Regretful Love

Chapter Four

                  

In the morning light, the encampment looked rough. Littered, burnt patches on the ground, even a few piles of excrement where men couldn't be bothered to go out into the grass away from the road. Kell wrinkled his nose in disgust. He tried to be as clean as he could. Speaking of which, he could use a bath. Might be time to start looking for a place to work for a night or two, get some of those home comforts, like access to a garden hose and maybe even a home-cooked meal.

His hands were shaking by the time he got far enough away from the encampment to take his dose. He found a small glade of trees just off the side of the road and did what needed to be done. It took a while—hard to poke a vein with jittery hands—but in the end he did it, having to wipe a trickle of blood from his arm with the tail of his shirt. He took a few minutes to pack away, going slowly now, waiting for the drugs to take hold, and only when he felt confident in his step did he get up again and move back to the road. Headed south. Always headed south.

The verge was strewn with debris, mostly rubber from burst tyres and hubcaps. But he found a half-bag of candy, probably thrown from a window by a crying child or an angry parent, and it gave him something to chew on as he walked.

The girl caught up with him a mile or so down the road and said nothing as she joined him. He just looked up and she was there, plodding away beside him. Kell smiled to himself. She was sticking with him, which meant he still had a chance to get her taken care of. He wondered what he might do with her when he reached his destination but decided it was too far off yet to come to any conclusions. After all, she might head her own way in a couple of days.

They walked in silence, the cars zooming past, until right around noon, when the sun burned hot and high in the sky. It was then that the road branched off into three, one route continuing with the highway, the other two became smaller country roads. Kell chose the one to the left. He'd heard from the other men that there were farms down here, places he might be able to work for a day, get some food and a wash. And it would still take him where he was headed.

"When was the first time you got into trouble?" the girl asked after they'd been walking on the quieter road for a half hour or so.

"What makes you think I got in any trouble?" Kell asked, not suspicious but curious to know what it was about him that gave that impression.

The girl shrugged. "You seem ... experienced, I guess. Like you know what you're talking about. Not just teaching like at school, but like you know from yourself how things go. How life goes." She paused for a minute before adding, "How things go wrong."

He chuckled a little at this. No one had ever called him a teacher before.

"Yeah, you're right," he said a few minutes later. "There was trouble. But the first time? Well ... can't say for sure it was the first time I ever did anything wrong, but it was the first time I ever got caught. Properly caught, that is. First time I got lock-in as well."

***

Kell shivered. Lock-in. They didn't get beaten for misbehaving, but, in his view, he'd rather get a whipping than have lock-in. He'd seen the kids come out after a weekend of lock-in. Seen the way their eyes looked, like they'd seen things. Bad things. Even after just two days, their skin always looked pallid. Still, though, he wasn't planning on getting caught, so he guessed he didn't have to worry about lock-in. Least, that was what Henry had told him. And he could trust Henry.

Henry. It had all really started with Henry, when he looked back at things later. Henry wasn't the biggest boy; he wasn't muscled or bearded or scary like some of the real big ones. Ones who should have been moved out of the orphanage a long time ago but didn't have no place to go and weren't eighteen so couldn't go off on their own. Most of those ended up running away anyway. Henry was smart, though. Smart as a snake, and the smartest thing Henry did was to always get someone else to do the troublemaking for him.