David Moody - Dog Blood

Ten seconds and nothing’s happened.

Don’t look back.

Another ten seconds. Have they moved on?

I turn the corner and I know I’m safe.

Millennium Square.

Last time I was here I got caught in the crossfire between groups of armed police officers who had suddenly found themselves on opposing sides. I ran for cover along with hundreds of other people, each person as scared and confused as the next. That was the day, I recall, when everything really changed. That was the day the Hate took over. Strange how what was such a terrifying experience now seems, with hindsight, like nothing out of the ordinary. I’m harder now, stronger. Back then I was just one of the crowd, trying to blend in with the masses and not be noticed. Today I’m here to kill them.

This vast public square is no longer the empty, underused space it always used to be. For as far as I can see the ground is covered with a sea of temporary shelters of endless different colors, shapes, and sizes. I can’t help looking into a few of those that I pass, and inside each of them I see more refugees desperately hoping that their flimsy cardboard, wood, and polyethylene structures will keep them safe inside and everyone else out. The occupants of one shelter are both dead. The green-tinged corpses of a middle-aged couple are lying together motionless, entwined and unnoticed. The stale air inside the small space is thick with flies.

Squatters have taken over the public toilets and moved in. They used to get vandalized every other week and were used more as a pickup point for gay men than anything else. A man and woman sit on chairs in the dark doorway, like a king and queen surveying their particularly grim kingdom. A fierce-looking, half-starved dog tied up with rope keeps everyone else at bay.

There’s a patch of land up ahead that’s unexpectedly empty. As I get closer I see that the road there is covered with streaks and puddles of drying mud, making it look like a dried-up riverbed. Flash-flood water seems to have washed away huge numbers of improvised tents, leaving an expanse of muddy block paving slabs visible. Weeds are sprouting in the gaps between the slabs. The council used to spend a fucking fortune on this place-I remember hearing someone from another department bitching about it-now it’s just as godforsaken as everywhere else. Incredibly, though, a street clock I walk past is still working. It says it’s coming up to 3:00 p.m. and it’s a Thursday, for a fraction of a second I feel an instinctive swell of relief because the weekend’s coming. Christ, how stupid is that? Itmakes me realize that no matter how much everything has changed, the effects of years of conditioning are going to take more than afew months to disappear. Has the clock been maintained purposely for precisely that reason? Does it help the Unchanged masses cope if they know where they are in relation to their old routines?

Something on the far side of the square has caught my eye. Covering virtually the full width of two adjacent buildings from ground level to a height of about six feet are what looks like hundreds of posters. As I get closer, I see that it’s a huge collage of photographs of people that have been pinned, nailed, and stapled to massive sheets of plywood used to board up the buildings. I move nearer, figuring it’s safe to do so because there are other Unchanged milling around here, too. It looks like nothing out of the ordinary. I’ve seen similar displays in films and on TV before, shattered populations coming together to share their grief and build an improvised shrine to remember the friends and family they’ve lost. Maybe Lizzie’s picture is here somewhere? I start to look along the rain-blurred and sun-bleached pictures.

I stop and stare at a random face, one of hundreds, no more or less remarkable than any of those above, below, or around it. It’s a man in his late forties with a mop of curly dark hair, a short beard, and dark, angular-framed glasses. There’s writing in the space below his face. It says, “James Jenkins. Killed his wife Louise and daughter Claire.” There’s a similar scrawled message on the next picture: “Marie Yates. Murdered everyone that mattered to me.” These aren’t the faces of victims, I realize, these are their killers. Christ, is my face up here somewhere? I panic and start quickly scanning the display, suddenly self-conscious, hoping I’ll find my picture before anyone else does. Wish I hadn’t shaved my head like Sahota said. I should have stayed hidden beneath that layer of stubble and shaggy hair. Then, bizarrely, I find myself making a sudden U-turn, hoping that I actually do manage to find my photograph because that, I tell myself, would be proof positive that Lizzie’s been here.

It won’t make any difference.

I force myself to move on, knowing that I can’t afford to waste time. Somewhere in this stinking, unhygienic, overcrowded wreck of a city, the woman I used to share my life with might still be hiding. And if I can track her down, she’ll be able to tell me what happened to my daughter.

I MUST BE GETTING close now. I thought I knew the address Sahota gave me, but around here it looks so very different from how I remember. I’m back out on the farthest edge of the refugee camp, heading for the border with the exclusion zone. The number of Unchanged around me has quickly diminished as I’ve moved out from the center of the city again. It’s a relief not to be surrounded by them and not to have to constantly struggle to keep myself under control. The buildings here are more empty than occupied. There are one or two Unchanged almost always in sight, but they make every effort to ignore me and slide back into the shadows when I approach.

I stop outside a fortified house, metal grilles and bars covering its windows and doors. The houses on either side have been destroyed, but this one looks like it’s managed to escape much of the fighting undamaged. Curious, I walk down a dark, narrow passageway between the house and the rubble of its nearest neighbor. The badly decomposed body of an Unchanged man lies facedown in the middle of an overgrown lawn, military fatigues flapping in the wind around his skeletal limbs. He’s been dead for several weeks at least. Was he the owner of this place? The back door’s been pried off its hinges, and I go inside. Most of the furniture has been used to blockade each room, leaving just a chair, a small table, and a bed in an upstairs bedroom. The remains of boxes and boxes of supplies cover the floors, and the walls have been daubed with pointless, empty slogans. death to the haters is one, kill them before they kill you another. There’s nothing of value left here. I leave the house, shaking my head and laughing to myself at the pathetic Unchanged who clearly spent so long trying to defend and protect what was his. Total waste of effort. He’d have been better off taking his chances in the center of town with the rest of them.

The wreck of a truck blocks the road ahead. It’s over on its side like a beached whale, the contents of the overturned Dumpster it was carrying now scattered across the entire width of the road. I clamber through the clutter and continue down a sloping ramp toward what was once a busy local shopping area. My footsteps echo around the small, drab, square plaza. Half of the open space is submerged under a shallow pool of black, germ-filled water. At its deepest point a dead soldier’s booted foot sticks up above the rippling surface like a shark’s fin.

Around me are a succession of abandoned and looted stores-a bookmaker’s with signs in the window advertising odds on an international soccer match that never took place, a fish-and-chip shop, a takeout pizza joint, a hairdresser’s, a general store… I don’t waste time looking in any of them. If there was ever anything useful in there, it would have been taken or destroyed by now.