Ben looks at the door. It’s painted in chipped and weathered green, and leads, presumably, into offices. He turns the handle, hoping it will be locked, and is disappointed and for a moment mortally afraid when it isn’t. Yes, he’ll go first. He invariably goes first.
And Ben wonders, as he’s frequently wondered, what’s keeping him alive.
Luck, maybe – whatever that means. In the wider scheme of things, perhaps usefulness of a sort. If nothing else, he’s a pair of hands, and these days even that amounts to a virtue. His death would equate to one less able body, a vacancy in need of filling. Because that vacancy would be at the nadir of Funland’s hierarchy, it isn’t a position anyone could possibly want.
These expeditions are supposed to be done by roster, partly out of a spirit of fairness but mostly from expediency. The strain of leaving Funland’s borders, of going into the world beyond, which every day turns its back further on humanity, takes its toll. And it’s only getting worse; since they’ve looted the nearby towns bare, each excursion now requires that they head out greater distances. Round trips can no longer be made in a day, especially with fall chilling and contracting toward winter. Everybody plays it tough, but Ben knows what the expeditions do to them. He knows because, whoever those other two names might belong to, his will always make the list.
He tried, just once, to complain to Foster, to emphasize the basic injustice. Why should it always be him?
“Tell me,” Foster had asked him, “what fucking use are you for anything else, Silensky?”
Ben had no answer to that. He’s no use at all. Not to his son, who he can barely look in the eye these days, and certainly not to Carlita. He had left her alone for a few days, as long as he could bear. Then he’d gone and knocked on the door that partitioned her small section of the Big House. There’d been no answer, though he could see the tenuous gleam of her candle under the door. He’d gone back the next night and the next, had knocked as loudly as he’d dared. He’d grown angry, but not angry enough that he might be overheard, because the thought of someone finding out, of what they would do to her, tore at Ben’s guts like a wild animal. There were levels of losing Carlita, and that was a level too far.
So maybe Foster was right. If Ben dies here, it will mean little to anyone but him. He pushes on the door, wincing when its hinges complain. Something has fallen upon its far side, and he has to lean into the dinted chipboard, until finally his full weight is against it.
There’s the sound again, a pit-a-pat like small feet running, faint yet close.
The offices along the passage, Ben suspects, had been abandoned even before the sickness. A thick layer of grime coats everything; the windows are blackened, staining what meager daylight creeps through the murky brown of ditchwater. There are four doors off the corridor to the right – all of them wedged open, so that the inadequate light just reaches to lap the borders of the passage – and a fifth door at the end, which is shut. Realizing that’s where the noise is coming from, Ben feels no surprise. It seems, in fact, inevitable.
He doesn’t look for Oxendine. He’s there or he isn’t. If those clatters of rapid motion represent a Sicker, Ben himself is between them and him, and between them and Oxendine’s shotgun. If it’s a Sicker then Ben is probably going to die, and whether that end comes from a diseased freak clawing through his face or from a back full of shot doesn’t strike him as that important. Better, in truth, if Oxendine keeps his distance. On his own, at least Ben can negotiate the garbage-strewn corridor quietly. There are piles of anonymous mulch everywhere, which he assumes were once the contents of an overturned file cabinet, corroded over the months by damp and mold. But there are other ingredients in there, too; animals have been in here, for the air is redolent with the unsubtle reek of shit and urine. Ben steps with caution.
He’s nearly at the door when the noise resumes in an abrupt explosion. It subsides as quickly as it began, and Ben is certain that what he heard was feet, small feet pattering on a hard surface. Yet from the layout of the building, he can tell that the room beyond isn’t large, no bigger than the narrow offices to the right. Could there be a back route in? If they’d done this properly, they’d have checked the perimeter before even setting foot inside.
If they’d done this properly, Ben would be the one with the gun.
He can’t resist then: he looks round for Oxendine. The big man has set himself up in the farthest doorway, all but cutting off the light from without. He’s twenty yards away or more. Close enough to stop anything that comes through the door in front of Ben, too far for accuracy. His disregard for Ben’s life is blatant.
Ben reaches for the handle. He’ll throw himself to the ground, he decides. He’ll hurl himself full length into the malodorous garbage if need be. Maybe no one will grieve his loss, but he doesn’t want to die. And maybe it’s even a good thing that he’s forced into positions like this, to be reminded of that fact occasionally.
He levers the handle. The door isn’t locked; he knows the moment he tries it. Perhaps, then, it will be rusted, or blocked on the far side as the other had been. But no, it gives freely. Body flat to the peeling jamb, neck craning, Ben shoves with the flat of his hand. His pulse is hammering. Every muscle is shivering with anticipation. He’s as ready as he can be for something to lurch at his face, for the thunder of Oxendine’s shotgun.
The room is mostly in darkness. A scant glow comes from a small window of frosted glass near the ceiling. The glass itself is opaque with dirt, but one corner is jaggedly broken, and there, drab afternoon sun trickles in. Ben can make out skeletons of metal shelving lining the walls to left and right, piled with decaying cardboard boxes.
The sound comes again: the flutter of padding feet, rising from the darkness. This time, however, Ben sees as well – a blur of white and gray that pinballs around the tiny room, first straight up toward the ceiling and then diagonally across, narrowly missing the shattered window, dipping and rising in a steep parabola and bursting through the doorway in a flurry of noise and motion, to veer up the passage and past Oxendine’s head.
“Fuckin’ bird,” grumbles Oxendine, who had looked as though he might empty the shotgun at close range into the terrified pigeon.
Ben slumps against the doorframe. He knows he should be relieved, but his heart is pounding harder and faster than ever. He gulps great lungfuls of air and grips the frame with one hand until his nails gouge the wood.
When Ben looks up, Gecko is standing over him, considering him with disdain. Gecko turns his gaze on the room at the end of the passage, appraises it briefly, and spits a wad of phlegm into the gloom. He turns away without a word. Oxendine shrugs and abandons his post in the far doorway, heading back into the warehouse.
Ben kneels there for a minute more, until it occurs to him with sudden clarity that they might simply leave without him. Then he clambers to his feet. He spares the storeroom one last glance, and feels vividly what it must have been like to be that pigeon: trapped, battering the walls, too dumb to get out the way it got in.
He hurries back along the passage, and, not seeing Gecko or Oxendine, carries on across the weathered concrete floor and through the gap left by the open metal roller door. There, Ben almost bumps into Gecko, who has stopped on the edge of the loading bay, looking out toward the road. Oxendine is just below him, at the bottom of the short flight of stairs leading down to the asphalt forecourt. He, too, is staring across the road.
For some reason, Gecko had chosen to park on the far verge rather than in front of the warehouse. There’s the crusted edge of the road, and then a steep, railed-off decline backed by tightly gathered pines.
On the strip of dirt and tufted grass between road edge and railing, the truck is pulled up. And now, five Sickers are standing around it.
It’s an ambush, Ben thinks. He wants to say so aloud, but he can’t get a single word out.
Waves of memory are washing over
him, rocking him with their ferocity, of the farm and of what happened there. Unbidden, Ben’s mind is conflating that time and this, molding them into a single moment neither past nor present. He watches, as clearly as if it’s happening before him, a fist descending upon Houseman’s nose, smearing flesh to mush – and then crashing down repeatedly, even though there’s no imaginable way to distort that ruined face further.
Only, Houseman is not Houseman but Nando, and the disintegrating glass is a web around his shattered features. Nando is Landser, dying in slow motion. Landser is Oxendine, is Gecko. It’s an ambush, and it’s happening again.
There are three men and two women. They’re strung out in a bracket that pins the truck within its confines. One of the men isn’t much more than a boy, surely no older than fifteen. The women are both in their twenties or early thirties, Ben guesses, though rough living has taken its toll. It dawns on Ben that he hasn’t once encountered a Sicker he’d have reckoned for over fifty. He wonders what happens to them. Do the others pick them off? Maybe they didn’t survive the initial infection. Is it possible there are camps somewhere, Sicker villages full of Sicker babies and Sicker geriatrics?
But such questions are meaningless. Life is short these days, for everyone. He and Gecko and Oxendine, are any of them going to see fifty? Or tomorrow, for that matter?
Oxendine takes a step forward, and, when there’s no reaction from the gathered Sickers, another and another. He stops halfway across the loading bay, straddling the faded white line that marks its leftmost edge, feet splayed like a movie western sheriff’s. He holds up the shotgun, while still pointing its muzzle in the general direction of the Sickers.
“You know what this is,” he says.
There’s no response from the Sickers. Ben hadn’t expected one; he has no idea if Oxendine did.
Oxendine takes half a dozen more steps. Now he’s at the road, equidistant between warehouse doors and truck. Far enough away that if they choose to go for him, there’ll be nothing Gecko or Ben can do; far enough that Oxendine might get one or two or even three of them, but couldn’t possibly take them all down before they reach him.
Then the shotgun will be lost, just like Houseman’s gun was lost. It will all be over. No reaching the truck this time. No last-minute escape; no leaving Gecko and Oxendine to their fate. This time, their fate will be Ben’s also.
Oxendine holds the shotgun higher, not quite pressing the stock to his shoulder, not quite aiming. “You know what this is. You know what it does.”
Then he does aim. He’s picked out one Sicker, the foremost. The man is big, though not as big as Oxendine himself. He’s wearing what may have been mechanic’s overalls; beneath the grime are patches that perhaps once were dark green. His hair is long and straggling, as is his beard. That’s true of all three of the men: they look like trappers come down from a frozen wilderness, the snowbound forest still in their blood and their bones.
“I can’t get you all,” Oxendine says. To the one Sicker he’s picked out, who might or might not be the leader, he adds, “But I can get you.” Slowly, Oxendine edges his aim to one side, until it rests on one of the women. “I can get you.” He adjusts again, picking out one of the other males. “And I can get you.” He returns his aim to the potential leader. “So what’s it to be?”
You can’t rationalize with them, Ben thinks. He doesn’t say it because he’s afraid the sound will be the trigger that makes the frozen tableau before him erupt into violent activity. They’re not people, not anymore. It’s no good talking to them like they’re rational, a group of gangbangers figuring out the odds. They’re animals. They’re monsters.
The one Oxendine first picked out takes a step back.
He’s standing toward the front of the truck. Step by step, he retreats past its hood. As if this were some unspoken command, another of the men emulates his lead, and then the two women. When all of them are on the far side of the truck, the side nearest the railing, the leader turns. An instant later and he’s gone, over the fence, down the slope beyond. In a moment more, the other four have followed.
Oxendine gives it a few seconds and then walks across the road, past the truck, and aims the shotgun over the railing. Apparently finding nothing there to concern him, he turns back and calls, “Okay. Let’s go.”
Let’s go. As though this is a day trip…just out with the wife and kids.
Gecko jumps down from the loading bay, landing easily. He strolls to the truck. Is his nonchalance an act? Even if it is, it’s a pretense he’s composed enough to make. Ben doesn’t comprehend how either of them can feel anything besides petrifying fear. Don’t they see what almost happened? Can they not understand?
“Fucking come on, Silensky,” Gecko calls. “Unless you really want to give us an excuse to leave your sorry ass here.”
With a great effort of will, Ben forces numbed muscles into life. He clambers down from the loading bay, not feeling capable of maneuvering the stairs. He walks unsteadily across the forecourt and the road, all his attention focused on moving one foot and then the other. A part of him craves to carry on to the barrier and look down – to verify that the Sickers are indeed gone, or else to confirm that they’re still there and that his fear has been entirely justified, it doesn’t seem to matter which.
Instead, Ben climbs into the truck.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Doyle hesitates outside the door to Aaronovich’s office. He’s done everything he can to avoid the conversation that lies on its far side.
After much heated debate, Doyle had managed to talk Foster around on the doctor’s behalf. To some extent, that had been the hardest part; with Foster on side, the remaining pieces had fallen quickly into place. Foster had put out word that he’d executed the Sicker child, and in a touch of drama suggested by Aaronovich, they had even faked a funeral pyre on the bare ground outside the gates. To most of Funland, that had been the issue settled, a minor crisis simply and rapidly averted. The truth would stay between the three of them, and Aaronovich could work in peace.
But Foster hasn’t tired of sidelining those leadership tasks for which he wants neither blame nor responsibility. He insisted that Doyle should be the one to keep an eye on the situation, and Doyle saw no choice except to comply. His one minor victory had been to push for a date far in the future, arguing that there was no point in letting Aaronovich study the child unless they gave her time and space to do so.
On the surface, the arrangement suited everyone. Aaronovich had got her way. Foster apparently had no difficulty ignoring a problem so long as no calamity could be traced back to him; he seemed satisfied by Aaronovich’s claims that she could minimize the risks virtually to nothing. And Doyle, well, he’d been spared a decision he had no desire to make, if only for a little while.
That hasn’t kept the prospect from grinding at his nerves. The reality is that he’d begun immediately to doubt the sanity of Aaronovich’s plan. Silensky’s descriptions of that fateful day, when he’d returned with two deaths to report and the Sicker girl in tow, had shaken Doyle badly. If there was so much as a hint of truth in Silensky’s story, then it meant that the Sickers had worked in unison, and that raised possibilities Doyle didn’t care to ponder. Worse was the insight that had struck him later; that even if the Sickers were dumber than the dumbest animals, they couldn’t be underestimated. That was the mistake Houseman and Landser had made, the one they’d all been making since the start. Maybe, too, it was the mistake Doyle had made by giving in to Aaronovich.
Reminding himself one last time that putting this confrontation off won’t make it any easier, Doyle raps hard upon the door. There’s no response at first, and he’s about to knock again when he hears the doctor’s footsteps from within. When the door opens, Aaronovich gazes at him blankly, as if she’d been expecting someone else. Then her eyes widen, and Doyle sees, unmistakably, fear there: fear of him and of what he represents.
“Oh,” she says. “Johnson.”
“Doctor.”
“Can I help you?”
“You’d forgotten,” he says. “Our meeting.”
“Oh,” Aaronovich repeats. She shakes her head dazedly. “No, I haven’t forgotten.”
“Then can I come in?” Doyle asks, since she’s still holding the door half-open, her body wedged into the gap.
Aaronovich edges back, drawing the door after her. “Of course,” she says, and almost succeeds in sounding as though she means it.
Doyle steps after her. The pain in his head is gathering like thunderclouds, as he’d known it would. Whatever happens in the next few minutes, whatever decision he makes, he senses that someone is certain to get hurt, for that’s the problem with choices that have no right answer.
* * *
Aaronovich hadn’t realized quite how severely she’d been dreading Johnson’s visit until she opened the door to him. Only when she sees his haggard eyes and the hard set of his lips does she understand that every instant she’s spent with Abigail has taken place in the shadow of this moment. What she’s imagined she was doing – trying to heal, to rehabilitate, to offer a semblance of the life she believes a little girl deserves – has always, on some level, been a sham. What she’s really been doing is building an argument that, here and now, will convince this man.
Perhaps she should be comforted that Johnson seems every bit as on edge as she is. Yet she would prefer a calm, clear-eyed Doyle Johnson, one who can be relied upon to make sound judgments when presented with rational evidence, and that’s not at all the man she sees before her.
A Savage Generation Page 23