David Moody - Them or Us

This place will have to do. With a little luck I can hide out here until the situation outside either blows over or comes to a head when Ankin’s army inevitably breaches the gates. I can bide my time, then get out of town along the beach as I’d originally planned.

I retrace my steps up to where I found Rona Scott when I was last here, back toward the room where she confirmed my death sentence a few days ago. Christ, is that all it’s been, a few days? So much has happened that it feels like a lifetime ago now. That thought makes each step I climb feel like it takes ten times the effort. How much closer am I to my inevitable end now than when I was last here? Is this what it’s going to be like from now on? Constantly wondering how long is left?

I check the room where I found Scott before. It’s dark, the blinds half drawn, and to my relief she’s not here. I go inside and look through the clutter on the table for food, pausing when I hear muffled shouting in the far distance, followed by gunfire and a high-pitched scream, sounding like a lynch mob catching up with its target. I turn around and jump with shock and surprise when I see the little girl I saw here previously. She’s still strapped to her seat, sitting bolt upright and staring at me in abject terror.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I tell her, and even though she probably doesn’t believe me, I mean it. She doesn’t react, too scared even to move. I approach her cautiously, not wanting her to panic or start screaming or do anything that might alert people to the fact I’m here. She doesn’t flinch as I kneel down in front of her. “You need to go. There are people outside who’ll hurt you. When you get out there, just run.”

I touch her wrist to undo the first of the bindings that hold her to the chair, and she doesn’t even move when I brush against her skin. She’s as cold as the room we’re in. I look into her face again. Her eyes are still focused on the same point in the distance. I shake her shoulder and wave my hand in front of her face, but it’s no use. By the looks of things she’s been dead for a while.

Upstairs, Rona Scott’s “clinic” is also empty. I have a quick, halfhearted search around for vials of drugs that look anything like the steroids Ankin’s doctor gave me, but I know I’m wasting my time. I find a two-thirds-full bottle of aspirin tablets and I shove them into my coat pocket. Maybe I’ll take a couple if the pain gets too bad. Then again, if the pain gets that bad maybe I’ll just take the whole damn lot.

The view from the window up here is unobstructed virtually all the way back into the very heart of Hinchcliffe’s compound. The helicopter buzzes overhead, and I think the south gate is open now. There’s a crowd on this side of the barrier trying to get out, and an army on the other side trying to get in, their numbers swollen by huge waves of underclass looking for food or vengeance or both. The same thing’s surely happening at the other end of town, and at any other potential access points. I stand and watch as the people of Lowestoft collide head-on and begin to tear themselves apart.

Is this what happened in Hull, and in all those other places where I’m sure that similar communities must have sprung up around the country? And was Lowestoft really the last of them? If Ankin’s right and this place is the only place left, then the chain reaction that’s spreading through this town now truly is the beginning of the end of everything.

42

THE STREETS THAT I can see from this window are constantly filled with movement now, frantic and uncontrollable, and I wonder: Where in all that chaos out there is Hinchcliffe?

The overwhelming uncertainty consuming this place and my frustrating inability to be able to do anything are affecting my concept of time now. I don’t know whether I’ve been here for one hour or four. It’s ice cold in this building, and the rain outside has turned to sleet. Everything looks relentlessly gray out there. My head is pounding. Are the effects of the drugs already fading?

I’m leaning up against the glass, staring at a street fight in the distance, numb to the bloody violence, when there’s a series of sudden bright flashes around Hinchcliffe’s courthouse building. Were they explosions? Now there are flames in the windows, and from what I can see the police station barracks used by most of his fighters is also under attack. A flood of people—fighters and Switchbacks alike—run from the scene. They’ve barely made any progress when they collide with an equally large surge of people coming from the opposite direction. What the hell’s going on? I keep watching long enough to see several of Ankin’s tanks rolling slowly toward the burning courthouse, converging on it from different directions.

The center of Lowestoft is a damned war zone. There are an incalculable number of people in there now, far more than there were originally. It’s the cumulative effect of Ankin’s invading army and the hordes of underclass all descending on the place at the same time. There are other buildings on fire, too. Before long the whole town will be in flames.

I need to move. The fighting is still a distraction at the moment, drawing people into the dying center of town, but it’s only a matter of time before they come looking around here. I should act now, and take advantage of the effects of Ankin’s drugs before they completely wear off.

I have one last quick search around the doctor’s room, then head back down to the guard station. I’m about to leave, but I stop myself. This building is huge and relatively inaccessible. For the most part people were too scared to come here. Knowing that the population would probably stay away and there’d be plenty of secure space here, wouldn’t this have made a perfect store for Hinchcliffe? For the sake of a few more minutes, I decide to scout around a little more of the place. I need to try to eat now and cram my body full of as much nutrition as possible while I still can. It scares me to think about how I’m going to feel again when the drugs wear off. Feeling better has made me realize how ill I’ve really become.

Opposite the main door is the entrance to a long, dark corridor I remember seeing when I was here before. Grabbing the flashlight I found earlier (the light it gives off is poor, but at least it’s heavy enough to make a decent club), I start moving along it. I stop when I reach a second door at the far end of the corridor, and peer through a round porthole window. I’m looking out over a vast, mostly empty, hangarlike space. There are large clear panels in the high, corrugated metal ceiling that diffuse the light, and it’s hard to make out much detail. The door’s stiff and it sticks at first, but I shove it open and go through, then immediately stop and cover my mouth and try not to gag. The smell in here is appalling and instantly recognizable. The unmistakable stench of death.

There’s a raised metal gantry running around the edge of this cavernous room about a yard off the ground. I walk along it slowly, my footsteps echoing around the building. There’s a huge amount of industrial pipework hanging down that obscures much of my view, and for a second I wonder whether this was another of those gas chamber killing sites from the beginning of the war. I stop walking, and just for a second I think I can hear something in here with me. It’s a quiet, scrambling sound that comes from the far side of this large space and echoes off the walls—the vermin I heard when I first arrived here, perhaps? Thinking about it, the combination of the dead flesh I can smell and the fact that so few people ever came to this place would make this a prime site for a nest of rats or other scavenging creatures. It’s weird, in spite of everything that’s happened to me recently and all that’s going on less than a mile away in the center of Lowestoft, the idea of stumbling blind into a horde of starving rodents is more frightening than anything else. There’s more light the farther I go into the room, and I jog along the gantry to get out of the shadows.