by David Moody
Left behind by the convoy, the soldier sprints toward the ruined fast food joint to retrieve his bike, but he’s not alone in his race for the building. Several Haters are gaining on him. His lungs are burning and his pistol’s now empty, but all that’s academic because before any of them can get anywhere near, another missile is launched from the circling helicopter, flattening what was left of the McDonald’s and killing everyone in a ten-meter radius.
This is No Man’s Land.
It’s only when the effects of this most recent blast die down that Matt begins to truly appreciate the scale of the devastation here. A wide swath of land has been cleared around the city, all buildings destroyed. It explains why he was able to see so much from so far out. The purpose of No Man’s Land is obvious: no buildings means there’s nowhere to hide.
Matt pulls his ice axe free and starts sliding farther down the roof of the bus toward the back, figuring he’ll stand a better chance if he can climb off here and join the crowds around the checkpoint. For the moment there are no vehicles behind. He leans over the edge and manages to wedge the tip of the axe in the corner of one of the metal window grilles, and he uses it to lower himself down. Taking advantage of the lack of weapon holes on the corner of the bus, and also its pedestrian speed, he starts to descend. A few months ago I hesitated climbing down a rock face on Skek with a safety harness, he thinks, now look at me. I’m a new man.
From his new vantage point he can better see the makeshift wall encircling the city. The gaps between most buildings have been filled in with cars and trucks, creating a vast blockade. Has this kind of improvised construction been repeated around the entire city? If it has, then he’s impressed. A perimeter barrier like this, he decides, serves two purposes: it makes the people inside feel safe (even if they’re not), and it also lets the Haters know this place will be no pushover. He knows his life might depend on these haphazard fortifications, but he can’t help thinking the oversized gates they’re now approaching remind him of King Kong’s island in the movies. No, the entrance to Jurassic Park, that’s it.
It’s no laughing matter. He needs to get out of sight.
The lack of speed allows him to shimmy down the back of the bus unnoticed. Now he’s ready to drop down and run but he waits because he knows it’s all about fitting in here, not standing out. He hangs his head out to look down the side of the lumbering vehicle and sees they’re almost at the gate, joining the end of a queue of other vehicles waiting to gain access. Heavily armed guards, watched by equally heavily armed colleagues, search each approaching vehicle for Haters. There’s also a line of people here waiting to get in. Hauling bags and boxes of possessions with them, they’re being funneled along a narrow path, fenced in by tall wire-mesh barriers on either side, topped with razor wire. It looks reasonably impenetrable and the refugees are treated with suspicion when they reach the border proper. There’s plenty of manhandling from the military, followed by the expected neck-jab Hater-testing ritual he himself has been subjected to previously. The precautions are only to be expected. Letting just one Hater into the camp could mean the death of thousands of people.
A helicopter thunders overhead, providing an unexpected distraction with its noise and blocking the sun momentarily, and Matt makes his move. He disentangles his ice axe then drops down and runs over to the wire mesh, trying to find a way in. The people already in the line recoil, not knowing who or what he is. “How d’you get in?” he asks, looking hopefully into faces which immediately look away. “Where’s the entrance?”
He works his way along the fence away from the gates, knowing that the end’s got to be here somewhere, a rippling wave of panic traveling with him as he moves. He finds the way in soon enough. And he finds the guards protecting it, too.
“Don’t move a fucking muscle,” a masked militiaman screams at him.
“It’s okay,” Matt says, “I’m not a Hater,” and he raises his hands in submission as he walks toward the guard. He realizes there are other soldiers behind him.
“I said don’t fucking move,” the militiaman warns him again.
“I just—”
A thump from the butt of a rifle to the back of his skull and Matt’s out cold.
4
When Matt comes around the first thing he feels is relief because he’s still alive. The next thing he feels is absolute panic because he’s strung up and naked, freezing cold. There are metal cuffs around his wrists attached to heavy chains which are slung through a steel loop affixed to the low ceiling. He loses his footing on the floor and slips, almost wrenching his arms from their sockets. His body fills with pain. He manages to regain his balance, but only for a second before a wave of nausea sends him reeling again. Bright lights blind him, increasing his anxiety.
“Not a Hater,” he manages to say, voice little more than a pathetic last gasp.
“Remind me why we didn’t just put this prick out of his misery,” a gruff voice asks from the shadows behind the arc lights.
There’s a woman standing next to Matt, a doctor in a grubby white coat, shielding her eyes. She looks pissed off. “Do we have to go through this every bloody time? If he was one of them he’d be trying to kill me.”
“So why didn’t he just queue up nicely like everyone else? You know the rules. We have to be certain.”
The doctor moves out of the way. “Yeah, I know the rules. Your rules.”
“Not a Hater,” Matt says again.
If there’s a response from his captors this time, he doesn’t hear it. He’s hit from out of nowhere by a fire-hose blast of ice-cold water, hard like nails and so strong it knocks him clean off his feet.
Arms wrenched. Searing agony. Nerves screaming. Muscles burning.
Matt’s feet slip and slide on the water-soaked concrete until he manages to grip with his toes and steady himself again. Finally there’s quiet; absolute silence save for trickling water.
The doctor angrily turns one of the lights around and illuminates a soldier with a brutal crew cut who has a look of utter contempt for everyone and everything on his face. “The test came back clear, you know it did,” she says. “He looks okay, Sergeant.”
“We can’t take any chances. You heard what happened in Portsmouth last week.”
“The test is almost completely accurate. The way he’s reacting indicates that he’s docile.”
“Almost isn’t good enough,” the sergeant grunts.
“You’re just doing this for kicks.”
“Whatever.” He gestures at the member of his squad who’s operating the hose. “Do it. Douse the fucker.”
Matt tenses himself up but it doesn’t make any difference. The water hits him for a second time. He tries to protect his face by turning to one side, but in doing so he exposes his bollocks and it’s like being kicked by a horse. The burning pain in his groin’s so bad that it makes the icy water feel almost comfortable by comparison.
This time when the high-force deluge stops, the sergeant allows the doctor to get a little closer again. Matt just about manages to stay upright, desperate to make eye contact with her, desperate for help. She looks straight through him. She leans in, faces almost touching, then turns back to face the sergeant. “For the last time, there’s no aggression reaction with this one. He’s no Hater.”
I tried to tell you that … Matt thinks but can’t bring himself to say.
Now the officer gets up and walks over. Both he and the doctor look their prisoner up and down. His cross-country ordeal has left Matt in fairly reasonable shape, all things considered. He is bony and lithe, nothing left but muscle and sinew. His skin is tanned and weathered. He hasn’t shaved for weeks and, until now, he hasn’t so much as wiped himself down for the best part of two months. It’s no surprise they think he might be one of those foul, animallike bastards marauding on the other side of the city wall.
Matt knows they’re not looking at him, they’re watching his reactions. The soldier leans in closer still, sneering face full of mock a
ggression, and Matt almost loses his balance again. “Pathetic,” the soldier snarls.
“What’s your story?” the doctor asks Matt directly. He looks from face to face, not sure if speaking will earn him another blast from the hose. “You came in on the bus, not in it. Why?”
“I hitched a ride,” Matt says, confidence returning.
“But the whole point of the bus was to bring people in.”
“Too dangerous … I stay away from numbers…”
“So why break into the camp?” the sergeant demands. He jabs a finger at Matt. “That’s textbook Hater behavior right there.”
“What do you mean you stay away from numbers?” the doctor asks. “Exactly how long have you been out there?”
“Since the start.”
“On your own?”
“Yep.”
The soldier’s not buying it. “I’m supposed to believe you survived all this time on your own out there? Come on.”
“It’s true.”
He grabs Matt by the neck and squeezes. Matt doesn’t know how to react. By now he thought he’d be on his way back to Jen, not strung up and physically and verbally abused by the military. Christ, he’d have had better treatment at the hands of the Haters. At least it would have been over quickly with them. When Matt doesn’t retaliate the soldier releases his grip and wipes his hand on the back of his grubby fatigues, then retreats. “Blast some more of that grime off him,” he orders.
“Come on,” the doctor protests as she quickly gets out of the way of the water. “You’re as bad as they are. Hasn’t he been through enough?”
“Do it,” the officer says, unconcerned.
Matt’s hosed down a third time. It’s like being sandblasted. There’s a momentary pause. He stands up straight but the hose operator has just been toying with him and knocks him down again with yet another torrent.
“That’s enough,” the doctor yells, her voice just about audible over the noise. The sergeant gives the order to stop.
Matt’s barely conscious. His legs threaten to buckle, but the pain in his shoulders, arms, and wrists keep him upright. Another gesture from the sergeant and the chains are slackened. Matt drops to his knees in a wet heap, breathing hard. The doctor crouches down in front of him.
“What’s your name?”
Matt looks up, checking for the whereabouts of the soldier with the hose before he answers. “Matthew Dunne.”
“So where’ve you really been all this time, Matthew?”
“Been trying to get home.”
“And where exactly is home?”
“Here.”
The sergeant is standing right behind the doctor, looking down. “I’m still not sure about this fucker,” he says. The doctor massages her temples, frustrated.
“He passed the test and he’s not reacting adversely to us. He may well be lying about where he’s been, but who gives a damn?”
“I do. If we let just one of those bastards in here then—”
“—then we’re all at risk. I know, Sergeant, you’ve told me a thousand times.”
“And I’ll keep telling you because—”
“—because one is all it takes,” she interrupts. “I get it. I know the score. But look at this guy.”
“I watched a Hater kid half his size take out five of my men by itself.”
“I know. Again, you told me. Look, I’m vouching for this one. I’ll get him processed myself and I’ll do the locked room test. If he really has been out there all this time, I want to hear what he’s got to say.”
The soldier walks away, unimpressed. “Waste of fucking time.”
The doctor fetches a towel and wraps it around Matt’s shoulders. “Thanks,” Matt mumbles, shivering so hard it looks like he’s convulsing.
“Don’t mention it. I’ll find someone to get those chains off you.”
* * *
Her name is Gillian Montgomery, and she works—worked—in mental health, dealing with schizophrenics and people with bipolar disorder and all manner of other problems which have been reduced to trivial nuisances now given the tsunami of psychopathy that’s swept the country. “I’ve seen all kinds of shit in my time, but I never came across anything quite like the Hate before,” she tells him. It’s just the two of them now. Matt’s back in his own (filthy and stinking) clothes, sitting across a desk from the doctor. The locked room test is as straightforward as it sounds: you sit in a small, locked room with someone you’re not one hundred percent convinced about, and if you’re both still alive in an hour, chances are neither of you are Haters.
“Anyone know what caused it? What the trigger was?” Matt asks. “I’ve been out of the loop for a while.”
“There is no loop anymore,” she says, concentrating on her laptop more than she is on him. “And no, no one knows and no one cares. What’s the point? What difference will it make? We are where we are.”
“Fair enough.”
Matt sits back on his chair and massages his aching neck and shoulders. He’s less on edge now, less worried that he’s about to be strung up and hosed down again. They fed him and let him use the toilet before locking him in here with the doctor. Strange, he thinks, how necessities feel like luxuries these days.
They had him fill out a paper form with all his details that he could remember. The doctor’s just finished entering them onto the computer. “Can you still get online?” he asks.
“After a fashion. They call this the Central System. Just a database of who’s where and who’s what really. To be honest it’s pretty unreliable.”
“What’s it tell you?” he asks, immediately thinking about Jen.
“If someone’s been tested, they’ll have a record. So if they came in through one of the checkpoints since the wall went up, we’ll probably know they’re here. But if you want to know where Aunty Alice is and how many people she’s killed, you’re out of luck. It’s all academic, anyway. You don’t need the internet to tell you everything’s fucked.”
And it occurs to Matt that as the last couple of hours haven’t exactly gone to plan, and because he’s been focused on toeing the line and staying alive, that he hasn’t yet asked the most basic of questions. “So exactly just how fucked is everything?”
Dr. Montgomery stops what she’s doing and pushes the laptop away. “Hard to say. It’s all so … fractured. Fragmented.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the nature of the beast, isn’t it? Society has been split down the middle—or not quite down the middle, depending on who you talk to—and it feels like making that split as wide as possible is the key to staying alive.”
“And that’s what’s happening here?”
“That’s exactly what’s happening. We’re isolating what’s left of the normal population from the Haters and putting as big a gap as possible between us and them. You saw all the flattened buildings on your way in?”
“Yeah.”
“No Man’s Land. Makes it harder for them to hide and harder for them to get to us. They’re all but invisible until they attack, so separation is our best defense.”
“That test you do…” he starts to ask, rubbing a sore patch of skin on the side of his neck. “Does it work?”
“It’s not conclusive, but it gives a pretty good indication. We look for elevated adrenaline and endorphin levels, and couple those measures with behavioral traits and other observations.”
“Behavioral traits?”
“If someone starts trying to gouge your eyes out while the test’s being administered, chances are they’re a Hater. You were pretty lucky the way you came in here just now. I’ve seen people less likely to be a Hater who’ve been killed just in case.”
“So why am I still here?”
“You must have caught the sergeant in a good mood.”
“That was a good mood?”
“You’re still alive, so yes.”
Matt looks around, trying to take it all in. “So what you’re saying is, no one really h
as a clue what’s going on?”
“I’m not saying that at all. They’re trying to kill us, and we’re trying not to be killed, that’s what’s going on. It’s pretty relentless. They don’t give up, those bastards. They just keep coming.”
“They’re not getting in, though. This place must be pretty well organized.”
“There’s some kind of structure and a basic plan, if that’s what you mean. This is a hell of a thing that’s happening here. There’s never been a war like this before. They’re calling it the final war. Everything’s broken down to an individual level, and that makes it all so much more complicated.”
“But there are still people in charge, right? Someone’s still calling the shots?”
“Taking shots, yes. I’m not so sure about calling them. The Civil Defense Force are in control now, primarily because they have all the guns. They’re more militia than military, but they get the job done. I’ve been hearing stories about active Hater-controlled military units, and that prospect scares the shit out of me.”
Matt rocks back on his chair and lets that sink in for a second.
The doctor gets up and helps herself to a bottle of water from a table at the back of the room. This is as much a cell as anything: four walls, one door, no windows. The only illumination comes from a desk lamp and the laptop screen. There’s a ceiling-mounted camera but it doesn’t seem to be working. Matt reckons the authorities (what’s left of them) have better things to do than watch what he’s up to and, anyway, he’s stuck here until they say otherwise. “So what happens next? What happens to me now?”
She leans against the back wall. Shrugs. “They let you go, I guess.”
“And that’s it?”
