A Savage Generation Read online

  DAVID TALLERMAN

  A Savage Generation

  FLAME TREE PRESS

  London & New York

  For My Father

  Prologue

  Early Warning Signs

  Kyle Silensky is watching as the city starts to burn.

  There’s only a single column of smoke so far, creeping almost apologetically up the sky, but Kyle has the sense that there will be other fires soon. The night has that feeling: an intensity, as though breaths are being held. As though, when the tension finally snaps, something terrible will follow in its wake.

  All it has taken is the sickness – and the Sickers. The infection, or whatever they now thought it was, had spread up the coast, before turning inward: each time a few dozen cases, then hundreds, and soon after, chaos. On the news, they mapped its spread with curves, curves that never ended well. They gave warnings, but no explanations. They showed footage of men and women made crazy, made unpredictable, just like the disease they carried in their blood. Every day they hinted that it was contained, by evening admitted it wasn’t.

  Here, the first sighting occurred a couple of days ago, and already the city seems on the verge of tearing apart.

  Kyle knows he should be afraid. And he is, but not for himself. The window he sits half in, half out of, is on the fifth floor. Being perched on the narrow frame feels dangerous, yet the danger is exciting. In another way, his position makes him safe. The street is far below, sufficiently far to belong to a different world. The bedroom at his back, the small apartment beyond, that has been home for a year and still doesn’t feel like home, is a world as well. Here he belongs to neither. In this moment, for as long as he can make it last, he has no need to worry about himself.

  A good thing, because right now he doesn’t have enough worry to go around. Kyle heard the argument, through a door too thin to muffle shouted words. He heard what Carlita told his dad, what his dad shouted back. Kyle has some idea where his dad has gone, and what he’s about to do.

  Kyle sits in his window, watching smoke crawl up an orange-bellied night sky, listening to the distant sounds of a city grown sick.

  He is waiting for his father to come home.

  * * *

  She would have liked to stand up to Howard. She’d have liked to refuse this task. She’s a doctor, and her job is not to run errands, nor to be a pawn in other people’s games. This time, Aaronovich would dearly have liked to say no.

  But the ice is thin under her feet.

  Not only thin, riddled with cracks. His hold on her is strong, and Howard knows that. He has always known, and so never says it. He is, in fact, never anything except polite to her.

  He can afford to be polite, she supposes, when his hold on her is so complete. Whatever the man is, he isn’t petty, not one to bully or cajole for its own sake. He established the terms of her presence at White Cliff on the day she arrived, explained why she was here and precisely what his own role in that had been, and afterward there had been nothing else to be said.

  Still, this time more than ever, Aaronovich would have liked to stand her ground.

  She keeps her head down as she crosses the yard. She can’t help feeling exposed. The angle of the gate tower hides Doyle Johnson from her view, but he’ll be there, because he invariably is. As she anticipates, the door at the bottom is unlocked and open, though surely it should be neither. Aaronovich climbs the stairs beyond with quiet steps.

  Coming up behind Johnson, Aaronovich follows his gaze. He’s staring at the distant forest edge, one hand clenched on the parapet of the guard tower, the other balled at his side. The trees are mostly pines, a jagged fence that falls away immediately as the land begins to decline. Their shadows are deep and black. Aaronovich imagines herself amid that cool gloom, the earth at her feet stained with its litter of needles, and shivers.

  Whatever the pines hide, whatever Johnson has spied, she can’t see it. “Something out there?” she asks, trying to make her voice sound bright, knowing he won’t like the news she brings.

  Johnson turns slowly – unwillingly, it seems. She’d thought he hadn’t heard her ascend the stairs, so absorbed had he been, but he doesn’t appear surprised by her presence. “No,” he says. “There’s nothing.”

  Then what are you looking for? she almost replies, before thinking better of it. Johnson’s business is his own, and increasingly, so is his time. His purpose has been stolen from him, and who is she to question how he chooses to occupy himself?

  “Howard asked me to come and find you,” she says.

  A terse smile passes across his lips.

  “What?” She had expected anger from him, frustration.

  “Why don’t you call him Plan John? Everyone else does.”

  Aaronovich tuts. “Because I’m not everyone else,” she says. “Because nicknames are for children.” And, she admits only to herself, because to think that creature has a plan, and that I’m part of it, frightens the hell out of me.

  * * *

  Doyle concentrates reluctantly on Aaronovich. He’s resentful of her intrusion. Momentarily, he’d been sure he saw a figure out there, hunched, flitting between the boles of two trees. Then, an instant later, it was gone – or else had never been. A headache is coming on, one of the bad ones. He can feel the pain rising like a tide.

  Sometimes they get so bad that it’s hard to think straight. Sometimes he doubts what he sees.

  One day he’ll have to talk to Aaronovich about the headaches, to get her professional opinion. He wonders why he hasn’t already. Perhaps because there’s always something else to deal with.

  “So what’s Howard after?” Doyle inquires.

  “A meeting.” Aaronovich phrases the two words with care, as though nervous of his reaction. Tension bunches the lines around her eyes and mouth.

  She may be in her fifties, but she rarely looks it. She has a stubborn handsomeness that has nothing to do with age, and her hair is so purely white that it makes her seem somehow younger rather than older. Now, however, Doyle feels for a moment that he is looking at an old woman. He wants to argue with her, though she’s merely a messenger, and an unwilling one at that; though she is among the few people here that he trusts.

  That’s why Howard sent her, Doyle realizes. Because we could be allies. The pain in his head has increased by a definite notch. He wants to ask Aaronovich who the hell Plan John Howard is to be calling meetings. He wants to ask what that man could have to say that will possibly interest him.

  “All right,” he agrees. “I’ll be down in five.”

  Doyle doesn’t need her to tell him. He knows what Plan John will say; he’s been waiting long enough to hear it. And with the warden finally transferred out, with most of the prisoners and guards evacuated, with bribes paid and strings pulled and records amended, with nobody even giving a damn amid the crisis that’s consuming the nation, what has been unofficially true for months has become an inescapable fact.

  That’s the message Plan John will deliver, no matter that they know already. That this is no longer a prison. That while it might resemble a prison from the outside, while it might still run something like a prison on the inside, if you thought a prison was only the routines that defined its day-to-day existence, it isn’t one anymore.

  It’s no longer the White Cliff State Penitentiary. Now it’s transformed entirely into the place they’ve taken to calling Funland. And it belongs to him, to Plan John.

  * * *

  “You about done in there?”

  Austin’s muscles freeze involuntarily. His stepfather is using his second voice, the one he never uses in front of
Austin’s mother. The one he reserves for Austin, which makes the pit of his stomach flip-flop. The one that makes each word a threat, and doesn’t make threats it isn’t willing to keep.

  “This isn’t the day to fuck around,” Martin observes from beyond the restroom door. As if there have been other days when disobedience was cheerfully tolerated.

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” Austin manages. His own voice is thin, turning the response into an apology without his conscious effort.

  “You better be.”

  Austin hears footsteps, and the slap of the door to the diner. The flip-flopping eases. But not altogether; maybe there are repercussions yet to come. Martin doesn’t forget quickly or easily, so there are often repercussions. Did he suspect the truth? That Austin finished using the toilet five minutes ago, that he barely needed to go anyway? That he came in here to escape, however briefly?

  Austin thinks about climbing through the tiny restroom window and running, just running, wherever his feet take him. Austin thinks about killing his stepfather: with a gun, a knife, with his bare hands. Austin pulls his pants up, rinses his palms under the rusted tap, unlocks the door, and goes out.

  In the diner, he expects to find his mother and Martin in the booth, as they were when he left them. He wonders if someone told them to leave. He had thought the man behind the counter would refuse to serve them, the way he’d acted. For an instant, Austin had supposed the man’s reaction was down to his color; he’d seen only white faces since they’d entered town. But of course, it wasn’t that, or not solely. The sickness didn’t care what color your skin was. And right now, people were on the roads for one reason: they were fleeing from somewhere or to somewhere. If they were fleeing, there was a chance they were sick. So probably no one was staring because he was black. They were staring because at any second he might lose his shit.

  And maybe they were right. As Austin picks a path along the center of the diner toward the doors, he could so easily let it all out. These days, he feels like he’s always on the verge of a scream that he needs every scrap of his strength to contain. He can see Martin’s SUV parked outside, partway onto the curb as if it owns the space around it. Martin has the driver’s window down. He looks impatient. Yet he waits for Austin to get close before he speaks, and when he does, it’s in his other voice, his normal voice, the one that’s a lie that perhaps only Austin perceives the truth of. “Holy cow, kiddo, were you giving birth in there?”

  Austin has no answer. He sees the disappointment in his mother’s eyes, in the moment before she glances away, her frustration at his sullen silence. That wounds him more than almost anything could. Austin climbs into the back of the SUV, and Martin tuts – as though to say, Look at the kid, can’t even speak up for himself – and pulls onto the road with a jolt.

  Austin still doesn’t know where they’re headed. But he knows it was Martin’s suggestion. So wherever they’re going, it can’t be anywhere good.

  Part One

  Containment

  Chapter One

  “Are you a Pole, Silensky?”

  “What?” Ben doesn’t take his eyes off the two men farther up the street.

  “I just thought, Silensky,” Brody says. “Maybe a Pole name or one of those places. Nice to know who I’m working with is all.”

  Though they’re almost upon them, Brody doesn’t appear to have noticed the men. His gaze is jumping about, but he doesn’t seem to be taking in much at all. Ben is sure that Brody is high on something. He remembers, as if he’d ever forgotten, why he’s always hated working with such assholes.

  He could turn around. He could just walk away. What would Carlita say then? If he went home and explained how it’s gone bad from the start, how Alvarez has fixed him up with an asshole, a liability?

  “Tough bastards, Polacks,” Brody suggests. “Heard they don’t get it so bad. Heard they got themselves a resistance.” The way Brody pronounces resistance, it sounds like a disease in itself.

  Ben hasn’t heard about anybody or anywhere not getting sick. Of course, he gave up on watching the news a couple of days ago, exhausted by its ceaseless and apparently ungrounded optimism. “I’m not a Pole,” he says. “I’m not anything.”

  “Yeah?” Brody gives a gurgling laugh. “Then I guess you’re as fucked as the rest of us.”

  They’re passing the two men now. One is a bum, dressed in traditional bum uniform: a long, filthy coat over layered shirts and sweaters. A shopping cart behind him is tipped on its side, spilling anonymous refuse into the street. He might be past sixty behind his straggle of beard, or younger and ravaged by whatever vices and misfortunes have brought him to the streets. He is cowering from the other man, who wears a dark pinstripe suit and has his hair trimmed threateningly short.

  The suit is stabbing a finger, planting it squarely in the bum’s chest, punctuating each stab with a snapped word. “I. Said. Have. You. Got. A. Light?”

  The bum, having retreated as far as he can toward the storefront behind him, is shaking his head furiously. Abruptly, the suit backs off a step. The bum sags with relief, eyeing his desecrated cart hopefully – until the suit shoves him with both hands, so hard that he falls against the window and the glass spiderwebs around him. The bum doesn’t try to get up. After a moment, he slides down onto his rear.

  The suit watches for a second longer, then turns and sees Ben and Brody on the far side of the street. He’s in the region of forty; his gut swells over his belt. He doesn’t appear to be in good enough shape to have pushed anyone so hard. His face is florid, glossy with sweat, and his eyes are bloodshot, not merely red but speckled black with hematomas.

  Ben notices Brody’s hand stray to the rise in the back of his jeans, flicking the hem of his shirt to reveal the pistol grip there. Ben recalls his own gun, which Alvarez insisted on loaning him, recalls how he carefully emptied out the bullets into the restroom bin. If things should go bad then, in his experience, guns would not make them better.

  “Come on,” he says, catching Brody by the arm, pulling his fingers from the pistol.

  “Hey, hey,” calls the suit, “I’m just hunting for a…you guys, you look like one of you would have a light.”

  “Let’s go.” Ben hauls, leading Brody, walking as fast as he dares. He doesn’t glance to see if the suit is following.

  “Funny thing is….” The suit’s voice is glutinous, as if he’s talking through a mouth full of phlegm. “I quit years ago.” Yet the retching noise he makes sounds like the product of a sixty-a-day habit.

  “I’d got it.” Brody wrenches his arm free. Ben thinks he might go back to prove his point. Instead, he turns left, marching toward a side street. “It’s this way, if we’re actually doing this fucking deed.”

  Ben could walk away. What would Carlita say?

  Only what she’s said already. God, Ben, don’t you see how this is going to end for us if we stay here? What kind of man are you that you won’t so much as try to get your girlfriend and your son out of this city?

  He could get them out, he’d told her. Except there’s nowhere for them to go, and no money once they get there.

  There must be someone you can talk to.

  He’d strived to convince her that he has no one, no one but her and Kyle. That even in the bad old days it had only ever been him and a few grifters just like him, hopeless men making money by whatever means, no matter how desperate or dumb. Now, since he turned his back on that life for her, he doesn’t even have them.

  You must know someone.

  Sure. There’s Alvarez, who’ll fix anybody up with anything if he gets his cut. Sure, if you don’t mind what it is or how bad it can go.

  Ben thinks about how scared she looked, and how beautiful Carlita is when she’s scared, how beautiful she is when she’s in any mood at all. She’ll leave, maybe even tonight, go back to her people, not because she doesn’t care but because sh
e’s scared and desperate, and they are better than he is, more able to weather the coming storm.

  Ben sighs, low enough that Brody won’t hear, and follows behind him.

  * * *

  The street, when they reach it, is short, dilapidated. Half a dozen buildings have been boarded and the boards are thick with graffiti. The lights are out at the farthest end, as they are out in so many parts of the city tonight. The store is on the edge of the blackout zone, making the glow that spills from its barred windows unnaturally harsh and bright. A neon sign blinks ‘Open All Hours’ in staccato rhythm.

  “That’s it?” asks Ben. “A liquor store?”

  “I’m telling you,” Brody says, “this place is great. We hit here, like, every six months, and the dumb old bastard never does a thing about it. He’s too cheap to hire anyone. He goes right on keeping money in the register. This guy is, like, a hundred. Easiest money in town.”

  “Screw this,” Ben announces.

  “Say what?”

  “I’m not knocking over a liquor store.”

  “Hey!” Suddenly Brody is in Ben’s face, the acid reek of his breath filling Ben’s nostrils. “You wanted easy money. This is easy money. You wanted to do it the hard way, maybe you should have trained your ass in, like, investment brokerage or something. Instead of, you know, going to Alvarez and pleading on your fucking Polack knees for a break.”

  Ben takes a step back, buying just enough time to consider his options. “I told you. I’m not a Pole.” He pulls the .38 out of his waistband, taps open the cylinder, and makes a show of inspecting bullets that aren’t there. “So what’s my part in this crime of the century?”

  “Hey, that’s easy.” Brody’s tone has changed completely, as though all memory of their dispute has been erased. “You, compadre, don’t have to do anything except watch my back. Hell, the Negro’s probably going to remember me. So it’s better if I do the talking, okay?”