incredibly, these people seem less aggressive. They’re armed to the teeth, and each person here (me included) has probably carried out more killings and been involved in more atrocities than any of those so-called freedom fighters I remember, but now they seem calm, assured, and in complete control.
The man talking to Ankin stands up and disappears, and Ankin finally turns his attention to me. I feel my pulse quicken.
“Danny McCoyne,” he says. “Llewellyn’s told me a lot about you.”
“Has he?” I reply quickly, silently hoping that the bit he hasn’t heard about me includes the time I spent underground with more than thirty Unchanged recently without killing them.
“He says you’re a useful man to have around.”
“He’s got a strange way of showing it. I thought he was going to kill me yesterday.”
Ankin smiles broadly. “We all have to keep our cards close to our vests these days, Danny. Your friend Hinchcliffe wouldn’t have taken it well if he knew Llewellyn was working for me.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I tell him, “and by the way, in spite of what you might have heard, Hinchcliffe’s definitely no friend of mine.”
“You know him well, though.”
“Better than most, I suppose. Not through choice.”
“I understand that. Kind of an awkward character, by all accounts.”
“Kind of a cunt, actually.”
“Indeed. Anyway, back to you. I’m sure you’ve got more than a few questions you’d like to ask about what you’ve seen.”
He smiles at me—a glimpse of an obviously fake and well-rehearsed politician’s smile from way back—and he studies my face intently. The power of his stare and his undeniably authoritarian presence is such that everything else seems to fade away and lose focus until it feels like we’re the only people left in the room.
“I’d like to know where you came from and where you’ve been. Why’s it taken you so long to get here?”
He thinks before answering, still staring at me, still smiling. “Tell me, Danny,” he finally says, leaning forward and, again like an old-time politician, avoiding answering my question by asking another of his own, “how much do you know about this strange new world of ours?”
“Not a lot. I know some of what’s happening around Lowestoft, not much else.”
“That’s about as much as I’d expect. Don’t you think it’s strange how much things have changed over the last year or so? I’m guessing that this time last year you were probably stuck in a rut like most of the rest of us, just going through the motions and getting through life as best you could, one day at a time.”
How right he is …
“Now you can do pretty much what you want, when you want, can’t you? Your priorities have completely changed, of course, and you have to work harder to get the basics like food and water and such stuff, but you’re your own master now. You’re less restricted and held back than you used to be.”
Apart from the specter of Hinchcliffe that looms over me constantly, he’s right again, although he’s not telling me anything I don’t already know.
“But there’s an obvious paradox here, isn’t there?” he announces.
“Is there?”
“Yes. Your world’s suddenly gotten a lot smaller, hasn’t it? A year ago you could switch on your TV or go online and you could find out in seconds what was happening pretty much anywhere around the world. You could send an e-mail or pick up the phone and talk instantly to people in other countries.”
“Right, and now we only know what’s happening immediately around us,” I interrupt, anticipating what I think he’s going to say next. “Anything could be happening elsewhere, but if we can’t see it or hear it and we can’t walk there or drive to it, we probably wouldn’t ever know anything about it. All the borders and barriers have been broken down, but we can’t get close enough to them to get over to the other side.”
“Exactly,” he says, leaning back in his chair, wagging his finger at me. “Llewellyn was right about you. You really do get it!”
That makes me feel uneasy again. I’ve forgotten how I’m supposed to respond to compliments. These days, on the very rare occasions someone says something positive about you, it’s inevitably followed by either a request for help or an attempt on your life. I’m hoping Ankin’s going to ask me to help him, because if things get heavy around here, I’m fucked.
“What point are you making?” I ask.
“Tell me how you got here,” he replies, still managing to avoid my questions.
“What, how I got to Norwich?” I ask stupidly. He shakes his head.
“No, how you got through the war. How you managed to survive for this long.”
“Just did what I had to, I guess. I just kept fighting.”
“There are plenty of people who just kept fighting, and most of them are dead. What makes you any different?”
“Luck of the draw,” I answer, not sure I want to give anything else away.
“I don’t believe you. There’s got to be more to it than that. Look at what happened to the Brutes—now that’s the result of just fighting, and you’re clearly no Brute, Danny.”
“I caught a few breaks, had some close calls…”
Ankin’s clearly growing tired of my bullshit.
“Llewellyn says you can hold the Hate.”
“For what it’s worth,” I answer. “Not much call for it these days, now the Unchanged are gone.”
“True, but having that ability says something about the kind of person you are. It shows that you’re less impulsive than most, that you’ve got self-control and willpower. Tell me, Danny, where did you learn to do it?”
“Came across a guy called Sahota. Or rather, he came across me.”
“Ahh … Sahota! I had a feeling you were one of his.”
“One of his?”
“From his ‘reeducation’ programs.”
“Is that what he called them?”
“So you were sent into one of the refugee camps?”
My mind suddenly fills with unwanted memories of those nightmare days last summer.
“I’ve never been through anything like it,” I tell him. “It was incredible … horrific…”
“Even so, you did it,” he says, “and you survived it. No matter how bad an ordeal it was, you managed to get through it and come out the other side, and in relatively decent shape, too, considering what happened. Seems to me, Danny, that if you managed to get out of that almighty mess in one piece, then Llewellyn’s right, you’re definitely someone worth having on our side.”
His smooth talk is really starting to unnerve me.
“Look, just cut the crap, what do you want?”
Ankin grins at me and avoids answering yet another question.
“We were just talking about how much the world’s changed, and how it feels like everything’s become smaller and more confined. Our needs and priorities have changed, too. I think that as a race we’ve reached a pivotal point in our development and—”
“Spare me the bullshit and get to the point.”
He sighs. “I think we’ve reached a make-or-break moment. You told me that all you know now is Lowestoft. Well, let me broaden your horizons a little.”
“Go on.”
“When the enemy refugee camps imploded, then exploded, much of the country became uninhabitable. Virtually every major city center was destroyed, most of them completely vaporized, some by us, some by them. As you’d expect, the radiation and pollution have spread since then. Even more people have died, and even more of the land has been contaminated. I’ve been trying to coordinate what’s left and ascertain how much of the country is actually still inhabitable.”
“And how much is that?”
“Less than you might have thought. It’s pretty much just the extremities now. Apart from Edinburgh and Glasgow, much of Scotland escaped the worst of it, and parts of North Wales, too. Cornwall and some parts of Devon are livable, but pretty much everything else, from Leeds and Manchester down all the way to the south
