“Is this what you wanted to show me?”
“It is, but don’t just look at it, think about it. Feel it, even. All across the whole country, our enemies are hiding together in places like this. Thousands of them crammed together in the space of just a few square miles at a time, stacked on top of each other, hardly able to breathe. Now turn around and look at what we’ve got. Out beyond the city boundary you can walk for miles and hardly see anyone.”
“I went back to where I used to live,” I tell her. “Couldn’t believe what little space we had…”
“And you know what makes it worse?” she continues, not listening. “Those idiots still have faith in the people who are supposed to be leading them, not that they ever see them or hear anything from them. Christ, they don’t even know who they are. They’re just clinging desperately to the structures and organizations that used to keep their pathetic little lives ticking along, trusting in a system that was dying long before we ever appeared.”
“Can you believe we used to-” I start to say before she interrupts. Her over-the-top enthusiasm for all of this is frightening.
“You know, some of those fuckers still think they’re going to be protected and that everything’s going to work out all right for them in the end. Thing is, you and me and everyone else knows different, don’t we?”
“They’ll never win,” I answer quickly, standing my ground as an unexpected gust of wind threatens to blow me forward. “They can’t.”
“And that’s why what we’re going to do is going to have such an effect. We’re gonna pull the carpet out from under their feet.”
“How many of us are here?”
“Including you, ten.”
“Is that enough?”
“We’re not the only group. There are others. I know Sahota wants to get more than a hundred of us in place when the time’s right.”
“And you think this is going to work?”
“No question. The Unchanged can’t trust each other. Christ, they can barely bring themselves to look at the person next to them anymore. I mean, there’s never been any real trust between strangers, but now they’ve got it into their heads that anyone could turn on them at any second. So there’s real fear in the air in there, a tension and uncertainty that’s never going to disappear. The more of them that cram themselves inside the city walls and the longer they’re in there, the more that fear increases.”
“So we just walk in there…”
“…and light the fuse. They’re right on the edge. I give ’em a week at most, ten days if they’re lucky, and that’s without us getting involved. No food, no sanitation, no medicine, the floods-”
“Makes you wonder how they’ve lasted this long.”
“Have you been in there yet?”
“Coming here just now.”
“So you know what it’s like?”
“I saw enough…”
“Thing is, they’re all out for themselves, whether they’d admit it or not. Every one of them will do all that they can to survive, screw everyone else. Self-preservation means everything to them. It’s all they’ve got left.”
“So when do we do it? When do we go in?”
“It’s up to Sahota. He’ll know when the time’s right.”
“And how will we know?”
“We’ll know, trust me.”
“So do we just sit here and wait?”
“We do tonight, maybe tomorrow, too. Then we’ll be told to get into position. Could be hours after that, might even be days. We get in, bury ourselves deep, then explode. It’s a small sacrifice to make.”
Sacrifice? The word makes me go cold. I’ll fight alongside these people, but I don’t intend to sacrifice myself. Not while there’s a chance Ellis might still be out there.
“So we do enough to push them over the edge, then get out?”
“We do enough to push them over the edge, then keep pushing,” she answers quickly, sounding annoyed by my obvious lack of enthusiasm. “What we do in the city is all that matters. You don’t think about the future, getting out, leaving the fight… anything like that. If you’re left standing at the end of all of this, well done. If you’re not, then that’s too bad. This is way bigger than any of us.”
With that Julia walks away and leaves me alone on the roof. I watch her go, feeling like I’ve just shut myself away with a group of kamikaze cult members.
vii
MARK HAD TO FIND more food. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if he didn’t. Impossible choices would have to be made. How could it have come to this? Kate had to eat, she was his obvious priority, but who next? Gurmit Singh could go to hell as far as he was concerned, but what about Kate’s parents? Her dad was in his late seventies, her mom not much younger… could they really justify wasting precious supplies on them at their age? Christ, what was he thinking? Leaving them to starve? He himself needed to eat because he couldn’t stand the thought of Katie and their child trying to survive in this nightmare world without him. Then there was Lizzie. What was her position in the pecking order? As for that thing she kept tied up in the bathroom… Mark cursed the day he’d agreed to let her stay with them.
The hotel room diagonally opposite 33 was empty. He’d heard noises there a while earlier and had watched through the peephole in his door as the occupants had fled. He wasn’t sure exactly what had happened; someone cracking under the pressure of this impossible situation and being hunted down as a Hater, he guessed. The soldiers hadn’t come to investigate (they never did anymore), and there were at least two bodies still in the room, but he didn’t care. As soon as he’d seen the rest of them thunder down the stairs in panic, he’d known he’d have a couple of minutes to get in there, strip out anything of value, then get out before other refugees claimed the precious space.
Mark felt like an amateur forensics investigator trying to piece together a murder scene as he stood in the small room and stepped over the first corpse. It was a mirror image of the room where he and the others were living. A woman lay on the floor, her face pallid and gray, savage welts, bruises, and scratches covering her neck. In the opposite corner, a man who he’d assumed was either her partner or her brother sat slumped with blood pouring out of razor slashes across his throat and wrists. The cuts were still dripping. He was the one who’d snapped, Mark assumed. Looked like he’d taken his sudden aggression out on the woman, then killed himself with regret. Another pointless waste of lives.
No time for sentimentality. He began searching for food, looking in the corresponding hiding places to those he used himself in the room across the hall. There were a few scraps; nothing much, but it was better than going back empty-handed. At least he’d be able to-
A piercing scream cut through the uneasy silence. He knew immediately that it was coming from room 33. He grabbed the food and ran, tripping over the outstretched legs of the dead woman as he frantically sprinted back. He already knew what was happening. He could hear her. She was loose.
Mark reached for the door and pushed it at the exact same moment Gurmit Singh pulled it open from the other side. In a single movement he raced into the room, dragging Singh back inside and kicking the door shut behind him. He couldn’t risk him getting out and telling anyone what they were keeping in here, not that they’d be able to understand him anyway.
The kid was on the bed, naked but for a dirty gray undershirt, her wrists still bound together with a plastic tie but her legs free. Her tiny hands were wrapped around Kate’s father’s throat, and she was repeatedly yanking his head up, then slamming him back against the wooden headboard. Kate and Lizzie both tried to pull her off the old man, but she refused to let go, her small but strong clawlike fingers digging into his skin and holding on. Mark pushed them both aside and wrapped his arms around the little Hater’s waist. He backed away from the bed,
