Them or Us

25

THE COLD AIR OUTSIDE hits my chest like a hammer blow, but I keep moving. I run back toward the farm, but I’ve scarcely made it to the top of the rise before I’m doubled over with pain, coughing so violently I can hardly breathe, making so much foul noise that the solitary cow bolts and runs for cover again. I make it back to the buildings, stumbling down the slope. In a momentary gap between painful convulsions I manage to suck in a lungful of air and spit a lump of sticky, dribbling phlegm against a wall. I watch it as it slowly drips down to the ground. My spit is red-brown and streaked with blood, and there’s a foul metallic aftertaste in my mouth. Fuck. What’s happening to me? I’m falling apart, physically and mentally. I slump back against the wall of the burned-out farmhouse, too weak to stay standing, sobbing with the pain. Christ, it hurts.

Peter Sutton slowly approaches. I wish he’d fuck off and leave me alone, but I’m too tired to fight or argue.

“I’m sorry,” he says pathetically. “There was no other way.”

“You should never have brought me here,” I tell him again, still wheezing badly.

“I didn’t know what else to do. I’m desperate, Danny. I didn’t have any choice. When I saw you in Southwold and realized you were like me…”

I slide farther down the wall and land hard on my backside on the ice-cold dirt.

“You did have a choice. You still do. You can just walk away from this place right now and not look back. Just forget about them.”

“Is that what you’re going to do?”

“That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” I tell him, pausing midsentence to clutch my chest as another wave of cramping pain takes hold. It’s snowing hard now, and I can feel my face and hands starting to freeze.

“You know I can’t do that,” he says, standing over me and looking down. He helps me sit up straight again.

“Why not? What’s stopping you? Why not just leave them down there to starve to death? It’ll be easier on them in the long run. Better than being forced out into the open and killed, and that’s what’s going to happen eventually. They can’t stay down there forever.”

“Those people down there are more human than most of what’s up here.”

“Then maybe it’s time to redefine ‘human.’”

He shakes his head and crouches down in front of me. I gasp for breath as the painful cramps return yet again. I’m shivering now. Shaking. Freezing cold. Sutton continues to watch me, but I can’t read his expression. Can barely even focus on his face through the snow.

“You’re in a bad way. Listen, there’s a doctor here. One of the women back there, Tracey, she used to be a GP. She might be able to do something to help you.”

“You think I’m going to let one of the Unchanged touch me? Jesus Christ—”

“Come on, rise above this, Danny. I really need your help.”

“The best way I can help is to bring Hinchcliffe here and finish this today.”

“You won’t do that, I know you won’t. I understand why you’re feeling this way, and I’ve listened to everything you said, but you know as well as I do that I can’t just abandon these people. I can’t give up on my own flesh and blood.”

I have to tell him. Have to try to make him see.

“After I met Mallon,” I explain, speaking slowly, trying to conserve energy, “I went into one of their refugee camps. We were sent there to kill, but I was looking for my family. I needed to find out what had happened to my daughter ’cause I knew she was like us.”

He looks confused.

“But if she was like us…?”

“I knew her mother would have done everything she could to try to keep the kids together. I managed to track her down, and I was right. She had Ellis drugged and locked up.”

There’s an awkward silence. He’s knows there’s no happy ending to my story because of the comment I made to Mallon earlier, and because there are no happy endings anymore.

“I tried to take her with me and get out of the city, but it was impossible. She wasn’t my little girl anymore. There was nothing left of her but Hate. Christ, Peter, you should have seen her. She didn’t even know me. I had to fight with her just to try to get her to safety. The city was tearing itself apart all around us, but all she wanted to do was keep killing. I managed to get us just out of range of the bomb blast, but even then, even after what had happened and what we’d been through, she still kept on fighting. Her Hate wasn’t like the Hate that made you and me fight, it was a thousand times worse than that. It had poisoned her to the core.”

“So where is she now?”

“Dead, probably.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

I slowly manage to drag myself back up onto my feet, my legs heavy. I clear my throat, spit again, and take a few slow, painful steps.

“You need to understand that you’re not helping anybody by doing this. I’ve come to a conclusion, and I think you need to do the same. This world is dying. It’s sick to the core and there’s no hope left. You and me, we’ll grow old and die or we’ll get ourselves killed, and in the end there will only be people like Hinchcliffe, his fighters, and the worst of the children left. If you’d seen the things I’d seen, then you’d know that your grandson back there doesn’t stand a chance. None of the kids do, and without kids, there’s no future. You should just block the bunker door and bury the lot of them. Now get me back to Lowestoft.”

I start to walk away but stop again, sensing that he hasn’t followed. Every extra movement takes ten times the effort it should, but I slowly turn back around.

“I think you’re wrong,” he says.

“Well, I know I’m right.”

“Just answer one question for me, Danny. Why did you bother?”

“What?”

“Looking for your daughter and wife … why did you bother?”

“Because I didn’t know what Ellis had become. Because I had this fucking stupid idea in my head that she’d be just as I left her and we’d stay fighting side by side together until the war was over. I thought some kind of normality might eventually return, but it won’t. The world is dead.”

“Not yet it isn’t.”

“Jesus, Peter, my own daughter didn’t even recognize me.”

“You said you had other kids. What happened to them?”

“Ellis killed them.”

“How many?”

“Two boys.”

“Both Unchanged?”

“Yes.”

I go on walking back to the car. He goes on talking.

“So tell me,” he shouts after me, “knowing what you know now, if I’d taken you down into that bunker today and you’d seen that one of your Unchanged sons had survived, would you still be turning your back on them?”