“That’s about right.”
“But there must be something we can do?”
Tracey, the doctor, gets to her feet. “I know exactly what we can do,” she says, picking up a bludgeon. “We kill the fucker.” She has to get past me to get out. She tries to push me aside, but the shack’s so narrow and tightly packed that she can’t get through. I try to hold her back, but she shoves me away.
“You don’t understand—”
“No, you don’t understand,” she yells at me. “There are almost thirty of us and just one of him. We get out there now and we kill him.”
“Then that will make you just as bad as him.”
“So? It’s a necessity, McCoyne. We have to do it to survive. There’s a world of difference between killing just one man to save us and all the thousands of innocent deaths that people like him are responsible for.”
“Is there?”
“Of course there is.”
“So what do you think I am?”
“What?”
“Me and Peter Sutton, how do you think we managed to survive aboveground for so long?”
“Peter told us,” she answers. “He said he could fake the anger and make them think he was like them. He said you were the same. Peter risked everything for us.”
“There’s no disputing that, but he wasn’t completely honest with any of you.”
There’s a ripple of discontent when I dare say something negative about Sutton.
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re like them,” I tell her. “Me and Peter, we’re the Haters, just like Hinchcliffe out there, and all those other bastards that have hounded you and made your lives hell for the last year.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true,” Joseph says. “I saw it for myself before I found Peter. I knew Danny from way back. He was a killer. He learned how to suppress the urge to fight.”
The space around me grows in size, and I sense people pushing themselves back against the walls to put the maximum possible distance between us.
“Then as soon as we’ve finished with this Hinchcliffe, we’ll come back for you,” Tracey sneers.
“Probably not worth the effort. I’ll be dead soon anyway.”
“Good.”
I’m about to speak again when someone screams. I turn around and look back along the pier toward the shore. I can see Hinchcliffe just inside the arcade building now, coming this way.
“Thing is,” I tell them, “whatever it was that caused the divide between us, it doesn’t matter now. I don’t know why it happened, and I doubt any of us ever will. All that matters now is what happens next. We’ve got to abandon all this us-and-them bullshit, because we’re all that’s left of the human race. You can either put a stop to the killing today or keep going at it until we’re all dead.”
“Which part of this don’t you understand, you fucking moron?” Tracey asks. “If we don’t kill him, he’ll kill us.”
Farther down the pier, Hinchcliffe is checking each of the wooden buildings in turn, kicking down doors and hunting for the Unchanged.
“The first person I killed,” I tell all of them, shouting to make myself heard over their nervous voices and the sound of the wind battering this exposed shack, “was my father-in-law. And do you know why I did it? You want to know what made me kill Harry and the hundreds of other people I went on to kill after him? I killed them all because I thought that if I didn’t, they’d kill me. Do you understand that? People like me killed people like you because we thought we had to do it before you killed us. Does that make any sense? It doesn’t to me. Almost a year further on and I still don’t understand why. But does it sound familiar? It should, because you’re saying exactly the same thing now. Kill him before he kills us. It doesn’t have to be this way. You can put an end to it today.”
The door at the other end of this narrow building flies open, and Gary, the badly scarred man, rushes outside, armed with a length of metal tubing. He runs back toward Hinchcliffe to try to head him off, but the poor naive bastard is still shackled with the uncertainty of being Unchanged. Instead of immediately attacking, he stops short and wildly swings at Hinchcliffe, who deflects one glancing blow, then catches the end of the pipe as it comes toward him again. Even injured he has more strength than this single, malnourished Unchanged. With each of them holding on to one end of the metal tubing, Hinchcliffe uses his weight and power advantage to swing Gary around into the railings along the edge of the pier. His body visibly rattles, and he screams with agony, then drops to his knees. Before anyone else can react, Hinchcliffe lays into him, beating him to a bloody pulp with ferocious speed, then lifting up his battered frame and pushing it over the side of the pier, down into the freezing waves below.
“Get them out of here, Joseph,” I yell as panic spreads quickly through the group. He does as I say, herding the rest of the Unchanged as a single mass out through the door at the far end of this narrow space, then trying to usher them back down along the other side of the wooden buildings. I instinctively check that the children are safe. A woman is carrying Peter Sutton’s grandson, and someone else has got Chloe on his back. I see the boy Jake’s head deep in the middle of the throng.
“Keep moving and keep safe,” I yell after them. They’re all that’s left now.
I exit through the other door. Hinchcliffe’s staggering toward this building. I block his way forward, hoping to buy the others a little time. He stops and rocks back on his heels, panting hard.
“Just let them go, Hinchcliffe,” I tell him, knowing my words will probably have little effect. “What difference does it make to you whether they live or die? There are so few of them left. There are so few of us left. Just let them go.”
“You know I can’t do that,” he says, lurching closer. “You shouldn’t be able to, either.”
He clumsily tries to sidestep me, but I move, too, and he just slumps against me, exhausted, his sudden weight almost knocking me over. He tries to push past, but I won’t let go.
“Are you scared of them? Do you think a few starved Unchanged are that much of a threat to you? Christ, Hinchcliffe, some of them are just kids.”
“It makes no difference.”
“Just walk away. I’ll come with you. We’ll go wherever you want. Start again somewhere like you said. Let’s just end this today.”
“I’ll end it, Danny, and I don’t need your help anymore.”
“But can’t you see? The fighting is the cause of all of this, not the solution.”
Hinchcliffe grabs at my collar and flips me over, slamming me down onto my back and winding me. I can hardly breathe. He starts to move away, and I roll over and reach out to try to catch him but I’m too slow and I watch helplessly as he strides farther down the pier. I crawl over to the handrail and pull myself back up onto my feet. Up ahead, Hinchcliffe takes my pistol from his pocket and starts firing indiscriminately at the Unchanged. Two shots go nowhere; the third hits one of them in the leg. A woman collapses in agony. Suddenly inspired, he surges toward her without mercy. She’s still alive when he reaches her, but within seconds she’s dead, finished by the remaining bullets and a volley of savage kicks to the side of her head.
Through the snow I see the Unchanged group has split. Most have continued to move back toward the shore with Joseph, but several others have panicked and gone the other way and are now hopelessly isolated. In confusion they run toward the far end of the pier, and Hinchcliffe heads after them, half staggering, half sprinting, unbelievably managing to somehow find enough energy to keep moving. He tackles the closest of them, an elderly man with long yellow-white hair, pulling his legs out from under him. He smashes his face repeatedly into the metal base of an observation point, continuing long after he’s dead.
I drag myself along the railings toward him. There are massive holes in the decking here—huge chunks missing like they’ve been bitten away by some enormous creature—and I can hear the pier creaking and groaning beneath me, its weakened metal struts straining the farther we get from the shore. By the time I’ve managed to make it across, Hinchcliffe is already attacking another man, smothering his screaming face with his hand. He’s distracted by the intensity of the kill, and I throw myself at him. He lets go of the man’s corpse and turns on me, using his bulk to force me back into the farthest corner of the pier, then tightening his grasp around my throat. My feet slip and slide on the wet boards and I can’t get a grip. I can hardly breathe. His eyes lock onto mine.
“I’ve had enough of you, you useless cunt. You’re worse than they are.”
