“Good,” he answers, wolfing down a cracker. “I’ll eat anything, me,” he continues, showering me with crumbs.
“So I can see.”
Swales obviously isn’t the sharpest tool in the box, but his strength and size (and no doubt his track record and ongoing appetite for violence) have helped him become one of Hinchcliffe’s “elite.” He’s strong, impressionable, and, I expect, easily manipulated—perfect fighter fodder.
“So what do you think about all this, then?” he asks.
That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. These days it seems that something happens every few minutes that skews my perspective on everything again. Everything feels fluid. Nothing sits still.
“Depends what ‘all this’ is, doesn’t it?”
“Don’t get you.”
“First I thought we were out plane spotting, then I thought Llewellyn was going to kill me, and now I’m sitting having lunch with half an army. I’ll be honest with you, Swales, I don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on anymore.”
“I got told nothing. Llewellyn said he’d got a job for me, that’s all. Didn’t know nothing about all this.”
“So what do you think about it all?”
Swales has a naivete and innocence that may well prove to be his undoing. He talks candidly, barely even thinking about what he’s saying. Still, that probably makes him more honest and reliable than most of the backstabbing bastards Hinchcliffe surrounds himself with.
“Got to be a good thing, ain’t it?”
“Suppose.”
“This is like things used to be.”
“I guess.”
He pauses to eat more food. Then, when his second plate’s almost clear, he speaks again.
“You know what I used to do for a job, Danny?”
“No.”
“I used to flip burgers ’cause that was the only job I could find. There’s plenty about the old times I miss —”
“But not flipping burgers?”
“Definitely not flipping burgers!” He laughs. “I miss my mom and my brother, even though he turned out to be one of them. Miss my buddies … Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t go back for any money, but I wouldn’t say I’m happy with the way everything is, you know?”
“Like what?”
“Like the fighting. You do it ’cause you have to, but that don’t make it right. You can’t just kick back and relax like you used to. You’ve always got to be on the lookout. Llewellyn says you got to stay one step ahead of everybody else, ’cause the one guy you’re not watching is the one who’ll creep up behind you and kill you.”
“So what do you think about that? Is he right?”
“Suppose. I’m just tired of it, that’s all. But what’s happening here, what that Chris Ankin guy’s doing, that sounds like a better option to me. Llewellyn says Ankin’s gonna see all of us right in the end.”
Poor bastard, he really does believe everything he’s told. Then again, I think to myself as I look around this place, maybe I’m the one who’s wrong. He may have been a long way from the front line of battle, but Ankin, more than anyone else, has been in control from the start. He’s not like Hinchcliffe. Hinchcliffe was just someone who just happened to be in the right place at the right time and took advantage of what he found to force himself into power. Ankin is different. And to have kept control for so long through so much, he must have done the right thing by his people. There’s a world of difference between the organized, uniformed people here and Hinchcliffe’s army of a couple of hundred individual fighters. Johannson, Thacker, and many others have proved how tenuous positions of power have become, and yet this weak-looking, white-haired politician has outlasted them all.
Maybe Peter Sutton was wrong and our species can take a step back from the abyss? Who the hell am I kidding? I’ll believe it when I see it.
“It’ll take more than this bunch to make everything right again.”
“That’s the best part,” Swales says excitedly, “there is more than this bunch. That’s what Llewellyn thinks, anyway. He says there’s thousands more of them on the way to Norwich. Thousands of them!”
32
AN UNEXPECTEDLY COMFORTABLE NIGHT’S sleep on the floor in a quiet corner of the museum is rudely interrupted at first light. Despite the fact that the first thing I see is Llewellyn’s foul, scowling face glaring down at me, I immediately feel different today. Optimism is too strong a word, but there’s no denying that, unexpectedly, things look more hopeful this morning than they have in months. The illusion doesn’t last long, when I start coughing my guts up and I remember what Rona Scott told me. If really this does turn out to be the dawn of a brave new world, I’m probably not going to get to see very much of it.
Llewellyn is chaperoning me this morning. I manage to get outside to take a piss in the half inch of snow that’s fallen overnight, but before I’ve even finished shaking myself dry, he’s already dragging me back indoors. He seems uncharacteristically anxious as he herds me into a large, busy room on the ground floor of the museum and tells me to sit down and wait. I don’t have to wait long to find out why.
In a week that has been crammed with bizarre events, this takes the cake. The events of the last few days in particular have been unbelievably surreal, like a crazy, barely controlled chain reaction, and it feels like the more I try to shut myself off and pull away from the madness, the worse it gets. Being forced to contribute to Hinchcliffe’s fucked-up breeding program was bad enough, but even that paled into insignificance alongside the unspeakable things that Peter Sutton showed me underground. In the space of a couple of days I’ve been told I’m dying; I’ve watched Rufus, the closest thing I had to a friend, be killed in front of me for no reason other than Hinchcliffe’s spite and frustration; I’ve convinced myself I was going to be executed … and now this? Here I am, in a dust-covered museum cafe, sitting across a table from Chris Ankin. The Chris Ankin. The ex–government official who broadcast that message I heard so long ago: the call to arms for all us fighters who, until he dared to speak out, had felt persecuted and alone. The man whose face I saw on a computer screen in the back of a van when my life changed direction again. The man who, by word of mouth alone it seemed, managed to coordinate an invisible army that marched into Unchanged settlements and stirred them up so much that they imploded and tore themselves apart. The Chris Ankin. The closest thing to a true leader we’ve had. Until now I’d never actually stopped to think about how much I owe this man. Without his words I’d have remained alone and unprepared for the onset of war. Without his planning and foresight I’d never have made it back into the city, I’d probably never have learned to hold the Hate, and, most importantly, I would never have shared those last few precious minutes with Lizzie and Ellis. It seems that whenever I cross paths with Ankin, everything changes. Today that makes me feel nervous. Why is he here, and why does he suddenly want to talk to me?
As usual I’m like a fifth wheel and the longer I have to wait, the worse I feel. Right now Ankin is busy talking to someone. The guy crouching down next to him is clean-shaven and relatively smartly dressed. It’s strange; I look around at the people who arrived here with Ankin and in some ways it’s almost as if I’m looking at another race, another species even. Without realizing I’m doing it I make a pathetic attempt to straighten my long, straggly hair with the tips of my fingers, as if it’s going to make a difference. These people are far better organized than anyone else I’ve seen since the war ended, better fed and fitter, too. Most of them wear something resembling a uniform, they have a clear command structure that appears to work, they are regimented and controlled, and they each have clearly defined jobs to do. In comparison to the military forces I remember from before the war, even the Unchanged, they’re still amateurish and ill disciplined, but they appear so much more capable than anyone else I’ve come across since the bombs were dropped. I thought that what I’d seen in Lowestoft was as close to civilization as we were ever going to get, but these people are on another level altogether. They remind me of the ragtag, cobbled-together armies I used to see in TV footage from war-torn African and Middle Eastern conflicts a long time ago: the warlord ruled militias that used to butcher, rape, and pillage their way through starving, nomadic populations, diverting aid cash and using drug money to keep themselves stocked up with weapons. Except,
