Hinchcliffe. I don’t know whether this place is the beginning of something new or the very end of everything. Either way, it’s not looking good.”
I start moving toward the door. I’m freezing and tired of wasting my breath. Hinchcliffe won’t listen to anything I’ve got to say. I’m about to open it when he speaks again.
“You’ve met this Ankin,” he says, getting up and walking toward me. “Tell me, Danny, would things be any different if he was in charge here?”
“I can’t answer that. What does it matter, Hinchcliffe?”
I reach down for the handle again. He grabs my wrist and won’t let go.
“Don’t,” he says. “You’re staying with me, Danny. I still need you. You’re not going anywhere.”
39
THE LONGER HINCHCLIFFE WAITS and does nothing, the more likely it is that Ankin will be forced to make a move. Maybe that’s what he’s hoping?
Hinchcliffe’s tactics—if any of what’s happening now is actually planned—are strange, almost unreadable. Unable to get out of the building, I head up onto the roof of the courthouse again and use the binoculars he’s left up there to scan the streets below. They’re virtually deserted. Most of Hinchcliffe’s remaining fighters have been ordered to either congregate around this building or guard the gates and the food stores. There are about a hundred of them downstairs, armed with every last weapon they can lay their hands on. Is he really planning to defend his territory like this? Sticks and stones against tanks and guns?
There’s a quiet buzzing sound that steadily increases in volume. I can see Ankin’s plane in the distance now, approaching quickly from the general direction of Norwich, here to report back to Ankin and to whip the crowds around town into a nervous frenzy. There’s no doubt it’ll work. The noise coming from the fighters below me begins to grow louder and more fractious. These men want to fight, but what can they do when their perceived enemy is out of reach a couple of thousand feet above them?
I feel exposed up here. I go back inside through Hinchcliffe’s chamber, then look for him in the courtroom. I hear his voice echoing through the otherwise empty corridors as he barks orders at his fighters, suddenly sending groups of them off in different directions. I creep closer to the main entrance and peer outside, and there I see him, right out in front of the building, coordinating the chaos.
As I watch, a car screeches around the corner and pulls up in front of the courthouse. Curtis gets out.
“The whole fucking place is surrounded, Hinchcliffe,” he says. Hinchcliffe says nothing, but plenty of other questions come from elsewhere in the crowd.
“Surrounded by what? How many are there?”
“Someone said tanks. Have those fuckers got tanks?”
“Should have stuck with Llewellyn—”
“Defend the positions I’ve told you to defend,” Hinchcliffe says, his voice suddenly louder than the rest. “Food stocks, the gates, this building.”
“What’s the fucking point?” someone stupidly asks. “We’re outnumbered. There’s ten times as many people on the other side of the barrier, and that’s before—”
The fighter doesn’t finish making his point. I watch from around the side of the door as Curtis drags him out into the open and attacks him with his machete. Taken by surprise, the other fighter drops to the ground. He raises his arm to protect himself, but Curtis keeps chopping down regardless, slicing his flesh and virtually removing the man’s arm, then rams his boot down onto his chest and starts to hack at his head and neck. I step back into the shadows and disappear into a room off the main entrance corridor. There’s a street-level window, and I watch as a range of reactions spreads through the fighters with lightning speed. Someone jumps Curtis, smacking him across the back of the legs with a metal bar and dropping him to his knees. Someone else then attacks Curtis’s attacker. Then another fighter wades through the crowd to get to Curtis’s car. Someone else cuts him off and tries to take the car for himself. Others turn and run for cover—
I press myself flat against the wall as I see Hinchcliffe start to slowly slip back into the courthouse. As the chaos outside quickly increases in ferocity, spreading like a brush fire, he quietly reenters the building and shuts and bolts the door behind him. I hold my breath and stay perfectly still, listening to his footsteps moving along the corridor outside this room, waiting until I’m sure he’s gone.
Time to get out of here.
This is my last chance.
I need to get to the house, get whatever stuff I can, then leave here and never look back.
40
AT THE END OF another corridor, a broken sign hanging from the ceiling points toward a fire exit hidden behind an untidy stack of boxes and crates, most of them empty. I fight my way through the rubbish, then force the door open and get out of the building, desperate to disappear before Hinchcliffe comes looking for me or the sudden violence outside escalates further. I follow the metal railings around the side of the courthouse, passing Llewellyn’s impaled corpse, running through the massive puddle of blood that’s seeped out of his body and not giving the stupid fucker a second glance. I pause at the back of the building to check that no one’s around, then sprint away. Once again I’m thankful for the steroids that Ankin’s doctor pumped me full of earlier today. If I hadn’t been drugged up, I’d never have been able to run like this. No doubt I’ll pay for it eventually when the effects wear off, but right now it doesn’t matter.
I try to follow the main road down toward the south gate, keeping the ocean to my left, but another sudden swell of trouble in a side street forces me to change direction. I’m close to the redbrick shopping center, one of the sites where Hinchcliffe stockpiles food and supplies. It’s in the process of being ransacked. Fighters scramble through debris, desperate to get their hands on whatever they can before someone else takes it. Some of them are attacked as they fight their way back out into the open. A gang of Switchbacks corner one. He manages to batter one of them, but three more take him down, blades flashing in the early morning light, bludgeons pounding him into a pulp. Men still loyal to Hinchcliffe try for a while to stop the looting, but they’re soon overcome and are either battered into submission or forced to switch sides. I get a glimpse inside one of the food buildings through an open door as I run past. It’s virtually empty now. Has everything already been taken, or was there never anything there?
Lowestoft is falling apart around me—splintering and fragmenting as I watch. Until now the specter of Hinchcliffe has loomed large over this place, and everyone has been in his shadow, too afraid to do anything that might risk incurring his wrath. Today his dominance has been challenged without even a single shot being fired between the fighters in the compound and Ankin’s army outside the town, and everything is rapidly beginning to fall apart. The ease with which it’s happened is terrifying. It’s almost as if Ankin wanted it to be this way.
Another left turn leads me back toward the coast and the main road again. The streets are filling with activity, and word of what’s happening seems to have spread with lightning speed. The people I see are uniformly panicked and scared, unsure what they should do. Some are simply barricading themselves into the buildings where they live, blocking up those doors and windows that are still accessible from outside. Others are preparing to defend themselves. Most have resorted to the language of the moment: violence and hate. More small mobs have appeared on street corners armed with clubs and blades and whatever else they can find. Some of these groups of people merge; others turn on each other in sudden, desperate fights over territory and weapons.
I can finally see the south gate up ahead, but there’s already a large crowd there trying to get out. A couple of fighters still loyal to Hinchcliffe try to push the bulk of the people back into the compound, but several more of them are doing the exact opposite—frantically trying to get the gate open. A couple of smaller, more athletic- looking people are scrambling up the sides of the trucks that form the barrier and are throwing themselves over.
A fight breaks out in the middle of the crowd in front of the gate. One man—a young, aggressive bastard I’ve
