Them or Us (3 page)

“One hour maximum,” Llewellyn shouted, his voice echoing eerily across the empty theme park. “Tear this place apart, then let’s get out of here.”

*   *   *

More than three-quarters of the allotted hour gone and McCoyne knew he was in trouble. His bag was only slightly less empty than when he’d started hunting. He’d wasted time mooching around an abandoned zoo, trying to work out what each of the various piles of odd-shaped, oversized bones and mangy scraps of fur had once been. For a place Hinchcliffe had assumed would have provided rich pickings, there was hardly anything here. He had been right in one respect; the theme park hadn’t been trashed and torn apart like everywhere else. It was as if the food and supplies here had simply disappeared.

Use your brain,
he told himself, trying to stay calm and not panic.
Think logically.
He walked under a dried-up log flume, heading for a long and narrow wooden hut that spanned the space between where people would have lined up to get on the ride and where they would have gotten off—the place they’d have been slowly channeled through to buy low-quality, overpriced souvenir photographs of themselves screaming, and presented in tacky cardboard frames or printed onto mouse mats, key rings, hats, and mugs. None of this was helping.
Put yourself in their shoes
, he thought.
Try to remember what it used to be like. I’d have gotten off this ride and I’d have been cold and wet and hungry
 … He looked around and noticed the side wall of another shack facing out onto a lake with dark green, almost black water, which, he presumed, would have supplied the flume. Was this a café or something similar? There was no one else scavenging around here. This was his last chance. Christ, he hoped he’d open the door and find a previously undiscovered stock of food in this hut. Anything would do. Just something for him to hand in to Llewellyn …

McCoyne was about to force the door of the building when he stopped. He could smell something. It stank like raw sewage. Was it just the stagnant lake? He leaned over an ornamental wall and peered down. On the muddy bank below him he could see (and smell) a glistening heap of shit being slowly washed away by the lapping water. It made his sensitive stomach turn, but he managed to keep control and not throw up. This didn’t make any sense. It looked like human waste, and there was far too much of it to be from just one person, so was this from an emptied-out slop bucket? Judging by the height it had been dropped from and the splatter pattern, that was the only logical explanation. Would one person have repeatedly used the same bucket? Wouldn’t they have just come here to shit and saved themselves the hassle?
So,
he decided,
unless Llewellyn has passed around a communal bucket for everyone to crap in while I’ve been out here alone, this is probably from another group of people—and if they’re hiding in a place like this, then there’s every chance they’re Unchanged.

“Ten minutes,” Llewellyn bellowed from the courtyard. McCoyne had to move fast.

“Found anything?” a voice asked, startling him. He turned around and saw it was the stooping man he’d spoken to earlier.

“Nothing,” he answered.

“Anything in there?” the man asked, gesturing at the shack McCoyne had been about to investigate.

“Empty,” he answered quickly, lying to protect his potential find. “Look, do me a favor, will you. Go tell Llewellyn that I think there have been Unchanged here.”

“Unchanged? Are you out of your fucking mind? Don’t you think we’d have found them by now?”

“Don’t bother, then. Suit yourself.”

The other man turned his back on McCoyne and walked away, shaking his head and mumbling under his breath. “Fucking idiot…”

Whether he told Llewellyn or not wasn’t important. As soon as he’d gone, McCoyne opened the door of the small wooden building and disappeared inside. He’d been right: It was some sort of café, as empty as everywhere else. It had been stripped clean. A deep-fat fryer in the small kitchen was filled with rancid, congealed oil, but the cooler cabinets and vending machines were empty. Even the packets of sauce and other condiments had been taken. He found one small packet of mustard, which he ripped open and sucked clean while he continued to investigate. There was another door at the back of the kitchen. It opened outward six inches, but no farther. It was chained shut from the other side. He quickly took off his pack, then dropped to his hands and knees, lay on his side, and squeezed through the gap. It was tight, but he was desperately thin now, and once his shoulders were through, the rest of him followed easily. On the other side he pulled his backpack through, then picked himself up and looked around. He was in a triangular-shaped patch of open space with the shack behind him and another similar-sized building adjacent. On the third side was a wire-mesh fence and, beyond that, another part of the forest they’d walked through to get here. He headed for the other hut but paused before going inside, sure he could hear movement. Probably another one of the scavengers, he told himself. He lifted his hand to pull the door but then staggered back with surprise as it was kicked open from the other side. An emaciated man came at him with a knife. Similar in height and age to McCoyne, clothes flapping around his wiry frame, McCoyne knew immediately that he was Unchanged. He felt himself tensing up inside and reached for the knife in his belt but then stopped at the last possible second.
Hold the Hate
, he silently ordered himself,
there might be more of them
. He lifted his hands in mock surrender. The Unchanged man, obviously terrified, took a couple of steps back. It occurred to McCoyne that the longer this unexpected standoff continued, the less obvious it would be that he was going to rip the fucker’s head from his shoulders any second now. He could almost see the man’s mind working behind his frightened, constantly moving eyes.
If he hasn’t killed me yet,
he was thinking,
then he can’t be one of them.

Turn this around
, McCoyne told himself.
Play the victim
.

“Help me,” he said quietly. “They’re here. If we don’t get out of sight they’ll kill us.”

“Who are you?” the man croaked, his voice barely audible. “How did you get here?”

McCoyne was struggling to come up with a plausible response when he heard Llewellyn shouting again, calling them back to the trucks. He didn’t have long.

“They’re coming,” he said. “Loads of them. Two trucks full. They followed me here. We need to get under cover.”

The man stood his ground for what felt like an eternity, eyeing McCoyne up and down and trying to make sense of the situation. McCoyne forced himself to stay still and not react, all the time knowing that he should finish this Unchanged bastard now and that if anyone found out he’d been standing here talking to one of them like this, they’d probably kill him as fast as they’d kill them.

“This way,” the man said suddenly, turning around and gesturing for McCoyne to follow him inside. He led him into the hut (a gift shop with shelves still well stocked with teddy bears, toys, and other assorted rubbish), through an interconnecting door and into yet another similar building, then out through another rear exit and across a narrow strip of asphalt. Hidden behind garbage cans and a mud-streaked golf cart emblazoned with the theme park’s logo was a door in the side of a large brick building. McCoyne followed him through, making sure to shut the door again behind him and block it to prevent the Unchanged from doubling back and getting away. They tripped down a tight and steep staircase, then squeezed down a narrow, twisting corridor before emerging into a huge, dimly lit space. McCoyne struggled to make sense of what he was seeing for a moment. The room was a vast and clearly artificial cavelike structure, with fake stalagmites and stalactites bolted to the floor and ceiling, and pools of foul-smelling, dripping water. Light came from a number of lanterns dotted around the room, just enough illumination for him to see at least another eight Unchanged, wide-eyed and mole-like. He shuffled back until he reached the nearest wall, eager to stay out of sight, and his foot kicked against a heap of dummies like the one he’d seen standing in the stream. Then it dawned on him, this was the Mine—the huge building he’d stood outside earlier.

He could hear the man who’d led him down here talking.

“He was outside by the kitchens,” he explained.

“For Christ’s sake, Jeff,
they’re
outside. Are you fucking stupid? He’s with
them
!”

“He’s not, I swear. He’s like us. Would I be standing here now if he was one of them?”

McCoyne slid along the wall, watching the small group beginning to splinter, listening to the arguments develop and the volume of their voices increase.

No time for this. Got to act
.

He ran forward and splashed through an unexpectedly deep puddle, his boots sinking into several inches of silt. Off balance and running almost blind, he tripped over a rocky mound and fell, then picked himself up again and carried on. The Unchanged panicked in response to the sudden movement and noise. Several of them ran after him. They were close behind, and he could hear their footsteps echoing off the walls and low ceiling. He kept moving, unable to see much more than just the occasional shadow, focusing more on the fact that Llewellyn and the others were about to leave than anything else. The ground beneath his feet began to slope upward. He ran up a long access ramp, then hit a wall, bounced off, and glanced over to his right, where he saw the faintest chink of light. It had to be the way out. One of the Unchanged dived for his legs and caught hold of one of his boots. McCoyne kicked out at him and managed to get free and keep moving, running now with arms outstretched. Another sharp bend and up ahead he could see the boards across the entrance that he’d seen earlier, shards of brightness pouring through the gaps between them. He slammed against the wood and peered through. The others were leaving, walking back to the trucks dragging their semifilled bags of supplies behind them.

“Llewellyn!” McCoyne yelled. “Back here!”

Someone lagging behind turned around and looked for him, but when he couldn’t see anything he turned back again and carried on. One of the Unchanged reached McCoyne and tried to pull him away from the door. He managed to force one of the smaller boards free. He shoved his arm through and grabbed hold of another piece of wood so they couldn’t pull him back.

“Unchanged!” he screamed.

McCoyne didn’t know if the others had heard him. With two Unchanged now trying to drag him away from the entrance, he closed his eyes and clung on. The Unchanged, desperate but, incredibly, even weaker than him in their pitiful, malnourished state, couldn’t break his grip. He could feel a third one hanging on to the back of him, tugging at his shoulders, and now the fingers on his right hand were starting to slip off the wood. He tried to stand his ground, but it was impossible. With a barely coordinated yank, he was wrenched from the entrance and dragged down onto his back. One of the Unchanged came at him with a knife, its blade glinting momentarily in a narrow shaft of light. As the terrified man dropped down and lunged for him, McCoyne managed to roll over to one side. Another one rolled him back, then another grabbed his kicking feet while others grabbed his thrashing arms.

The wooden boards across the door began to splinter as someone outside struck at them repeatedly with a heavy axe. The Unchanged scattered, and as soon as a big enough gap had been forced open, fighters and scavengers alike began to pour through. Suddenly free, McCoyne scrambled up onto his feet and pressed himself flat against the wall until the flash flood of bodies coming in had dried up, then got down on his hands and knees to avoid the fighting and crawled out into the open. He sat on his backside in the dust, panting hard, listening to the screams coming from the Mine, and waited.

*   *   *

All talk of radiation levels and other such threats had been forgotten in the euphoria of the kill. Three-quarters of an hour later and the theme park courtyard was still a hive of activity. Scavengers searched the den and collected piles of supplies the Unchanged had hoarded. Fighters dragged the bodies of their enemy out into the open and stripped the corpses of anything of value. Eleven kills. More than the last ten days combined.

Llewellyn marched over to where McCoyne was working, piling food into the back of one of the trucks that had been driven in from the parking lot.

“What’s your name?”

“Danny McCoyne.”

“Lucky find, McCoyne.”

“Suppose.”

“So what happened? Did you just stumble into their nest? Take a wrong turn and find yourself surrounded?”

“Something like that.”

“Talk me through it.”

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t I’ll break your fucking legs.”

McCoyne sighed and threw the bag of food he’d been carrying into the truck.

“I found one of them while I was scavenging. I made him think I was like him and that you others were looking for me, then I got him to take me to the rest of them.”

“And it was that easy?”

“Yep, that easy.”

“So how’d you manage that, then?”

“Just something I picked up.”

“Is that right?”

“Yep.”

Llewellyn grinned at him. “You devious little bastard, you can hold the Hate, can’t you?”

McCoyne looked away and picked up another bag. Did he really want anyone to know?

“So what if I can,” he said nonchalantly. “Not a lot of call for it these days, is there? Hardly any of them left.”

“When we get back to Lowestoft,” Llewellyn said, leaning over him until their faces were just inches apart, “you’re coming with me to see Hinchcliffe. He’ll be interested to know we’ve got a freak like you in town.”

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.”

“
He
found us,” she said, pointing at the man in the corner again.

“That was just luck,” Winston argued. “He’s like us, Sally. He found this place the same way we did.”

Sally shook her head in despair and walked far enough away into the shadows that no one could see her. She leaned against the wall and massaged her temples. Maybe Winston was right. She’d overreacted, and not for the first time, either. Every day the pressure of being cooped up in here was getting harder and harder to handle. A year ago, all she’d had to worry about was getting the kids to and from school and getting to work on time. Hiding in a disused highway storage depot with strangers, eating cold food from a can, shitting in a bucket in full view of the others, fearing for her safety every second of every minute of every hour of every day … if she’d known what her life was going to become, she’d probably have ended it when the troubles first began.

*   *   *

They tried to make the food last, but they were starving and much of it was gone within an hour, empty stomachs finally satisfied after weeks of being drip-fed scraps. It didn’t matter. Eating was a distraction that helped reduce the tension in the shelter for a precious few minutes. Sally looked around at the few faces she could see in the low light. Eight-year-old Charlotte stared back at her from the corner where she always sat, surrounded by a barricade of traffic cones she’d built around herself, her face as pale as ever. The two other children sat close by, Chloe fast asleep, eleven-year-old Jake dutifully sitting beside her, drawing shapes in the dirt with a stick. On the opposite side of the room, Jean Walker and Kerry Hayes spoke together in hushed whispers about nothing of any importance. Sally had thought Kerry beautiful when she’d first met her, but her young body had been ravaged by hunger since they’d had to lock themselves away in here. Her full figure had wasted away to nothing. She looked anorexic now: all protruding bones, stretched skin, and strawlike hair. In the opposite corner, Brian Greene did his best to disguise the fact that he was crying again …

A packet of stale cookies (what luxury, Sally thought to herself dejectedly) was being passed around. She took one, but stopped before she ate it, distracted suddenly by a low rumbling in the distance.

“Did anyone hear that?”

“Hear what?” Kerry asked, immediately concerned, yellow eyes bulging in the light.

“Thought I heard something,” she said, already beginning to doubt herself. “Sounded like an engine.”

“There’s nothing,” Fisher said quickly, scowling at her. “Just
them
moving around up there. Either that or your imagination…”

He was probably right. She couldn’t hear anything now. Sally passed the packet on to the man sitting next to her—the new arrival. He’d hardly spoken since he’d gotten here, but it was obvious he was as desperate as the rest of them: a scrawny bag of skin and bones, a haunted expression etched permanently onto his weary face. He took the cookies from Sally, then passed them on without saying a word.

He waited for a few minutes longer before quietly getting up and slipping farther back into the shadows. He stepped over a couple of bodies—one sleeping, one dying—then made his way to the part of the cramped storage depot they used as a toilet.

Sally tried to block out the foul noise of the man pissing from a height into a metal bucket, and was relieved when it finally stopped. She waited for him to come back, but became concerned when he didn’t immediately return. The rest of the shelter was almost pitch black, but she got up and felt her way along the cold, damp walls until she found him by almost falling over him. He was lying on the ground on his back, trying to force open the roller-shutter. A chink of light spilled across the floor where he’d managed to get his fingers under the shutter. With a grunt of effort he lifted it up another six inches.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sally asked, standing directly behind him. He didn’t answer. Didn’t even look at her. Instead he kept working, shoving his hands farther under the shutter and forcing it up another couple of inches at a time. He rolled over onto his front and was about to try to slide through the gap when she grabbed the heel of his boot and yanked him back.

“Don’t panic,” she pleaded with him, keeping her voice low so the others didn’t hear. “Please don’t do anything stupid. I know it’s hard being trapped in here, but don’t—”

He scrambled back and stood up fast. Catching Sally off guard, in a single sudden movement he spun around and reversed their positions, pushing her up against the wall. He covered her mouth with his left hand, barely needing to use any force, then sank a knife deep into her belly.

“I’m sorry,” Danny McCoyne said, keeping her mouth covered to stifle any noise. “It’s better for all of us this way. Trust me.”

He laid Sally’s body down, waited until he was sure she was dead, then wiped his bloodied hand clean on her jacket and slid out under the roller-shutter.

In stark contrast to the desolate silence an hour or so earlier, the road outside was now full of movement. Several battered vehicles and a group of eight armed figures had gathered a short distance from the storage depot doors. McCoyne picked himself up, brushed himself down, and wearily walked over to talk to Llewellyn, who marshaled the movements of the fighters from the back of a pickup truck.

“Had fun in there, McCoyne?”

“They’re fucked,” he grunted. “They won’t give you any trouble.”

“How many?”

“Eleven of them left. Three kids. Few basic weapons. All of them are pretty weak. A couple of them are virtually dead already.”

Llewellyn nodded, then gestured for his soldiers to take up their positions. Five men armed with blades, bludgeons, and the occasional gun stood on either side at the doorway and waited. A van reversed back into the gap. The driver got out and moved around to the back.

“Wilson,” Llewellyn bellowed at him, “let them go.”

On his command, Kevin Wilson, chief kid-wrangler, yanked the van doors open and dragged two small children out on leashes. Naked and covered with grime, they struggled to escape, one of them trying to bite through the lead. When a terrified Unchanged face appeared under the roller-shutter for a split second, the children both lunged forward and threw themselves at the gap with furious speed. It was all Wilson could do to untangle himself from the leather straps and let go before he was dragged inside with them.