A Savage Generation

by David Tallerman

  “What if she attacks me?” Kyle queries at last.

  “The infection is transmitted through blood and saliva,” Aaronovich says. “So if she bites you, it’s highly likely you’ll be infected.” She relates this calmly, as a teacher in front of a class might. “If she scratches you, it’s conceivable the result would be the same, but I’ve pared her nails to make sure that can’t happen. Aside from pulling out her teeth, which is an option I’m not prepared to consider, all we can do to mitigate the risk of biting is to keep her calm and maintain a safe distance. There may be other possibilities I haven’t identified yet. But as I said, there’s definite danger in what I’m asking and I won’t hide that from you.”

  Kyle likes how she talks to him, that she treats him with the respect she’d afford an adult, while at the same time not pretending he isn’t in many ways still a child. It isn’t so much that she’s got the balance right as that she acknowledges there is a balance.

  “Okay,” he says. “I’ll do it.”

  Aaronovich looks surprised, and hides her reaction badly. Kyle only realizes then that she hadn’t expected him to say yes.

  “Why don’t you come and meet her tomorrow morning?” she suggests. “The sooner she starts to get used to your presence the better.”

  “Sure,” Kyle agrees. “I’d like that.”

  * * *

  It’s late when Ben sets out to find Carlita.

  He can’t say exactly how late. He’s been drinking in the library. If the place has probably never been well used, now it’s one of the few in Funland where solitude is all but guaranteed. The fragile light outside the window faded fast, and after that Ben was sitting in the dark. Since then, he’s been drinking steadily, endeavoring to make the whiskey last. He’s drunk enough to know he’s drunk, too drunk to judge how badly.

  Ben understands that part of what he’s feeling is traditional inebriated self-pity. Underneath, he’s distantly conscious that he’s suffering genuine trauma. What he was forced to witness at the farmhouse was horrible; but it isn’t what’s stayed with him, what blooms into life when he shuts his eyes. Then he’s aware again of that girl, that thing that looked like a child, so close to him, never more than a couple of feet away all through the drive. In every moment, he could feel her nearness. She’s left icy knots of fear in the back of his mind that refuse to melt under the whiskey’s hot breath.

  He’s been thinking about going to Carlita for a while. Yet something has restrained him. Ben doesn’t have the words to explain to her why, now more than ever, he needs her, needs her to love him or just to pretend, until the fear shrinks to a size he can contain.

  At some point he starts, as if from a shallow sleep, though he knows he hasn’t slept. The bottle is still gripped firmly in his good hand, and when he shakes it, he hears the whiskey sloshing in its base. Ben attempts to estimate how much is left from the sound, but the concentrated thought makes the room wobble. It’s so long since he’s been drunk, hard drunk.

  The night is completely dark. The generator is reserved for emergencies, and they get by with candles, battery flashlights, lanterns, and in a couple of the big rooms, braziers. Ben has none of those. He stumbles to his feet, nearly falls, thrusts out a hand, and by pure luck finds a table edge. He gasps with relief. He’d been terrified of breaking the bottle. Then Ben recalls that it has a cap, and fishes in his pocket. After considerable effort, he manages to screw the cap in place, and returns the bottle to the inside of his jacket.

  Ben tries to remember his reservations about visiting Carlita and can’t. There’s even a little whiskey left for them to share. He tries to remember if Carlita drinks whiskey. Regardless, beggars can’t be choosers. And aren’t they all beggars now? Hasn’t he spent the day fumbling in the wreckage of other people’s lives? So Carlita can make do.

  Ben can just see the doorway. He makes his way there, arms outstretched. Its angles are wrong, but when he teeters into it, the frame takes his weight. Outside in the passage, the going is easier. Ben lets his subconscious navigate and concentrates on keeping his footing. Eventually, a turning brings him out at the staircase that leads up to Carlita’s rooms. The stairs look steep. Ben closes his eyes, and the dizziness subsides to a mild swirling, like he’s sitting in a hot tub. He takes the steps one by one.

  Halfway along the corridor at their summit is the door that splits Carlita’s small empire from the rest of the Big House. There’s the faintest suggestion of light at its base; he’d never have noticed had he not been looking for it. That band of amber-gray fills him with both hope and trepidation.

  Ben doesn’t bother to analyze either sensation. If he did, he’s sure the whiskey would wash him away again. Instead, he stumbles toward the light.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Austin enters Kyle’s room without him hearing. He’s got good at moving quietly these last few weeks. There are tricks, he’s discovered; a lot of it is in your head. Like the world is paper and he can cut himself out, can vanish into his own space.

  Austin stands waiting for a while. When finally he grows bored, he scuffs a heel, and Kyle looks up, startled – though not so startled as Austin might have anticipated.

  “Come on,” Austin says, “I want to show you something.” That’s all he’s prepared to give. He’s already decided that he’ll make no reference to what happened before, no apology. If Kyle expects one, he isn’t worth wasting energy on.

  Yet whatever Kyle’s thinking, it isn’t that. Now that he’s over his initial shock, he doesn’t even seem that interested in Austin’s presence. In the light of his single candle, he looks worried, or at least distracted. Has he been reading at all or only deep in thought?

  Austin is out of the habit of caring what anyone else thinks, but in that moment, curiosity gets the better of him. “What’s up?”

  Kyle catches himself immediately. “Nothing.”

  So that’s how it is. Austin is readying to expose his deepest secret, but it’s okay for Kyle to hold onto his. Maybe it’s to do with that stupid code book, in which case Austin couldn’t care less. He feels like walking away, has to remind himself that this isn’t about Kyle. Having conceded that he can’t do what he needs to do alone, there can be no turning back.

  “So are you coming?” Austin asks, fastidiously blanking any trace of emotion from his voice.

  “Sure.” This time Kyle makes an effort to sound enthusiastic, recognizing his mistake too late. He tucks down the corner of the page and follows Austin out the door, through the corridors, into the yard. Though Kyle keeps a respectful distance as they cross to the Big House, he must have guessed where they’re going. He knows to stand well clear when Austin leaps for the ladder. Nor is he as nervous climbing up; the muted chime of his shoes upon the rungs is steadier.

  On the roof, Austin leads Kyle into the maze of piping and ductwork, stopping once more at the loosened vent cover. He feels better now, the earlier slight almost forgotten. Kyle is doing okay. He’s passing the tests. “You didn’t tell anyone,” he says, and it’s a statement rather than a question.

  Kyle shakes his head, the motion barely perceptible in the darkness.

  “I’d have got to you,” Austin says, “if you had. Even if they’d locked me up or something. I’d have figured a way.”

  He can sense that Kyle believes him. Austin wishes he had the same faith in his own abilities. The truth is that the prospect of his secrets being exposed, his hidden places taken away, fills him with such numbing, unreasoning terror that he hardly dares put it into thought. He has a weapon. He has his anger. In Funland, those things don’t make him special, or even dangerous. Kyle is more of a threat to him than Austin can ever be to Kyle.

  His brief good mood already beginning to fracture, Austin focuses on removing the vent cover. Immediately beyond the cube of gray around the opening, the inside shades into utter darkness. Taking out a small flashlight, Aus
tin shines it within. “You scared?”

  “No,” Kyle says.

  “If you get scared,” Austin tells him, “don’t freak out. If you freak out, I might have to hurt you.”

  He has thought over the possibilities carefully. If Kyle starts losing his shit in the ventilation shafts, which conduct sound so perfectly, Austin will have to shut him up as quickly as he can. A part of him isn’t sure he’ll be able to do it. Another part knows that, given the choices, he’ll act without hesitation.

  Even for Austin, though, the duct will be a close fit. The muscle he’s built in the last weeks, much of it from doing exactly this, has in some ways actually made his exploration harder. Kyle, however, is lightly built. His farm work has done little to change that, adding definition rather than bulk. Kyle should be able to get through just fine, more easily, perhaps, than Austin himself can.

  “I’m going first,” he says. “So you’ll be in the dark. You scared of the dark?”

  “I told you,” Kyle says. “I’m not going to get scared.”

  Austin is surprised by the resolve in his voice. “Shit,” he says. “Don’t get cocky.” Has he underestimated Kyle? The notion disturbs him. “Keep me in sight. Don’t go slow or you might lose me. You got it?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’m going to go headfirst, but that takes practice. You won’t be able to manage it this time. Put your feet in and shuffle on your back.”

  Austin hitches his arms within the vent mouth, its lip vaguely silvered by moon and stars. He shimmies forward, braces, and draws his legs after him. He knows that all Kyle will be able to see of him will be the flashlight’s faint backwash.

  Austin lies motionless. Even after so long, and so many expeditions into the depths of the pipes, he still finds their silence strange. Something about the look of them, the hard lines, the metallic sheen, seems to require a background noise of machinery. Nothing in the ductwork serves any function, and much of what previously did he has disabled and dismantled, working in fearful quiet to expand his claustrophobic territory.

  This is how it should be. He understands that now. It’s right that he should have claimed these passages, turning them to a new function. It’s part of a natural cycle, like bugs occupying a discarded beer can. Only, he’s the bug. The thought horrified him at first, and ever since has been a source of comfort. Yes, he’s becoming a cockroach. You stomp on a cockroach and it just skitters away. He saw on TV once that cockroaches can survive anything, even an atomic bomb. They can live through the end of the world.

  Austin resumes his crawling, and is glad when he hears the accompanying rattle of movement from behind him.

  He’s learned to survive as a cockroach. Is it possible Kyle can do the same?

  * * *

  Ben knocks on the door that cuts off Carlita’s small portion of the Big House. He’d intended a gentle rap, but he misjudges the first attempt and overcompensates on the second, and the result is three sharp blows that echo back along the passage. His immediate instinct is to run, as if he’s a naughty child playing a game. It takes effort to stand his ground.

  Initially there’s silence, deep in the vacuum left by his thunderous knocking. Then, as Ben’s wondering if he dares to knock again, Carlita’s voice comes. “Who is it?”

  Who does she think it is? Well, he has an idea. In his mind, he imitates Johnson’s taciturn baritone: It’s Doyle, baby, come to tuck you in. The thought is nowhere near as funny as he’d imagined it would be. It must be late, he rationalizes to himself, so of course she would ask. “Ben,” he says, striving to enunciate.

  The lock clicks. “Come in,” Carlita says. Ben can’t see her. The only light is coming from her room at the end of the passage, cast in diminishing reflections across the walls. Ben, walking with the utmost concentration, follows her dark shape.

  Carlita’s apartment had presumably been meant to lodge visitors. There’s the small bedroom, and a shower room with a toilet, all of it utilitarian and nondescript. When Johnson told him about the move – and that memory riles Ben now, that Doyle Johnson had the balls to tell him what was happening to his girlfriend – Ben had been almost dizzy with anticipation. With Carlita free of the infirmary, they could start seeing each other again; no more bi-weekly visits, no more begging for Johnson’s permission.

  She’ll be safe there, Johnson had assured him. But not if you draw attention.

  So Ben had kept his distance, sure that soon Carlita would talk Johnson around. This latest separation would be temporary, and then things would go back to…not normality, he wasn’t fool enough to hope for that, but a shadow of normality that might serve some of the same needs. A foundation, if nothing else, a place from which to begin rebuilding their relationship, and from there his life in Funland, which had grown so frighteningly tenuous.

  Had he believed that? Maybe he’d known, even then, that he’d let something happen that couldn’t be reversed. Maybe he’d understood that he’d given up more than he would ever be able to take back, and had done so easily.

  Ben follows Carlita into her room, closing the door. There’s little furniture: the bed and a chest of drawers beside it, a small folding table, a chair, and a set of shelves. Two candles are burning, a cracked dinner plate and tatty hardback book serving as stands, stubs of fresh wax jutting from the remnants of countless forebears. Carlita has gone straight to the bed, where she sits with her knees laid to one side, watching him steadily.

  Ben waits while she assesses him, seeing the process work itself out over her features. He finds no affection there, only distrust at first and then distaste, a curling of the lip and hardening behind the eyes as she recognizes his drunkenness. He wants to appeal against her judgment, to explain his reasons. Instead, he collapses onto the chair in the corner. Ben starts to put his head in his hands and thinks better of it, if only because his sling would make doing so difficult.

  In an instinct of rebelliousness, he takes the bottle out. “Brought us a nightcap.” His voice is ridiculous to his own ears, like the yapping of a dog. There’s less whiskey left than he’d recalled: a half inch of piss-yellow fluid. “You can have it,” he says. He offers her the bottle.

  Carlita doesn’t move to take it, and after a few seconds, Ben withdraws his hand and places the bottle delicately beside the chair.

  “The trip out today went all to shit,” he says. “We got jumped. So quick, from nowhere, like they’d planned it. Maybe you heard.”

  “How would I have heard?”

  “I thought maybe Johnson—”

  “No,” Carlita says.

  Ben can’t decide whether he believes her. “It was bad. Seriously bad. I didn’t know they could be smart like that. I think, in a way…I think it was my fault.”

  “Your fault?” For the first time, she sounds genuinely curious.

  “We could have just come back. Houseman wanted to. We’d got a good haul, that’s what he said. I figured he was chicken. I mean, he was. But we could have just walked away and he wouldn’t be…. It’s as if they knew.”

  “That’s not your fault,” Carlita says.

  “No?” He’s glad. If Carlita deems him innocent then perhaps it’s even true.

  “You shouldn’t have got so drunk,” she adds. Her tone, though, is fractionally softer. “You should have come here and talked to me.”

  Ben wants to explain about what Houseman’s body looked like in the last glimpse he’d had, about how methodically they’d worked at Landser, like hunters gutting a downed deer. He wants to tell her about the little girl and the journey back and how in every moment he’d thought she would start trying to break into the cab. He wants Carlita to see how the whiskey is the only thing keeping all of that down.

  Ben wishes she’d taken the bottle from him, that she’d made that small concession. He remembers what she was like when they met, how wild she was. At the time, h
e’d been struggling to bring Kyle up on his own, contemplating finding an honest living, always too much in need of ready cash. They’d been good for each other. Carlita, it turned out, had been seeking a way to balance out her own life, tired of getting drunk and stoned with girlfriends and of one-night stands and of not having her own place. She was happy to help look after Kyle if it allowed Ben to hunt for regular work, regular enough for them to get a decent apartment between them. Things had been good, really good, and the sex had been…well, she’d learned some tricks in the wild years, he’d discovered that quickly.

  Where did they go wrong? Has it simply been the sickness? Has it infected their happiness? That’s the only plausible explanation. It seems unfair and incomprehensible and cruel, cruel most of all.

  Ben realizes that he’s crying, viscous streaks struggling down his cheeks. Carlita is watching him, with concern that he can’t mistake for affection. That just makes the tears flow harder. He doesn’t want her pity. He wants her to regard him with that bright, hot passion he recollects from certain summer mornings, when he’d come out of the shower to find her waiting, bedcovers cast aside, sweat beading across her flawless copper skin.

  “Come here,” Carlita says softly.

  Do the words mean what he craves for them to mean? His mind has snagged on the image of her naked in their small bedroom, the lime-green curtains parted, casting soft shadows over her torso and legs and a band of glaring white from her thighs up to her belly button. The memory makes him ache, deep in his heart and in his groin. Ben stands, knocking the chair as he does so. Something goes thunk and whirrs as it rolls across the floor.

  The bottle has come to rest against the shelves. Thank god it hasn’t broken. Ben reaches, staggers, and ends up on all fours.

  He looks at Carlita. The moment, if moment there had been, is past. He’s lost it for a shot of whiskey. He sits awkwardly on the end of the bed, so near to her that she has to shuffle her feet round. Overcome with self-disgust, Ben murmurs a noise that might be, “Sorry.”