A Savage Generation

by David Tallerman

  Carlita half strokes, half pats his shoulder. “It must have been pretty bad.”

  “It was fucking awful.”

  Ben shuffles closer, so that he’s sitting beside her legs. Sure enough, Carlita drapes an arm around his shoulders. Suddenly, although he’s still horny, Ben also feels immensely tired, and there’s nothing pleasant about how the two sensations mingle.

  “Can I stay here tonight?” he asks softly.

  A long silence. He’s already convinced himself the answer will be no when she says, “Okay. This once. And you’ve got to go before dawn.” A further silence, and then, “So long as it’s just to sleep.”

  Ben jerks up. He’s surprised by how angry he feels. The tiredness is gone, and even the drunkenness has subsided. “What?”

  “Oh, Ben. Stop.”

  Now he’s on his feet. “Stop what?”

  “You’re drunk! You stink of whiskey! Do you think I want to—”

  “To what?”

  “To fuck you!” Carlita is fighting not to shout, self-preservation struggling against her mounting frustration. “Is that what you want to hear? I’m not going to fuck you, Ben, because you’re drunk and you stink.”

  Ben’s hand lashes out. Afterward, he has difficulty putting the moment together. There’s a mingled emotion of rage and pain and disgust, a red stain heaving from the edges of his consciousness. He thought he’d intended to slap her: not hard, just enough to stop the words. Yet the result is not a slap. It takes him a second to absorb, as if an obscuring fog has rolled in and then dissolved as abruptly. What the fog leaves behind is his hand outstretched and Carlita somehow off the bed and on the floor, red flowing from her split lip, her face bloodless behind. Her eyes are fixed on his, and he can see nothing in their black pits but hate.

  His mind says, Carly, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you.

  His voice, a choked rasp he hardly recognizes, says, “I know who you want to fuck. You want nigger in you. That’s right, isn’t it? You want a man who can take care of you.”

  She doesn’t make a sound. The hatred in her eyes is like a furnace. It makes Ben terribly afraid. He’s lost her, and with her, everything. He can’t take back what he’s done. It’s as if he’s come out unexpectedly on some vertiginous edge, and now the only way on is down.

  Still, a part of him would like to hurl curses at her, and that part will keep hitting her if he lets it, hit until her face resembles hamburger meat and those awful eyes have to let him go. It would be so easy, a million times easier than trying to repair the damage he’s done. And doesn’t she deserve to be punished? For not loving him? For killing their love?

  Ben doesn’t have that in him. He isn’t even strong enough to be a monster. He certainly isn’t strong enough to do what needs doing: to beg forgiveness, to swear this will never happen again so hard that the promise would have to be true.

  What can he do? If he’s too weak to hurt her more, too weak to try and make things right? What is he strong enough for?

  Ben turns and stumbles toward the door. He’s strong enough to run away.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Kyle had really believed he wouldn’t get scared.

  He continued to believe with utter faith, up to the moment when the shaft turned downward, at a ninety-degree angle he knows without question he can’t navigate. Then his heart bobs into his throat, solid and sharp-edged as broken concrete, and it’s all he can do to breathe, let alone move.

  Austin has already made it down, clambering headfirst into the blackness. The only sign of his presence is splinters of torchlight, flitting nightmarishly. Every nerve in Kyle’s body is screaming at him to go back. Except, he isn’t sure he can do that either; the possibility is equally bad.

  Instead, Kyle forces himself forward, slithering until his legs are dangling over the edge. When his feet brush the far side, he can detect that there are slender ledges in the descending vent, where segments of tube meet, enough that they could serve as handholds. He can’t judge the shaft’s depth, but realistically it can’t be far, though the fear insists the descent goes on forever.

  If you don’t do this, he tells himself, you might as well give up. Just give up on everything.

  With care, Kyle rolls onto his front. Then he slides, painfully aware of how his legs are supported by nothing. His fingers and upper arms are greasy with sweat. He walks his feet down until he’s in a standing position. The flashlight’s luminance is the faintest glow from beneath.

  He’s scarcely started his descent before his feet touch the bottom. It wasn’t far at all. Kyle’s almost disappointed. Yet there’s also no reassurance. He’s come to rest in an awkward squat and still can’t see where the light is coming from, or what’s ahead. The darkness seems to be closing around him, his fear expanding to meet it. When he attempts to shift onto his back, he dashes his forehead hard against metal.

  Kyle bites his tongue to keep from sobbing. He won’t let Austin know he’s scared. If this is a test, he isn’t about to fail. Six months ago, maybe he’d have buckled, but that was then. He’s braver now. He’s grown tougher.

  Kyle tries again to lie flat, scrunching small to negotiate the bend, stretching his legs and supporting himself with palms flat upon cool metal, lowering his head only when he’s sure there’s space. When he’s certain he can move without scraping the rim of the vertical shaft, he begins to edge forward, hurrying to catch the light.

  He turns a slight angle, grazing his shoulder, and there it is, breaking this time from a gap in the tube. The orifice isn’t a junction, Kyle observes as he shuffles closer, but another point where a panel has been levered away. Beyond is a narrow space between cinder-block walls, pipes and cables bunched above. Kyle slides out into the gap, leading with his legs, and discovers that he’s able to stand upright. He can walk in side steps, though the rough walls sting his hands. He keeps going and the light grows stronger.

  Suddenly there’s nothing behind him. He’s come out in a room, or something like a room. Austin sits on the floor in the far corner, staring back. The flashlight is propped on its base beside him, creating a weird funnel of illumination. Austin is sitting on a rolled quilt, and the space is just long and wide enough for someone to sleep in. Beside him, a block has been levered out to create a shelf, and books, a bundle of candles, food wrappers, and other assorted junk are heaped within.

  Kyle’s rapid breathing subsides. His heart’s pounding grows steady. He’s made it. He sinks into a squat, careful to maintain the distance between them.

  “You’ve got to be quiet,” says Austin, his voice barely a whisper.

  Kyle, who’s hardly made a noise since they left the administrative wing, merely nods.

  “I sleep here sometimes,” continues Austin redundantly. Now that they’ve arrived, he seems unfocused, like he’s concentrating on a sound he can’t quite distinguish.

  Kyle’s excitement is quickly spoiling, tainted by a nagging claustrophobia that makes it hard to stay still. He’d envisaged so much, yet here he is and this is only strange and frightening. Austin’s behavior had made sense out there in Funland; in this cramped aperture, at such close proximity, it makes Kyle’s skin creep. What if Austin really is crazy, crazy like the Sickers outside, and Kyle has blindly followed him down to this den?

  “You can get all over,” Austin says. “There are gaps into the walls, into the ceilings. I’ve a way into the stores that no one knows about. I can get near to my dad’s room.”

  That’s better, more like what Kyle wants to hear. He can ignore the craziness if only the results are worthwhile. He needs someone, a friend, because otherwise this may be how he’ll end up, broken and alone. Probably he can’t help Austin, but with Austin on his side he might at least avoid becoming him.

  “If I had some help I could go everywhere,” Austin adds.

  Yes. Even if Kyle doesn�
��t entirely believe, still, that sounds right. Two friends, keeping safe from the world outside by reshaping it from within, going where they like and taking what they want. How messed up Austin is won’t matter, so long as he’s on Kyle’s side.

  “I could get to anyone,” Austin says.

  There’s a new edge to his voice, not anger but dreaminess. At the same time, his face contorts. It’s a fracture in Austin’s surface, a glimpse at what lies beneath: the ugliness, the desperation, the spiraling pain.

  It’s too deep an insight. Kyle understands then that, just as they’ve crawled like worms into this tiny space deep within Funland, so there’s some similar cavity within Austin, hidden at his very core. It’s been revealed for an instant, and if they’re to be friends, Kyle will have to see it again.

  Kyle had promised himself he wouldn’t get scared. But he hadn’t expected this, though he should have. And now he is scared, maybe more than he’s ever been, and he can’t, mustn’t, show it.

  So Kyle sits still, clenching his hands, digging fingernails into palms, and he listens to what Austin has to tell him.

  * * *

  Doyle knows who’s knocking at his door. There’s something in the agitated rhythm that identifies Carlita uniquely, even though she’s never come to his rooms before. His first reaction is a rush of anticipation, so intoxicating that it could almost be called joy. His second is an unaccountable trepidation that roots him halfway between the chair where he’d been sitting and the door.

  It’s late, perhaps even early, and the only illumination is a rigid trapezoid of moonlight sprawled upon the floor. Doyle hurriedly lights a candle, and is snuffing the match as the knocking resumes, now more rapid and insistent. This time, he goes straight to the door and opens it. The corridor beyond is absolutely dark, and Carlita is nothing more than an outline until she steps into the room. She’s wearing dark blue jeans and a gray sweatshirt. Her hair, which normally she keeps tied back, is loose and tousled across her face.

  Doyle closes the door, easing it gently though it’s absurd to imagine anyone might hear. “What’s wrong?” he says. “You know how dangerous—”

  Then he takes in the dark line tracing its way up her chin, and his gaze follows it to the ragged dint in her lower lip.

  What ensues cannot be called thinking. His brain acknowledges the details – the streak of crusted blood, the torn and puffy lip – and collates other facts, like the slackness in her posture, the distant expression. It produces a theory, and from the theory a course, all without conscious intent on Doyle’s part. The next he knows, he’s pushing past her and wrenching the door back open, with no doubt in his mind of what he has to do.

  A hand catches his arm. Doyle tries to resist. “I’ll kill him,” he says, without emotion. Trying again to pull free, he realizes that only roughness will liberate him.

  “Please, Doyle. Will you just stop?”

  The swelling makes her voice fuzzy and lisping. That merely enrages him more.

  “He shouldn’t get away with this,” Doyle growls.

  “I know. But you need to calm down.”

  “Calm down?”

  “Doyle!” Carlita says sharply. “Please. Stop. This isn’t why I came here. If you do this, it’s not for me.”

  She’s right. Of course she’s right. But he can’t simply let the rage go; instead he drives it down, stashing it in that dead place where so much of him seems to be stored these days. He leads her into the bedroom, sits her on the bed, dips a facecloth in the bowl of water he keeps for washing, and begins to dab at her lip. Though Carlita winces, she lets him continue. Soon he can see that the damage isn’t so bad, really little more than a scratch.

  The fact that Silensky throws a lousy punch when he hits a woman does not do much to assuage Doyle’s caged anger.

  “It’s not how you think,” Carlita says.

  “This wasn’t Silensky? He didn’t hit you?”

  “No, he did. But never before. He was drunk. He’s in a bad way over what happened today. Those men who died. I didn’t get it at first; I’ve never seen him like that. I said some things…I don’t know…they were the wrong things. I made it worse.”

  “Don’t you dare make excuses for him,” Doyle says.

  “I’m not. I just need you to understand. And I need you to keep this between us. He’s not a bad man, Doyle. He’s not strong, but he’s not a bad man.”

  Doyle goes to the first aid kit he keeps under his bed, a prize inherited from Plan John, and, taking out the antiseptic cream, tries to read the use-by date in the wavering candlelight. How long before all their drugs and medicines, all the pharmaceuticals stashed in Aaronovich’s lair, become useless? Sitting also, he squeezes a drop of amber gunk onto his fingertip and says, “Open your mouth.”

  Carlita parts her lips and Doyle leans in to better see the cut, balancing himself with a hand on her shoulder. He dabs with his index finger. His other fingers lie on her jaw and cheek, and he finds himself unable to shut out the texture of her skin. He has to drive himself to remove his hand.

  “I don’t love him anymore,” Carlita says. “Maybe I did once, I don’t know. But I don’t now. I don’t feel anything for him.”

  Doyle has an urge to back away. There’s nothing he wants to know about Ben and Carlita’s relationship. But he has nowhere to escape to. “I’m not the person you should be telling this to.”

  “You are. You’re all I have. I’m sorry, but I can’t be alone.”

  She’s clearly upset. He should be comforting her. Doyle’s mind darts to that first night, beneath the overly bright striplights of the infirmary, and how he gripped Carlita until her sobs receded. He recalls her hair against his cheek, the heat of her breath on his neck, so vividly that for a moment he actually feels the sensations. “Carlita…I’m tired. I’ll come in the morning. We can talk then.”

  She nods, despite the disappointment evident in her face. She half rises. Softly enough that he barely catches the words, she says, “After he hit me, Ben told me it was because I wanted to be with you.”

  Doyle freezes: every inch of him, he thinks, down to the last drop of blood. “He was making excuses,” he manages, though speaking is like working the muscles of a corpse.

  “No,” Carlita says, “he was right.”

  Then he’s alive again, and the urge to reach out to her floods molten through him, screaming incoherence in his brain. She looks beautiful and perfect in the candlelight, perilous too, the shadows outlining each curve of her and every detail of her face, making them sharp and graceful and threatening. Doyle fights not to move. He’s on the verge of something he knows to be wrong, but he can no longer remember how he knows, as if the details have been swept from his thoughts.

  “Carlita….”

  She sits once more, on the very edge of the bed. She cups a hand over his knee. “Since I got here, you’re the one who’s been there for me. You saved me. You’ve kept me safe.”

  “I haven’t done anything,” Doyle says.

  “You have.”

  It’s growing difficult to breathe. “I won’t put you in danger,” he tells her.

  “I’m always in danger.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do. But it’s just tonight. Only one night.”

  Not waiting for an answer, not allowing one, Carlita pulls her sweater over her head. She bends forward, so close that her hair brushes Doyle’s face, and undoes her jeans and eases free of them. The candle casts her in harsh relief, pooling blackness beneath her breasts, in the hollows of her ribs, between her legs.

  She puts her hands upon Doyle’s face, holding his eyes with hers. Then she wraps her arms behind his shoulders, drawing him closer. Again Carlita parts her lips, one perfect, one bruised and torn.

  This time Doyle doesn’t pull away.

  * * *

  Abigail
rouses slowly. The tablets will make her groggy, Aaronovich knows.

  Aaronovich doubts she can be aware that she’s been drugged. Even a healthy child of her age would be unlikely to understand that. Nevertheless, she seems anxious and irritable at first. Half-conscious, she mewls plaintively. After a while, her eyes flicker open, then widen at the unfamiliarity of her surroundings. When she sees Aaronovich, who has placed herself as far from the bed as the small room will allow, Abigail fights feebly against the bedclothes, until Aaronovich is certain she’ll tip onto the floor.

  “It’s okay,” Aaronovich says. “Shh. It’s okay.”

  At the noise, Abigail stops struggling and goes still. Abruptly, she puts a hand to her own head and runs stubby fingers across the smooth skin. She investigates every inch of her skull, checking down her neck and around her ears.

  Then she begins to chuckle.

  It might be the strangest thing Aaronovich has ever heard. It’s so undiluted and so inhuman. The one quality explains the other: there’s such raw pleasure in the sound. And it’s so long since Aaronovich heard anyone laugh like that – or at all.

  Bored of her own shaven head, Abigail discovers further details. She holds a hand up to her face and scrutinizes, one by one, her newly trimmed nails. She notes the fresh pink skin, where once there had been ingrained dirt. Unselfconsciously, she shimmies free of the bedclothes and inspects her arms and legs, and then the clumsy garment Aaronovich has made for her, holding up its folds and letting them fall back around her skinny frame. She giggles.

  Aaronovich stands. She does so slowly, keeping her eyes averted, heedful not to make any movement that might be interpreted as hostile. Yet initially Abigail doesn’t even notice. When she does, she whimpers faintly, and watches. Aaronovich goes out into the kitchen, all of her movements smooth, unthreatening.

  An expedition the week before managed to retrieve a haul of canned foodstuffs. Aaronovich heats an unappetizing slop of grayish meat and unidentifiable vegetables, pours the results into a bowl, and lets it cool somewhat. She fills another bowl with water, puts both on a tray, and carries them through to the bedroom.