Them or Us

Three Months, Three Weeks Ago

JOHANNSON WAS GONE, KILLED in a battle over hunting grounds several weeks back. In the days preceding her death, her growing army had slowly drifted east toward the coast, ultimately reaching the edge of territory controlled by a man called Thacker. Although nowhere near as ruthless a warrior as Johannson, Thacker had other qualities that inspired hordes of fighters to follow him, and their numbers ultimately gave him a crucial edge. In contrast to much of the now nomadic population, he ran his operations from an established and easily defendable location that provided shelter and a place to store food, weapons, and other supplies. When Johannson had challenged him, her own people had turned against her, realizing they’d be better off with this new lord and master. Thacker was different. As well as being aware of the importance of finding the next Unchanged to kill, he was already thinking about what might happen tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. Unlike just about everyone else, he had started to plan ahead.

Thacker, his fighters, and an ever-increasing horde of accompanying scavengers had occupied the coastal town of Lowestoft. The most easterly point on the map, before the war it had been a curious mix of industrial port and seaside resort, and its relative remoteness seemed to have shielded it from the worst of the fighting. Sure, it was a mere shadow of the place it had once been and it had been stripped of pretty much everything of value, but unlike most of the rest of the country’s towns and cities, it remained remarkably intact. Unbroken windows, secure doors, and the like were still few and far between, but most buildings remained standing, and its basic physical infrastructure was sound.

A sensible man (in his prewar life he’d been national operations manager for a large and successful chain of hotels), Thacker immediately recognized the potential value of a place like Lowestoft in this new, postwar world. Its coastal location was important and easy to defend. Furthermore, its size was ideal: large and established enough to cope with a decent-sized population, but sufficiently compact to be managed effectively by him and his small army.

* * *

First light.

McCoyne reported for duty and joined the back of the line of volunteers as he did every morning. The hunting parties he’d been forced to be a part of since being picked up off the road after the bombs exploded had begun to gradually change in purpose over the last few weeks. The Unchanged were becoming harder to find each day, and the competition to be the one who actually made the kills when they found them was intensifying. Like an increasing number of other people (Switchbacks, Thacker liked to call them—Christ, McCoyne thought, why does everyone have to have a label these days?), McCoyne volunteered daily to head out into the wilderness alongside the hunting parties to scavenge. Other people, those who weren’t particularly capable fighters but who had retained useful skills from their prewar vocations—builders, mechanics, medics, and the like—found some useful employment in the town and were paid by Thacker with scraps of food to repair and rebuild as best they could with limited resources. There was no call, though, for a useless, second-rate desk jockey like the man McCoyne used to be. His career options had been reduced almost overnight to a simple choice: scavenge or beg. At least scavenging sometimes enabled him to find the odd extra scrap, which he’d shove in his pocket when no one was looking to either eat himself or trade with later.

Lowestoft was as good as it was going to get. McCoyne knew what he needed to do to survive, and he knew the town was his best chance. He wasn’t stupid. Tired, apathetic, and sick of fighting constantly perhaps, but not stupid.

* * *

A fleet of battered vans left Lowestoft each morning at daybreak: a couple of fighters in each sitting up front, a handful of scavengers crammed into the back behind them. Thacker’s generals (as the few fighters who exerted sufficient influence over the rest of them had come to be known) dispatched the vehicles out toward villages and towns in a steadily widening arc. Once they’d arrived at their predetermined locations, the teams were under orders to split up and search, looking for Unchanged first of all, then food, water, and fuel. Then anything else they could find.

McCoyne stood behind the van in the middle of a dead village he didn’t even know the name of and looked around dejectedly. The hissing gray rain had stopped momentarily, and now all he could hear was the water dripping off roofs and trees and trickling down drains. It was already obvious that this was a lifeless place, and he silently cursed whoever it was who had decided to send them out this way. There were clear signs that numerous other scouting parties had been here before them. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference where they went, he thought to himself: Everywhere was like this now.

Hook, the lead fighter who’d driven the van this morning, shoved McCoyne toward a row of buildings on the other side of the road, grunting at him to check them out. McCoyne stumbled forward but managed to keep his balance and didn’t protest for fear of provoking a reaction. A momentary scowl over his shoulder was as defiant as he dared to be. Grumbling under his breath, he wrapped his arms around himself and limped toward the buildings, chest rattling with the cold.

He peered through a grubby, cobweb-covered window into the first of five narrow row houses. He couldn’t see anything inside and moved on, more interested in the takeout place next door and the newsagent’s next to that. The newsagent’s seemed the most sensible place to start. The door was stuck, but he managed to shove it open, the unexpected noise of an old-fashioned entrance bell ringing out and announcing his success at gaining entry. He stood still in the middle of the shop and waited for a moment, wondering if anyone was going to come to the counter. It was a dumb, instinctive reaction. The owners of this place were almost certainly long gone or dead, and judging by the stench in this gloomy, icy-cold building, he was betting on the latter.

Once his eyes had become accustomed to the low light, he swung his empty backpack off his shoulders and started picking his way through the waste scattered all around the musty, enclosed space. He took everything he could find, no matter how insignificant: newspapers and magazines to help light fires, a couple of paperback books, some string, scissors, bits of stationery … Around the back of the counter he found some sweets—several bars of chocolate and a handful of lollipops, which he split unequally between Thacker and himself, shoving his personal hoard into the pockets of the trousers he wore under his baggy overtrousers, where Hook and the others wouldn’t find them. He checked the rest of the building but found little: some garden tools in an outhouse, some bedding, and a few pieces of cutlery. He briefly checked inside a half-empty storeroom but didn’t waste much time there. He could tell from the droppings that covered the floor and the holes that had been gnawed in the sides of the few cardboard boxes that remained on the shelves that he wasn’t the first scavenger to have been there. There was a body slumped against the back wall, and he could see the flesh of the corpse had been picked clean by rodents’ teeth. Yellow bone was visible beneath flaps of heavily stained clothing.

McCoyne returned to the road outside to dump his stash. The rest of the party had busied themselves clearing out a service station and hotel, and by the looks of things they’d already found a damn sight more than he had. Hook, who just happened to be looking up at the wrong moment, stormed out to meet him and snatched his backpack. “This it?”

“There’s nothing left. What am I supposed to do if there’s nothing left? I can’t magic stuff out of thin air.”

Hook angrily shoved McCoyne in the chest. He tripped back and fell on his backside in the gutter at the side of the road, getting soaked with dirty rainwater. Hook grabbed another empty bag from the back of the van and threw it at him.

“Keep looking,” he ordered. “Find more.”

McCoyne wearily picked himself up again and trudged toward the takeout restaurant, praying he’d find enough stuff inside to avoid the inevitable beating that fucker Hook would give him if he came back empty-handed. His body ached and he felt permanently tired these days. He didn’t know how much more of this he could take.

Inside the shop, a waist-high counter separated the public area from the rest of the building. He fumbled with an awkward brass latch, then lifted up a hinged section of counter and went through. Please let me find food, he thought to himself. He started making desperate contingency plans just in case, for a while even considering trying to creep back to the van, steal some of what the others had already found, then hand it back in again as his own and try to make it look like it was newly discovered stash.

The kitchen was disappointingly—but not unexpectedly—empty. It had obviously been ransacked like the shop next door, and subject to the same ferocious vermin infestation. McCoyne checked every cupboard and shelf, desperate to find something that might appease Hook, but there was nothing. He walked along a hallway into a small and compact living area behind the kitchen and stared out into the overgrown back garden. He was trying to decide whether he had enough strength (or desire) to try to get back to Lowestoft by himself, and avoid facing that bastard Hook altogether, when he heard something. It was directly above his head—footsteps in a room upstairs.

McCoyne quietly laid down his bag, unsheathed one of his knives, then crept slowly toward the bottom of the staircase. Whoever or whatever was up there, he knew it might be enough to help him avoid a battering. There was silence now, but he hadn’t imagined it. With his pulse racing and his mouth dry, he climbed the steep steps to the second floor. It was dark, but he didn’t need to see to know that there was someone up here with him. The smell gave it away—a pungent, inescapable whiff of sweat and fresh human waste. He needed to take his time and not screw this up. It was either someone like him who’d turned their back on what was left of society (and he’d come across several people like that before now), or it was one of them.

The room above the kitchen was empty. There was a bed that looked like it had been recently slept in, and a pathetically small store of supplies. Whoever had been staying here had shown some initiative and had been living off the vermin who were living off the food downstairs and next door. Three dead rats were hung by their tails from a clothes drier, and next to them was the deflated husk of something that had been either a cat or a small dog, he couldn’t tell. Regardless of what else turned out to be here, this pathetic stock of meat meant that McCoyne did at least now have something to give to Hook. He opened a pair of threadbare curtains, filling the room with dull morning light, and looked around for something to put his booty into.

As McCoyne walked back toward the top of the stairs to check the other rooms, he noticed that a wooden chest of drawers he’d just passed was in an unusual position. There was a gap of a couple of inches between the back of the unit and the wall. Curious, he leaned over the top of it, looked down, and saw that there was a small hole in the wall between this building and the next, just wide enough for someone to crawl through. Clever little fucker, he thought to himself as he carefully pushed the chest of drawers out of the way. Whoever he’d disturbed in here had got their escape route planned, and that was no doubt how they’d survived undetected for so long. By now they’d probably either have disappeared out through the back of the building next door or locked themselves away in some other equally devious hidden hideaway. He crouched down and looked through the gap but couldn’t see anything other than complete darkness on the other side. He leaned farther in and was about to crawl right through when he heard scurrying footsteps running up fast behind him. He tried to back out and turn around but couldn’t move quickly enough in the confined space. He heard someone give a grunt of effort, then felt sudden, intense pain as he was cracked across the back with a plank of wood. He screamed out in agony and managed to roll over in time to see a scrawny figure sprinting out through the bedroom door.

“Up here!” he yelled, hoping that someone outside would hear him and help. “Unchanged!”

He limped out of the room, legs weak and back throbbing, then staggered downstairs. By the time he got outside, Hook and another fighter had already caught and killed the Unchanged man. His body was spread around the front of the restaurant, bright bloodred splashes of dribbling color among the dust-covered gray. Hook was standing on the sidewalk, the euphoria on his face clear even from a distance.

“Bastard was hiding,” McCoyne said, groaning and stretching for effect. “Came up behind me and—”

Hook grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and threw him against the side of the van. McCoyne, stunned, couldn’t move.

“You’re fucking useless, McCoyne,” Hook sneered. “Couldn’t even kill one starving Unchanged. You need to watch yourself, pal. Fuck up like that again on my watch and you’ll be the next one I kill.”

“I won’t,” McCoyne tried to say, his strangled voice barely audible.

“That Unchanged,” Hook continued, pointing at the man’s remains smeared up the window, “he had more backbone than you, you prick. At least he made an effort. You, you’re just a waste of oxygen. Completely fucking useless.”