Them or Us

16

HINCHCLIFFE TOLD ME TO meet him outside the courthouse, but I think he’s stood me up. He’s not inside, and I’ve been out here waiting in the freezing cold for ages now. The wind is biting, and I thrust my hands deep into my pockets, wishing I was anywhere but here. I would go back to the house, but I don’t want to risk pissing him off any more than I think I already have today. He’ll kill me if I’m not here when he’s ready.

The contrast between Lowestoft and what I saw happening in Southwold is stark. Across the way from where I’m standing, a group of Switchbacks are unloading supplies from a cart and taking them into the police station barracks, where most of the fighters live. Others are collecting waste and dumping it over the compound walls for vagrants to plunder. Elsewhere, more of them are working on setting up a rudimentary water supply outside what used to be the library, to replace the previous one, which fell apart. They’ve lined up a series of drainpipes and water barrels to collect water from the gutters of buildings, black plastic taps hanging over the lip of a low brick wall for people to take water from. Lizzie’s dad used to have one of those barrels in his garden. I remember how the kids used to mess with it, and how they used to complain about the stagnant stench and the flies and the algae … and is this the best we can manage now? Still, if it’s bad here by Hinchcliffe’s courthouse, it’s much worse on the other side of the barricades.

Just outside the south gate, on the approach to the bridge, there’s an old man who lives in an ambulance. I pass him often when I go to or from the house, and I saw him on my way here today. He’s clearly not a fighter—he can barely stand—but he seems able to switch on an angry, violent facade at will, using it as a deterrent to anyone who approaches him. He’s well known, and Hinchcliffe’s fighters often taunt him for sport, trying to get him to react and bite back. He collects rocks and chucks them at anyone who gets too close. Fucker almost got me today. His ambulance is useless—just a battered wreck with a blown engine and only a single wheel remaining—but it seems to symbolize everything that’s wrong here. All around this place, people have taken things that used to matter and turned them into nothing. I’ve stayed here because this place looked like my best option, but maybe it’s time to reconsider. The longer the violence here continues, the further we seem to regress.

“What d’you want?” Curtis asks as he thunders out through the courthouse door, knocking into me.

“I’m supposed to be meeting Hinchcliffe.”

“He’s not here.”

“I know that, I—”

“Factory,” he says, shoving me out of the way.

Typical. I immediately start walking, hobbling the first few steps, my legs stiff and painful. It’s a relief at last to be moving. My body aches and my face is frozen, completely numb with cold.

It’s not far from the courthouse to the factory, but I always get distracted when I walk this route. I always end up imagining what this place was like before the war … seaside shops selling worthless junk and kitsch, pandering to the hordes of vacationers who used to come here (hard to believe this was a destination of choice once). There are the usual main street chain stores, supermarkets, banks, real estate agents, doctors’ and lawyers’ offices—all just shells now, their unlit signs the only indication of what they used to be. Now these wildly different buildings, those which are still safe enough to be used, all look the same. They’re dark and uninviting, stripped of anything of worth and occupied by squatters who stare out from the shadows. I just put my head down and keep moving.

* * *

“You seen Hinchcliffe?” I ask a remarkably fresh-faced fighter who’s on guard duty at the checkpoint at the end of the road into the factory. He’s slumped down on a chair inside what looks like half a garden shed, buried under blankets, hardly guarding, and hardly threatening. It’s no surprise, really. No one in their right mind would want to come here. Apart from some of the more vicious kids (who’d kill you as soon as look at you), there’s nothing here worth taking.

“He’s up with Wilson,” the guard answers. “He said you’d probably turn up.”

The fact that Hinchcliffe’s with Wilson, his chief kid-wrangler, is a relief. That means he’s at the opposite end of the factory complex from where Rona Scott does whatever she does to the Unchanged kids. I can see a handful of flickering lights in the distance up ahead, and I wrap my coat around me even tighter as the wind whips up off the sea and blasts through the gaps between buildings. Eventually I reach a set of metal gates behind which the useful kids are kept. There’s another guard here—an irritating little shit who takes himself too seriously and blocks my way through. When I tell him I’m supposed to be meeting Hinchcliffe he disappears. He’s gone for a couple of minutes before eventually returning and begrudgingly letting me pass.

I find Hinchcliffe waiting for me in a small courtyard, surrounded on three sides by a series of squat, metal-walled, box-shaped buildings which probably used to be industrial units, storage sheds or something similar. The roofs of the buildings are covered with curls of razor wire.

“Forgot about you, Danny,” Hinchcliffe says, and that’s as good an apology as I’m going to get. “I was just checking the stock.”

“The stock?”

“The kids,” he explains. “I’ve been thinking more about what we were saying earlier.”

“And?” I press hopefully.

“And maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m not looking as far forward as I should be.”

“So what’s that got to do with the kids?”

“Everything, you dumb fuck! No kids, no future.”

“That doesn’t bode well, does it? All the kids I’ve seen since the war started have either been Unchanged or are wild animals.”

“You lost kids in the fighting, didn’t you?”

“Three,” I answer.

“One like us?”

“My little girl.”

“Where is she now?”

“Dead, I expect. Last time I saw her she was running toward the base of a fucking mushroom cloud, looking for an Unchanged to kill.”

He thinks for a moment. “Look at this,” he says, gesturing to a narrow window in the front of the nearest metal building. I notice something’s been written in chalk on the door. It’s hard to make out, but I think it says BOY 5–7. Is that a serial number or an age range? I bend down to look through the window. It takes my eyes a couple of seconds to adjust to the negligible light levels inside. Can’t see anything …

“What am I supposed to be looking at—”

Something smashes against the glass. It’s a young boy, and he hits the strengthened window so hard that he bounces off and crashes back down onto the floor. He immediately picks himself up again and starts hammering on the window, scratching at it with his fingers, trying to claw his way out and get to me. He moves with the same speed and animal-like agility that Ellis had before I lost her. He’s feral. Wild. His blue eyes lock onto mine, and after a few seconds he stops struggling. As soon as he realizes I’m not Unchanged he slopes back into the corner, dejected. I keep watching him, unable to look away.

Hinchcliffe shines a flashlight around. Christ, the room the kid’s being held in is like an animal’s cage. There are yellow-tinged puddles of piss on the floor, chunks of half-chewed food lying around, smears of shit like tire tracks …

“This one like your daughter?”

“Just the same.”

“Thought so. Now come over here.”

I follow him across the square patch of asphalt toward a similar-sized building, almost directly opposite the first. There’s writing on the door of this unit, too. It says BOY 10–12. I’m hesitant to get too close to the glass this time, but Hinchcliffe shoves me forward. I tense up, expecting another kid to hurl itself at me. When it doesn’t happen I start to relax. I can’t see any movement at all through the window.

“Is there anything in here?”

“Over there in the corner,” Hinchcliffe says, shining his flashlight toward the far end of the squalid rectangular space. Then I see it: a figure slumped up against the wall. It’s another boy, older than the first. He stands perfectly still, staring back at me but not reacting. “The older ones are starting to show more control,” Hinchcliffe explains. “Show them one of the Unchanged and they’ll still pull its fucking arms out of its sockets, but when they’re not fighting, they’re more lucid than they were. The older they get, the more control over their urges they seem to have.”

“What point are you making?” I ask, not taking my eyes off the child.

“That maybe the kids can be rehabilitated. That there might still be hope for them. Pure instinct made them fight the Unchanged with as much ferocity as they did. Now the Unchanged are gone, we might be able to straighten them out again.”

“You think so?”

He leads me away from the cells.

“I’m convinced these kids are as wild as they are because they’ve just lived through the worst of the war. When things calm down again, so will they. We’ll teach them how to be human again, how to control themselves.”

“Be human?” I laugh. “What, human like your fighters? Christ, Hinchcliffe, hardly the best role models for them. Anyway, these children have spent the last year killing. Do you really think you’re going to be able to make them stop?”

“What use are they to us if we can’t?”

“So what are you suggesting? Are you going to keep all newborns locked up until they’ve grown out of their viciousness?”

I think he’s confused being controlled with being catatonic, but I don’t want to risk antagonizing him. It says something when his idea of progress is producing a kid that doesn’t immediately want to kill everything in the immediate vicinity. These children are hardwired to fight now. They’ve had a year of running wild, and their immature, prepubescent brains either don’t know or don’t want to know anything else.

“It’s been less than twelve months,” he continues. “We’ll keep studying the ones we’ve got here. My guess is that newborns won’t be like this, because they won’t have lived through the fighting that these kids have. It might be that we end up with a missed generation or two, but there’s nothing anyone can do about that.”

The guard lets us back out through the gate, and we walk on down the road.

“So what about the other end of the factory?” I ask, stupidly prolonging a conversation I never actually wanted to have, realizing I still don’t know why Hinchcliffe wanted to see me.

“What about it?”

“What have you got going on there? Is it the reverse of all this? Have you got Rona Scott provoking Unchanged kids until they fight back?”

“Something like that. It’s not so much about making them fight as it is getting them to be like us.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They’ve got to be able to survive and hold their own.”

Hinchcliffe increases his speed. Heading north, I follow him past the farthest end of the complex and then continue along a wide footpath which runs parallel with the seawall. The last light of day is beginning to fade. I don’t think I’ve been out here before. To my left is a sheer drop of several yards down onto another walkway, beyond it the remains of a long-since-abandoned RV park. There are numerous equally spaced rectangular slabs of concrete visible through the overgrowth and weeds where RVs used to stand, looking like oversized graves. It’s an eerie place, silent but for our footsteps and the sea battering the rocks on the other side of the wall to my right.

“There’s so much I need to know the answers to, Danny,” he explains as I catch up with him, “things you probably haven’t even considered. For a start, what do we do if any of the women give birth to Unchanged kids? A kid’s just a kid, that’s got to be the position we get to. It’ll get easier over time.”

“Will it?”

“Rona Scott thinks so. She says when there’s absolutely nothing left but us, they won’t know any different. We still don’t know why we are like we are, and we probably never will. We don’t know if what happened was because of some physical change or a virus or germ or just something we saw on TV. Thing is, kids who are inherently Unchanged are going to have to adapt and become like us to survive. Either that or they’ll be killed.”

I deliberately don’t respond because this is something I’ve thought about already. I’ve thought about it too much, if anything. Months ago, back when I was looking for Ellis, I saw a pregnant woman. Since then I’ve often wondered what would happen to a newborn child. What if the kid’s born and its mother’s gut instinct—the same raw, undeniable gut instinct that made me kill hundreds of Unchanged—tells her to kill her own child? I’ve had nightmare visions of people crowding around the birth, trying to work out if the baby’s like us or like them, trying to decide whether they should keep it alive or drown it in the river. Or worse still, people fighting with each other to be the one who kills an Unchanged child. I’ve even imagined delivery rooms with a dividing line drawn down the middle—medical equipment on one side, weapons on the other.

I try to bite my lip and stop myself, but I can’t help speaking out again. I wish I could ignore what’s happening and switch off, but the memory of what happened to all three of my own children keeps me asking questions and searching for answers I know I’ll probably never find.

“It’s a paradox, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“What you’re talking about. You’re saying we have to straighten out our kids and corrupt the Unchanged. Isn’t there a danger you’ll just end up breaking all of them? Aren’t you just going to end up with generation after generation of fuckups? Kids that can’t fight, can’t think, can’t even function?”

Hinchcliffe just looks at me and grunts, and I think I’ve gone too far again.

“Sorry,” I apologize quickly, remembering who I’m talking to. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Yes you should,” he says, surprising me. “You should keep challenging like this. I told you, no one else has got the balls to do it. You see things differently than the rest of them.”

“I’m not trying to be difficult, I’m just—”

“You’re just saying what you think, and that’s a good thing. You might turn out to be right about everything, but for the record, I don’t think you are. Thing is, there’s no way of knowing yet. The world these kids will end up inheriting will be completely different from anything we’ve experienced, different from what we’re seeing now, even. Until then, the only thing we can do is explore every possibility and cover all eventualities.”

“That’s a tall order. How are you planning to do that?” I ask. I’m really struggling to keep up with Hinchcliffe’s fast pace now and I’m relieved when he finally stops walking. He turns around and grins. It scares the shit out of me when he looks at me like that.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he says. “It’s like everything else. It all boils down to supply and demand.”