Them or Us (20 page)

“Well?” I ask as I quickly pull my clothes back on again.

“Not a lot to say, really.”

“So what’s wrong with me?”

She groans and plumps her heavy frame down into a chair, which creaks with surprise under her sudden weight. She rummages around on top of a desk and fishes out a half-smoked cigarette, then spends a few seconds picking dirt off the filter and flicking ash off the end before lighting up. Bitch is doing this on purpose, I’m sure of it. She’s tormenting me, dragging this out unnecessarily. She’s probably enjoying the feeling of power. She’s probably heard what I can do with the Hate, and now she’s showing me who’s in charge.

“Were you close to any of the bombs?” she eventually asks.

“Which bombs?” I answer stupidly.

“
The
bombs. Remember? Great big friggin’ explosions? Bright light? Mushroom clouds?”

“I was about ten miles from one of them. Might have been farther. Why?”

“Don’t suppose it matters really, but it probably didn’t help. We’ve probably all had enough of a dose by now. How long were you exposed for?”

“Exposed?”

“How long were you out there?”

“I don’t know. I passed out for a while. I was picked up on the highway, but I don’t know how long.”

“Wouldn’t have made much difference anyway,” she says, drawing on her cigarette and looking past me at the rain running down the window. “No doubt we’ll all end up going the same way in the end. Christ, they threw enough of that shit up into the atmosphere to do us all in.”

“So what’s wrong with me?” I ask again, although I think I already know the answer. I think I knew it before I came here. I’ve suspected for a while, but I didn’t want to accept it.

“Cancer,” she finally says, before adding a disclaimer, “probably.”

For a second all I can think about is the way she said “probably,” as if we’re still in the old world and she’s covering her back in case she’s made a misdiagnosis and I sue. The fact she’s just confirmed my worst fear goes almost unnoticed at first, but then it slowly starts to sink in.
Cancer.

“Where?”

“What?”

“The cancer, where is it?”

“I’d do an MRI scan, but the power’s down,” she says sarcastically. “Hard to say for certain,” she finally answers. “You’ve got something big in your gut, probably in your stomach, too, but there are bound to be more. Those are secondaries, I think, but I’m no expert. Truth is you’re probably riddled with it by now.”

I stare at her, my mouth hanging open, knowing what I want to ask next but not knowing if I can. She looks up at me, makes fleeting eye contact, then looks away again, anticipating the question that’s inevitably coming.

“How long?”

There, I finally managed to spit the words out. Scott smokes again and pauses before answering.

“Don’t know. No accurate way of telling anymore. Could be weeks, could be months. Maybe a year at the absolute outside if you’re lucky.”

“If I’m
lucky
?”

“Figure of speech.”

“But isn’t there anything you can do?”

“Like what? The National Health Service is falling apart at the seams, in case you hadn’t noticed. There are no spare beds anywhere. Come to think of it, there are no beds.”

“There must be something.”

“You know the score, McCoyne. You’ve been around here long enough to know what it’s like. There probably used to be a cure, or some surgical procedure that might have given you a little more time, but things have changed. If there was a drug, your chances of finding a good enough supply now are pretty much zero, and even if you did, it’d probably be contaminated and you wouldn’t know how to administer it. No point wasting the little time you’ve got left worrying about it, if you ask me. And you did ask me, so I think you should listen.”

“But there must be
something
,” I say again.

She shakes her head. “Only thing you can do,” she starts, giving me hope for that briefest of moments, “is take control and finish it sooner rather than later. Save yourself the pain.”

“You’re joking,” I hear myself instinctively say, my brain completely failing to process everything I’m being told. “Tell me you’re joking.”

She just looks at me with disdain, then gets up and walks toward the door. She holds it open and waits for me to leave.

“Do I look like I’m joking? When was the last time you heard me laughing? When was the last time you heard anyone laughing? Tell you what, here’s a good one for you: Find yourself a gun and shove it in your mouth. Take one bullet tonight before bedtime. Caution, may cause headaches and drowsiness.”

Her insensitive comment goes unanswered. Suddenly the room is painfully quiet and empty, the only noise is the rain as it continues to hammer against the windows.

“Just go,” she says. “There’s nothing I can do for you. There’s nothing anyone can do. Live with it till you die from it.”

27

I’M ON THE EDGE
of the empty development, almost back at the house. The thought of being shut away in the dark there again makes my heart sink, but it’s the only place I’ve got left to go. Don’t remember how I got here. Don’t even remember leaving the factory.

Take a couple of days off, Hinchcliffe told me. Relax and straighten yourself out, he said. That was a fucking joke. Relax? Since when has anyone been able to relax in this vile, fucked-up world? Straighten myself out? Jesus, that’s equally impossible. In the space of a day everything has become infinitely more complicated and yet immeasurably simpler at the same time: more to think about, but less time to do it. My mind flits constantly as I walk through the torrential rain, never settling on any one thing long enough to give me time to work anything out. If I’m not thinking about the fact I’m dying, I’m thinking about Peter Sutton, Joseph Mallon, and the crowd of Unchanged buried underground. And if I’m not thinking about them, I’m thinking about the little girl strapped to the chair in Rona Scott’s fucking torture chamber. I can’t get her out of my head, poor little cow. And if I’m not thinking about her, I’m thinking about my own kids, and that’s never a good sign. Under it all there’s just one main thought I keep coming back to:
I have a terminal disease
.

If this had happened to me in my old life, I’d be panicking now, and so would everyone else. I’d be thinking about the kids and Lizzie, checking whether I had any insurance coverage, avoiding all the difficult but necessary practical conversations that Liz would be having with me about the future I wasn’t going to have … but today there’s no panic and no noise, just a strange, uneasy calm—an empty black hole where my life used to be. I knew I wasn’t well, and nothing the doctor said came as a great surprise, but at least until I’d spoken to her there was still an element of uncertainty and doubt, and I could still think I might wake up tomorrow and feel better. Now that’s gone, and the only thing I know for sure is that I’m well and truly fucked. There was a guy at work who got cancer. We all had half a day off for his funeral, and the crematorium was packed. There were hundreds of people there—hundreds of lives affected by one death. Christ, no one will even notice when I go. If I die alone at the house, my body will just be left there to rot. No one gives a shit about me. They all just take what they need from me, then dump me.

I trudge slowly through the housing development, soaked through, laughing to myself at the bloody irony of it all. I’ve survived the war—countless attacks, battles, and fights, a gas chamber, bombings, a nuclear blast even—and yet it’s my own flesh and bone that’s finally going to finish me off as my body eats itself from the inside out.

I remember Adam, the crippled fighter I spent a few days with last summer, when the war was close to reaching its peak and the killing still felt brave and righteous. I often think about him. In constant pain and barely able to move without help, all he wanted to do was fight. In spite of his obvious physical limitations, the only thing that mattered to him was killing—wiping out the last of the Unchanged before they could get to him. It’s not his determination or his aggression I remember most, though. It’s his attitude to death. I sat with him as his body shut itself down, and I listened to him still talking about the next fight and the next kill as if he was going to go on forever. He was like an animal, blissfully unaware of his own mortality, living for each moment, not wallowing in self-pity and waiting for his life to reach its inevitably anticlimactic ending.

What I’ve learned today has forced me into a position that is almost the exact opposite of Adam’s. He felt free and uninhibited; I’m restricted and trapped. His death meant nothing to him; mine is all I can think about. I’m already consumed by it; damned to spend my last days, weeks, and months (if I’m
lucky
) wondering how many more times I’ll wake up and see the sun rise, how many more times I’ll fall asleep, how many more fights I’ll have or avoid, how many books I’ll read or how many more times I’ll go to certain places or see certain people …

I’m between a rock and a hard place—Hinchcliffe on one side, Peter Sutton on the other—and I know I have to either do something about it or take Rona Scott’s advice and finish things right now. Last night I was on the verge of packing up and getting out of here for good, and Christ, I wish I had. Apart from suicide, leaving here is my only remaining option.

There’s a light up ahead. Someone with a flashlight is coming toward me, a coat over his head. Even from this distance I can tell by his height and the way he’s moving that it’s Rufus. What the fuck does he want now? Why can’t everyone just fuck off and leave me alone? There’s always someone looking for me, and they all want something. None of them ever wants to do anything for me. Well, they can all go to hell. I’ve got nothing left to give.

“Danny,” he yells as he flags me down, his voice sounding even more tense and unsure than usual. “Thank God I found you. Hinchcliffe wants to see you.”

“Hinchcliffe can fuck off,” I tell him, pushing past and continuing on toward the house. Rufus scurries after me, again overtaking and getting in my way, desperately trying to stop me.

“Where have you been?”

“Leave me alone, Rufus.”

“I’ve been looking for you all day.”

“Now you’ve found me.”

“You have to come—”

“I don’t
have
to do anything,” I tell him. “You can tell Hinchcliffe to go fuck himself. I’m through running around after him. I quit.”

“No, Danny,” he says, beginning to sob, “you can’t. Please. If I go back without you again he’ll kill me.”

“Then don’t go back. Make a stand. Let someone else deal with him.”

“I’ve never seen him like this before. Please, Danny, you’ve got to come.”

Decision time. How much longer do I keep putting up with all this crap? I don’t enjoy seeing Rufus like this, but at least he’s still got a choice. My hand has been forced.

“Listen,” I tell him, a hand on either shoulder, standing him upright and looking into his face, “I’m not going back. I’m finished with this place and with Hinchcliffe. I’m going to pack my stuff and get out of here, and if you’ve got any sense, I think you should do the same.”

He just looks at me pathetically, dumbstruck and terrified. What he does next is up to him, but my mind’s made up.

“You can’t … I can’t…”

“Yes you can, Rufus. Hinchcliffe is an evil cunt, and the only hold he’s got over you is fear. Don’t go back. Walk out of here tonight and find somewhere else. That’s what I’m doing.”

“But there is nowhere else. I—”

“Good luck, pal. I hope everything works out for you.”

With that I force myself to move and sidestep him. When I look back I see he’s still standing in the pouring rain in the middle of the street, just watching me go.

28

I KNOW I’VE MADE
a rod for my own back, but that’s just how it is. Once Rufus plucks up the courage to go back and face Hinchcliffe (and I know he will—he’ll be too scared not to, and he doesn’t have the strength to walk away from this place), then the shit will hit the fan. He’ll probably send Llewellyn or one of the others out here to find me. I know I’m doing the right thing, but I’ve managed to put myself under a whole load of pressure I didn’t need. Well, you have to go with your gut feeling, I guess, even when your gut is apparently stuffed full of tumors.

The day has evaporated and it’s late now, but I force myself to keep working, packing up as much stuff as I can carry before word filters down to Hinchcliffe that I’m no longer playing ball. The fucker is going to explode. I’ll get as much together as I can, then maybe move it to another house nearby, just to get it away from here. I’ll find a way of getting a car, and once I’ve done that, I’m gone. Good-bye Hinchcliffe and good-bye Lowestoft. Good-bye Rufus, too. I feel bad for him, but he has to make a stand. He doesn’t even have to fight, just walk.

I’ve packed almost everything except for the food under the floorboards. I head upstairs to see if there’s anything of any worth left in the bedrooms. I rarely ever come up here because all I’ve ever needed to use in this house has been the living room and kitchen, so these upstairs rooms are just as the previous occupants left them, and it freaks me out. I spent a few nights up here when I first started using the house, but I couldn’t sleep among the memories. Coming upstairs is like stepping back in time a year into a dust-covered reminder of the prewar world. It’s like the people who lived here just got up one morning and never came back, and that’s probably exactly what happened. There’s a pile of laundry still waiting to be put away on the end of an unmade double bed, and a board game on a kid’s bedroom floor, abandoned before the last game was ever finished. There are pictures of the people who lived here on the wall, and I try not to look at them. I feel like their eyes are following me as I walk around what’s left of their home.

The only things I keep up here are a few weapons. A pistol, a handful of bullets, and a grenade, all hidden in the dried-up water tank. The grenade’s a souvenir. It came from the final battle in my hometown. Julia gave it to me before I—

What was that?

Shit. A car.

I run to the front bedroom window and look down. I can hear it but I can’t see it. I strain to see and then pull my head back as it screeches around the corner at the end of the road. It overshoots the house; then the driver slams on the brakes and reverses back, wheels skidding on the icy road. Fuck, it’s Hinchcliffe. What’s he doing here? This is bad news. He must be extremely pissed off to have dragged himself out of the courthouse and come here. I stand to the side of the window and press myself back against the wall, trying to work out how I’m going to get out without him seeing me. I lean forward slightly and look out again. Rufus gets out of the car but tries to hang back, cowering away. Hinchcliffe grabs him, then marches up the drive, dragging him behind. He kicks the front door, then yells through the mail slot.

“Open up, McCoyne. Open this fucking door right now!”

What do I do? I press myself back against the wall again, too scared to go down but also too scared not to. I could try the attic, but I don’t know if there’s a ladder to get up, and even if there is, I’d be backing myself into a corner with no way out. Downstairs I hear the door begin to splinter and crack as Hinchcliffe boots it again and again. What the hell did Rufus say to him? I told him to stand up for himself when he came around here earlier, and is that what he’s done? Or has he betrayed me so that Hinchcliffe would go easy on him? My fear suddenly increases massively—Christ, what if he had me followed earlier? What if he knows about Peter Sutton and the Unchanged? Worse still, what if I was wrong about Sutton? What if he’s double-crossed me and told Hinchcliffe I’m the one harboring Unchanged to get himself off the hook?

“Open this fucking door, McCoyne!” Hinchcliffe yells again, and I know my best option is to get out through the back of the house. I’ll go down and slip out, then come back later as I’d planned and fetch my stuff. I check around the edge of the window frame again. There’s only Hinchcliffe and Rufus here, no other fighters. I could hide in any one of the hundreds of other empty houses around this estate and they’d be none the wiser.

On the street below, poor old Rufus tries to make a run for it. Hinchcliffe knows what he’s up to and he’s having none of it. He turns on him in a heartbeat and kicks his legs out from under him. Rufus crashes down on his back on the driveway with a heavy thump and a horrible yelp of pain. Hinchcliffe kicks him in the kidney, screaming at him that he’s not going anywhere until they’ve found me, then takes another run at the door.

Got to move fast.

I start to run through the house, but I’m not even halfway down the stairs when the door flies open, finally giving way under the force of Hinchcliffe’s boot. I try to turn back but trip and land on my backside on the bottom step as splinters of broken wood and shards of glass go flying in all directions around me.

“McCoyne,” he yells when he sees me. “Where the fuck have you been?”

“Upstairs. I was asleep,” I tell him, trying to lie my way out of trouble. “I’m sick, Hinchcliffe. I didn’t know you were here.”

I can’t tell whether or not he believes me. He turns and grabs hold of Rufus, then hauls him into the house. Rufus stands and stares at me with a petrified expression on his face. He’s been badly beaten. His right eye is swollen shut, and there’s blood running down his chin. At least he’s managing to hold my gaze. That’s a good sign, I hope. I don’t think he’d be able to look at me if he’d told Hinchcliffe what I said earlier. Poor bastard’s no good at handling situations like this.

“Where have you been?” Hinchcliffe asks again.

“I already told you, asleep upstairs.”

“No, earlier. I sent Rufus to find you and you weren’t here.”

“When?” I ask, deliberately acting dumb, hoping he’ll give me some details to help flesh out my story. “I’m not well. I had a few drinks and I took some stuff to help me sleep…”

Hinchcliffe glares at me, the shadows and darkness making his face look uncomfortably angular and fierce, accentuating his anger. “What time was that?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“I don’t know, honest. I don’t wear a watch. It was dark and—”

“What about earlier? Where were you this afternoon?”

“I went to see Rona Scott.”

“I know about that, she told me. I’m talking about before then.”

I can’t risk telling him anything. “I don’t know. Look, Hinchcliffe, I’m sorry if I wasn’t around. Did Scott tell you what she told me? Thing is, I’m dying. I’ve just been walking around, trying to get my head together so I could—”

“We’re all dying,” he interrupts. “Now stop pissing around and tell me where you were when the plane flew over.”

“Plane? What plane?”

What the hell is he talking about now? The skies are empty, have been for months. Even the birds are dying out. The last thing I saw flying was the missile carrying the warhead that destroyed my hometown. I don’t feel any less nervous now, but suddenly the pressure is fractionally reduced. Is this the reason he’s come out here? Unless he thinks I was flying this plane (which would be impossible), then maybe I’m not the real focus of his fury tonight.

“Just before midday,” he explains slowly, virtually spitting each word at me, “a plane flew over the town.”

“And you think I’ve got something to do with it?”

“Don’t be so fucking stupid,” he snaps (confirming my suspicions), “of course I don’t think that. I don’t know what you do out here on your own, but I know you’re not flying fucking airplanes.”

“What, then?”

Frustrated, Hinchcliffe turns his back on me and kicks what’s left of the door shut. Rufus flinches at the noise, then shuffles farther away, trying to move deeper into the house and hoping neither of us will notice. I start to feel marginally more confident, as it seems I’m not the problem here. Someone else has pissed him off.

“
I
run this place,” he says, turning around and advancing toward me menacingly, pointing his finger into my face. I take a step back to get out of his way and trip and fall back onto the stairs again. I’ve never seen him like this before. He’s incensed, barely able to keep his anger suppressed. I need to watch my step here and choose my next words carefully. Don’t want to do anything that’s going to push him over the edge.

“I know you run Lowestoft. Everyone here knows it.”

“Yes, but those fuckers up there don’t,” he yells, jabbing his finger skyward.

“Yes, but—”

“But nothing. I need to keep control here. I need to know exactly what’s going on. I can’t have people doing things that I can’t control, you understand?”

I’m not sure I do.

“So did they just fly over? Just happen to come across the town by chance?”

He shakes his head and massages his temples. “No, they flew circuits. Put on a proper fucking show. They might have found us by chance, but they definitely checked everything out properly before they left.”

“So what type of plane was it?”

“What?” he asks, confused.

“What type of plane? Military? A jet or bomber?”

He shakes his head again. “No, nothing like that.”

“What, then?”

“Just a little plane. Two- or four-seater, something like that.”

“So what’s the problem? Someone probably just got lucky and managed to get a plane up and—”

“What’s the problem?!” he screams at me, storming forward again, now so close that I can feel his hot, booze-tinged breath on my face. “What’s the problem? The problem is that they’re doing something I can’t. I can’t allow anyone to have that kind of advantage over me.”

“A little plane? Is that really such an advantage?”

“Well, if you’d been here like you should have been, McCoyne, you’d have seen the effect it had.
That’s
what I’m talking about. When that plane flew over, every single fucker in Lowestoft stopped what they were doing and looked up at it. My fighters, the underclass—all of them.”

“Yes, but a two-seater plane … Come on, what are they going to do?”

“Nothing right now, but it’s what they
could
do that’s important. They’ve got one plane today, they could have two tomorrow. They could train pilots and have a whole goddamn fleet up in the air before we know it. Now they know we’re here they’ll be back. They could drop bombs on us and there’d be nothing we could do.”

“That’s not likely to happen, is it? Like I said, it’s probably just someone who got lucky.”

“I know that and you know that, McCoyne, but the hundreds of dumb bastards lining the streets of this town don’t.”

“So hunt them out. Try to get whoever it was on the team.”

For a moment he’s quiet. He leans back against the wall and runs his fingers through his hair, then massages his temples. I’m sure he’s already thought of that. He’s probably already sent his fighters out there hunting the plane and its pilot—and if and when he finds them, I know he’ll leave them with no choice but to work with him.

“Thing is,” he says, sounding marginally calmer again, “seeing people flying around affects what the people here think about me. They know I don’t have any planes, so they automatically assume those bastards up there are superior. This is eroding my authority and putting unnecessary strain on the control I’ve got here. I can’t let that happen, you understand?”

“Yes, but—”

He holds up his hand and stops me talking.

“There’s also the very real possibility that they
might
attack from the skies. What would I do then? Have people standing on rooftops chucking stones back at them if they fly low enough?”

“The chances of them attacking are remote—”

“How do you know that? Anyway, a chance is a chance. It gives them a tactical advantage, and we have to do something about it.”

“We?” I say stupidly. Hinchcliffe glares at me again, then starts pacing around the living room. Rufus scuttles out of the way as he moves toward him. Hinchcliffe spots the wrench I leave lying around for self-defense. He picks it up and starts swinging it, passing it from hand to hand and feeling its weight.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he announces. “I’m sending Llewellyn and a few others out at first light to find those bastards. Llewellyn thinks he’s worked out where they’re likely to have come from. He’ll find them and either bring them back to me or get rid of them. And you’re going with them.”

“Me? Why?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t fucking know. Same reason I always send you. You’re so fucking insignificant that no one gives you a second glance. You can assess the situation better than most, and if you can’t assess it, you can at least spy on the fuckers and tell me what’s going on.”

“But I’m sick.”

“So? I’m not asking you to run a fucking marathon.”

I try to think of a valid reason that’ll make him change his mind, but I can’t.

“Okay,” I say, desperate to pacify him but already trying to think of ways to get away from this mess once and for all. I’m relieved when he starts walking back toward the door. Rufus hesitates, then follows in his footsteps, unsure what to do next. Clumsy bastard knocks another stack of books over, then walks into Hinchcliffe when he stops suddenly.

“Sorry, Hinchcliffe,” he mumbles pathetically, cowering back. Hinchcliffe ignores him and slowly turns back around to face me.

“Where were you, Danny?”

“What?”

“When the plane flew over, where were you? You still haven’t told me.”

“I don’t know when that was. Like I said, I’m sick. I went for a walk to try to clear my head, and when I got back I went to see your doctor.”

“Does it affect your hearing?”

“What?”

“This ‘sickness’ of yours, makes you deaf, does it?”

“No.”

“So how come you didn’t hear anything? They were circling Lowestoft for almost an hour, maybe even longer. How could you not have heard it?”