David Moody - Them or Us

Today

THE TWO MEN SKULKED silently through the filthy streets like starving rats, skin deathly pale, eyes blinking wide, both of them looking from side to side in constant, never-ending fear of attack. They ran frantically through the collapsed ruins at the edge of the town, arms overloaded with the food they’d unexpectedly managed to scavenge, fear and adrenaline driving them on, temporarily masking their physical pain. Their bodies were wrecked: exhausted and underfed. It was the first time either of them had been out in the open in more than two weeks, but, weak as they were, as the physically strongest members of the last remaining group of Unchanged in the area, this was something Fisher and Winston had had no choice but to do. Including the straggler who’d found them a few days back, there were only thirteen of them left now. They both knew that none of them would last much longer if they didn’t have food.

Fisher froze. “Up ahead. Top of the road. Two hundred yards.”

Winston grabbed his arm and pulled him back against the wall of the nearest building. He watched the Hater in the distance. Was it alone or part of a pack? His eyes were failing and it was hard to tell anything from here, but it looked like a young boy, probably one of those feral kids like the one that had killed his dad last summer. It paused on the dotted white line in the middle of the road, sniffing at the air like a hunting animal trying to catch a scent. Winston forced himself to remain completely motionless and prayed that Fisher would do the same. Even the slightest movement or noise might give them away and that’d be it—months of constantly struggling to survive ended in a heartbeat (maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, he thought). He watched the figure up ahead as it began to move again, very slowly at first, then sprinting away swiftly when something in the distance caught its eye. Winston didn’t move until he was completely sure it had gone. In those unbearably long moments, he asked himself again (as he did at least once every hour) why he was even bothering to try to stay alive. Why not just give up and get it over with? A few seconds of agony and it would all be over and he could stop at last. The fear of death had always been enough to keep driving him on until now, but life was rapidly losing its appeal. Imagine the relief, he thought. No more running. No more hiding. No more crying. No more sitting in silence in the dark with the others, freezing cold, doubled up with hunger pains, feeling himself draining away, just waiting for the inevitable …

“We’re clear,” Fisher said, his voice just a whisper against the icy wind. Winston pushed himself away from the wall and ran forward again, just managing to keep his balance as he tripped down the curb, narrowly avoiding the crumbling edge of a huge, egg-shaped crater in the road where the skeletal body of someone who had once been like him lay facedown in several inches of dirty rainwater.

* * *

Another few minutes of breathless, stop-start running and hiding, and they were almost there. Winston dropped the supplies he’d been carrying in front of the wooden fence, then quickly lifted up the third panel along from the right, his fingers numb with cold. Fisher hurriedly climbed through the gap, then reached back for the tins and boxes they’d collected. He stood up again and took the weight of the panel so the other man could follow him through. Winston paused to snatch up a can of fruit that Fisher had missed, and to check they hadn’t been seen. Behind them, everything appeared reassuringly silent and still. A flurry of gray, ashlike snow drifted down, each flake settling on the ground for just a fraction of a second before melting away to nothing. The remains of the town where he used to live looked as lifeless as Winston felt. The gaping doors and broken windows of battle-damaged houses offered unwanted glimpses into a world he used to belong to but which he was no longer a part of. A dead world. Their world.

“Get a goddamn move on,” Fisher said anxiously, his teeth chattering. Winston pulled his head back, and Fisher quickly dropped the panel down with a welcome thud, blocking his view. Between them they snatched up their food, then scrambled down a steep, grassy bank toward what once used to be a permanently busy road but was now just a desolate, wide gray scar lined with rusting wrecks.

In their pitiful condition, the two men both struggled to control their descent down the muddy incline. Wearing dead man’s shoes two sizes too big, Fisher fell near the bottom of the slope, dropping most of the tins and packets he’d been carrying and filling the silent world with ugly, unwanted noise. He frantically scooped everything back up again, still constantly checking his surroundings for movement, before racing after Winston, who’d been too scared to stop.

Beneath a bridge, midway along an otherwise featureless concrete wall, was a corrugated steel roller-shutter and, another couple of yards farther along, a metal door. Dirty gray, and with once important warning signs now obscured by a layer of black-speckled grime, the door was well camouflaged. Several freshly smudged handprints around the handle and the edges of the frame were the only faint indications that it had recently been used. Precariously balancing his supplies with one arm, Winston hammered on the door to be let inside. Several seconds passed—several seconds too long for his liking—before it finally swung open inward. An emaciated, skeleton-thin man appeared, brandishing a nail-spiked baseball bat. He frantically ushered Winston and Fisher indoors, then peered down the road in either direction before shutting the door again.

Stumbling in the sudden darkness, Fisher and Winston followed the short access corridor down toward a pool of dull yellow light around the main storeroom, where the others were waiting. They dumped their hoard in the middle of the room. The other survivors hiding in this dank highway department storage depot—those who were conscious and still sane—all looked on in disbelief. Sally Marks said what everyone else was thinking. “Where the fuck did you get all that?”

Fisher dropped to his knees and began examining the treasure they’d found outside. He grabbed can after can, holding each of them in turn up to the weak light from the single battery-powered lantern, struggling to read the labels. Around him, stomachs growled with hunger and mouths began to water at the prospect of food. Corned beef, canned vegetables, soup … how long had it been?

“Where did you find it?” Sally asked again.

“Where he said,” Winston answered, pointing at the man in the corner who’d recently arrived. Thank God he’d found them. He said he’d been following the road for days since his last hiding place had been discovered by the enemy, and he’d tried to take shelter in their hideout, not realizing it was already occupied.

“And how did you find it?” Sally asked him, unable to make out his face in the shadows.

“I already told you,” he answered. “I saw it just before I found you all. Couldn’t carry it all myself.”

“Does it really matter?” Winston sighed.

“Yes, it does.”

“Remember that corner store by where the bus station used to be?” Fisher volunteered.

“On Marlbrook Road?” Sally asked.

“That’s the one.”

“But we’ve been there before,” she said. “Christ, we’ve been there hundreds of times before.”

“So?”

“Well, did we just walk past this stuff all those other times? Did you find a hidden storeroom we hadn’t found before? Open a door you hadn’t seen? Someone put this stuff there for us to find, you dumb bastards. It was one of them. It’s a trap, you fucking idiots, and you walked right into it.”

“What the hell does it matter?” Winston spat angrily, struggling with the ring pull on a can of fruit chunks, his fingers numb with cold. “No one followed us back. We only saw one of them in all the time we were out there, and that was just a kid from a distance. If this was a trap, then it didn’t work. This place is dead. Even they don’t come here anymore.”