“Dad,” he murmurs, “I think she’s screwing him.”
Then Ben’s hands are off his jacket, no longer near his throat, and Kyle reels back, barely keeping his footing. He’s free, and his father is stumbling away.
But Kyle saw his face – for an instant only, though one frozen in his mind’s eye. He saw that the words had accomplished everything he’d hoped they would, everything he’d feared. Darkness wasn’t enough to hide so much pain and rage.
And even before his father disappears within the Big House, Kyle knows what he’s done.
* * *
Doyle pushes back through the gap in the walls. His hands are shaking and he can’t stop them, since they don’t feel like his hands. His eyes sting; the stinging blinds him. The headache has become a monstrous presence squatting in his brain, shutting out all else.
Almost all. Not enough.
In his memory he can see an outline defined by the last dying candlelight, growing hazy and then sharp as the flame gutters. A body. Sometime soon, Doyle will have to get him out of there. He’ll have to find a way, so that he can bury his son; so that Austin won’t be left curled in the darkness, abandoned in death as he’d been in life.
Doyle stumbles over cracked masonry, dragging his feet, hands scraped raw upon bare cinder block. He has no strength, nothing left to keep him up, and his body keeps moving presumably only because that’s what bodies do. Vague instincts demand freedom from this crushing fissure, from the nail-varnish stink of cordite in his nostrils. Perhaps when he gets out he’ll keep walking, until his body finally agrees to stop and never start again.
The glow from the flashlight is growing brighter. It’s as Doyle reaches the hole he made, scrabbles at its edges, contorts his limbs free, that he realizes the beam’s angle is wrong. He’d left the flashlight on the floor. Now the light is at shoulder height. Doyle reaches uncertainly for the glaring circle of whiteness – and something strikes him hard across the face. He rebounds against the wall, coming up with his arms across his face, so that a second blow hammers his wrists.
“You fucker!”
The voice is contorted by rage into a snarl. Doyle can discern nothing besides the dark and his own raised arms. He tries to return a punch and takes another buffet to the head, redoubling the pain already there. He ducks aside, searching for space and finding none. All the while, the blows keep coming. They’re clumsy, flailing, but every jolt is like liquid fire poured across his brain. He can’t think, can scarcely react.
Distantly, Doyle is aware that he can’t dodge forever. He can’t fight back, can hardly see. He’s ready to collapse, and it’s solely the magnitude of his suffering that keeps him standing, the likelihood of worse that keeps him resisting. If he gives in, his head might crack open, the pain might claw free like a living being, and that thought is too horrifying not to resist.
Then from nowhere comes the recollection of the gun. It’s tucked into his jeans, nestling the small of his back. Doyle takes a sharp step away, keeps one arm up, and reaches with the other.
“How dare you?” the voice rasps. “How dare you put your hands on her?”
Silensky. Oh hell. It’s Silensky.
When Doyle points the gun, aiming at the outline masked by the flashlight’s brutal glare, he has no doubt that Silensky will back off. Even as Silensky plunges nearer, oblivious of the barrel tracking his movements, Doyle doesn’t believe for an instant that he’ll have to pull the trigger. Only at the very last, as Silensky’s knuckles dash toward his face, does the possibility seems real, and by then his finger is already constricting.
The noise is far beyond what his fracturing mind can bear. Doyle drops the gun, doubles up. The punch didn’t connect. He tenses for another, but his muscles are barely responsive. Doyle waits, helplessly anticipating a blow that with each moment doesn’t come. He gives himself maybe a minute, as the shot’s reverberation subsides, hoping against hope that the torture in his head will retreat too.
He has to pull himself together. The shot will bring someone. How can he explain this? How, when he can’t make sense of it himself? Doyle fumbles at his feet, picks up the gun. Then he retrieves the flashlight. He swings the beam, hunting for the spot where Silensky went down, as Doyle knows now that he must have.
There he is, a shape with the implication of human form, sprawled in the dust, oily blackness pooling around what remains of a head.
And there, looking up from beside his father’s blasted body, crouches Kyle Silensky.
Part Five
Outbreak
Chapter Thirty-Five
The sound of the outer door startles Aaronovich, as it inevitably does these days.
It’s hard not to assume that her visitor will be Doyle Johnson, come to exercise his rage. Aaronovich hasn’t seen him since the night of his son’s death, the night that also claimed Ben Silensky. What she knows of those terrible events Aaronovich has learned in scraps over the succeeding weeks, for Johnson has stayed away and even Kyle visits only rarely these days, saying little when he does.
Kyle, sullen and troubled though he may be, would have knocked. The same is true of Contreras, who sometimes brings her food. Who does that leave? Foster, perhaps. Aaronovich is certain that the events of that night aren’t widely known; it’s impossible to imagine how word of a death caused even indirectly by infection wouldn’t have brought the mob to her door. Foster, however, must at least suspect. And Aaronovich and her ward make for the easiest of targets. It would be a mistake to pretend their presence might have been forgotten.
Therefore, Aaronovich runs hurriedly through her mental checklist as she gets up from her desk. Abigail is safe within the apartment, and the door is locked, the key in its hiding place. Crude precautions with obvious flaws, but then she couldn’t have hidden behind her locks forever.
“Hey! Doc!”
The shout comes from the opposite side of the office door. Aaronovich opens it hastily. A man is standing in the middle of the reception room. Aaronovich recognizes him, but struggles to remember his name. He’s wearing a heavy cotton logger’s shirt, no doubt looted from a nearby town. The left arm is ragged from below the elbow, torn into strips and stained. From the fingers of that hand, blood drips in a slow trickle.
Colton, that’s it. His name is Curtis Colton.
A patient. And she knows a knife wound when she sees one. Aaronovich has always been surprised that she doesn’t have more injuries to deal with. It’s a testament to Plan John’s social engineering that these men have shown so little inclination to seriously harm each other. Conversely, she supposes that the fact Plan John isn’t alive to witness the results of his efforts hints at inherent weaknesses in what he built.
“Wait here,” she says. There’s no point trying to work in the infirmary; she doesn’t even sleep in there anymore. She hurries downstairs, relying on the flashlight to gather the few things she’ll need, thinking that she should have moved them to her office long ago. She carries them back upstairs and motions Colton into a chair.
“Who did this?” Aaronovich asks.
“Does it matter?” he mutters gruffly.
Aaronovich shears away the loose-hanging tatters of sleeve. Then she begins to clean the cuts, of which there are four, only one of them particularly deep. Colton doesn’t wince at the sting of the antiseptic.
“If I’m going to treat you,” she says, “I need to know exactly what happened.”
A clear lie. It’s obvious that the wounds have been inflicted with a small blade, and their origin makes no difference whatever to their treatment. She’s simply curious, starved of information from outside her hermetic world, and she hopes that Colton won’t see that.
Then again, maybe he just doesn’t care enough to resist her interest. “Was that fuck Silensky,” he growls.
Aaronovich pauses, perplexed, wanting to say, But Ben Silensky is dead. Finally
, she comprehends her mistake. “Kyle did this?”
“Told him his old man was a fucking pussy. He didn’t take it kindly.”
Aaronovich grits her teeth, thinking how easy it would be to slip. Oh, she could do things that would make Colton wince. And though she knows the thought is beneath her, a disgrace to a profession she once valued, she empties her mind until she’s wiped away the last streak of crusted blood.
“Should I expect Kyle to be coming in for treatment?”
Colton grimaces. “When I catch the little shit, hell yes.”
“I’m going to need to stitch this middle cut,” she says. “I’m afraid I don’t have any anesthetic.” Another lie, but one she can justify to herself. Her supplies are limited, unlikely to be replenished, and sooner or later there are bound to be worse injuries than this requiring her attention. Still, she’s careful not to think of Kyle as she sews a line of four neat stitches, and Colton doesn’t flinch.
When she’s done, Aaronovich recleans the cuts, applies an antiseptic dressing, and neatly bandages the entire forearm. She steps aside and considers her work, while Colton stares at it in vague disgust.
“Come back in a week and I’ll take those stitches out,” Aaronovich tells him.
Colton shakes his head, not disagreeing, only expressing his contempt. “Whatever,” he says, and is through the outer door before it occurs to Aaronovich that there was a time when patients, even patients like Curtis Colton, would have thanked her.
There was a time when people thanked people. There was a time when people, some people, cared for each other. She looks at the splashes of scarlet trailing across the tiles and wonders at how distant and improbable that memory seems.
She has endeavored to talk to Kyle, on those occasions when he’s visited her. Not about his father, not about what happened, just to talk and to draw him out of himself. Yet she has also been distracted herself, overwhelmed – as she invariably is now – by the impossible burden of caring night and day for Abigail. And though she’s tried, she hasn’t done so nearly hard enough. In her obsessive desire to protect one child, she’s been blind to the evidence that another is in grave jeopardy.
She’s blind no longer. Of everyone in Funland, Kyle has been the one to support her, asking nothing in return. He has helped her more than she’s ever helped him. So there’s no way around it: she’ll have to do the thing she’s been putting off all these weeks, the thing she least wants to do and which has most potential for endangering both her and Abigail.
There’s one way for her to help Kyle, and that’s by confronting Doyle Johnson.
* * *
He’d imagined he might lash out at her, or at the very least shout, curse, spit his vitriol. For those reasons and others, Doyle had avoided the doctor. Yet when he’d seen her, there in the passage outside his apartment, Doyle had discovered to his absolute surprise that he’d missed her. It struck him how much he had relied on her calm, her rationality, her ability to be a rock of sanity even when all the world was in flood.
And so he’d been polite and businesslike, and he hadn’t mentioned Austin. In fact, for the first time in weeks, it seemed, he hadn’t so much as thought of him. Only afterward, when she’d left, had the image that haunted Doyle returned: the curled body, smeared by encroaching darkness. Only then had he perceived what lay behind everything Aaronovich had said. That boy’s going to seriously hurt somebody, or – and I think we both know this is by far the likelier outcome – he’s going to get hurt himself. That she’d stopped there hadn’t made her implication any less clear. Hurt, just like your son.
Even that hadn’t angered him. She was right. Doyle was failing Kyle, as he’d failed Austin.
He’d spoken to Contreras, and to Singh on the farm, passing a simple message. If you see Kyle, tell him I need to talk to him. Kyle had gone to ground after the incident with Colton, and as Austin had proved beyond doubt, there was no shortage of places to hide in Funland. But Singh appeared confident he’d return to the farm. “He always comes back, sooner or later.”
Now, as Kyle Silensky stands in front of Doyle’s open door, it’s the morning of the second day after the fight, a couple of hours past dawn. The boy looks nervous and defiant. But he’s come, and that’s more than Doyle had entirely expected.
“Come in,” Doyle says. “Sit down.”
“What do you want?”
“For you to come in. We’re not talking in a doorway.”
“We’ve nothing to talk about anywhere.”
“Then you can listen. Either way, come in.” Doyle strives to keep his voice level, while injecting an edge of authority. He can’t let this conversation end before it’s even started.
Kyle moves past, taking pains not to brush against him. Rather than sit, he walks to the balcony doors and stands there with his arms folded, his back to the room. “Is this about Colton?” he asks, with no hint of interest.
“Among other things.”
“I’m not going to apologize.”
“I don’t suppose he’d accept it if you did.”
“I meant to you.”
“I don’t want your apology,” Doyle says.
“Good. I don’t want yours either.”
Doyle has no answer to that. The conversation is already slipping away from him. Kyle is smart enough to keep this up all day, and nothing meaningful will be said. Doyle lets the silence draw out, sure there must be a way past Kyle’s resistance but unable to see it.
He’s taken by surprise when Kyle glances toward the door that leads through to Doyle’s bedroom and says, “I know she’s in there. She might as well come out.”
Doyle considers. Then he says, “He’s right, Carlita. You should hear this.”
There’s a pause, a brief tap of footsteps, and the door swings inward. Carlita hesitates in the doorway. “Hello, Kyle.”
Kyle ignores her. His eyes don’t flicker from the point he’s staring at outside the balcony doors. Probably, Doyle thinks, that’s all he wants her here for: another diversion, another small blow.
Doyle can tell from Carlita’s face that this blow has sunk home. Does Kyle have any idea of how much she blames herself for his father’s death? Yet likely he blames her too. It’s surprised Doyle that Kyle has held off from revealing her existence. Perhaps, though, he’s only saving his most potent weapon for when it can wreak the greatest devastation.
There’s no use in stalling. He has just one thing to say to Kyle and maybe just this one opportunity to say it. “You came to me a few weeks ago and told me you’d cracked Plan John’s logbook.”
Kyle looks at him then. “What?”
“You said you’d deciphered it. That there might be other survivors.”
Anger and confusion are warring over Kyle’s face. “What are you talking about?”
“Do you still believe that?”
“What does it matter?”
“I asked, do you believe it?”
“And I said, what does it matter whether there are survivors or not? I don’t care. You don’t care. No one does.” Kyle’s voice is rising. His cheeks are flushed. “Is that what this is? Do you think I give a shit anymore?”
Here, then, is the moment of truth. “Yes,” Doyle says, “I think you do.”
It’s as if Kyle is a balloon that Doyle has stuck a pin into. All the fight spurts out in a gust and in an instant he seems to deflate. “You shot my dad. What does some stupid book matter? We’re going to die here.”
“Yeah,” Doyle says, “we are.”
Once more, Kyle looks straight at him. And again all he says is, “What?” This time, though, there’s the barest suggestion of real interest in the question.
“We’ll all die, sooner or later. Probably sooner. Probably real soon. I get that now. Nothing I do or anyone else does is going to change that. But I was a fool for not taking you ser
iously when you told me about the logbook and about breaking the code.”
“Out of everything,” Kyle says, “you’re apologizing for that?” He sounds genuinely astonished.
“It’s the only thing I can do something about.”
“Really? How’s that?”
“We can go to the city,” Doyle says, “and see what’s there.”
From beside him, Doyle hears Carlita gasp. Kyle looks bewildered, utterly off balance.
Good. That’s how Doyle needs him. He’s been going over their situation for weeks, testing answers in his head, and every path seemed to lead closer to the abyss, every one but this. He doesn’t dare interrogate the reasons for that too intently. Because once the prospect of leaving Funland, even briefly, had embedded itself in his mind, he had felt as though a weight had lifted, setting him free.
“You know I hate you?” Kyle says. There’s no aggression in the words, just numbed indifference.
“And you know I can’t let you run around stabbing people. We can’t afford to lose even a maggot like Colton. We can’t afford to lose you either.” Realizing that isn’t an answer, Doyle adds, “This is the best chance you’ll have to get to me. If that’s what you decide. And, to answer your question, yes, I think you care. You want to find out if you were right.”
“I was right. I finished the translation weeks ago. There were survivors there when Plan John died.”
“Then come with me and prove it.”
Kyle shakes his head, but uncertainly.
“Fine,” Doyle says. “Take some time. Figure it out, Kyle. Deep down, I think you know this is the thing to do.”
* * *
Reaching the yard, Kyle is unaware of where his feet are leading him. He should be watching out for Colton, but he isn’t. He had been so sure he was beyond anyone’s ability to harm, and now Doyle Johnson, of all people, has stripped away his most basic defenses.
A Savage Generation Page 29