David Moody - Them or Us

I reach Hinchcliffe’s place too quickly for my liking. I should go straight inside, but I pace up and down the pavement for a couple of minutes to compose myself first, breathing in slowly to settle my nerves and trying to stop myself from coughing again. The hazy sun peeks unexpectedly through a gap in the heavy clouds, and I cover my eyes. It’s probably my imagination, but even the sun seems to have changed since the bombs. It’s never as clear as it used to be. The light looks and feels different, like a layer of color and strength has been stripped away. Then again, maybe it’s just my eyes.

I feel sick, and the smell here’s not helping. Sanitation is pretty basic around town, and the stench is inescapable. People have taken to crapping in the gutters to get their waste into the drains and sewers. If we carry on at this rate it won’t be long before we’re slopping out again: people emptying buckets of shit into the street from upstairs windows.

A sudden gust of wind clears the air momentarily, and I stop and breathe in the odd breeze. No one pays me any attention, and that’s the way I like it. I can see a crowd around the entrance to the small shopping mall that Hinchcliffe uses as a food store and, occasionally, a distribution point. The same thing’s happening again a couple of hundred yards away, where a street-corner hamburger stand is being used for a similar purpose. These lines never completely disappear. There are always more people than there is food, but no one dares to steal. Just a little way up the road is what’s left of Hook, the last thief Hinchcliffe caught. Once the bane of my life, his corpse now hangs from a lamppost by its feet like a grotesque piece of street decoration. When he found out what he’d been up to, Hinchcliffe strung him up and gutted him like a pig. The rumor was that someone else had been pulling his strings …

The courthouse looks squat and small from street level, but its size is deceptive. Hinchcliffe has occupied a large part of the surrounding area, and most of the neighboring buildings have been taken by his small army of fighters. There’s usually power and water in this part of town. Huge fuel-fired generators thump away continually in the background like a monotonous, mechanical call to the faithful. Hinchcliffe is no fool. This place is a less than subtle symbol of his unquestioned authority here. He’s aligned himself with what used to be the traditional centers of power in Lowestoft, and no matter how the people here behave now and what they’ve become, everyone is still conditioned to a certain extent. They still look at places like this and, whether they’d admit it or not, they see people in charge. I certainly do.

The sooner I get this over with, the sooner I can head back home again. I take a deep breath and go inside.

I enter the courthouse building unchallenged and head straight for Hinchcliffe’s room. Much of the space in here is filled with boxes of supplies, piled so high that in places they’ve spilled out of rooms and have blocked corridors. It’s not that there’s a vast amount of stuff here, more that it’s just incredibly disorganized. Dirty, too. Cleanliness is the very least of anyone’s concerns today. The windows are opaque, and every surface I touch is either covered in dust or sticky with a layer of grime.

Hinchcliffe’s empire is based on a few core principles. Central to his control (of both the fighters and the underclass) is the provision (or at least the promise) of food and water, backed up with the threat of brutal force if anyone steps out of line. He drip-feeds the people here to keep them sweet: Do what I say and you might get what you need, he tells them, fuck with me and I’ll kill you. It really is as simple as that. Today he hoards whatever scraps he can find and stockpiles everything at various locations within the compound. I know where one stash is kept and I have an idea about two others, but I don’t know any more than that. No one knows where everything is except for Hinchcliffe. He manipulates the situation to consciously generate an air of mutual distrust between his fighters when it comes to the supplies, rewarding loyalty with increased rations and at the same time encouraging them to rat on anyone who doesn’t play ball.

Hinchcliffe is the worst of the worst. He is physically and mentally stronger than anyone else, the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a Brute with a brain.

I pause outside the tall double doors to his office to compose myself, trying to make myself appear more confident than I feel. I go through and, thankfully, my entrance goes largely unnoticed. The heat in here literally stops me in my tracks. There are electric and oil-fired heaters placed around the edges of the room, probably more here than in the rest of the town combined. Recycling, energy efficiency … all consigned to history now. The amount of waste in here alone is astonishing. Hinchcliffe and his posse seem to go through supplies as if there’s no tomorrow, as if they’re expecting fresh supplies to turn up any day now in a goddamn supermarket truck.

This used to be the main county courtroom, but it’s barely recognizable as such today. It’s been stripped of all gravitas by yet more boxes and crates stacked around in haphazard piles, and the floor and desks are covered with a layer of rubbish. Most of it is clearly just general litter, food wrappers and the like, but there’s a lot of discarded, office-type paperwork lying around, too. Considering this is supposed to be the administrative hub of the town—the beating heart of Hinchcliffe’s empire—it doesn’t look like anyone’s doing very much. I pick up a map that’s been left open on the desk next to where I’m standing. Black crosses have been scrawled over every town and village within thirty miles of this place. There’s a sudden noise behind me, and I spin around to see Llewellyn hurtling toward me. I try to put the map down without him seeing I’ve been looking at it, but it’s too late. He snatches it from my hand and pushes me back against the wall. He hits me harder than I was expecting and my skull cracks against the plaster.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Hinchcliffe wants to see me.”

“Does he? And did he say you could come in here and start looking through my stuff?”

“No, I—”

“You nosy fucker. I’ll break your fucking legs if I catch you at it again. He shouldn’t let a freak like you just wander around.”

“You tell him, then,” I stupidly say, and Llewellyn wraps his hand around my neck.

“You wiseass bastard. Watch yourself, McCoyne, I’m going to—”

“He’s coming,” another fighter says as he bursts into the room. “I’ve just seen him. He’ll be here in a sec.”

Llewellyn lets me go. The other man is Curtis, his deputy. He’s half Llewellyn’s age but just as vicious. He always wears full body armor, taken from his first-ever kill, he’ll regularly tell anyone who’ll listen. Llewellyn grunts at him, then snarls at me, and they walk away together to study the crumpled map, finally leaving me alone. I rub the back of my head and sit down on the edge of the nearest desk. Llewellyn’s got a real problem with me, but I don’t care. If he touches me, Hinchcliffe will kill him, and he knows it. Maybe that’s why he hates me. He doesn’t like the fact that Hinchcliffe seems to trust me, if trust is the right word. It’s a thinly veiled, childlike jealousy, and it’s pitiful.

As I wait for Hinchcliffe to arrive, I watch three other fighters I don’t recognize crowding around a thin slip of a man who’s trying to repair a radio with shaking hands. Sitting at a desk facing me, keeping to himself and working on a battered old laptop, is Anderson, Hinchcliffe’s “stock-keeper.” He’s another gopher, like Rufus. I’m told he used to be an accountant, but now he’s the man charged with keeping a tally of everything that Hinchcliffe owns and controls: the land, food, weapons, vehicles, people … I walk farther into the room and pass him, but he doesn’t even look up. I glance back and see that he’s playing cards on the computer, not working at all.