Them or Us (27 page)

40

AT THE END OF
another corridor, a broken sign hanging from the ceiling points toward a fire exit hidden behind an untidy stack of boxes and crates, most of them empty. I fight my way through the rubbish, then force the door open and get out of the building, desperate to disappear before Hinchcliffe comes looking for me or the sudden violence outside escalates further. I follow the metal railings around the side of the courthouse, passing Llewellyn’s impaled corpse, running through the massive puddle of blood that’s seeped out of his body and not giving the stupid fucker a second glance. I pause at the back of the building to check that no one’s around, then sprint away. Once again I’m thankful for the steroids that Ankin’s doctor pumped me full of earlier today. If I hadn’t been drugged up, I’d never have been able to run like this. No doubt I’ll pay for it eventually when the effects wear off, but right now it doesn’t matter.

I try to follow the main road down toward the south gate, keeping the ocean to my left, but another sudden swell of trouble in a side street forces me to change direction. I’m close to the redbrick shopping center, one of the sites where Hinchcliffe stockpiles food and supplies. It’s in the process of being ransacked. Fighters scramble through debris, desperate to get their hands on whatever they can before someone else takes it. Some of them are attacked as they fight their way back out into the open. A gang of Switchbacks corner one. He manages to batter one of them, but three more take him down, blades flashing in the early morning light, bludgeons pounding him into a pulp. Men still loyal to Hinchcliffe try for a while to stop the looting, but they’re soon overcome and are either battered into submission or forced to switch sides. I get a glimpse inside one of the food buildings through an open door as I run past. It’s virtually empty now. Has everything already been taken, or was there never anything there?

Lowestoft is falling apart around me—splintering and fragmenting as I watch. Until now the specter of Hinchcliffe has loomed large over this place, and everyone has been in his shadow, too afraid to do anything that might risk incurring his wrath. Today his dominance has been challenged without even a single shot being fired between the fighters in the compound and Ankin’s army outside the town, and everything is rapidly beginning to fall apart. The ease with which it’s happened is terrifying. It’s almost as if Ankin wanted it to be this way.

Another left turn leads me back toward the coast and the main road again. The streets are filling with activity, and word of what’s happening seems to have spread with lightning speed. The people I see are uniformly panicked and scared, unsure what they should do. Some are simply barricading themselves into the buildings where they live, blocking up those doors and windows that are still accessible from outside. Others are preparing to defend themselves. Most have resorted to the language of the moment: violence and hate. More small mobs have appeared on street corners armed with clubs and blades and whatever else they can find. Some of these groups of people merge; others turn on each other in sudden, desperate fights over territory and weapons.

I can finally see the south gate up ahead, but there’s already a large crowd there trying to get out. A couple of fighters still loyal to Hinchcliffe try to push the bulk of the people back into the compound, but several more of them are doing the exact opposite—frantically trying to get the gate open. A couple of smaller, more athletic-looking people are scrambling up the sides of the trucks that form the barrier and are throwing themselves over.

A fight breaks out in the middle of the crowd in front of the gate. One man—a young, aggressive bastard I’ve taken a beating from before now—is warding off several others with a pistol and a knife. He’s gesturing desperately toward the metal barrier, but his words are being drowned out by increasing levels of noise coming from the other side. He lashes out at the one-legged guard, who can’t get away, slashing a line across his chest with the tip of his blade. He then fires his pistol several times, killing two more, before throwing it into the crowd when he’s out of ammunition. The gunshots are enough to force the people to scatter momentarily, and the brief distraction gives him enough time to get the access door in the gate open and get out. I can’t see much—several other fighters race to the barrier and close it again within a few seconds—but I see enough, and so does much of the rest of the crowd. The young fighter runs down the road, arms held high in surrender. Coming toward him, coming toward the heart of Lowestoft, is one of Ankin’s tanks. Behind it, for as far as I can see, the road is filled with more people and vehicles. As the gate slams shut again the crowd on this side reacts with increased anger and fear, and another fight erupts, which spreads rapidly.

I need to find another way out of town. If Ankin’s this close and he has anything like the manpower he’s boasted of having, then the entire compound must surely have been surrounded by now. I double back, now running away from the ever-expanding riot and moving back toward Hinchcliffe and the courthouse again, seriously lacking anything resembling a coherent plan of action. In the space of just a few minutes the streets have begun to fill with even more chaos and confusion, wanton violence flooding the entire compound.

I’ve run out of options. All the major routes north and south are blocked now, and everything to the west will be impassable before long if the panic and rioting continue to increase. The beach is the only sensible route left to take. It’ll take me much longer to get away, but at least it should be clear. Providing the tides are kind and the violence here is contained to the half-mile square around Hinchcliffe’s base, I should be able to follow the shingle and sand until I’m level with the development, then get back up onto the roads again and reach the house.

I turn and head down toward the ocean, my body still fooled into thinking it’s healthy by the drugs. I know I can keep running at this speed if I don’t push too hard. The noise of the waves increases steadily as I approach the sea, but then I become aware of another, even louder noise. Ankin’s plane again? I look up and see a helicopter flying low and fast toward the town. For a second I stop dead in my tracks, transfixed as I watch the machine crawl along under the dark gray clouds, taillights blinking through the gloom. It’s been so long since I’ve seen anything like this … and now it’s directly over the center of Lowestoft, flying this way toward the ocean. My brain is screaming at me, trying to make me understand that whoever’s flying the chopper isn’t interested in me or even capable of attack, but common sense has gone out of the window and now I’m running like I think the pilot’s about to machine-gun me down. It seems that everyone else feels the same level of paranoia, because the arrival of the helicopter has whipped the crowds behind me into an unpredictable frenzy, herding many of them in this direction. Fuck, are we being rounded up? I’ve almost reached the beach now, but there are other people swarming nearby, and with the perceived threat of attacks from the air it suddenly seems a dangerously exposed place to be. I need an alternative. I look up again and then I see it: a place that’s out on a limb, isolated and alone; a place where I can shelter until the chaos dies down; a place where no fucker in their right mind would go.

I put my head down and start sprinting toward Hinchcliffe’s factory.

41

THE PLACE IS DESERTED.
Hinchcliffe’s guards are gone, and there are no signs of life around the outside of this vast, ugly building. Everything looks featureless and black in the late morning gloom. I plan to head straight for the entrance I used to get inside when I saw Rona Scott, but I’m disoriented and I end up at the wrong end of the site, outside the metal industrial units Hinchcliffe bought me to before. The doors of several of the small buildings are open, and I panic and freeze, thinking I’m about to be surrounded by a pack of feral kids, working together like starving hyenas. The helicopter flies off toward the other end of the compound, and as the noise of its engine finally fades I realize this place is silent. The children are long gone, probably released by the kid-wrangler. There’s only one of them left here. It’s the older boy I saw previously. I see him sitting in the corner of his cell, covering his head.

“Get out of here,” I shout at him. “Run!”

He doesn’t move, doesn’t even react. The kid’s catatonic, and I know I can’t waste any more time here. I double back and head straight for the entrance I used to get to Rona Scott’s office previously, figuring that’s as good a place as any to shelter. The main door has been left unlocked, and I slip into the building unseen. I close it behind me, then lean up against it, panting hard and listening for sounds of movement, conscious that my noise is now filling this otherwise empty place.

The guard’s station in the reception area has been abandoned. The desk is empty, and behind it I find a dirty sleeping bag lying among crushed soda cans, food wrappers, and an empty liquor bottle. The scavenger in me takes over and I quickly check through the mess, but the only things I find of any value are a pathetically weak long-handled flashlight, some scraps of clothing, and half of the packet of candy I used to bribe the guard with the other day. Looks like he was rationing himself and he didn’t get to finish them before either duty called or he fled.

I shout out just in case I’m not alone.

“Hello. Is anybody there?”

I’m relieved when no one answers. The last thing I want is to be trapped here with Rona Scott or any of Hinchcliffe’s other cronies. I do hear something in another part of the building, and I remain still as I try to make it out. It’s a quiet, indistinct scurrying noise, and I lose track of it when Ankin’s helicopter returns and flies overhead again. It was probably just rats. Vermin have learned to hide in places like this where they’re away from the bulk of the population but still close enough to hunt for scraps. Back in the main part of town and the surrounding areas, rodents are often hunted out for food. It’s as if our places on the lower levels of the food chain have become interchangeable.

This place will have to do. With a little luck I can hide out here until the situation outside either blows over or comes to a head when Ankin’s army inevitably breaches the gates. I can bide my time, then get out of town along the beach as I’d originally planned.

I retrace my steps up to where I found Rona Scott when I was last here, back toward the room where she confirmed my death sentence a few days ago. Christ, is that all it’s been, a few days? So much has happened that it feels like a lifetime ago now. That thought makes each step I climb feel like it takes ten times the effort. How much closer am I to my inevitable end now than when I was last here? Is this what it’s going to be like from now on? Constantly wondering how long is left?

I check the room where I found Scott before. It’s dark, the blinds half drawn, and to my relief she’s not here. I go inside and look through the clutter on the table for food, pausing when I hear muffled shouting in the far distance, followed by gunfire and a high-pitched scream, sounding like a lynch mob catching up with its target. I turn around and jump with shock and surprise when I see the little girl I saw here previously. She’s still strapped to her seat, sitting bolt upright and staring at me in abject terror.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I tell her, and even though she probably doesn’t believe me, I mean it. She doesn’t react, too scared even to move. I approach her cautiously, not wanting her to panic or start screaming or do anything that might alert people to the fact I’m here. She doesn’t flinch as I kneel down in front of her. “You need to go. There are people outside who’ll hurt you. When you get out there, just run.”

I touch her wrist to undo the first of the bindings that hold her to the chair, and she doesn’t even move when I brush against her skin. She’s as cold as the room we’re in. I look into her face again. Her eyes are still focused on the same point in the distance. I shake her shoulder and wave my hand in front of her face, but it’s no use. By the looks of things she’s been dead for a while.

Upstairs, Rona Scott’s “clinic” is also empty. I have a quick, halfhearted search around for vials of drugs that look anything like the steroids Ankin’s doctor gave me, but I know I’m wasting my time. I find a two-thirds-full bottle of aspirin tablets and I shove them into my coat pocket. Maybe I’ll take a couple if the pain gets too bad. Then again, if the pain gets that bad maybe I’ll just take the whole damn lot.

The view from the window up here is unobstructed virtually all the way back into the very heart of Hinchcliffe’s compound. The helicopter buzzes overhead, and I think the south gate is open now. There’s a crowd on this side of the barrier trying to get out, and an army on the other side trying to get in, their numbers swollen by huge waves of underclass looking for food or vengeance or both. The same thing’s surely happening at the other end of town, and at any other potential access points. I stand and watch as the people of Lowestoft collide head-on and begin to tear themselves apart.

Is this what happened in Hull, and in all those other places where I’m sure that similar communities must have sprung up around the country? And was Lowestoft really the last of them? If Ankin’s right and this place is the only place left, then the chain reaction that’s spreading through this town now truly is the beginning of the end of everything.

42

THE STREETS THAT I
can see from this window are constantly filled with movement now, frantic and uncontrollable, and I wonder: Where in all that chaos out there is Hinchcliffe?

The overwhelming uncertainty consuming this place and my frustrating inability to be able to do anything are affecting my concept of time now. I don’t know whether I’ve been here for one hour or four. It’s ice cold in this building, and the rain outside has turned to sleet. Everything looks relentlessly gray out there. My head is pounding. Are the effects of the drugs already fading?

I’m leaning up against the glass, staring at a street fight in the distance, numb to the bloody violence, when there’s a series of sudden bright flashes around Hinchcliffe’s courthouse building. Were they explosions? Now there are flames in the windows, and from what I can see the police station barracks used by most of his fighters is also under attack. A flood of people—fighters and Switchbacks alike—run from the scene. They’ve barely made any progress when they collide with an equally large surge of people coming from the opposite direction. What the hell’s going on? I keep watching long enough to see several of Ankin’s tanks rolling slowly toward the burning courthouse, converging on it from different directions.

The center of Lowestoft is a damned war zone. There are an incalculable number of people in there now, far more than there were originally. It’s the cumulative effect of Ankin’s invading army and the hordes of underclass all descending on the place at the same time. There are other buildings on fire, too. Before long the whole town will be in flames.

I need to move. The fighting is still a distraction at the moment, drawing people into the dying center of town, but it’s only a matter of time before they come looking around here. I should act now, and take advantage of the effects of Ankin’s drugs before they completely wear off.

I have one last quick search around the doctor’s room, then head back down to the guard station. I’m about to leave, but I stop myself. This building is huge and relatively inaccessible. For the most part people were too scared to come here. Knowing that the population would probably stay away and there’d be plenty of secure space here, wouldn’t this have made a perfect store for Hinchcliffe? For the sake of a few more minutes, I decide to scout around a little more of the place. I need to try to eat now and cram my body full of as much nutrition as possible while I still can. It scares me to think about how I’m going to feel again when the drugs wear off. Feeling better has made me realize how ill I’ve really become.

Opposite the main door is the entrance to a long, dark corridor I remember seeing when I was here before. Grabbing the flashlight I found earlier (the light it gives off is poor, but at least it’s heavy enough to make a decent club), I start moving along it. I stop when I reach a second door at the far end of the corridor, and peer through a round porthole window. I’m looking out over a vast, mostly empty, hangarlike space. There are large clear panels in the high, corrugated metal ceiling that diffuse the light, and it’s hard to make out much detail. The door’s stiff and it sticks at first, but I shove it open and go through, then immediately stop and cover my mouth and try not to gag. The smell in here is appalling and instantly recognizable. The unmistakable stench of death.

There’s a raised metal gantry running around the edge of this cavernous room about a yard off the ground. I walk along it slowly, my footsteps echoing around the building. There’s a huge amount of industrial pipework hanging down that obscures much of my view, and for a second I wonder whether this was another of those gas chamber killing sites from the beginning of the war. I stop walking, and just for a second I think I can hear something in here with me. It’s a quiet, scrambling sound that comes from the far side of this large space and echoes off the walls—the vermin I heard when I first arrived here, perhaps? Thinking about it, the combination of the dead flesh I can smell and the fact that so few people ever came to this place would make this a prime site for a nest of rats or other scavenging creatures. It’s weird, in spite of everything that’s happened to me recently and all that’s going on less than a mile away in the center of Lowestoft, the idea of stumbling blind into a horde of starving rodents is more frightening than anything else. There’s more light the farther I go into the room, and I jog along the gantry to get out of the shadows.

Bizarre. At the far end of this open space the floor has been divided up with metal barriers into a number of pens, maybe as many as twenty altogether. It looks like a cattle market, but didn’t Hinchcliffe tell me this place was originally used to process seafood? Then I remember what he was using this factory for, and even though I don’t want to look, I climb down to check the nearest of the pens.

The metal divides have created spaces that are each approximately six feet square. The floor of the pen closest to me is covered with what looks like hay and scraps of clothing, but otherwise it’s empty. In the one next to it, however, there’s something else. It’s oddly shaped, and it’s hard to make out what it is. I lean down over the railings to reach it or at least get a better look, and I immediately wish I hadn’t. Lying slumped in the corner of the cage with its back to me, one arm stretched up and shackled by the wrist to the highest of the metal rungs, is the emaciated body of an Unchanged child. It’s so badly decayed and the light’s so dull that I can barely make out enough detail to estimate either its sex or its age. There are more of them, too. I start walking again, and I see that there are bodies in most of the pens. Most are little more than withered, bony husks now, while a few clearly died more recently and are less decayed.

There’s a yard-wide pathway that runs right through the middle of the pens, and I follow it, looking from side to side and struggling to come to terms with what I see around me. I’ve seen more horrific sights in the last year than I ever thought possible—images I still see when I close my eyes each night—but I’ve never come across anything like this before. Regardless of the fact that these children were, as far as I can tell, all Unchanged, the wanton cruelty and neglect that they’ve been subjected to in this place is unimaginable. For a second I think about Hinchcliffe again, and I hope the fucker is burning in his courthouse palace right now. To have tried to turn a couple of children and have failed is one thing. To just have killed them would have been understandable in the circumstances, but this? To have continued to repeatedly abuse child after child is another matter altogether. Hinchcliffe and Rona Scott must have derived some sick, sadistic pleasure from this appalling torture. Evil fuckers.

I crouch down and look between the metal rungs into another pen, where there’s a small boy about the age my youngest son was before he was killed. I shine the miserable light from my flashlight into his face and bang it against the railings to try to get a reaction from him. Nothing happens. I stare at the corpse a while longer and realize the boy was probably older than he looked. His limbs are long, but his body appears collapsed and shrunken by decay. He died lying flat on his back, his arms and legs unchained. Couldn’t he have at least tried to get away? Maybe he knew it would have been futile, or maybe he no longer had the strength or desire to escape. I shine the light around the pen and see that there are chains in here after all. Then I look at his withered right wrist and I realize his shrunken hand just slipped out from his shackles.

In every subsequent pen I pass, I see something horrific. I thought that nothing could hurt like this anymore, but I’m struggling to comprehend what I’m seeing. In one cage is the body of a girl—ten or eleven years old, perhaps—and her chains have been wrapped around her neck several times. Did someone do this to her, or did she do it to herself?

Is this the great victory we’ve been fighting for? Am I a part of this? Am I responsible for it? I helped bring many of these children here, so is what happened to them my fault? But what was the alternative? If they hadn’t died here, they’d have died somewhere else. A year ago people were flying around the world, sending probes out into space, eradicating diseases, firing atoms around underground tunnels to find out how the universe was created … and look at us now. If Lowestoft truly is the last best hope for this country, and if this kind of atrocity is at its very heart, then what hope do we have? Is this Hinchcliffe’s great plan for the future? Is Chris Ankin’s vision any different?

I stagger back across the pathway and collide with the barrier around another pen. The vile noise of metal on metal seems to take forever to fade away into silence. I know I should keep moving, but I’m lost again, staring into the cage I’ve just disturbed, unable to look away. Here there are two bodies, and for a moment I’m struggling to work out why they were being doubled up when there was clearly more than enough space here for them to be separated. They were chained by their necks to diagonally opposite corners, and even though they’re heavily discolored by rot, I can see that both of their small bodies are covered in scratches and marks. Had they been fighting each other? Fuck … had these kids been forced to fight each other to the death like caged dogs? Was Hinchcliffe using them for sport?

There’s another sudden noise, much closer this time, too loud for a rat. I spin around quickly, but I can’t see anything.

“Who’s there?”

I freeze, figuring that it’ll either be one of Hinchcliffe’s fighters or Ankin’s soldiers, and trying to work out my story for being here. No one answers. I keep walking, then stop when I hear the noise again, even closer now. I’m almost on top of it—a frantic shuffling and scurrying as something does its best not to be seen. Then there’s the faintest chink of metal on metal, like chains being rattled. I glance down into the nearest few pens, but I can’t see anything. Wait! There, just for a second, in the farthest corner of the cage behind the one I’m standing right in front of, I see something. I clumsily climb over the barriers to get closer, almost falling when one of my boots gets tangled up, and my sudden movements unleash a wave of panic in the shadows. Now I can see it. One of the children is still alive! An Unchanged boy tries to climb out of his pen and into another in desperation, but there’s a chain wrapped around his ankle. He’s weak and terrified and yanks at the chain to free himself but falls back and smashes down onto his face, yelping with pain when he hits the ground. I climb into his pen, and he continues to back away from me, pushing himself along the floor until he can go no farther back. About the same age as my son Edward was, he’s barely clothed and is blue with cold. He’s in worse physical condition than I am.

“Don’t fight,” I tell him. “I won’t hurt you.”

He just stares at me, too afraid even to blink, and I don’t know what to do. Every time I move he flinches. I climb back out of his pen and into another to put some space between us, hoping he’ll see that I’m not going to kill him.

“Are there any more of you?”

The boy doesn’t answer. His face looks familiar. He’s the lad from the last Unchanged nest I helped clear out, I’m sure he is. I lean forward and he spits at me, and now I know I’m right.

“Are there any more of you?” I ask again. I give him a few seconds to answer, but he remains silent. I wait a moment longer, but I know I have to go. I can’t afford to waste any more time here. I climb back over the barriers until I reach the walkway, then start walking. This catatonic kid is lost anyway. There’s nothing I can do for him.

“Wait,” a quiet and unexpectedly fragile voice says from behind me. I turn back around and see that he’s at the front of his cage now, leaning against the barrier. I keep walking, determined now to get away from Lowestoft and everyone and everything in it. “Please,” he says, “let us out.”

I keep moving but then stop and turn back again when he rattles his chains against the barrier in protest.

“Shh,” I say to him, “they’ll hear you if you—”

I shut up when I realize he’s not the one making the noise. It’s coming from another pen on the same side of the walkway, a little farther back. I can see another Unchanged face looking back at me now; small, round, and ghostly pale. It’s a little girl. Dressed only in a grubby ripped T-shirt several sizes too big, she’s standing on tiptoes to look at me over the top of the metal divide. When I take a step toward her she takes several panicked steps back, almost tripping over her own chained feet.

“You’re the one who told them where we were,” the boy says accusingly, his voice now stronger.

“What?”

“We were hiding and you told them where we were. It’s all your fault.”

“I had to do it,” I say without thinking. Then I curse myself—what the hell am I apologizing for? Why am I explaining myself to him? Why am I explaining myself to one of the Unchanged?

“No you didn’t. They wouldn’t have found us if you hadn’t told them. It’s your fault.”

Arrogant little bastard. The way he’s shouting now reminds me of the way I used to argue with Ed. I start walking again, and the girl starts to cry.

“Let us out,” the boy demands. I ignore him and keep going, then stop again because my head is suddenly full of stupid, dangerous thoughts. He’s right, isn’t he? It
is
my fault they’re here. But what else could I have done? It was them or me, and these days you have to look after yourself ’cause no other fucker’s going to help. Anyway, they’d have had to come out of their shelter eventually. All I did was make things happen faster than they would otherwise have. I’m saving them pain in the long run, or at least I would have if they hadn’t ended up in here.

“Please!” he shouts as I try to walk on, but this time I stop because I know I’m wrong. No matter how I try to dress it up and justify what I did, these kids are only in the position they are today because of me. It doesn’t matter what they are or what I am or what we’re supposed to do to each other, I can’t just leave them to die here. Lowestoft is burning around us, for Christ’s sake. Well, maybe I can leave them, but the point is, I realize, I don’t want to. The very least they deserve is a chance, no matter how slight. I can’t deny them that.