Tallerman - A Savage Generation

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.

Theres 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 wasnt.

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 doesnt 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 doesnt 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 hes 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. Shed have liked to refuse this task. Shes a doctor, and her job is not to run errands, nor to be a pawn in other peoples 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 isnt 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 cant help feeling exposed. The angle of the gate tower hides Doyle Johnson from her view, but hell 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. Hes 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 cant see it. Something out there? she asks, trying to make her voice sound bright, knowing he wont like the news she brings.

Johnson turns slowly unwillingly, it seems. Shed thought he hadnt heard her ascend the stairs, so absorbed had he been, but he doesnt appear surprised by her presence. No, he says. Theres nothing.

Then what are you looking for? she almost replies, before thinking better of it. Johnsons 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 dont you call him Plan John? Everyone else does.

Aaronovich tuts. Because Im 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 Im part of it, frightens the hell out of me.

* * *

Doyle concentrates reluctantly on Aaronovich. Hes resentful of her intrusion. Momentarily, hed 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 its hard to think straight. Sometimes he doubts what he sees.

One day hell have to talk to Aaronovich about the headaches, to get her professional opinion. He wonders why he hasnt already. Perhaps because theres always something else to deal with.

So whats 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 shes merely a messenger, and an unwilling one at that; though she is among the few people here that he trusts.

Thats 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. Ill be down in five.

Doyle doesnt need her to tell him. He knows what Plan John will say; hes 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 thats consuming the nation, what has been unofficially true for months has become an inescapable fact.

Thats 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 isnt one anymore.

Its no longer the White Cliff State Penitentiary. Now its transformed entirely into the place theyve taken to calling Funland. And it belongs to him, to Plan John.

* * *

You about done in there?

Austins muscles freeze involuntarily. His stepfather is using his second voice, the one he never uses in front of Austins 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 doesnt make threats it isnt willing to keep.