“You lost kids in the fighting, didn’t you?”
“Three,” I answer.
“One like us?”
“My little girl.”
“Where is she now?”
“Dead, I expect. Last time I saw her she was running toward the base of a fucking mushroom cloud, looking for an Unchanged to kill.”
He thinks for a moment. “Look at this,” he says, gesturing to a narrow window in the front of the nearest metal building. I notice something’s been written in chalk on the door. It’s hard to make out, but I think it says BOY 5–7. Is that a serial number or an age range? I bend down to look through the window. It takes my eyes a couple of seconds to adjust to the negligible light levels inside. Can’t see anything …
“What am I supposed to be looking at—”
Something smashes against the glass. It’s a young boy, and he hits the strengthened window so hard that he bounces off and crashes back down onto the floor. He immediately picks himself up again and starts hammering on the window, scratching at it with his fingers, trying to claw his way out and get to me. He moves with the same speed and animal-like agility that Ellis had before I lost her. He’s feral. Wild. His blue eyes lock onto mine, and after a few seconds he stops struggling. As soon as he realizes I’m not Unchanged he slopes back into the corner, dejected. I keep watching him, unable to look away.
Hinchcliffe shines a flashlight around. Christ, the room the kid’s being held in is like an animal’s cage. There are yellow-tinged puddles of piss on the floor, chunks of half-chewed food lying around, smears of shit like tire tracks …
“This one like your daughter?”
“Just the same.”
“Thought so. Now come over here.”
I follow him across the square patch of asphalt toward a similar-sized building, almost directly opposite the first. There’s writing on the door of this unit, too. It says BOY 10–12. I’m hesitant to get too close to the glass this time, but Hinchcliffe shoves me forward. I tense up, expecting another kid to hurl itself at me. When it doesn’t happen I start to relax. I can’t see any movement at all through the window.
“Is there anything in here?”
“Over there in the corner,” Hinchcliffe says, shining his flashlight toward the far end of the squalid rectangular space. Then I see it: a figure slumped up against the wall. It’s another boy, older than the first. He stands perfectly still, staring back at me but not reacting. “The older ones are starting to show more control,” Hinchcliffe explains. “Show them one of the Unchanged and they’ll still pull its fucking arms out of its sockets, but when they’re not fighting, they’re more lucid than they were. The older they get, the more control over their urges they seem to have.”
“What point are you making?” I ask, not taking my eyes off the child.
“That maybe the kids can be rehabilitated. That there might still be hope for them. Pure instinct made them fight the Unchanged with as much ferocity as they did. Now the Unchanged are gone, we might be able to straighten them out again.”
“You think so?”
He leads me away from the cells.
“I’m convinced these kids are as wild as they are because they’ve just lived through the worst of the war. When things calm down again, so will they. We’ll teach them how to be human again, how to control themselves.”
“Be human?” I laugh. “What, human like your fighters? Christ, Hinchcliffe, hardly the best role models for them. Anyway, these children have spent the last year killing. Do you really think you’re going to be able to make them stop?”
“What use are they to us if we can’t?”
“So what are you suggesting? Are you going to keep all newborns locked up until they’ve grown out of their viciousness?”
I think he’s confused being controlled with being catatonic, but I don’t want to risk antagonizing him. It says something when his idea of progress is producing a kid that doesn’t immediately want to kill everything in the immediate vicinity. These children are hardwired to fight now. They’ve had a year of running wild, and their immature, prepubescent brains either don’t know or don’t want to know anything else.
“It’s been less than twelve months,” he continues. “We’ll keep studying the ones we’ve got here. My guess is that newborns won’t be like this, because they won’t have lived through the fighting that these kids have. It might be that we end up with a missed generation or two, but there’s nothing anyone can do about that.”
The guard lets us back out through the gate, and we walk on down the road.
“So what about the other end of the factory?” I ask, stupidly prolonging a conversation I never actually wanted to have, realizing I still don’t know why Hinchcliffe wanted to see me.
“What about it?”
“What have you got going on there? Is it the reverse of all this? Have you got Rona Scott provoking Unchanged kids until they fight back?”
“Something like that. It’s not so much about making them fight as it is getting them to be like us.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They’ve got to be able to survive and hold their own.”
Hinchcliffe increases his speed. Heading north, I follow him past the farthest end of the complex and then continue along a wide footpath which runs parallel with the seawall. The last light of day is beginning to fade. I don’t think I’ve been out here before. To my left is a sheer drop of several yards down onto another walkway, beyond it the remains of a long-since-abandoned RV park. There are numerous equally spaced rectangular slabs of concrete visible through the overgrowth and weeds where RVs used to stand, looking like oversized graves. It’s an eerie place, silent but for our footsteps and the sea battering the rocks on the other side of the wall to my right.
“There’s so much I need to know the answers to, Danny,” he explains as I catch up with him, “things you probably haven’t even considered. For a start, what do we do if any of the women give birth to Unchanged kids? A kid’s just a kid, that’s got to be the position we get to. It’ll get easier over time.”
“Will it?”
“Rona Scott thinks so. She says when there’s absolutely nothing left but us, they won’t know any different. We still don’t know why we are like we are, and we probably never will. We don’t know if what happened was because of some physical change or a virus or germ or just something we saw on TV. Thing is, kids who are inherently Unchanged are going to have to adapt and become like us to survive. Either that or they’ll be killed.”
I deliberately don’t respond because this is something I’ve thought about already. I’ve thought about it too much, if anything. Months ago, back when I was looking for Ellis, I saw a pregnant woman. Since then I’ve often wondered what would happen to a newborn child. What if the kid’s born and its mother’s gut instinct—the same raw, undeniable gut instinct that made me kill hundreds of Unchanged—tells her to kill her own child? I’ve had nightmare visions of people crowding around the birth, trying to work out if the baby’s like us or like them, trying to decide whether they should keep it alive or drown it in the river. Or worse still, people fighting with each other to be the one who kills an Unchanged child. I’ve even imagined delivery rooms with a dividing line drawn down the middle—medical equipment on one side, weapons on the other.
I try to bite my lip and stop myself, but I can’t help speaking out again. I wish I could ignore what’s happening and switch off, but the memory of what happened to all three of my own children keeps me asking questions and searching for answers I know I’ll probably never find.
“It’s a paradox, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“What you’re talking about. You’re saying we have to straighten out our kids and corrupt the Unchanged. Isn’t there a danger you’ll just end up breaking all of them? Aren’t you just going to end up with generation after generation of fuckups? Kids that can’t fight, can’t think, can’t even function?”
Hinchcliffe just looks at me and grunts, and I think I’ve gone too far again.
“Sorry,” I apologize quickly, remembering who I’m talking to. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
