Chokehold

by David Moody

  The permanently open doors allow more and more people inside, but there’s nowhere for any of them to go. The revolving door is still revolving, but only just. It judders around inch by inch, moving at a hopelessly slow speed because of the people packed into this enclosed, overfull space. No one gives a shit about anyone else any longer. It’s every man, woman, and child for themselves.

  Darren tries to dig his way through the crowd, shoving people out of the way that he’s previously helped, concerned only with putting maximum distance between himself and the approaching Haters.

  “What do we do, Darren?” someone asks when they recognize him, but he doesn’t answer. He just shrugs them off.

  All that bullshit he used to spout about this group being the future of the human race … about how they’d be here after everyone else had gone, after all the fighting was over … they’re just empty words. Hollow promises made to keep other people in line and to keep himself safe.

  Another woman throws her arms around him, sobbing. “Help me, Darren. Please…” Darren pushes her away, fighting harder and harder to wade through the bodies and get to safety. He makes it as far as the glass-fronted foyer, but no one’s going any farther. The revolving door is now stuck: filled with people, arms and legs trapped, preventing it from moving.

  Darren can’t go forward, and the people behind are stopping him from going back. He’s trapped.

  The fastest Haters make short work of the slowest civilian survivors. They grab the outliers by whatever they can get a hold of—belts, collars, hair—then separate them from the crowd and kill them with knives, clubs, spears, bludgeons, fists, boots … whatever is available.

  Darren feels the pressure lift as more of the crowds behind him are hauled away and slaughtered. The more of them there are for the Haters to kill, he thinks, the better my chances of getting away. He pushes forward again, but he can feel the enemy on his back, can see their reflections in the glass, and he knows he’s next. He tries again to worm his way deeper in, literally throwing other people out of the way until he reaches the non-revolving door. There’s a narrow gap, maybe half as wide as he needs it to be, but it’s the only option he has, and he squeezes his head and one arm and shoulder through and tries to use his bulk to lever the door around.

  It’s stuck tight, and so is Darren.

  He kicks and thrashes, but he’s not going anywhere. He looks back and sees there are very few of his people left alive, but plenty of the enemy still fighting. One Hater grabs his legs and pulls him back out into the foyer, then another drops down onto his chest and thumps a stubby blade into his heart.

  * * *

  Moira Kay is somehow still alive. She can hardly believe it herself. She has an advantage over the enemy, though, in that she knows this area backward. There’s not a single square inch of the outpost that’s unknown to her.

  The longer she’s spent out on the battlefield, the more like a Hater she’s become. She’s covered from head to toe in blood and mud. Her rifle long lost, she’s carrying a nail-skewered baseball bat she snatched from the grip of a Hater she killed in the midst of the carnage, and she swings it wildly at anything that’s still moving. With the vast majority of enemy fighters concentrating on the madness at the front of the service station and partially demolished hotel, she’s able to disappear the other way. She drops into one of the trenches, wincing with pain and nursing a stab wound, then deals with a few more rogue attackers before heading for the rear of the building. Exhausted, she hauls herself out of the trench, then disappears into the maze of abandoned vehicles.

  She turns a corner, then stops. There’s a crowd of people ahead, and she doesn’t have enough energy left to run again.

  “Moira? That you?”

  Thank Christ for that. It’s Aaron.

  “What the hell are you doing out here?” she asks, breathless.

  “Getting this lot away,” he says, and he steps back to reveal a truck filled with desperate-looking refugees.

  “I’ll help,” she tells him without hesitation.

  57

  They don’t have long. The hordes are closing in fast. “You know where you’re going?” Aaron asks Matt, handing him a set of keys.

  “Driving away from here, that’s all I know. To be honest, I think that’s all I want to know.”

  “Just follow Moira for as long as you can.”

  “I will.”

  Joseph reaches out and shakes Matt’s hand. “Thank you for doing this.”

  “Well, it went so well when I tried something similar last time,” Matt says, managing the briefest wry smile.

  “This is different.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  He looks at the keys in his hand and for a second is almost overcome by the enormity of what he’s agreed to do. His body feels broken, shutting down fast. Everything comes down to this. This is all he has left.

  “Ready?” Aaron asks. “Leave it any longer and those fuckers will be riding shotgun.”

  “I’m ready.”

  Aaron bangs his hand against the door of Moira’s truck, and she acknowledges him with an immediate thumbs-up.

  Matt gets into his truck and starts the engine. There’s an unexpected wave of familiarity as the vehicle rattles and rumbles into life—a flashback to the night of the bomb—followed by an equally strong and almost overwhelming feeling of despair. No going back now. Nowhere left to go back to. This place is another dead end among many, and he knows that everywhere else will be the same, no matter where they end up today.

  But although there’s nothing left to look forward to, when he glances in his mirror, he’s suddenly keen to get moving. It’s happening just as he’d thought it would. He could have written the script. The service station is falling with almost dismissive speed. The enemy is crawling over every inch of the building like locusts, stripping flesh from the bones of the place. He knows the only people who have any chance of making it out of here alive are those who’ve reached the trucks.

  Moira pulls away, and Matt follows. Aaron brings up the rear in a third vehicle, a short and tight-packed convoy. The chaos elsewhere around the fallen outpost is such that they initially go unnoticed. A few Hater stragglers see the vehicles and sprint down to intercept them, but Moira accelerates, mowing them down with satisfaction. Once she’s clear, she puts her foot down and crosses the trenches, clattering over the nearest pontoon bridge. She steers up onto the road, then drives the wrong way around the traffic roundabout before swinging down onto the A14 and heading east.

  * * *

  McCoyne hammers on the window of Bryce’s car. “I see them!”

  “What?”

  “I told you they’d try something. There’s a group of them trying to get away, sneaking out the back door. Three trucks. They’ll hit the roadblocks, but they look big enough to get through. Make a move now and you’ll catch them. Hinchcliffe will know you’re worth keeping onside if you can catch three truckloads of Unchanged his army missed.”

  Bryce doesn’t need convincing. “Good work. Get in.”

  “But you don’t need me. I should stay here and—” McCoyne protests.

  “Get in!”

  58

  The Road Heading East

  The road ahead is blocked across its entire width. Moira knows what she has to do. There simply is no other option. All that matters now is getting these trucks as far from the carnage as they can. The massed Haters, on an adrenaline-fueled high after an easy victory, start hurling missiles. A brick bounces off the windshield, then another smashes through, leaving the glass a spiderwebbed mess. Moira punches it clear so she can see, then locks her arms and braces for impact.

  Foot down. Eyes screwed shut.

  The collision between the truck and the roadblock is hard and unforgiving. Moira feels the front wheels bounce up, then crash back down. She’s through, but several of her tires are blown, and she loses control on the landing. The cab overbalances, and all she can think about are those civilians relyi
ng on her to help them get away. Still hanging on to the wheel, she throws her weight right over to the opposite side of the cab in a vain attempt to regain control and keep moving. For a moment, it feels like it might work, but the truck has sustained catastrophic damage, and she knows it’s hopeless.

  Her frantic escape is over almost as quickly as it began. The massive vehicle skids along the road on its wheel rims before finally stopping, black smoke spewing from the exhaust. Aaron had given Moira a handgun, which she grabs without thinking because she knows it’s only going to be seconds before the inevitable attack.

  There are so many of them that they block out the light. Some rip out what’s left of the shattered windshield, others yank at the doors to get them open. Their numbers are such that they block their own way through, giving Moria an unexpected few seconds to think. She looks around at their crazed, hate-filled faces, knowing that all any of them wants right now is to kill her. She thinks about the instantaneous yet fleeting pleasure that ending her life will bring them, about the repellent euphoria the one who does the deed will inevitably feel. She manages to shoot a couple of them, but they’re immediately replaced by others, and she knows there will always be more.

  It sickens her to think that her death will bring so much ravenous excitement, but that’s just how it is. “Sorry to spoil your party,” she says, and she shoves the pistol into her mouth and fires, denying them the pleasure.

  * * *

  Without looking back, Matt powers through the gaping hole in the Hater blockade left by Moira’s truck, then steers hard around the end of the beached wreck and accelerates away, clear. Aaron follows close behind, tucked in tight.

  “Shit,” Matt says as he glances in the rearview mirror. A red Subaru swerves out onto the road behind both of them and begins to accelerate. Matt has a quarter tank of fuel remaining, not even a hundred miles. All he can do is keep driving until he runs out of gas or the Haters give up. He knows which will happen first.

  Aaron flashes his headlamps, and Matt appreciates the fleeting attempt at communication. He’s nervous as hell being out in front. It’s the fear of what’s coming, he tells himself, combined with the inevitability of everything. He starts talking out loud, trying both to distract and to motivate himself. “You can do this, mate. Estelle was right; you’re a slippery bastard. You should have died ten times over by now.”

  There are more Hater-driven vehicles teeming all over the road behind the two trucks now, too many to count. Some, like the Subaru, are much quicker than his own cumbersome, heavy-duty vehicle. He’s struggling with the steering. Aaron, on the other hand, seems to be having little problem. He has a definite speed advantage, with the nose of his truck now almost touching the tail of Matt’s.

  Just get as far as I can.

  If he focuses ahead and not behind, being alone in the cab with nothing but empty road in front, he starts to feel like the last man on earth again. He remembers standing on the beach on Skek and thinking the same thing months ago on the morning normality died and this nightmare began. Christ, that feels like a lifetime ago now. Several lifetimes.

  “Pretty good that you made it this far,” he says, congratulating himself, and he wonders how much farther he can go.

  Another quick look in his mirrors and he sees that the road behind is a mass of movement and headlights now. Aaron swerves and drifts, deliberately blocking as many of them as he can. Matt thinks this would look amazing filmed from above, like those big police chases they used to show on TV back in the day. It’s like a scene from the climax of a movie. He knows how it’s going to end. There’s only one direction this is going. It’s the end of the line.

  Aaron’s protecting Matt’s truck as best he can, and Aaron scores a minor victory when a jeep from the chasing pack gets too close and he side shunts it into the central crash barrier. The jeep bounces off the carefully engineered metal strip, out of control, arcs around, and takes out another three vehicles. Tangled together, they hold up some of the pursuing pack for a few precious seconds.

  The driver of the red Subaru spots a gap and accelerates through. Compared to the rest of the wrecks making up this haphazard procession of vehicles, his is a performance vehicle, and he leaves the bulk of them in the dust. Aaron tries to shut the door on him, swinging his truck out toward the central barrier again and blocking the way through, but the truck’s not as responsive as he’d hoped, and he oversteers, almost losing control. It’s only a slight wobble, but it’s enough to massively affect his speed. The engine groans with effort, and Aaron has to change down a gear to keep moving.

  The truck has become unexpectedly exposed. The driver of a Transit puts her foot down and rams the back of the truck, shunting Aaron wildly off course. He corrects himself quick, but not before the Subaru has whipped up the inside. Its driver swings out right in front of the truck, then brakes. The unexpected speed change takes Aaron by surprise, and he slams his foot on the brake without thinking. The Transit, a 4 × 4, and a rust-colored sedan all plow into him, and he loses control.

  The cab of the truck smashes into the central barrier and comes to a sudden, wrenching halt. The trailer slides out behind it, blocking all but the inside lane, leaving only a narrow strip of tarmac clear for the pursuing pack to get through.

  Aaron is out of his seat and out of the cab in a heartbeat. He jumps the median and sprints along the opposite road, but he doesn’t get far. A motorbike rider drives through a gap in the barrier, accelerates hard, then lances him with a crudely forged spear.

  * * *

  Just one truck remaining now, with the red Subaru leading the charge.

  “Careful. He’ll run us off the road,” McCoyne says, gesturing at the vehicle up ahead.

  “He won’t risk it. He’ll just keep going if I don’t do something.”

  “He’ll have to stop eventually.”

  “Yeah, but what if we stop first? Hinchliffe will be pissed if let them get away. These are the last Unchanged.”

  “So you need to take control of the situation. Force him to go where you want him to. Deny him the open road. Send him somewhere where he doesn’t have any options.”

  * * *

  The Subaru accelerates again, then pulls up alongside the truck and holds steady. Matt looks down and can’t believe his eyes when he sees it’s that same scrawny fucker in the passenger seat he’s come across before. The one who killed Kara and the others and led the Haters to Thornhill. The one he’d helped Joseph Mallon to torture back in the city-camp. One of the group who was responsible for starting the chain reaction that caused his hometown to be reduced to a pile of toxic ash. He’s aware it’s a tenuous connection, but Matt directly links this one particular bastard to Jen’s death. Now he’s the one filled with hate. It helps him stay focused. Strangely fitting that it should come to this, he thinks.

  But what the hell are these fanatics planning? He can’t work out their tactics—if they even have any. Their actions seem as uncoordinated and haphazard as ever. It angers him to think that so much of the human race has been destroyed, so much that was good in the world has been lost, and that these dregs are all that remains. These base, unsophisticated fuckers. For a moment, he’s consumed by rage himself, forgetting everything he’s been sent out here to do, all the people he’s pledged to try to protect.

  His hands grip the wheel tightly.

  He’s ready to swerve into the Subaru and wipe these bastards off the road. But before he can do it, the Subaru driver accelerates again, then stops at an angle, blocking most of the road.

  What the fuck?

  Matt’s forced to react at speed. He sees an unexpected opportunity and swings the truck down an off-ramp he spots at the last possible moment. He swerves around a cluttered traffic roundabout, driving through the gaps between wrecks, then accelerates out onto another road that loops back under the first.

  He quickly realizes he’s driving straight into the heart of the dead city of Cambridge.

  59

 
; Cambridge

  The road stretches out ahead of the truck, but with every passing meter, Matt’s less confident of the split-second decision he’s just made. He realizes he’s been played. At some point between the beginning of the war and the height of the fighting, there was an attempted exodus from here, and one side of the road he’s now motoring along is lined with an endless procession of motionless vehicles facing out of town—a failed evacuation. At points, the forgotten traffic has spilled over onto this side of the tarmac, causing Matt to have to slow and steer carefully around, and at other times, rainwater has pooled in huge, stagnant lakes, blurring the lines and making it all but impossible to follow the road. Matt knows he’s made a wrong move—his last move, perhaps—but for now, all he can do is keep driving. There isn’t room to stop and turn around. There isn’t time to try. Every meter might make a difference.

  After being out in the open, the suburbs of Cambridge feel like an enclosed, claustrophobic place. The dark, empty homes and offices on either side seem to close in like the walls of a prison cell. There are turns he could take, but what would be the point? The truck is a cumbersome, unrefined vehicle, and if it’s a struggle to get down a major route like this, what hope would he have trying to navigate the twisting side streets?

  Apart from the truck, there’s no other movement or noise out here right now. It feels deceptively calm. If he ignores the chaos down at ground level and focuses up, the world looks almost like it used to, and for a few brief seconds, he allows himself to remember. The routine. The pressures. The mundanity and pointlessness of the day-to-day. Then he thinks about the triviality: hours wasted in front of the TV with Jen, going out and getting drunk, lying in bed until lunchtime on a Sunday and making love together because they had nothing else to do and, even if they did, what better way to while away the hours? Despite everything, he smiles to himself. These memories are all he has left now.