Doyle pulls up. He doesn’t shut off the engine. Prior to climbing out of the jeep, he reaches into the glove compartment for the gun he has stashed there.
He doesn’t like this. Rationally, the obstacle makes perfect sense. Irrationally, it feels too much like a trap.
* * *
Having watched Johnson scrutinize the fallen tree, Kyle turns his attention to Abigail. She’s squatting on her haunches, shifting to gaze first through the side window and then the back, all the while making a strange chuckling deep in her throat. She seems uneasy, and oblivious to his presence. Kyle wonders if he should try to calm her, suspects that she won’t let him. Reaching a decision, he instead opens his door and slips out.
Johnson has moved around to the trunk. Seeing Kyle, he holds up a saw in one hand, a pistol in the other. “Which one?”
The enforced stop and Abigail’s behavior have frayed Kyle’s nerves, and the sight of the gun sets them further on edge. “Are we okay here?”
“Maybe. Best to be wary.”
Kyle considers the gun. For a moment his craving of revenge surfaces, only to be submerged quickly by the reality of their situation. He doesn’t want to be out here alone, not like this. “I’ll saw,” he decides.
The tool is a small hacksaw, ill-suited to the task at hand. Up until about its middle, the tree’s bole is thicker than his leg. Kyle strives to calculate the farthest place he can cut and still leave room for the jeep to get by. Picking his spot, he makes a few experimental strokes and then begins to work steadily.
He realizes quickly, the saw is no good, and he’s taking too long. Should he suggest they trade jobs? But he’s not trained to shoot the gun. This is all he can do. Except that he can’t even do this, because he’s too damned slow.
“Kyle….”
Kyle stops sawing and turns. Johnson isn’t pointing the gun. Rather, he’s holding it ready with both hands, arms outstretched at a diagonal to his torso. He has his back to the jeep. He isn’t looking at Kyle but directly ahead. There, two figures, a man and a woman, are standing just within the forest.
“Behind us,” Johnson says.
Kyle looks. Two more are farther up the road, and a fifth stands amid the trees on the far side. He doesn’t know which of them Johnson was referring to, or whether he’s seen them all. “Five,” he reports.
“Five,” Johnson confirms. “Don’t stop. But when I say go, then you stop, drop the saw, and get over here. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Only, Kyle’s palms are sweating. It’s difficult to get a good grip. As soon as he starts, he finds that the blade is jamming in the wood, where it hadn’t before. Is Johnson going to leave him behind? Even if he doesn’t, there’s nothing he can do about five Sickers.
Kyle struggles to focus. Back and forth, back and forth, smoke of sawdust in his eyes, cringing whenever the blade jams, as it seems to do now on every second or third stroke. He shuts out everything else, but even that won’t steady his hand or put new strength into numbed biceps. Back and forth, on and on. How far through is he? Maybe two thirds, three quarters, yet when he puts his weight on the shorter section, it doesn’t give. So there’s no choice except to keep sawing, despite the screaming pain in the muscles from his fingers to his shoulder.
“Go,” Johnson says, not loudly but firmly.
Kyle almost does as he was told. At the last instant he can’t bear the thought of leaving the saw, and wrenches it free. Then he turns. The two Sickers on this side of the jeep have advanced, though currently they aren’t moving. They’re outside the forest, at the bottom of the bank beside the road.
Johnson has his back to the jeep’s flank and has the driver’s door open. Kyle crosses to him, walking rather than running. The two Sickers don’t advance, but he can’t see the other three. They could be very close.
“Get in,” Johnson tells him. “Climb over.” He edges aside to make way. At that, one of the Sickers, the woman, takes a step forward. Kyle tries to calculate if he can get into the jeep before she reaches him, and if in that time Johnson could shoot her – and if the second Sicker should go for Johnson, what would happen then. And there are still the others. He feels that they’re near.
Kyle backs up as far as the wedge of space within the open door. He knows without doubt that, the moment he enters the jeep, one of the Sickers is going to go for Johnson. They’ll go for him, and if they get through him they’ll come for Kyle. Glass windows won’t stop them. Nothing will stop them. Clear in his mind, he plays the scene: Johnson going down and glass showering like snow, hands dragging him out the splintered opening, tearing, gouging, digging….
Kyle hears the sound of a door opening.
He doesn’t want to turn to look, but he can’t help tracing the female Sicker’s gaze. There, crouching beside Johnson, is Abigail. Her mouth is open, and only then does Kyle comprehend that the noise he’s been barely conscious of, the low hiss like air escaping a tire, is coming from her. It shifts pitch, rises higher – becomes a snarl. Abigail moves farther forward, in front of Johnson. The Sickers observe, heads tilted. They seem more fascinated than hostile.
The woman is the first to retreat, hesitantly for a step and then with determination. The man follows, edging backward with confidence. Kyle feels with certainty that the other three are withdrawing too, as though a storm has passed and now the pressure is tangibly lifting.
“Get in the back,” Johnson says.
Kyle edges around and slithers inside. He watches as Johnson slips into the driver’s seat.
“Shut the door,” Johnson says, as he drags closed his own.
“What?”
“We’re going. Shut the door.”
Kyle sees, finally, what Johnson is intending. “No!”
“Yes.”
“She just saved us.”
“She’s better with them.”
“No.”
“Shut the door, Kyle.”
“She just saved your life!” He’s almost shouting. He doesn’t like the thought of shouting, with the Sickers so near. But he can’t give in. In that moment, it doesn’t even matter that Johnson might be right. The sense that has come over him is primal and he has no resistance.
“Abigail,” Kyle says. “Come on. We’re going.”
She turns her head. The look in her mottled eyes makes him afraid. There’s no affection, no recognition, nothing he can identify. Yes, he thinks, she’s better with them.
“Come on,” Kyle says again. He shuffles back, clearing space.
When she moves, it’s in one swift motion. She seems to flow across the asphalt. Then she’s on the seat, curled, arms tight around knees, a pose he understands well enough to associate with fear. Kyle reaches over her to catch at the door and haul it closed, though in that instant, their proximity and the strange scent of her terrify him.
Johnson is already reversing. Only when he slams on the brakes and accelerates does Kyle grasp his intention, by which time it’s too late to do more than brace against the seat ahead.
They strike the end of the tree with juddering force.
It slows them, but doesn’t stop them. With a catastrophic crack, the tree’s entire summit snaps free. They carry it with them, wedged upon the windshield, the road altogether concealed by tangled foliage, until Johnson hammers the brakes again and it tumbles out of view.
Then he backs up, accelerates, throws the wheel hard right, and they’re past.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
It’s inevitable, Aaronovich realizes. Not because Doyle Johnson is crucial to the integrity of Funland, though maybe in some strange way he is, but because Funland as an organism has grown so utterly resistant to change. While Foster isn’t stupid, he possesses no inventiveness or ingenuity. He’s tried to preserve what Plan John built without appreciating any of its complexities, to freeze it in place even as decay corrod
es its edges. Aaronovich pictures a great and ugly machine of clockwork: it isn’t perhaps that Johnson is a vital cog, only that he’s a cog at all, in a mechanism that no longer allows for redundancy.
Thus, Aaronovich isn’t surprised when Foster comes, nor that he’s angry. His anger, in fact, makes the encounter easier. So, strangely, does her grief. It’s like coolant running through her veins, like lubricant that makes the untruths slip easily from her throat.
“Johnson? No, he hasn’t spoken to me. Why would he?”
“If you’re lying to me, Doctor….”
She feigns confusion, indignation. Both come effortlessly. “What possible reason do I have to lie?”
“Oh,” says Foster, “I can think of a few.” Yet she can see that his anger is burning itself out in the absence of anything he can identify as a valid target.
“Has something happened?” Aaronovich asks, more softly.
Foster’s scowl cuts deep into the lines of his face. “He’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Fucking Christ,” he says. “If I knew that, would I be talking to you?”
“And,” she asks, patiently ignoring the outburst, “is it a problem? I mean—”
“Yes.” She recognizes it in his eyes now, the fear. “Yes, it’s a problem. How long do you think they’ll take to start wondering, to get suspicious? For someone to decide that Doyle Johnson’s bailed so clearly Funland’s finished? What the hell do you imagine is holding this place together, Doctor? I tell you, it’s spit and fucking duct tape.”
“I see,” Aaronovich says.
“You see?”
“Yes.” And she does.
“Well, great.” As Foster begins to turn away, a thought holds him. “You still got that Sicker here?” he says. His gaze drifts downward, toward the infirmary invisible below.
“Abigail? Yes. She’s sleeping.”
Foster nods. “I can’t have that. Not any longer. Never should have agreed to it in the first place. You’ve got until tomorrow, Doctor. Say your goodbyes or whatever the hell you feel the need to do, because then I’m coming back here.”
Foster turns again, and makes it all the way out of the door this time, leaving Aaronovich staring into the morass of her own thoughts. He can’t, of course, harm Abigail. He probably will hurt Contreras, knowing that Contreras and Johnson often talked, and Contreras will likely give up his secrets. Maybe he’s learned enough sense and courage to keep Carlita out of it, but there are no guarantees.
In either case, it won’t matter, because, on one count at least, Foster was right. Johnson’s absence will be the spark that sets off the incendiary Funland has become. The fuse is already lit and burning. Foster’s coming to her just now is a sure sign of its progress toward the inevitable. She can’t wait for him to return, to discover Abigail’s absence and so expose her lie. She can’t wait for Funland to disintegrate around her.
Still, she will have to wait until nightfall. That gives her the rest of the day.
Aaronovich destroys anything that might be dangerous. Given the nature of the infirmary’s contents, that doesn’t leave much. She burns all of her records, taking them down into the darkness and feeding them steadily into a metal wastepaper bin. Once the blaze gets going, the flames lick almost to the ceiling, taunting the long-dead smoke detector. They light the walls a grimy, flailing yellow, and cast huge shadows. When the ashes in the bottom of the bin are white-hot, enough to make the metal itself glow dully, Aaronovich starts dropping medications in there, those that could be addictive, poisonous, or readily abused. Of the remainder, she takes whatever she’ll be able to carry easily, leaves the rest.
She knows she’s breaking a pledge. Not, perhaps, her Hippocratic Oath, but a deeper version of it, something she formulated herself and has held unspoken, practically unthought. She’d told herself she would look after these men, regardless of who or what they were, regardless of what they did. She’d told herself she would continue to do so until someone took over her responsibilities or, as seemed infinitely more plausible, until they cost her life.
It’s hard even to say what has changed her mind, only that her mind has changed. Her previous existence and the death she’d promised herself both now resemble martyrdom. Aaronovich no longer wants to die a martyr. Maybe it’s entirely that simple.
When she’s burned everything that needs burning, she takes off her smoke-reeking garments, leaves them at the bottom of the stairs, goes back up to her apartment and dresses in cleaner clothes. She packs a few things, including the medicines and a small bag of equipment, and then, in a separate bag, what little food she has that won’t quickly spoil. She makes one last, hurried check of her apartment and office, and pockets a pack of batteries, a pen and paper, other small items. She checks that the key Contreras passed on to her that morning, the one that will open the main gate, is safe. She finds herself wishing she still had the firearm that Johnson insisted she take.
But that is her sole regret. She feels nothing at the prospect of leaving this place, which for so long has been her home, nothing except a tug of sorrow at the thought of Abigail’s absence, which she forces herself to rapidly stifle.
There may come a time for grief. But more likely, there will be no time at all.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Now that the adrenalin has subsided, Kyle feels only exhaustion.
He fingers the knife in his pocket, not thinking about Johnson or his father, just grateful of its presence. If he considers one man or the other, the two swim together in his tired brain, a self-murdering chimera that horrifies him more than anything.
He can’t understand why his mind would play such vicious tricks on him. Perhaps it’s that this journey draws him back so strongly to its reverse, the days they spent travelling to Funland. He’d arrived there with his father. He’s leaving with his father’s killer. How can he be expected to make sense of that?
Since it’s impossible, Kyle rejects thinking altogether. Sunk in half-awareness, he hunches into his seat and lets the world slide by.
Only when a familiar detail catches his attention does Kyle begin to come out of his fugue. He sits up and stares blearily through the dust-darkened window, trying to remember the significance of what he’s seen: a turnoff and a signpost, the name stirring faint memories.
Of course. It’s the town where they stopped, all those months ago. He recalls the woman in the store, the man with the gun, how they’d left him on his knees in the street. What’s become of those people? Are they dead? Probably they are.
Kyle is reminded of Fernando then, for the first time in weeks, and feels a sharp pang of remorse at having all but forgotten someone who was so good to him. He remembers what Carlita said on that last night in the city, her voice taut with shame and anger. Your father’s been arrested. Uncle Nando is going to pick us up. If not for Nando, they never would have made it out. He’d saved their lives, and sacrificed his own. Fernando, his father, Austin…the truth is that Funland has taken more from Kyle than the outside world ever has.
Yet two of those people died at the hands of the man sitting in front of him, and perhaps Nando would still be alive if Johnson had played things differently. So maybe Funland isn’t the problem.
The day wears on, the sky sliding through shades of gray – slate to almost white to slate again – the sun never quite penetrating, the clouds never quite surrendering to rain. Johnson doesn’t talk, except for when they stop to eat a brief lunch out of cans and a perfunctory exchange when another fallen tree compels a short, nerve-jangling stop. Afternoon wears into evening, and Kyle wonders if Johnson plans to sleep at all.
When the sun splits over the horizon, a little color finally enters the sky, peach, fleshy pink, and faded lilac. They’ve driven through two towns already; a third, with its ageing, untreated clapperboard homes and badly weathered stores, brings with it more reminiscences
of that long-ago day. Kyle thinks again of the man with the gun and how he’d threatened them. It takes him a moment to dredge up the reason: his father and a pocketful of stolen candy bars. He can’t help but be ashamed, and the shame brings guilt. His father, after all, had been trying to feed his son and girlfriend.
Or was he just looking out for himself?
The thought feels like a betrayal, and Kyle stifles it, though not quickly enough. It’s tied to too many other thoughts, other memories, and a tug on one thread sends the whole web shivering. He wants to doubt. He wants his resolve to weaken. That’s all this is. Doubt is the way out of what he needs to do, but only if he allows it to be. Once more, Kyle empties his mind of everything and stares into the growing gloom beyond the windshield.
There’s no room for weakness. Johnson killed his father. He has to kill Johnson. Nothing can be allowed to change that.
* * *
By evening, Doyle’s legs feel bruised from ankles to thighs, and the small of his back as if someone is rhythmically sliding needles through the muscle there. Unaccustomed inertia has hardened his shoulders into a solid bar of pain.
Still, he stubbornly resists the urge to stop. While they’re moving, they’re safe, or so his instincts tell him.
Also, there’s no need to talk. Doyle is ashamed of himself for admitting it, but there it is: now that they’re out here, all of the things he’d intended saying to Kyle, all the carefully judged words that might have drawn the boy back from this path he’s on, have vanished. Any argument Doyle can come up with seems melodramatic and absurd, or else banal, dismissive of the weight of horror and bloodshed between them.
As darkness starts to fall, however, as the torment of unaccustomed hours behind the wheel exceeds the point of discomfort and the silence shifts from strained to ominous, so it becomes harder to deny that he’s risking a terrible mistake. The deteriorated road has already slowed them to a crawl, and still Doyle keeps snagging dips and cracks in the asphalt, drawing creaks from the suspension. In the rear mirror, the Sicker child looks dangerously tense. Kyle appears merely drained and anxious. The boy will never ask to stop, regardless of how badly he might want to.
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