Devastation Road by Jason Hewitt Page A

tried to give the bawling infant to a family in a wagon. He held it up to the elderly mother at the reins
but she shooed him off, snapping something at him and spurring the horses on. The man and two daughters, who were hurrying alongside the piled cart and hauling their cases, pushed their way around
him.
    He stopped the nearest daughter to him, pulling her back. She looked about twenty. Just the right age, he thought. Her face was pale and blotchy, and her greasy hair was sliding out of a clip.
She looked at the child grizzling in his arms, its clenched fist waving.
    ‘Please,’ he said. If she could just take it . . .
    Her eyes were hard.
    ‘
Englisch?
’ she said.
    ‘Yes.’
    She considered this for a moment. Then, pulling up a force from within her, she spat into his face.
    They sat in the entrance of a field, Owen in the long grass, the baby growing heavy in the crook of his arm. He tried jigging it, turning it, resting it over his shoulder and
then holding it again in his arm, but its crying had become incessant and he had no idea how to stop it.
    Janek perched on the top bar of the gate, hunched over his knees, and his head tilted with his fingers in his ears.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said Owen, ‘but we couldn’t have left it. You understand that.’
    The boy turned his head away and gazed instead out across the fields.
    Owen had never had someone spit at him before, let alone a girl. He still felt the prickle of her saliva on his skin. It felt like shame.
    The baby was a boy. No more than a few weeks old, the thinnest wisps of blond hair lifting from the top of his head. The skin of his face looked loose, as if the flesh still needed padding, and
there were wrinkles gathering around his neck. His eyes were full of gunk and a thin film of snot was drying into a crust under a nose no bigger than a thumb tip. As they sat, the child’s
cries tired into a resentful whimper.
    ‘We’ll have to do something with him,’ Owen said. ‘There must be places. Orphanages or something, I don’t know. Somebody will have it. Don’t you
think?’
    The boy kicked his heel at the gate bar and arched his shoulders into a shrug.
    ‘He’ll need feeding too,’ Owen added. ‘Can’t give him bloody tins of processed meat. We’ll need to find him something. And nappies. God! Milk, clothes . . .
Jesus Christ.’ The list went on.
    The boy remained silent. It was so hard to tell whether he was even listening sometimes. He stared out across the field. Something in the trees where the field dipped had caught his eye –
a sudden flash of movement – and he craned to see. For a long time his eyes fixed on a spinney, then he turned to look at Owen.
    ‘No more road,’ he said.
    ‘What?’
    He swivelled around, jumped off the gate into the field and set off through the furrows.
    ‘Hey! Where are you going?’
    But the boy just whistled a call and beckoned him on with a wave.
    In the small cluttered kitchen of a farmhouse they forced a widow at gunpoint to give them food, while the baby screamed in Owen’s arms, and Janek yelled at it and the
woman, waving the pistol about, and Owen shouted and the flustered woman cried, ‘
Nein! Bitte! Nicht schießen!
’
    ‘
Milch
,’ Janek shouted. ‘
Milch
.’
    He swung the gun on the baby and Owen, and then on the woman again, who by now was red-faced and sobbing as she bumped around the table, knocking things over, flour dusting the floor and her
hands all of a flap.
    ‘And towels,’ Owen added.
    ‘
Und Brot!
’
    ‘And soap.’
    Janek swung the gun, still yelling.
    ‘Jesus Christ. Will you put that bloody thing down?’ He’d fire it if he weren’t careful.
    The baby screamed and screamed.
    After, as they walked, he held the bottle to the child’s mouth and it sucked hungrily on the teat, the bottle old and cracked but good enough until they found something
better. His arms were already aching.
    Janek strode on ahead, the milk canister he had stolen yesterday