“Volunteering,” McCoyne said quickly. Llewellyn screwed up his face and looked him up and down.
“Suppose you’ll do,” Llewellyn said, throwing him toward the back of his truck before reaching out and grabbing someone else, “and you, and you…”
McCoyne climbed into the empty truck and found himself a dark spot at the very back of the vehicle, where he could watch the others and keep all his options open. He pulled his knees up tight to his chest to try to get warm. Get out there, he told himself, get what you can, then get back.
* * *
The drive away from town was long, slow, and disorienting. Conversation in the back of the windowless truck was sparse, and the time dragged painfully. It reminded McCoyne of another journey he’d taken like this, many months ago now, almost a year. Back then his eventual destination had been a gas chamber, from which he’d barely managed to escape with his life. What the hell was he going to see when they opened up the back of the truck today? He felt bad—an uncomfortable mix of travel sickness and nerves. Or was it more than that? He knew that every mile they drove in this direction took them deeper into the deadlands with its poisoned, radiation-filled air.
The journey ended abruptly. There were sudden murmurs from the people all around McCoyne, some of whom he could hear getting up and moving about. He stayed where he was, fingering the hilt of one of the knives he always carried attached to his belt, just in case.
The roller-shutter at the back of the truck was thrown open, flooding the inside of the vehicle with unexpectedly bright light.
“Out,” one of the fighters ordered, and the volunteers did exactly as they were told. McCoyne was the last to move. He jumped down onto gravel, then looked around and grinned, caught off guard by his unexpectedly bizarre surroundings.
“What the hell’s this?”
In front of him was a picnic area and an iced-over, duck-free duck pond, to his right a children’s playground.
“I came here with the family once,” a stooping, painfully thin man next to him whispered, grinning wryly. “Place has gone downhill since then…”
The group of volunteers and their fighter escort were stood in the first of several immense, interconnected, fieldlike parking lots. McCoyne shielded his eyes from the hazy sun and looked around. Behind him was a huge billboard covered with faded pictures of smiling kids’ faces, cartoon characters, roller coasters and rides, and other things he’d hadn’t thought about in what felt like an eternity. A theme park. He’d heard of this one. He’d even talked about bringing the kids here once with Lizzie, but he’d managed to get out of it because, as he’d told her at the time, it was too far from home, and the entrance prices were obscene, and then he’d have had to pay to feed them all, then the kids would have wanted to go to the gift shop and …
“Hey, you!” an angry voice shouted in his direction. McCoyne spun around and realized he was on his own. The others were already shuffling away along an overgrown path that led through a copse of bare trees, deeper into the park. “Stop fucking daydreaming,” the fighter yelled at him. “You’re here to hunt, not fucking sightsee.”
McCoyne ran after the others, legs already aching, struggling to catch up. He tried to focus on the job at hand, but it was all but impossible in these unexpectedly surreal surroundings. He crossed an artificially rickety wooden bridge over a murky stream, then caught his breath with surprise when he looked down and saw a frozen figure standing ankle deep in the water. It was a mannequin—a caricature of an old-time gold prospector with fading paint and exaggerated, cartoonlike features—but the plastic man still looked in better shape than he felt.
Ahead of the group, the silent heart of the theme park began to appear through the trees. Initially all they could see was the tops of the tallest, long-since-silent rides, the occasional scaffolding tower or the curving arc of a stretch of roller-coaster track. Being in a place like this was unexpectedly painful. It wasn’t so much that it made McCoyne think about who and what he’d lost; rather, it made him realize what he’d never get back again. When finding the basic necessities to survive each day was such a struggle, would there ever be a time when places like this fulfilled a useful function again? Playing, laughing, time-wasting … it had been a long time since anyone had done anything even remotely pleasurable, and he thought it would be another age before any of them did again.
The group stopped in an open courtyard at the edge of the theme park proper, crowding dutifully around Llewellyn as if he were their tour guide. There were numerous buildings around, small and insignificant beneath the erstwhile attractions, all done up in a mock gold-rush style. The prospecting theme felt strangely appropriate. Directly in front of them was a large, odd-shaped concrete building with a faux-rock fascia and a large sign hung across its frontage announcing simply THE MINE. Its door had been roughly boarded up, like the windows of the house in a zombie movie where survivors were hiding, gaps between the overlapping planks for undead arms to reach through. McCoyne couldn’t tell whether the boards were real or just there for effect.
Llewellyn, wearing a face mask and with a rifle now slung over his shoulder, flanked by similarly masked fighters on either side, addressed the volunteers.
“Hinchcliffe figures we’ll find good pickings here,” he announced, voice muffled. “Places like this have been overlooked, not looted over and over like the towns. If you don’t bring me back as much stuff as you can carry, then you will be officially designated as being fucking useless and I will leave you here to rot. Understand?” No response, but no arguments either. Llewellyn continued. “And the quicker you move, the less chance there is you’ll get sick. There’s probably all kinds of nasty shit still hanging around in the air here.”
Llewellyn’s second comment got more of a reaction than the first. Even the vaguest mention of radiation and poisoning was enough to cause concern in the underclass ranks. McCoyne couldn’t understand it. Why were they so stupid? He knew from what he’d seen and heard that Hinchcliffe certainly was no fool, so would he really have sent them here to collect poisoned food from a poisoned place? It was just scare tactics, designed to increase the tightness of the stranglehold grip he already had on the rest of the population. Was Danny the only one who could see him for what he was? Maybe they all realized but, like him, had chosen to keep their mouths shut rather than risk incurring Llewellyn’s wrath?
The group split up. McCoyne kept his distance from everyone else, deliberately keeping to himself. If he didn’t collect enough stuff today, he was a dead man.
“One hour maximum,” Llewellyn shouted, his voice echoing eerily across the empty theme park. “Tear this place apart, then let’s get out of here.”
* * *
More than three-quarters of the allotted hour gone and McCoyne knew he was in trouble. His bag was only slightly less empty than when he’d started hunting. He’d wasted time mooching around an abandoned zoo, trying to work out what each of the various piles of odd-shaped, oversized bones and mangy scraps of fur had once been. For a place Hinchcliffe had assumed would have provided rich pickings, there was hardly anything here. He had been right in one respect; the theme park hadn’t been trashed and torn apart like everywhere else. It was as if the food and supplies here had simply disappeared.
Use your brain, he told himself, trying to stay calm and not panic. Think logically. He walked under a dried-up log flume, heading for a long and narrow wooden hut that spanned the space between where people would have lined up to get on the ride and where they would have gotten off—the place they’d have been slowly channeled through to buy low-quality, overpriced souvenir photographs of themselves screaming, and presented in tacky cardboard frames or printed onto mouse mats, key rings, hats, and mugs. None of this was helping. Put yourself in their shoes, he thought. Try to remember what it used to be like. I’d have gotten off this ride and I’d have been cold and wet and hungry … He looked around and noticed the side wall of another shack facing out onto a lake with dark green, almost black water, which, he presumed, would have supplied the flume. Was this a cafe or something similar? There was no one else scavenging around here. This was his last chance. Christ, he hoped he’d open the door and find a previously undiscovered stock of food in this hut. Anything would do. Just something for him to hand in to Llewellyn …
McCoyne was about to force the door of the building when he stopped. He could smell something. It stank like raw sewage. Was it just the stagnant lake? He leaned over an ornamental wall and peered down. On the muddy bank below him he could see (and smell) a glistening heap of shit being slowly washed away by the lapping water. It made his sensitive stomach turn, but he managed to keep control and not throw up. This didn’t make any sense. It looked like human waste, and there was far too much of it to be from just one person, so was this from an
