Them or Us h-3

by David Moody

  Heading down the tightly spiraling steps is infinitely easier than climbing up. I stumble down quickly and trip out of the door, then start moving toward the pier, wishing I could go faster but knowing I can’t. Not much energy left, now. Not much time left, either. I head directly for the ocean, moving in a straight line down through the ruins until I reach the promenade, then start the long walk up toward the pier, the bitter wind feeling like it’s knocking me two steps sideways for every step I manage to take forward. The snow is like a dense fog again now, and I’m walking blind, but eventually the building at the shore end of the pier looms large ahead of me, a once proud and grand facade that’s now as crumbling and worn as everything else.

  “McCoyne,” a voice shouts at me, and I look around for whoever’s yelling. Can’t tell where it came from or who it was. Didn’t sound like Joseph. Was it Parker or one of the others? The noise of the wind and the waves just adds to the confusion, and I keep moving forward. I stop when I reach the van and the truck and look back. Someone’s walking toward me, following me from the town. Can’t make out who it is. He starts to speed up, but whoever it is, he’s clearly struggling. Is he injured? I take a couple of steps back toward him, then stop. Fuck, it’s Hinchcliffe. I try to get away, but despite his injuries he’s still too fast for me, his hate and anger driving him on, oblivious to his pain. He reaches out and grabs my shoulder, then spins me around and throws me back against the side of the van. The noise echoes through the air like a gunshot, and I bounce back off the metal toward him, straight into his fist. He catches me hard on the chin, and I slam back against the van again, then drop to the ground, face numb, head filled with blinding pain. He picks me up by the collar again, lifting me until our faces are just inches apart. My feet are off the ground, toes barely scraping the slush.

  “Hinchcliffe, I—”

  “What the hell are you trying to do? I should kill you right now.”

  “That’s your answer to everything.”

  He throws me back against the van again, and I drop to my knees. I watch him as he comes toward me, drenched with his own blood, fist raised ready to strike again and finish me off. I don’t have the strength to defend myself anymore. Just let it happen …

  “I don’t understand,” he says. “Why, Danny? You could’ve had it all.”

  “What, like you?” I manage to spit at him, my mouth filled with blood. “We’ve all lost everything, you stupid bastard, and it’s all thanks to people like you. The more you try to take, the more stuff slips through your fingers, didn’t you realize that? You started with a whole town and ended up barricaded into one corner of it. Even then you were a virtual prisoner in the courthouse. You’ve lost that now and there’s nothing left. It’s over. It’s all gone. Just leave me alone, Hinchcliffe.”

  Still staring down at me and breathing hard, he takes a step back, then runs forward and punches his fist into the side of the van. I slowly pick myself up, dribbling red into the snow around my feet.

  “Just kill me if you’re going to. Why don’t you just get it over with?”

  “Because you’re still useful. Look around you, Danny. The fact you’re here at all just proves my point. There are people still fighting and dying in Lowestoft, but you’re safe. We’re safe. It’s like you’ve been observing the rest of us, only getting involved and getting your hands dirty when you absolutely have to.”

  “Or when you forced me to.”

  “Look what you achieved—”

  “I’ve achieved nothing, Hinchcliffe. I’ve lost everything, same as you.”

  “But you’re the man who walked free from a gas chamber. You told me stories about how you talked your way out of Unchanged traps. For Christ’s sake, you were almost right under one of the bombs but you managed to get away.”

  “Right place, right time…”

  “It’s more than that. It has to be.”

  “Empty words, Hinchcliffe.”

  “No, I swear. Listen to me, we can get out of this mess and start again. I know where we can find food, and there’s a place—”

  “You’re out of your fucking mind. You just don’t get it, do you? All you know now is fighting. You won’t ever change. It doesn’t matter where you go or what you do, the end result will always be the same. You don’t need me to help you fuck things up.”

  Hinchcliffe walks away, and I can see that he’s losing a lot of blood from his left leg. He’s limping badly. I push myself off the side of the van and try to slip past and get to the front of the pier entrance building, but I’ve barely taken a couple of steps before he sees me. He lunges for me, and I lose my already unsteady footing and hit the deck. I’m on my back looking up at him leaning down over me. He draws a holstered machete.

  “Maybe you’re right—”

  “Leave him alone, you bastard,” another voice shouts. I lean my head back and see that it’s Parker. He’s aiming a rifle directly at Hinchcliffe, and behind him Joseph Mallon is standing in an open doorway. Hinchcliffe stares at the Unchanged in disbelief, then dives at Parker, unable to suppress his instinctive hatred of the Unchanged. Scrambling back out of the way, Parker fires the rifle but misses as Hinchcliffe anticipates and drops to the ground. Seemingly oblivious to any pain he must be feeling, he immediately gets up again and flashes his blade at Parker. The Unchanged man’s rifle and his severed right arm fall into the snow just a short distance from where I’m lying. Hinchcliffe drags him down and drops onto his stomach, then plunges the machete down again and again into his flesh, totally consumed with Hate, everything else temporarily forgotten. I drag myself back up and push Joseph away.

  “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.”

  The door at the other end of this narrow building flies open, and Gary, the badly scarred man, rushes outside, armed with a length of metal tubing. He runs back toward Hinchcliffe to try to head him off, but the poor naive bastard is still shackled with the uncertainty of being Unchanged. Instead of immediately attacking, he stops short and wildly swings at Hinchcliffe, who deflects one glancing blow, then catches the end of the pipe as it comes toward him again. Even injured he has more strength than this single, malnourished Unchanged. With each of them holding on to one end of the metal tubing, Hinchcliffe uses his weight and power advantage to swing Gary around into the railings along the edge of the pier. His body visibly rattles, and he screams with agony, then drops to his knees. Before anyone else can react, Hinchcliffe lays into him, beating him to a bloody pulp with ferocious speed, then lifting up his battered frame and pushing it over the side of the pier, down into the freezing waves below.

  “Get them out of here, Joseph,” I yell as panic spreads quickly through the group. He does as I say, herding the rest of the Unchanged as a single mass out through the door at the far end of this narrow space, then trying to usher them back down along the other side of the wooden buildings. I instinctively check that the children are safe. A woman is carrying Peter Sutton’s grandson, and someone else has got Chloe on his back. I see the boy Jake’s head deep in the middle of the throng.

  “Keep moving and keep safe,” I yell after them. They’re all that’s left now.

  I exit through the other door. Hinchcliffe’s staggering toward this building. I block his way forward, hoping to buy the others a little time. He stops and rocks back on his heels, panting hard.

  “Just let them go, Hinchcliffe,” I tell him, knowing my words will probably have little effect. “What difference does it make to you whether they live or die? There are so few of them left. There are so few of us left. Just let them go.”

  “You know I can’t do that,” he says, lurching closer. “You shouldn’t be able to, either.”

  He clumsily tries to sidestep me, but I move, too, and he just slumps against me, exhausted, his sudden weight almost knocking me over. He tries to push past, but I won’t let go.

  “Are you scared of them? Do you think a few starved Unchanged are that much of a threat to you? Christ, Hinchcliffe, some of them are just kids.”

  “It makes no difference.”

  “Just walk away. I’ll come with you. We’ll go wherever you want. Start again somewhere like you said. Let’s just end this today.”

  “I’ll end it, Danny, and I don’t need your help anymore.”


  “But can’t you see? The fighting is the cause of all of this, not the solution.”

  Hinchcliffe grabs at my collar and flips me over, slamming me down onto my back and winding me. I can hardly breathe. He starts to move away, and I roll over and reach out to try to catch him but I’m too slow and I watch helplessly as he strides farther down the pier. I crawl over to the handrail and pull myself back up onto my feet. Up ahead, Hinchcliffe takes my pistol from his pocket and starts firing indiscriminately at the Unchanged. Two shots go nowhere; the third hits one of them in the leg. A woman collapses in agony. Suddenly inspired, he surges toward her without mercy. She’s still alive when he reaches her, but within seconds she’s dead, finished by the remaining bullets and a volley of savage kicks to the side of her head.

  Through the snow I see the Unchanged group has split. Most have continued to move back toward the shore with Joseph, but several others have panicked and gone the other way and are now hopelessly isolated. In confusion they run toward the far end of the pier, and Hinchcliffe heads after them, half staggering, half sprinting, unbelievably managing to somehow find enough energy to keep moving. He tackles the closest of them, an elderly man with long yellow-white hair, pulling his legs out from under him. He smashes his face repeatedly into the metal base of an observation point, continuing long after he’s dead.

  I drag myself along the railings toward him. There are massive holes in the decking here—huge chunks missing like they’ve been bitten away by some enormous creature—and I can hear the pier creaking and groaning beneath me, its weakened metal struts straining the farther we get from the shore. By the time I’ve managed to make it across, Hinchcliffe is already attacking another man, smothering his screaming face with his hand. He’s distracted by the intensity of the kill, and I throw myself at him. He lets go of the man’s corpse and turns on me, using his bulk to force me back into the farthest corner of the pier, then tightening his grasp around my throat. My feet slip and slide on the wet boards and I can’t get a grip. I can hardly breathe. His eyes lock onto mine.