Chokehold

by David Moody

  Johannson is silent for a few overlong seconds, her entire ragged entourage holding its collective breath in anticipation of her inevitable fury. Then she just laughs. A deep, belly-shaking, guttural laugh that echoes through the emptiness of the Cambridge ruins.

  She marches up to face Hinchcliffe. He doesn’t flinch.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you,” she tells him. “What’s going to happen now is you’re going to go back to this Mr. Thacker of yours, and you’re going to tell him to keep away from my territory and keep his filthy hands off my people. If I see you or anyone else I don’t recognize sniffing around here, I’ll kill the fucking lot of you myself. Understand?”

  “Wait, Johannson, please…” Pinchy says. “Just think about this…”

  Hinchliffe has had enough. With a single movement so swift, so violent, so devastating and so completely unexpected that barely anyone realizes what’s happening until it’s done, he carves a blade through the air and stabs Pinchy through his Adam’s apple. Pinchy drops to his knees, clutching his throat and gurgling blood. He looks up at Hinchcliffe.

  “I told you to shut up, you moron,” Hinchcliffe says with disdain. “You can keep the knife. I don’t need it back.”

  Pinchy collapses forward. He hits the ground face-first with a thud, shoving the knife in deeper, leaving the tip of the blade jutting out at the nape of his neck.

  Johannson is unfazed. Not a flicker of emotion. There are mumbles of dissention in the ranks around her, but she silences all of them with the simplest of gestures. No one argues. Hinchliffe stands his ground also. “You saved me a job with that yellow-bellied bastard,” she tells him. “Now get out of here before I order this lot to lynch the fucking lot of you.”

  “You’re letting them go?” a voice asks from behind her. One of her generals or just one of the crowd? She turns around, but the owner of the voice has already slunk back into the masses.

  “It’s been a pleasure,” Hinchcliffe says. “Thank you for your time.”

  “You won’t be walking away next time,” she warns, but he’s not listening. He’s already pushing through the crowd on his way back to his convoy.

  They disappear in a mass of churned mud spray and fumes.

  26

  RAF Thornhill

  The windowless, cell-like room Matt wakes up in is dark, permanently filled with shadow. It’s early morning, he thinks, but which morning? He could have been unconscious for minutes or days. Who knows how long it’s been?

  The mattress is uncomfortable and sweat-soaked. He’s been drifting in and out of consciousness for what feels like forever as the drugs have worked their way through his system. The combination of his reduced body mass and the unscientifically measured slug of chemicals the doctor pumped into his system knocked him out like a sledgehammer. For the longest time, he’s been trying to remember where he is and how he got here. He gets so far, then loses track of his thoughts before he’s worked it out.

  Eventually, he’s composed enough to be able to swing his feet off the bed and stand up. He immediately wishes he hadn’t, and he leans against the wall as a wave of nausea washes over him. His legs threaten to buckle, and he just about makes it to a basin but can only spit into the bowl, nothing inside to throw up. He steadies himself and tries to wash his face, forgetting it’s been weeks since any water flowed through these pipes.

  It’s only after a few more minutes, once the strength in his muscles has begun to return and he can stand upright without fear of passing out, that he realizes how quiet it is. Utterly, unnaturally silent. It’s icy cold, too. He’s still at RAF Thornhill, of that much he’s reasonably certain, but in which part of the base is he?

  Matt resists the temptation to call out, because his time alone since the war began has taught him that’s almost always a bad move. Assess the situation in as quiet and unobtrusive a way as possible, then act on whatever you find. But that’s a problem today. The absolute lack of noise makes his every movement sound deafeningly loud.

  This isn’t right. This is very, very wrong. This section of the base feels lifeless and tomb-like. They must have dumped him well away from everyone else near the border fence. Solitary confinement. He thinks he probably asked for it, kicking off like that.

  He’s halfway down the corridor now, and the sharpness of his drug-dulled mind is gradually beginning to return. The sudden recollection of what happened stops him in his tracks. It’s like being drenched with a bucket of ice-cold water, and immediately he’s wide awake and alert and afraid. He remembers the paranoia he experienced in the infirmary, seeing that Hater’s face again. He edges farther along in the shadows of the mazelike corridors, terrified at what, or who, he might be about to find around the next corner.

  Wait. He knows where he is. He’s reached the mess hall.

  Shit.

  He’s right in the hub of the base after all, and there’s no one else here. The main public areas of Thornhill are deserted. The others have packed up and shipped out without him. It looks like it was a sudden exodus; the place has been stripped bare, but no attempt has been made to cover their tracks. He’s thinking Estelle and her people are so well prepared that they must surely have had a preplanned evacuation routine, triggered no doubt by the discovery of a Hater in their midst.

  But wait … they didn’t believe him. What changed? He finds the answer when he reaches the infirmary.

  It’s a bloodbath.

  There may only have been a handful of people here at the very end, but the condition their bodies have been left in makes it look like there were many more. There’s blood everywhere, and the smell inside the space is worse than he remembers: the stench of sickness, sweat, and spoil now tinged with sickly sweet notes of decay. He bends down and inspects a pool of blood. Dry and tacky on the edges, still wet elsewhere. Half a day old, tops.

  He rips the makeshift covers from a window, allowing murky light to dribble in from outside, and tries to piece together what might have happened here. There’s Dr. Giles’s corpse over there, killed by a single blow to the head. Matt stops in his tracks when he trips over the outstretched legs of the next body. It’s Kara. Her face is a frozen snapshot of her final moments. Utter panic. Sheer terror.

  Jesus.

  He drops to his knees and holds her head in his hands, brushing blood-matted hair from her face.

  Should have helped her. Should have done more for her. Shouldn’t have let it come to this. See … it happened again. Someone got close … Someone trusted me … and now they’re dead.

  Matt thinks he’s cursed. The people he gets closest to are those who get hurt the most.

  Focus. Where’s the Hater?

  Moving fast, he finds a flashlight wedged under another corpse, which he shines into each of the remaining dead faces in turn. There are eleven bodies in total here, and other than Kara and the doctor, he doesn’t recognize any of them. There’s no sign of the intruder. Matt knows that despicable bastard had been trained to hold the Hate. He must have been sussing the place out, then fought his way out when his cover was blown. So where would he have gone? Matt thinks he would have gone straight back to whoever it was who sent him here, and he realizes the enemy will likely be on their way here soon. They might be here already.

  He doesn’t have long.

  27

  On the Road

  Funny how things never work out the way you expect, McCoyne thinks as he half walks, half staggers down the long road he hopes will get him back to the university ruins and the security of the pack. It wasn’t long ago he was doing everything he could to put some distance between himself and Johannson and her herd of uncivilized grunts; now all he wants is to be back with them again. There’s still some relative safety in numbers, as long as you’re fighting for the same side. Knowledge is power, they used to say. They should listen to him when he tells them what he found. Actually, brute force is absolute power now, but a little knowledge will at least give him the slightest edge over the other
fight-avoiders. For now, at least.

  The floodwater laps against either side of the road here. There’s no telling how deep it is, so he keeps to the dotted line in the middle of the tarmac. He’s cold, wet, and exposed, but the university is big enough and rambling enough so that he’ll be able to find a quiet corner to dry out and get his strength back.

  Nothing but the rain and the road and the water in every direction. McCoyne thinks he hears something on the wind, and he looks up and sees a pair of bright headlights racing toward him. He stops and faces off against the rapidly approaching vehicle. Running’s not an option, so he flags them down. He figures he’ll dive to one side if the driver tries to take him out (and he wouldn’t put it past anyone these days), but instead, the car skids to a halt. It aquaplanes in the standing water and barely stops in time.

  Shit.

  Of all the cars on all the roads … what were the chances of this happening?

  It’s a red Subaru. Damn. It’s bloody Karl Bryce.

  McCoyne doesn’t bother looking for a way out, because there isn’t one. Bryce gets out of the car, then grabs McCoyne by the collar and drops him to the ground. “You ran out on me, you fucker.”

  “Didn’t mean to. I got lost. I went for a piss, and I couldn’t find the way back. It was dark…”

  “Bullshit.”

  He punches McCoyne in the face, and all McCoyne can do is soak it up. His body is already ruined; another battering isn’t going to make any difference. Bryce punches him again, then lifts his fist to strike him a third time.

  Knowledge is power.

  “Wait. Don’t hurt me. I know something you don’t.”

  Bryce stops midswing.

  “What?”

  McCoyne knows he’s going to have to play his trump card early, but he doesn’t have any choice. “Unchanged. I found a nest. I can show you.”

  “Don’t believe you,” Bryce says, fist pulled back again.

  “It’s an old army base, something like that. Back down this road. Fuckers are well hidden.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “There’s loads of them there, all hunkered down and quiet. There was talk they’d gotten another base somewhere ’round here, too. Military. I couldn’t find out where it is. Didn’t have time.”

  “You expect me to believe all of this?”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “Because I was about to kick the shit out of you.”

  “That’s par for the course these days.”

  Bryce loosens his grip. “Tell me more.”

  McCoyne sits up and wipes rainwater and dribbles of blood from his face, blows snot from his stinging nose. It gives him a few seconds to think, to work out how to play this.

  “No one else knows they’re there. You can be the one who tells Johannson, score yourself some points. I know you want to climb the ranks.”

  He watches Bryce thinking it over.

  “I need more than that.”

  “There’s thirty or forty of them at least, maybe more. They’re pretty well organized from what I saw. Don’t know what weapons they’ve got or what supplies, though. They stay quiet and right out of sight. Clever fuckers, they are.”

  Bryce goes for him again, knocking him back to the ground. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “What?”

  “You must think I’m fucking stupid. How do you know all this? Are you a fucking sympathizer or something?”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “Sounds like you had a good look around and really got to know the place. So how did you manage that without killing those bastards?”

  “There were too many of them. I killed enough so that I could get away. I couldn’t have handled all of them on my own.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  McCoyne knows he’s already said too much. “I don’t expect you to believe anything.”

  Bryce is struggling to compute.

  “So how long were you there? I mean, you walked out on us a few nights back now…”

  No answer.

  “How close did you actually get to them?”

  Still nothing.

  “Were you just watching from a distance?”

  McCoyne shakes his head.

  “You were in there with them?” Bryce can’t believe where this train of thought is leading him, but there’s no other explanation. “Fuck me, you were. You were neck-deep in those fuckers, weren’t you?”

  His silence says everything.

  “You fucker. You chose not to kill them.”

  “Like I said, I killed some,” McCoyne mumbles. “Too many to kill all of them.”

  Bryce is struggling with the implications of what he’s hearing. “You can hold the Hate, can’t you? Bloody hell…”

  “I told you, Bryce, there were too many. They’d have killed me if I’d tried anything.”

  “Cut the crap. Be straight with me if you want to stay alive. Can you hold the Hate?”

  “Yes,” McCoyne reluctantly admits.

  “We’re going to go back to Cambridge, get some extra bodies, then you’re going to take us to this army base so we can deal with the Unchanged, understand?”

  “Okay.”

  “Then I’m going to kill you. You’re a fucking abomination.”

  McCoyne knows he won’t hesitate to carry out his threat. “You don’t have to do that, Bryce. I can help you. I can be useful. I can give you an advantage over all the rest of them.”

  “Yeah, and that’s exactly what you’re going to do. Because if you put one foot out of line, I’ll tell Johannson all about your party tricks. She’ll have you strung up in front of the whole damn camp.”

  28

  RAF Thornhill

  Matt frantically works his way through the abandoned base, collecting anything of use. Scraps of food, discarded clothing … there’s nothing much worth taking. It takes longer than he’d like, the last vestiges of Dr. Giles’s industrial-strength tranquilizers still working their way through his system. He needs to pull himself together. He has to get out of here.

  The last place he checks is the control room where he’d left the rest of his gear. He picks up his binoculars from where he left them and a few other odds and ends, which he crams into a rucksack. He pauses to clear a discreet patch of mud from the obscured main windows.

  “Matt?”

  Matt spins around, his heart in his mouth, and sees Jason standing behind him.

  “What the hell are you still doing here?”

  Jason shakes his head, looks on the verge of tears. “Got split up from the others when they left. Didn’t want to end up stuck out there on my own, so I came back. I didn’t know there was anyone else here. Thought everyone had gone.”

  “I couldn’t leave. Some fucker knocked me out, remember?”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t believe me.”

  “I know,” he says again. “It just seemed so bloody ridiculous. He said it wasn’t true, and we were all thinking he had to be right, because how could a Hater have been in here with us?”

  “I recognized him from the city.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I knew he was different.”

  “I know that now…”

  “People have died because you didn’t believe me. Kara died. She was my friend.”

  This time Jason says nothing. He just stands there, numb.

  “So what exactly happened?” Matt asks.

  “Nothing for a while. The bastard was biding his time. He knew we were watching him, so he waited long enough for us to think he was fine and it was you who’d lost your mind.”

  “And then?”

  “Most of us were asleep when it happened. We heard the screams coming from the infirmary, but by the time we’d gotten there, he’d already gone. Estelle and Darren reckoned he’d gone back to his base or wherever it was he’d come from. They said he’d bring other Haters back here, so they packed up and left. Jesus, Matt
, thank fuck I found you. I thought I was going to be here on my own. What are we going to do?”

  “When did they go?”

  “They’ve got a few hours’ lead on us. We could try to catch them.”

  Matt returns his attention to the window and rubs at the mud with his sleeve. “Do you know the way to the CDF outpost?”

  “I know it’s on one of the main roads into Cambridge…”

  “But you don’t actually know the route?”

  “No,” he admits.

  “Great.”

  “It’s a service station on a main road. Can’t be too hard to find.”

  “You think? We’ll worry about that later. Right now, we just need to get out of this place.”

  “Now? Shouldn’t we wait until dark?”

  “We don’t have that luxury,” Matt says, and he beckons Jason over to the window he’s been looking through. “Look.”

  They’re still a way off and are only visible because of the stillness of everything else, but there’s a veritable shitload of Haters approaching. It looks like an army—a mass of frantic movement cutting a swath through the dead lands and closing in on the RAF base at speed. It’s a cavalcade of beaten-up vehicles packed with fighters, so many they’re hanging off the sides and clinging to tailgates. They don’t care if they’re seen or heard. They’re not here to negotiate. They’re not here to rape and pillage. The sole reason these bastards are here is to annihilate the remaining Unchanged.

  “We need to get gone,” Matt says, stating the obvious.

  “But there’s nothing here for them. Maybe they’ll see that everyone’s gone and disappear?”

  “You want to take that chance? You’re so fucking naïve. They’ll turn this place upside down if they think there’s the slightest chance even one of us is left alive. We’re going. Right now.”

  “But if we—”

  Matt turns on him. “You do exactly what I tell you, understand? You start playing up and I’ll leave you for dead. Believe me, it’ll be far easier for me to slip away unnoticed if they’re busy fighting over your scraps.”