by David Moody
I glance across at him. He’s hanging his head out over the high balcony next to me, staring into the distance.
“I guess relationships and stuff like that have had to take a backseat with all this going on.”
“You’re not wrong,” he sighs. “You know, I was thinking the other day, I haven’t had a hard-on for weeks.”
“Thanks for sharing.”
“I’m not complaining,” he says quickly. “It just hadn’t occurred to me before. I’ve stopped thinking about sex, stopped looking at women … hope to God this is just temporary.”
I’m the same, although I don’t bother telling him. It’s just a question of priorities, I expect. When the fighting’s over, things will get back to normal again.
I look out toward the city center in the distance, glowing like the embers of a dying fire. There’s a strange beauty to the devastation tonight. This place always seemed ugly and oppressive to me before, but these days I see wonder and detail in things I used to look straight through. The Hate has opened my eyes. The area immediately around this high-rise—the place I used to call home—is dark and largely silent, just a few small fires and the odd flash of movement visible through the early evening gloom. From up here tonight the world seems vast and never-ending. There are clouds looming on the horizon, swallowing up the stars. There’s rain coming.
“What’re you thinking?” Paul asks after a couple of minutes have passed. “Not still thinking about my dick, I hope!”
“Just how massive the world feels tonight,” I answer honestly as I watch a lone helicopter leading a distant convoy of Unchanged vehicles across their so-called exclusion zone. “First time I’ve been back here in months. From up here I can see where I lived and where I worked and everything in between. Can’t believe I used to spend virtually all my time in the same few square miles of space. Kind of makes you feel insignificant, doesn’t it?”
“The best thing about this life of ours now,” he tells me, “is how open it’s made everything. All the walls and barriers that used to hold us back have gone.”
“I’ve been thinking about my apartment. It was just barely bigger than this place, and there were five of us living there. Five of us! How the hell did we ever manage to cram that many lives into such a small space?”
“That wasn’t living, that was just existing.”
“I can see it now, but when you’re in the middle of it you just make do, don’t you. You try to make the most of what you’ve got…”
Paul nudges my shoulder, and I look across at him. He gestures out over the city.
“All of this, my friend,” he says, “is ours now.”
ii
IN A SITUATION WHERE everybody was either on one side or the other and there was no in-between, ascertaining who was who was a priority. A DNA-based “test of allegiance” had been developed early on, and from it the Central System had been born. It was little more than an electronic checklist—a massive summary of names cribbed from the electoral roll, voters’ roll, and births, deaths, and marriages records. The details held on each person were sparse: name, sex, date of birth, last known address, whether the person was dead or not, and, most importantly, whether he or she was Hater or Unchanged.
Many records—no one knew exactly how many—were incomplete or inaccurate. Up-to-date information was increasingly hard to find. Data gathering had been carried out at cull sites, evacuation camps, temporary mortuaries, military checkpoints, and anywhere else there was a controlled flow of civilians. Within the first two months of the crisis, however, that flow had been reduced to a trickle, then a drip. The thousands of bodies lying rotting in their homes, in overgrown fields, or on street corners remained unaccounted for, blank records returned should anyone inquire about their names.
The quality of data wasn’t the only problem with the system. Administration, backups, integrity, access rights, security … the speed and chaotic nature of the Change meant that these and so many other aspects of development were truncated, attempted halfheartedly, skimped, skipped over, or simply abandoned altogether. Nevertheless, the ever-decreasing number of people still using the system continued to do what they could, believing that, eventually, what they were doing would prove worthwhile.
Almost thirty-six hours since he’d been back to the hotel room. He’d managed to catch a few hours’ sleep in the back of one of the empty food trucks this afternoon, but Mark was still exhausted. Volunteers were becoming increasingly hard to find, and they weren’t about to let him go until they had to. He continued to do it because of the promises of extra rations (which had, so far, been fulfilled) and because he felt safer being on the side of the people who had the biggest guns. The city streets were increasingly ugly and unsafe places. Better to walk them with the protection of a little body armor and a weapon, he thought, than without.
All that aside, Mark decided, when I get back to the hotel this time, I’m not coming out again.
Over the past few days he’d begun to sense a change in the air—a difficult situation becoming impossible, a slight risk becoming almost a certainty. Things were deteriorating, and the rate of decline was accelerating. He hadn’t completely given up hope of some semblance of normality eventually being restored, but he knew things were going to get a lot worse before they got any better.
Processing. Of all the jobs they had him do, he hated processing the most. Maybe it was because, bizarrely, it reminded him of working in the call center? Perhaps it was just because it was so desperately sad. Those people who today still staggered into the military camp after months of trying to survive alone were little more than shells. Traumatized. Empty. Vegetative.
Heavy rain lashed down onto the roof of the tent, clattering against the taut canvas. A steady drip, drip, drip hit the corner of his unsteady desk, each splash just wide enough to reach the edge of his papers. Hot days and generally clear skies frequently meant cold nights, and even though it was cloudy tonight, it was still damn cold. He warmed his hands around the gas lamp while he waited. Wouldn’t be long. He’d just had word that a food patrol had found another few stragglers hiding in a warehouse storeroom, drowning in their own filth. Kate had worked here when they’d both first arrived in the city. Back then there’d been a steady stream of refugees coming through here 24/7. Now there were just a handful being processed every day.
“Should have seen him, Mark,” Gary Phillips said, sitting on the dry corner of the desk. “He went fucking wild when we found him.”
Phillips had been out in many of the same convoys as Mark over the weeks. This afternoon he’d won the toss and had taken the last available seat, leaving Mark to fill the desk job. Now he was back telling Mark in unnecessary detail how one of the survivors they’d found had gone crazy when they’d arrived at the warehouse. Mark wasn’t sure whether it was Phillips’s way of coping with what he’d experienced or whether he derived some sick pleasure from watching refugees suffer. Whatever the reason, Mark didn’t tell him to shut up or fuck off like he wanted to do. Instead he bit his lip and put up with Phillips’s pointless drivel. Better that than to show any kind of reaction that might be misconstrued.
“It was just unbelievable, I tell you,” Phillips continued, still pumped with adrenaline. “There were six of them shut in this fucking storeroom smaller than this tent. They’d used up just about every scrap of food they had, but on the other side of the door there was a warehouse still half full of stuff. Too fucking scared to put their heads out into the open.”
“Gets to us all in different ways, doesn’t it?” Mark said quietly, drawing lines on a piece of paper with the longest ruler he could find and writing out the questions he needed to ask. All the photocopied forms had been used up weeks ago.
“I know, but this was a bit fucking extreme by anyone’s standards. Anyway, the soldiers force the door open, not knowing what they’re gonna find in there, and this guy comes charging out, convinced they’re Haters. Fair play, they gave him a chance, which is more than I�
�d have done, but the dumb bastard wasn’t listening. He just kept coming at them.”
“So what happened?”
“What do you think happened? Fucker didn’t stand a chance. They put so many bullets in him I thought he was gonna … What’s the matter?”
Mark nodded toward the entrance to the tent. Phillips stopped talking and looked around. Behind him stood an elderly couple, who, if you looked past the emaciation, and their haunted, vacant stares, could have just stepped out of their house to go out shopping together. Their surprisingly smart clothes, albeit drenched with rain and streaked with dirt, looked several sizes too big for them. Phillips jumped off the desk, feet splashing in a puddle of mud, grabbed a chair, and placed it next to the one that was already opposite Mark.
“I’ll leave you to it,” he said. “See you around.”
With that he was gone. Mark gestured for the new arrivals to sit down. He hated doing this. It was hard. Damned hard. Too hard. He watched as the man sat his wife down, almost slipping in the greasy mud, then sat down next to her. Christ, after all they’d probably been through, he was still managing to be a bloody gentleman. He’d probably been looking after his wife for so long that he was hardwired to do it. She’d no doubt be the same, darning the holes in his clothes and checking he’d had enough to eat when both of them struggled to find any food and the world was falling apart around them. The couple huddled together for warmth, rainwater running off their clothes and dripping from the ends of their noses. The woman sobbed and shook, her shoulders jerking forward again and again. Her husband couldn’t help her or console her. He tried, of course, but she wouldn’t stop. He turned and faced Mark and stared at him, begging for help without saying a word, eyes filled with tears, mouth hanging open.
“Okay, what are your—?” he began to ask, stopping short when a low-flying jet tore through the air above the park, sounding like it was just yards above the roof of the tent. The gut-wrenching noise and blast of wind made the canvas walls shake and the woman wail and screw her eyes shut. Her husband took her hand in his and gripped it tight. Mark waited a few seconds for the jet to completely disappear before trying again.
“What are your names?”
Nothing.
“Do you have any identification papers with you?”
Nothing.
“Do you have any credit cards, letters … anything with your names on it, or an address?”
Nothing. Mark sighed and held his head in his hands, barely making any attempt to hide his frustration and fatigue. He looked up again, reached across the table, and gently shook the old man’s wet right arm. The man reacted to his touch, shaking his head slightly as if he’d just been woken from a trance.
“Can you tell me your name?”
“Graeme Reynolds,” he finally answered, his voice barely audible over the rain.
“Okay, Graeme,” Mark continued, looking down and scribbling the name at the top of the form he’d drawn up, “is this your wife?”
He nodded. Mark waited.
“What’s her name?” Mark asked finally.
Another pause, almost as if he were having to dredge his memory for the answer.
“Mary.”
“Your date of birth?”
No answer. Graeme seemed to be looking past Mark now, gazing into space. Waste of fucking time, Mark thought to himself. He’s gone again. What’s the point?
“Wait there,” he told him, although he knew the man wasn’t going anywhere. He got up from his chair and walked across the dark tent to another table, where he added the couple’s names to a register and entered the same names against the next available address in another file. He wrote out the details on a slip of paper and took it back, wondering if anyone was ever going to collect the files and update the Central System. When he and Kate had first started volunteering, the system had been updated religiously by a dedicated team tasked with keeping the information as accurate as was humanly possible. Now, whether it was because of a lack of functioning computers, a lack of trained operators, or any one of a hundred possible other reasons, the system seemed to be falling apart as quickly as everything else.
Mark handed the slip of paper to Graeme. He took it but didn’t look at it.
“Take that to the next tent,” Mark told him, unsure if there was anyone left working there tonight. “Those are your billet details. The people next door will give you ration papers. When you’re finished there, they’ll send you to the food store. They’ll give you something to eat if there’s anything left—”
He stopped speaking. Neither of them was listening. Poor bastards were barely even conscious. They didn’t know where they were, who he was, what he was doing, what he was trying to tell them … Graeme and Mary Reynolds didn’t move. He looked long and hard into their empty, vacant faces and wondered, as he now did with increasing and alarming regularity, why he was bothering. What was the point? When the fighting’s over, he thought, will we ever return to any kind of normality? Or have we gone too far for that? Is this as good as it’s ever going to get? All trust, hope, and faith gone forever … nothing left but fear and hate.
Mark stood up, took Graeme’s arm, waited for his wife, and then led them to the next tent. Without even stopping to see if there was anyone there, he grabbed his coat and the heavy wrench he always carried with him for self-defense and left. He went out into the rain and walked, determined not to stop again until he was back in the hotel room with Kate and the others.
13
I WAKE UP STRETCHED out on the threadbare living room carpet of the apartment we broke into last night. I ache like hell, but I slept pretty well considering. Our position midway up the high-rise has kept us out of sight, separated by height from the rest of town. The apartment is filled with dark shadows and the dull blue-gray light of early morning. It’s raining outside, and the rain clatters against the glass like someone’s throwing stones.
Paul’s asleep in an armchair in the corner of the room, looking up at the ceiling with closed eyes, his head lolling back on his shoulders. Carol’s curled up on the floor near his feet. I get up and stretch, looking around the dull room in daylight for the first time. The decor’s badly dated, and the entire apartment’s in a hell of a state as aresult of its owner’s self-imposed incarceration, but it still feels strangely complete and untouched—isolated to a surprising extent from everything that’s happened outside. I glance at my monochrome reflection in a long-silent TV, then pick up a framed photograph that still sits on top of the set. It’s a twenty- or thirty-year-old wedding day memory. The guy’s just about recognizable as the man from last night. His bride is the corpse next door.
I find Keith in the kitchen with a map spread out on a small Formica-topped table.
“All right?” he asks as I trudge toward him, eyes still full of sleep.
“Fine. You?”
He nods and returns his attention to the map.
“We’ll get moving in a while,” he announces. “It’s all quiet out there for now.”
I look down at the map with him and start trying to work out the best route to Lizzie’s sister’s house. The same two circles representing the edge of the enemy encampment and their exclusion zone have been drawn on this map as on the one Preston showed me yesterday. Except the lines are in slightly different positions on this map. According to this, Lizzie’s sister’s house is just inside enemy territory. I point to roughly where the house is and look across at Keith.
“That’s where we need to go.”
“That’s where you think you need to go,” he answers quickly. “That’s where we’re going to try to go, but I’m not promising anything. We’re out here to find recruits. If we get your kid it’s a bonus.”
“I know, but—”
“But nothing. We’ll head in that direction and see how far we get.”
“Is he still going on about that damn kid of his?” Carol says as she shuffles into the kitchen, bleary-eyed. She drags her feet across the sticky linoleum a
nd lights up the first cigarette of the day.
“I’ve already told him,” Keith starts to say, trying (and failing) to stop her from getting involved.
“You’ve got to let her go,” she tells me, blowing smoke in my direction.
“No I don’t—”
“Yes you do. What’s the point of looking for her? What are you going to do if you find her?”
“I just want to know that she’s safe. I want her fighting alongside me.”
“And if you don’t find her?”
“Then I guess I’ll…”
“Assuming she’s still alive, what’ll happen if you don’t find her?”
“She’ll just carry on fighting wherever she is.”
“Exactly. So what difference does it make?”
“She needs me. She’s only five.”
“I reckon you need her more than she needs you.”
“Bullshit!”
“Not bullshit,” she says, shaking her head and flicking ash into a sink filled with dirty plates and cups. “I doubt she needs you at all.”
Stupid woman.
“Did you not hear me? She’s five years old. I don’t even know if she can fight—”
“Of course she can fight. We can all fight. It’s instinctive.”
“Okay, but what about food? What about keeping warm in the winter and dry in the rain? What if she gets hurt?”
“She’ll survive.”
“She’ll survive?! For Christ’s sake, Carol, she can’t even tie her own fucking shoelaces!”
Keith folds up his map and pushes his way between us, clearly fed up with being caught in the crossfire of our conversation. I shake my head in disbelief and follow him.
“You need to wake up and start living in the real world,” Carol shouts after me. There’s no point arguing, so I don’t.
•••
We’re back in the van and ready to move within minutes of Paul waking up. The rain has eased, but the ground is still covered with puddles of dirty black rainwater that hide the potholes and debris and make it even more difficult to follow the roads than it was in the dark last night. Keith manages to avoid most of the obstructions, but when he oversteers to avoid an overturned trash can, one of the rear wheels clips something else. We go a few more yards, and then there’s a sudden bang and hiss of air as a tire blows out.
