Them or Us

6

HINCHCLIFFE HAS BUILT UP a vast collection of cars in varying states of disrepair. He has several mechanics working for him, but their skills are seriously lacking, as are their resources. Crude bodywork repairs are generally managed, but if their engines don’t run the cars are stripped down for spare parts, then dumped, much the same as everything else. Hinchcliffe’s car pools are starting to look more like scrapyards with heaps of discarded body parts building up and fewer complete vehicles. Some cars have been increasingly cannibalized to keep them running. They look like something out of a third-rate rip-off Mad Max movie but without the performance; sheets of metal welded over missing doors, mismatched tires, wire-mesh windows …

Hinchcliffe keeps most of the better vehicles in a parking lot behind what used to be the police station, and the rest on a guarded patch of wasteland adjacent to the railway station. I always try to take the same car. The guards and mechanics look at me as if I’m crazy because I never go for the one with the biggest engine, the strongest body, or the most space inside. Instead I choose the same little silver, box-shaped car every time—a safe, reliable, old man’s car. Hardly the Road Warrior, but the reason I use this one is simple: I know it’s got a working CD player.

For a long time at the height of the fighting, driving wasn’t such a great idea. In the weeks leading up to the nuclear bombings, when the Unchanged still outnumbered us and before they squandered their last remaining military advantage in desperation, it was generally too dangerous to risk traveling anywhere by road. Now, though, it’s the lack of people and fuel that makes the roads—what’s left of them anyway—quieter than ever. For me, getting in a car today is a relief, a way of shutting out everything and everyone else for as long as the journey lasts—and when you have music, the effect is so much more complete …

I leave the railway station with music blasting out, ignoring the bemused stares I get from fighter guards who look at me like I’ve gone insane. I never used to listen to this kind of music, but I don’t care anymore. The name of the piece, the composer, the conductor, the orchestra—none of that matters now. All that’s important is the effect. The sound takes me back to a time when people sang and laughed and played instruments and made CDs and listened to the radio and went to gigs. A time when people didn’t kill each other (that often), and when having a bad day meant you’d missed something on TV or you’d had a run-in with someone at work.

Checkpoint.

There are two guards on duty here at the gate that spans the bridge. The stretch of water below is called Lake Lothing, although it’s less of a lake at this point, more a narrow channel that runs into the sea. One of the guards mans the gate in the cordon; the other stands at the side of the road and flags me down. This guy’s always around here. He lost the bottom part of his left leg in the war, but he still keeps fighting. His stump is wrapped up with layers of old, crusted brown dressings, and he rests it on a pile of sandbags level with his other knee so he can stay standing upright. That pile of ballast is probably the closest he’s ever going to get to a false leg. I stop a short distance away (far enough so he can’t hit me without hopping over first) and wind down the window. I refuse to turn off the music.

“This one of Hinchcliffe’s cars?” he asks, shouting to make himself heard.

“I’m doing a job for him,” I shout back. “Check with him if you want.”

“What?”

“I said check with him.”

He still can’t hear me. “Turn that shit down, you fucking idiot.”

“What?” I yell, feigning deafness. He starts to repeat his request, but I’m just playing with him. I hold up the radio—one of Hinchcliffe’s standard-issue handsets—and he immediately nods his head, signals to the other man, and waves me through. Having a radio is almost as good as having an ID card. There’s no access to these things without Hinchcliffe’s express permission, and he controls them himself. It’s not the danger of having communications interrupted that makes him so anal about this radio equipment, it’s the fact that he’s rapidly running out of batteries and spares.

The other fighter opens the gate, and as soon as the gap’s wide enough, I accelerate through it, past the underclass crowds, and on toward Southwold, trying not to think too much about what I might find there.