Them or Us

by David Moody

  “In there,” I tell them, pushing them toward the front of the house, terrified that someone’s going to see them. “Move!”

  I follow them in, then walk straight into Todd’s back. Both he and Dean have stopped dead and are staring into the living room. I push past them to see what’s wrong. It’s Rufus’s body. I forgot about him, poor bastard. I grab my dead friend’s ankles and try to drag him out of the way.

  “This is the kind of thing you’re up against,” I tell them, struggling to move Rufus because he’s frozen to the ground. “This guy was a friend of mine who fucked up.”

  Still struggling with the corpse, I glance up and see them both staring back at me in horror.

  “Your friend, but why…?” Todd starts to ask.

  “Not me,” I quickly interrupt, setting him straight. “I didn’t do it.”

  I don’t know if they believe me or not; it doesn’t make any difference. I pick up my sleeping bag that’s still draped over the back of my chair and use it to cover Rufus up. There’s nothing worth salvaging in this room. My pile of books and some of my other belongings lie scattered all around the place, and that’s where they’ll stay now. I don’t need them anymore. Even if I started reading another book today, the way I’m feeling I doubt I’d last long enough to finish it. I go through into the kitchen, beckoning the men to follow, then peel up the linoleum and lift up the floorboards.

  “Start with all of this,” I tell them, crouching down and showing them where my food store is. “Then open the cupboards and take what you can from them, too. I’ll have a look and see if there’s anything useful upstairs.”

  I remove the padlock and chain from the side door so they can easily load up the back of the jeep, then throw Dean the keys and leave them both to it. I climb the steps to the mausoleum-like rooms on the second floor, heading straight for the dried-up water tank where I keep my pathetic weapons cache: a pistol, some ammunition, and a grenade.

  Last time I was here—last time I was trying to leave Lowestoft—I was working alone and intending to travel alone, too. Things are different now. The Unchanged need to get enough stuff together for at least thirty people. Bedding, clothes, furniture for firewood, everything counts today. Between us we need to completely empty this place and leave nothing behind. Maybe we should check a few of the nearest houses, too, if we have time. We should fill the car to capacity and take as much stuff as possible with us to the boatyard.

  * * *

  The noises downstairs have stopped. By the sound of things they’re done loading the jeep. I’ve been watching the road outside from an upstairs window, making sure no one comes snooping around. The people we saw as we were driving back here were a concern. If any of them drift off the main road and end up around this place we could be in trouble. My body hurts, and it’s hard to concentrate. Every movement is an effort, and I lean against the windowsill and stare out, my eyes drawn to the drifting black smoke rising up over what’s left of Lowestoft in the distance.

  I throw a couple of sheets and blankets down the stairs, then empty out a chest of drawers and chuck a load of clothing and underwear down, too. In the bathroom there’s a little soap and shampoo and a few other things in a mirrored cabinet on the wall. We had one like that in the apartment back home. I used to shave in front of it, but the man I see when I look in the mirror today is nothing like the man I used to be. Today I look like the life has been sucked out of me, and I’m thankful for the mess of hair and the straggly beard that hide the full extent of my physical deterioration. The longer I look, the more frightened I get. If someone cut me open, they’d find more cancer than man now, I think.

  I pause to catch my breath again in the back bedroom, the child’s room with the abandoned board game on the floor. I used to avoid coming in here before, but things feel different today. It’s not much of a gesture, but I pick up a couple of small teddy bears and shove them in my pocket along with the grenade and gun. I bet that kid Chloe will like them. She deserves to have something like—

  “What’s going on, Danny?”

  I freeze and stand perfectly still, unable to move, staring at the wall dead ahead, gripping another toy tight in my hand. I know that voice. It’s neither Todd nor Dean. Too calm. Too composed. Too confident. It can’t be, can it? I slowly turn around, and there, standing in the doorway in front of me, his clothes glistening with streaks of freshly spilled blood, is Hinchcliffe. My mouth’s dry and I can’t speak. How can this be happening?

  “Found two Unchanged downstairs, helping themselves to your stuff. What’s that all about? Don’t worry, by the way, Danny, I straightened them out for you. Stopped them stealing anything. Killed both of the fuckers before they even knew I was watching.”

  “I can explain, Hinchcliffe…”

  “I doubt you can.”

  He takes a step toward me, and I move back until I hit the wall and I can’t go any farther.

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “How would you know? You don’t know what I think. I don’t know how you think, either. I thought I was starting to understand, but you keep surprising me, Danny McCoyne.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Because I knew you’d come back. You’re so fucking naive. You’ve got no idea, have you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He walks forward again, and I’ve got nowhere left to go. He leans over me, an arm on either side of my shoulders, pinning me down without even having to touch me. He checks my pockets, taking my grenade, my pistol, and one of my knives. He digs the tip of the knife into the wall, level with my eyeline. He twists the blade around and makes a hole, plaster dust drifting down and landing on my boot.

  “Why do you think I’ve kept hold of you for so long, Danny?” he asks. “Is it because of your dynamic personality? Your sparkling wit? Your remarkable strength?”

  Sarcastic bastard.

  “Because I’m useful to you? Because I can hold the Hate? Because I can hunt out the Unchanged?”

  “Right on all three counts,” he says, “but you still don’t completely get it.”

  I can’t think straight, and I doubt I’d be able to understand what he’s talking about even if I could. He pushes himself away from the wall and walks away. I have two more knives on me; should I just try to attack and get this over with? The temptation’s strong, but I don’t think I can. Even if I did, Hinchcliffe’s always been far more powerful than me. He’s just killed two Unchanged men without breaking a sweat. I wouldn’t stand a chance.

  “You, Danny,” he explains, pointing at me with my blade, “are unique. Didn’t you ever wonder why I gave you so many chances?”

  “To be honest, I was just relieved you weren’t kicking the shit out of me. Anything else was a bonus.”

  He laughs and sits down on the end of the narrow single bed on one side of this room. He picks up a small metal toy—looks like a music box—from a bedside table, then puts down his knife and turns a key to wind it up. When he lets it go it starts to play a tune. A lullaby. Can’t remember the name of it. Makes me want to cry.

  “The reality, Danny,” he says, talking over the beautiful noise, “is that you’re different. I told you before that I liked the way you could take a step back from everything, remember? You’ve always been able to look beyond the fighting and see the bigger picture. Most people think you’re a useless coward, and to an extent you are, but there’s more to you than that.”

  “So how is a useless coward supposed to help the all-powerful Hinchcliffe?”

  “Simple, you’re always looking for the way out. You come at problems from a different perspective that no one else sees. We’re all focused on the kill, but not you. I came back here for you, Danny, because I knew you’d be trying to get away from the fighting, not running toward it like the rest of them, and I knew you’d end up here again eventually. I’m not stupid, I know how much stuff you’ve got hidden away here. Christ, I’ve been giving you extra ration
s for weeks, and I know you haven’t been eating any of it. It was pretty damn obvious you’d been stashing it away somewhere. Close enough to Lowestoft for you to get to, far enough away to avoid any fallout, so to speak.”

  “Take everything.”

  “I don’t want your food, you moron.”

  “What, then?”

  “I want to know where you were going. I knew you’d have a plan to get away, Dan, I just didn’t think it would involve Unchanged.”

  “It doesn’t now you’ve killed them.”

  “For fuck’s sake, what else was I going to do? They were Unchanged, Danny.”

  “They hadn’t done anything wrong.”

  “They were still breathing, that’s wrong in my book.”

  “Then maybe you need a new book.”

  He gets up fast and charges across the room, slamming into me before I have a chance to react, shoving me hard against the wall, his hand wrapped around my throat.

  “Don’t push me,” he hisses in my face, tightening his grip. “I’m really not in the mood. I’ve had a bad couple of days.”

  “It didn’t have to be like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “You could have talked to Ankin. You could have tried to find some common ground.”

  “I didn’t get the chance. Anyway, the Unchanged are our common ground, or at least they were. Now it’s just every man for himself. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d talked to Ankin for six fucking months and agreed with him on everything, the end result would have been the same.”

  “No it wouldn’t. There was no need for what you did.”

  He lets me go and takes a step back.

  “What I did? You fuckwit, Danny, I didn’t do anything. For the record, neither did Ankin. Lowestoft is dead today because Ankin’s appearance gave people a choice.”

  “What?”

  “I watched the whole thing from up on the roof once it kicked off. I always knew there was a chance it was going to happen. That was why I came down so hard on John Warner in Southwold last week. People always think the grass is greener on the other side, but it’s not. You have to take away the temptation. Everywhere you look now, everything is fucked. Word got around that Ankin had surrounded the town. Half the people panicked and tried to fight them off because they thought they were coming in to raid Lowestoft like we’ve raided everywhere else. The other half were throwing themselves at their mercy, thinking these assholes in their fucking uniforms with their fucking tanks were bringing them some kind of salvation. The people destroyed Lowestoft, not me and not Ankin. Granted, it would have been better if the stupid fucker hadn’t turned up like that, but that’s how it goes.”

  “I don’t understand. You just walked away from it all?”

  “From what? From a few hundred fighters who couldn’t take a shit without checking with me first? From a couple of thousand underclass who could barely function? Do you think any of that actually mattered?”

  “What about your breeding plan? The stuff that was going on at the factory? All the food you’d been storing?”

  “The storerooms were almost empty, and the factory was just a remnant from Thacker’s day, something to keep Rona Scott entertained and out of my hair. As for the hotel … that was just a way to keep people quiet and keep them occupied. You know, all that stuff you said after you came back from Southwold that time, you were absolutely right. The world is well and truly fucked, and the only thing that matters now is looking after number one. No amount of farming, fucking, or fighting is going to change anything, I’ve come to realize that. I stayed in Lowestoft because it was my best option until now, but it was never anything worth fighting for. I knew it wouldn’t last.”

  “What about your fighters?”

  “What about them? They can make their own choices. They’ve got brains—some of them, anyway. Those who haven’t will just go the way of the Brutes.”

  “What about you? What do you do now?”

  “Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? And it depends on you. Like I said, I always knew something like this was probably going to happen sooner or later. Didn’t think it would be quite so fast, though.”

  “Wait, wait … what do you mean, it depends on me? What have I got to do with anything?”

  “You’ve got a plan, haven’t you? You weren’t just showing those foul fuckers downstairs around your house, were you? You must have had a damn good reason to risk bringing them here.”

  “I was giving them the food. I don’t need it.”

  “Bullshit. Where were they going to take it?”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  He shoots out his arm and slams me back against the wall again, winding me.

  “Pissing me off is not a good idea, McCoyne. Tell me what you were planning.”

  “I’m not telling you anything. Listen, just kill me if it’ll make you feel better. I’ll be dead soon anyway.”

  He screws up his fist and pulls it back, and for a moment I brace myself, but he doesn’t hit me. In frustration, he turns around and kicks the abandoned board game across the room.

  “You’re probably right,” he says. “You can’t talk if you’re dead.”

  “I’m not going to talk.”

  “You don’t have to. I’m getting to know you too well. I can tell when you’re lying.”

  “Why would I bother lying now? What’s the point?”

  “Depends how many more Unchanged you’re hiding.”

  “I’m not hiding any Unchanged. Come on, Hinchcliffe—”

  “Deny it all you like, I know you’re helping more of them.”

  “Think what you want.”

  “The taller guy downstairs,” he says, “just before I killed him, I heard him say something about a boat, and something about a guy called Joseph.”

  I try bullshitting my way out of trouble. “The name means nothing to me. All I know is they were going to try to take a boat from one of the boatyards in town.”

  “They’d never have made it.”

  “That’s what I told them.”

  “I still don’t believe you.”

  “I still don’t care.”

  He stands across the room and glares at me, and I can see him thinking, working through the options.

  “So where is this Joseph?”

  “I told you, I’ve never heard of him.”

  “And I told you, I can tell when you’re lying. So if the Unchanged were trying to get onto a boat, it’s safe to assume this mystery man Joseph and his pals are close to water.”

  “Hinchcliffe, I’m not going to tell you anything.”

  “They’re not going to want to travel any farther inland, so the coast would have been the best option—and as the bulk of Ankin’s forces came from Norwich to the north, I’m guessing they’ll have wanted to travel south. Am I getting close now?”

  My silence gives him all the answers he needs. He grabs my arm and drags me downstairs.

  47

  HINCHCLIFFE KNOWS HIS WAY around this place far better than I do. Bastard’s obviously had his escape routes planned for some time. He drives the fully loaded jeep at a frantic speed along back roads and side streets I didn’t even know existed, frequently skidding in the ice and snow, obviously as eager to get away from Lowestoft as I am.

  The nauseous panic I’ve felt since he appeared in the house has finally started to reduce. I’ve spent weeks focusing on myself, my every decision made at the potential expense of everyone and everything else. Hinchcliffe is still doing exactly that, but now I find that I can’t. I know that the fate of Joseph Mallon and the rest of the Unchanged now rests squarely on my shoulders, and suddenly it matters. Peter Sutton told me they were all that was left of the human race, and I’m starting to think he might be right. If I don’t get to Southwold, they’re fucked. I might not have the boat we promised them, but this jeep full of supplies is their lifeline. This food will buy them a little time, and with all that’s happening in and
around Lowestoft, that time might be enough for them to find another way of getting away. Then again, if I turn up there with Hinchcliffe, they won’t have a hope in hell anyway. I have to get as close as I can, then get rid of him.

  “All this was inevitable,” he says as he swings the jeep around another corner, sliding across the road and just missing hitting a lone vagrant who scrambles for cover. Hinchcliffe doesn’t even flinch.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The war, them and us—the human race has been on a downward spiral since the first caveman killed the fucker living in the cave next door because he’d stolen his woman or his dinner.”

  “We were better than that. It didn’t have to be this way.”

  “Yes it did. We’re all hardwired to want to survive, and when push comes to shove, we’ll do it at the expense of everyone else. I worked in the City, remember? I used to shaft people for a living. The Change came, and the war that followed was inevitable. There was nothing any of us could have done to stop it. We just did what we had to do, you included.”

  “We’ve all played our part, I don’t deny that—but trying to rebuild a society based on power and fear? How was that ever going to be anything but a failure?”

  “I was never trying to rebuild a society, you idiot. Don’t you listen? I was just trying to survive. This day has been a long time coming,” he continues, swerving around a traffic circle the wrong way and joining the A12. “Thing is, Danny, people have always been out for themselves, even when they made it look like they were cooperating. Look at this Ankin guy and all those other politicians you remember—elected into power to serve the people, but all they were doing was making sure their own backsides were comfortable and safe, lining their own nests. All the Hate did was accelerate things and help us all cut through some of the bullshit. Look back and you’ll see that everything’s always been built on power and fear. Think back to any story you remember from the news before all of this began, and you’ll be able to trace it back to someone, somewhere who wasn’t prepared to be fucked over by someone else.”