David Moody - Them or Us

“Get out of here,” I yell into his face as I shove him back through the door, then pull it shut again. I watch him as he watches me through the glass, then starts to back away because Hinchcliffe is close again. I catch a brief reflection of his movement and spin around to face him. I catch him as he throws himself at the door like a vicious, hunting animal. It takes all my remaining strength to hold him back.

“Unchanged,” he hisses, trying to fight his way past me. “We have to kill them!”

He tries to throw me to one side, but I’ve got hold of him and I won’t let go. We spin around through almost a full three hundred and sixty degrees together and he smashes me against the door again. I feel every bone in my body rattle, but I still won’t let go.

“Just leave them, Hinchcliffe,” I plead with him, our faces just inches apart.

“Leave them? Are you out of your fucking mind? Listen to yourself. You know this will never be over until they’re all dead and—”

“You know as well as I do that this is never going to end. If we’re not fighting Unchanged we’re fighting each other. It’s like you said, we’re on a downward spiral, and this is rock bottom.”

“You’re farther down than me,” he says, and he lifts up his knee and thuds it into my balls. A wave of nauseating pain shoots through me, and I let him go. Another Unchanged man bursts out through the door to the pier and tries to rush him. He hits Hinchcliffe at full speed, and the two of them smack into the side of the delivery truck. For a second it looks like he’s been overpowered, but Hinchcliffe’s aggression and rage are remarkable and unmatched. He pushes the malnourished Unchanged man away with barely any effort, then snatches up Parker’s rifle from the ground and, holding it by the barrel, smacks him around the head repeatedly with its wooden butt.

“Come on,” a desperate voice whispers in my ear. It’s Joseph. He puts his hands under my shoulders, lifts me back up, and drags me toward the pier door. Hinchcliffe doesn’t even notice. He’s totally focused on the kill, venting all his anger, hatred, and frustration on the poor blood-soaked bastard who lies dying at his feet.

49

WE MOVE QUICKLY THROUGH a musty amusement arcade, Joseph having to support me as we stagger along the gaps between rows of silent gaming machines. He ducks and weaves around one-armed bandits and video-game cabinets with smashed screens, trying to keep us moving at a speed I can barely match. He heads for another open door at the far end of this large, high-ceilinged room and I follow him through, out onto the pier. The wind out here over the sea is ferocious. The slatted wooden walkways are slippery as grease, the snow and ice turned to slush by the salt spray from the water below. There are several narrow buildings up ahead, stretching up along the center of the pier. A door at the front of the third one along is being held open.

“Get inside,” Joseph says, shoving me into what used to be a gift shop. There are still rows of dust-covered souvenirs on shelves on the walls. The Unchanged are cowering in every available space. Wherever I look I see their frightened faces staring back at me, most of them desperate for help and reassurance. I’m in no position to provide either. Others of them are armed and ready to fight.

“Where are Parker and Charlie?” a man crouching down next to me asks. Joseph shakes his head.

“They didn’t stand a chance,” I tell him. “None of you do.”

“What the hell happened, Danny?” Joseph asks. “What about Todd and Dean? The boat?”

“We never made it as far as the boatyard,” I explain. “He was waiting for me back at the house when we got there. He waited until they’d loaded up the jeep, then killed them both while I was out of the way. I didn’t know he was going to be there, Joseph, I swear. Fucker was on to me.”

“Who is he?” someone else asks.

“Hinchcliffe.”

“Peter told me about him,” Joseph says. “Said he was the worst of the worst.”

“That’s about right.”

“But there must be something we can do?”

Tracey, the doctor, gets to her feet. “I know exactly what we can do,” she says, picking up a bludgeon. “We kill the fucker.” She has to get past me to get out. She tries to push me aside, but the shack’s so narrow and tightly packed that she can’t get through. I try to hold her back, but she shoves me away.

“You don’t understand—”

“No, you don’t understand,” she yells at me. “There are almost thirty of us and just one of him. We get out there now and we kill him.”

“Then that will make you just as bad as him.”

“So? It’s a necessity, McCoyne. We have to do it to survive. There’s a world of difference between killing just one man to save us and all the thousands of innocent deaths that people like him are responsible for.”

“Is there?”

“Of course there is.”

“So what do you think I am?”

“What?”

“Me and Peter Sutton, how do you think we managed to survive aboveground for so long?”

“Peter told us,” she answers. “He said he could fake the anger and make them think he was like them. He said you were the same. Peter risked everything for us.”

“There’s no disputing that, but he wasn’t completely honest with any of you.”

There’s a ripple of discontent when I dare say something negative about Sutton.

“What are you talking about?”

“We’re like them,” I tell her. “Me and Peter, we’re the Haters, just like Hinchcliffe out there, and all those other bastards that have hounded you and made your lives hell for the last year.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true,” Joseph says. “I saw it for myself before I found Peter. I knew Danny from way back. He was a killer. He learned how to suppress the urge to fight.”

The space around me grows in size, and I sense people pushing themselves back against the walls to put the maximum possible distance between us.

“Then as soon as we’ve finished with this Hinchcliffe, we’ll come back for you,” Tracey sneers.

“Probably not worth the effort. I’ll be dead soon anyway.”

“Good.”

I’m about to speak again when someone screams. I turn around and look back along the pier toward the shore. I can see Hinchcliffe just inside the arcade building now, coming this way.

“Thing is,” I tell them, “whatever it was that caused the divide between us, it doesn’t matter now. I don’t know why it happened, and I doubt any of us ever will. All that matters now is what happens next. We’ve got to abandon all this us-and-them bullshit, because we’re all that’s left of the human race. You can either put a stop to the killing today or keep going at it until we’re all dead.”

“Which part of this don’t you understand, you fucking moron?” Tracey asks. “If we don’t kill him, he’ll kill us.”

Farther down the pier, Hinchcliffe is checking each of the wooden buildings in turn, kicking down doors and hunting for the Unchanged.

“The first person I killed,” I tell all of them, shouting to make myself heard over their nervous voices and the sound of the wind battering this exposed shack, “was my father-in-law. And do you know why I did it? You want to know what made me kill Harry and the hundreds of other people I went on to kill after him? I killed them all because I thought that if I didn’t, they’d kill me. Do you understand that? People like me killed people like you because we thought we had to do it before you killed us. Does that make any sense? It doesn’t to me. Almost a year further on and I still don’t understand why. But does it sound familiar? It should, because you’re saying exactly the same thing now. Kill him before he kills us. It doesn’t have to be this way. You can put an end to it today.”