes are already soaked through, adhering like a second skin. He’s beginning to shiver, or maybe has been shivering for a while. But he feels no impulse to do something about it.
By the time he’d got outside and across the yard, his dad had been hauling another man, a white guy in faded jeans and a T-shirt, out of the wreckage of the ambulance’s cab. There were two bodies at their feet, and there was blood everywhere, in great splashes that were streaking and dissolving under the storm’s onslaught.
But Austin hadn’t cared about that. Because there had been a third figure: out past the gate and the overturned ambulance, far up the road toward the forest’s verge. Someone he recognized, even at such a distance. Someone who, no matter how bad everything else might be, he’d thought that at least he would never have to see again.
Austin had watched, frozen. He had barely noticed as his dad passed him, supporting the wounded man, leading him in the direction of the doctor’s office.
“Austin,” his dad had called, “what are you doing here? Get inside.”
Austin hadn’t been able to answer. He couldn’t have begun to explain. Even thinking was beyond him. And acknowledging that he wasn’t about to speak, let alone move, his dad had said, “I’ll come back for you.” He’d sounded angry, and immensely tired.
More time had passed. Austin didn’t know how long. Then the figure moved, out of his line of sight. In a frenzy, Austin had looked around for somewhere he could get a better view. There was the guard tower, its door standing open. He’d covered the distance and the stairs inside at a run. Still, he’d been too late. He’d thought he saw a trace of movement in the shadows at the forest’s edge, but hadn’t been sure. It had been hard to make out anything through the downpour.
His gaze remains on that spot. He blinks rain from his eyes and wonders if he’s been crying. How are you supposed to tell the difference? Distantly he hears footsteps, first slapping upon the drenched concrete of the yard and then jangling on the metal staircase under his feet. From behind him comes his father’s voice, at once irritable and concerned. “Austin, what are you doing up here?”
He can’t say. He can’t. That his stepfather, the man he hates above all others, is out there. That he’s sick. That Austin can imagine no explanation of that fact that doesn’t mean his mother is dead.
“Are you all right?” Doyle asks, but the irritation is winning over the concern.
Austin can’t put those realizatio
ns into words. If he did, he feels certain they’d tear his throat open, like scorpions clambering into the air.
“Austin?” Now, finally, his father sounds nothing but impatient.
And with that, something breaks inside Austin – something that has been drawing taut throughout the day, and for much longer, longer than he can remember. Austin turns and pushes past his father, wishing he had the strength to shove him to the ground, wishing for so many reasons that he was stronger than he is.
“Leave me the fuck alone,” he snarls.
Before his father can react, he is out of the tower and storming across the yard. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but everything else is perfectly, painfully lucid.
Austin sees the future ahead of him, unavoidable. He knows what he’ll have to do.
He knows that, when the time comes, he’ll do it alone.
Part Two
Resistance
Chapter Ten
“We can’t keep on like this.”
Ben, not wanting to be drawn, grunts noncommittally.
Foster slides back the mirrored door of a walk-in wardrobe and starts rummaging through its contents: first the neat row of women’s clothes on hangers and then the boxes, mostly shoeboxes, arranged beneath. “Two of us killed. Not including the thing at the beginning, because okay, no one’s saying that was Plan John’s fault.”
No, they say it was Ben’s fault. Nando, after all, can hardly be held to blame for his own death.
“But everything since. What happened with Cooper and Dallas.” From where he’s kneeling before the wardrobe, Foster regards Ben warily.
Ben walks to a bedside cabinet and opens the drawer. There’s a tattered paperback, on the cover a firefighter with his jacket open to reveal his bare chest, holding a woman in a negligee. There are some hairclips, a small flashlight, a pair of reading glasses, and two packets of tablets, one of painkillers and the other some drug Ben’s never heard of. Ben takes the glasses and flashlight and stuffs them into the bag he carries. The tablets he slips into his own pocket, having made sure that Foster is no longer watching him.
Ben knows what’s going on. At least, he hopes he does, hopes this is merely Foster desiring an in with Plan John. He’s been angling for a share of the pie for weeks, setting himself up as leadership material – playing hero.
Yet Foster doesn’t have the look of a hero. His jaw is weak and patterned with gray-tinged stubble, not clean-shaven and square like the firefighter’s on the paperback cover. He’s too close to forty and too out of shape to boast such flawless musculature. His eyes may have a certain steely quality, but that resolve tends to get lost in the sneer that hangs around the corners of his mouth.
Foster abandons the wardrobe. “Nothing in here. What are we going to turn up that we haven’t already?”
“What do you suggest?” Ben asks carefully.
Foster doesn’t reply. Instead, he walks to the window and stares down into the street.
He has a point, Ben thinks, but only halfway. There’s no pinning Cooper’s and Dallas’s deaths on Plan John. Probably they got sloppy. No one knows, since all they found were the bodies. But the violence of their deaths, the way they’d been bitten and bludgeoned, that said Sickers, and so far the Sickers have proved an avoidable threat. Alone, they tend to run. In packs, which increasingly is how they travel, they’re conspicuous enough to steer around. A couple of near run-ins have ended the moment a gun was fired.
These days, they’re not what frightens Ben the most.
As for the growing redundancy of these interminable search parties, if it’s hard to see the purpose in ransacking a town for the third time then the pills, flashlight, and glasses, and the other pieces in Ben’s bag, raise doubts over how thorough the efforts were the first two times. As long as their supplies are holding out – and the stocks Plan John managed to accumulate in the run-up to the outbreak were considerable – it’s difficult to imagine anyone taking these expeditions entirely seriously.
“The thing with a situation like this,” says Foster, just as Ben has given up expecting a response, “is that everyone needs to know where everyone else stands. Or else assumptions get made.”
“Maybe we should be looking farther afield,” Ben ventures, since it’s clear he needs to say something and he isn’t ready to answer Foster’s unspoken query.
“You talking about going into the city?” But that isn’t what Foster’s asking. What he means is: Is Plan John talking about going into the city?
“I’m just saying,” Ben tells him.
Foster scrutinizes him closely. Expanding the range of their looting is one of the pillars of his campaign. Foster’s main reason seems to be that Plan John opposes it, no doubt because he fears that the army or some other vestige of government remains there and will be disinclined to turn a blind eye to a looting colony of former convicts.
A shout from the street saves Ben from trying to wriggle out of the question. “You pricks done up there?” It sounds like Landser.
Foster, still by the window, counters, “Unless you want a nice new dress.”
“You keep it, Foster. Look nice for Plan John the next time he fucks your fat ass.”
Foster, flushing, is evidently prepared to escalate the shouting contest. Getting a grip on himself, he instead stamps out of the room, calling back, “You fucking coming, Silensky?”
Ben, grinning at Foster’s discomfort, pauses a moment to snatch up an item unearthed by his rummaging. He stuffs it into a pocket and hurries after. Outside, the other search parties are gathered around the two trucks, three groups of two men each. Aside from Foster, the only guard along is Houseman – though that differentiation, guard, is becoming less meaningful with each passing day.
Or so Ben had thought. He perceives now that Foster has gravitated toward Houseman and a couple of the older cons, Art Green and the English cook everyone calls Porridge. Everybody knows Houseman is on side with Foster, and likely the cons are too, both of them temperamentally unsuited to life under Plan John’s rule. At any rate, if Foster is recruiting, they’re where he would start.
Plan John won’t tolerate factions. If Foster is getting away with anything, it’s because Plan John intends to make an example of him. However this dissent shakes out, it will lead to trouble. And trouble has a way of exposing secrets. Ben has an excess of those; it seems to him that secrets are about all he has. The situation with Carlita can’t go on forever, or even for much longer.
Foster and his little group have already occupied one of the trucks, with Houseman and Foster in the cab. Oxendine has settled into the driver’s seat of the second vehicle. Ben clambers over the tailboard, joining Stokes and Silas in the back, and tries to make himself comfortable. Then they’re off.
The worst of the summer heat is behind them, and the days are cooling rapidly. The wind whipping across the open rear of the truck has a particular chill, a premature taste of autumn. Ben tucks his parka round him, pulls the hood up, and leans against the corner where the tailboard meets the low sidewall. He closes his eyes.
He doesn’t want to be drawn into conversation, or even to overhear. If something is going down, if sides are being picked, he doesn’t want to be forced to choose.
Yet Plan John has chosen for him, and in so doing, has set the trap that’s closing on him day by day. If Ben can’t find a way to escape then sooner or later it will snap shut, and when it does, it won’t be just him it tears apart. Carlita, Johnson, perhaps Aaronovich, even Kyle and Contreras, all of them are within its radius.
So could it be Foster? Could Foster be his chance, his route out?
Conceivably. If he plays things right. But the risk appalls him. This isn’t a decision he dares make alone.
* * *
Doyle happens to be crossing the yard when the search parties come back. He is crossing from nowhere to nowhere. These da
ys he has less and less to do, and feels the weight of inactivity more keenly than ever. Plan John doesn’t send him out on the search parties. Plan John doesn’t ask him, or tell him, to do anything.
I won’t work for you. But I won’t screw with you either.
Is this Doyle’s punishment for standing up to the man? To get his wish? Because the price of not working for Plan John is not working, and these days not working is too close to not existing. Is that the message Plan John had intended to send through Doyle, by giving him his way?
Maybe, or maybe Doyle is overthinking it. As their de facto leader in a world grown generally and unignorably hostile, Plan John has a lot on his plate, and for that matter, a lot of plates in the air. So maybe Doyle just isn’t as important to the man’s schemes as he believes he is.
“Hey, wait up.”
Recognizing Ben Silensky’s voice, Doyle hesitates before he slows. “What is it?” he inquires, not turning.
Catching up, Silensky delays until he can be sure no one is in earshot. “I need to see her, Johnson.”
Doyle picks up his pace again, and Silensky falls into step behind him. “What the hell?” Doyle growls. “Have you forgotten what I said?”
“Look, I’m sorry. But I need to talk to her.”
“There’s no way.”
“Hey, I mean it, I’m sorry, but—”
“I can take a message for you.”
“Johnson….”
Doyle stops then and turns on him, suddenly not caring who might be watching. “What do you want, Silensky? Questions being asked? Because that’s what will happen. Everything I do with this looks suspicious. And no one trusts anyone at the best of times.”
“That’s why I need to talk to her.”
That gives Doyle pause. “How so?”
“I think there’s something going on,” Silensky says. He’s pleading now, and his body language wills Doyle to start moving again. “And fuck, Johnson, anyway, it’s been over a week since I last saw her. I mean, I appreciate all that you’ve done, but this is my girlfriend we’re talking about. If someone notices, we’ll tell them I needed to talk to Aaronovich.” Silensky takes a deep breath. “I’m serious, I appreciate how you’ve helped us. I know how it could have been for Carlita if you hadn’t done what you’ve done. I won’t ask again, not like this.”
A Savage Generation Page 8