Devastation Road by Jason Hewitt

alongside her.
    ‘
Nehmen Sie doch bitte mein Kind!
’
    The woman turned her head away and quickened her pace. The girl seized at her arm.
    ‘
Ich will es nicht,
’ the woman said sharply, pulling her arm free, but the girl grabbed at it again.
    ‘
Bitte! Ich kann mich nicht darum kümmern
.’
    ‘
Ich kann es nicht,
’ the woman snapped.
    The girl tried to force the bundle on her anyway, pressing the crying infant against her and talking fast, imploring her as the woman struggled to push her away, red-faced and flustered now.
    Janek shouted, ‘
Lasst sie los!
’ and before Owen could stop him, he was in the middle, giving the girl such a shove that she staggered back against the verge.
    ‘
Sie kann nicht helfen!
’ he yelled.
    She stopped, her eyes filling as the baby wailed in her arms.
    Then they turned and marched on – Janek, Owen, the woman with the holdall – leaving the girl behind.
    ‘
Danke,
’ the woman murmured, but she would no more catch Janek’s eye than she had the girl’s, and after a while they let her pull away, the hard soles of her
patent shoes clicking on the road, the leather holdall still in her hand and the silk scarf fluttering out behind her collar.
    When Owen glanced back, the road was quiet again. There was only the girl, holding the child to her chest and trying to soothe it, while she looked helplessly around her. She didn’t seem
to know what to do.
    They walked in silence, an uphill slog, but the girl and her baby played uncomfortably on his mind.
    It was another ten minutes before he dared turn again, but the road behind them fell away, as long and straight as a grid-line, and now deserted; just the fields swilling on either side, empty
but for the breeze. He stopped, hesitant and suddenly worried.
    ‘Come,’ Janek said. He gave Owen a glare and pulled at his arm.
    But Owen would not. His eyes were fixed on the spot where the girl had been, a feeling of sickness starting to creep through him. He couldn’t see where she could have disappeared to with
the child so quickly. Then a terrible thought struck him, and with a growing sense of panic he started to walk back, slowly at first and then faster, his heart bumping up into his throat and
thumping in his ears. Like a distant echo he could hear Janek behind him, yelling – ‘
Ne!
’ and ‘
Ne! Jdeme!
’ – but Owen would not stop. As the
road took him down the hill, he broke into a run.
    The bundle was in the deep grass on the side of the road, just as he had feared, the infant’s small face white within the shawl, its eyes blinking and tiny pink fingers
fumbling at the air. He turned and turned and turned again, scanning the corn in every direction for her, and trying to see her in the pockets of trees.
    ‘Hey,’ he shouted. ‘HEY!’
    He waited, and then yelled again, even louder, but the child’s mother was gone.
    Janek stalked on ahead, furious and striding hard. He would barely speak to Owen.
    ‘No!’ he said. ‘No!
To dít ě ne!
’
    Owen had tried to explain that he couldn’t leave it, but Janek kept shouting, a rattling barrage of Czech. She wouldn’t come back, if that was what Janek was thinking. But Janek
wasn’t listening. He paced down the road throwing his hands up in disbelief.
    ‘
Ne dít ě , je ž išmarjá!
’
    Already the infant was crying.
    In the hours that passed he would tell himself that there had been no choice. The truth, though, was that he couldn’t rationalize why he had gone back and then picked the
child up – it had come from a compulsion within him that he couldn’t put his finger on.
    The infant now was inconsolable, its pink face reddening until it was the same colour as the inside of its mouth, and its crying quivered in Owen’s chest. He tried to soothe it as best he
could, holding it this way and that. He was filled with a growing sense of dread. Dear God, what the hell had he done?
    On a road lined with poplar trees, the panic finally took him and he