Them or Us Page 10

  “Let it go, Ben,” Warner says, still surprisingly calm. “Does it really matter? Fact is, he’s here now and he’s got a simple choice to make. He can play ball and follow our rules, or he can fuck off and keep walking. If he’s as cold, hungry, and miserable as he looks, I think he’ll do what he’s told.”

  “I will,” I say quickly, sounding deliberately pathetic. “I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Fair enough, then,” Warner says, picking up his pen again and chewing thoughtfully on the end of it. “The first rule you need to know is that it’s one day’s work here for one meal and one night’s shelter. You work hard and you keep working until you’re told to stop and you’ll get fed. Any slacking and you’ll get fuck all.”

  “Sounds fair.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, but you get the idea.”

  “Okay.”

  “Second rule: Any problems here, you come and see me. Understand?”

  “Understand.”

  “You don’t try to sort things out yourself, right?”

  “Right.”

  Warner leans back in his chair and continues to watch me for a few uncomfortable seconds longer.

  “You don’t look like you’ll last the day,” he says. Insolent bastard.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Right, then,” he announces. “Get him out to the others, Ben, and find him something to do.”

  9

  FUCKING HINCHCLIFFE. THIS WAS never part of the deal. The light’s poor and I have no way of telling the time, but I feel like I’ve been working here for hours now. The time is dragging and I’m fucked—completely exhausted—but I don’t dare stop and show it. I’m not interested in the promise of a meal (I’ll take their food, but I’m not hungry—I’ll end up adding it to my stocks back at the house), but I need to keep up the illusion and find out as much as possible about what’s happening here. I just want an easy life, and that means putting up with a day’s hard work to try to keep Hinchcliffe happy.

  He’s got good reason to be suspicious. Something’s not right here. All this “one meal for one day’s work” bullshit doesn’t ring true. They’re definitely starting to play from a different rule book here in Southwold, but I don’t know what they’re hoping to achieve. Maybe John Warner’s got Lowestoft in his sights and he’s trying to build a platform here, a stepping-stone to taking over? Whatever’s going on, he must be personally benefiting from it somehow. No one does things “for the greater good” anymore. I need to find out what’s going on, and I need to be quick. Hinchcliffe will expect a report from me before nightfall.

  Days like today confirm that Hinchcliffe’s faith in me is badly misplaced. I’m not cut out for this subterfuge and bullshit. He sent me here to uncover what’s happening in Southwold, but so far all I’ve done is help dig a pit in a field well away from everything and everyone else. I’m working with a handful of other people—some look like fighters, others more underclass in their demeanor—but generally conversation is sparse and everyone keeps to themselves. From what I understand, this is just one of several work parties operating today. There are more people working just outside the town, trying to prepare fields for planting crops next year. They’re stupidly optimistic. There’s been so much smoke, radiation, and Christ knows what else thrown up into the atmosphere that I doubt anything will grow again for a long time. A while ago, before Hinchcliffe plucked me from the crowds, back when I was just another member of his scavenging pack, I saw the full extent of the damage the war has done: huge swathes of countryside that were completely dead, forests full of bleached, bare-branched trees, the corpses of thousands of birds littering the ground …

  “You asleep?”

  I shake my head and look around quickly. Not asleep, just daydreaming.

  “Sorry,” I say to the short, nervous-looking man who’s standing next to me with a shovel. He’s just finished filling a wheelbarrow with soil, and I’m supposed to be emptying it. He stares at me through glasses held together with tape. Long strands of greasy black hair blow wildly in the wind—the comb-over from hell whipping back and forth across his otherwise bald pate like a lid.

  “Focus on the job,” he whispers to me. “They won’t feed you otherwise.”

  He makes it sound like they’re fattening us up so they can eat us. I’ve got to get this sudden cannibal fixation out of my head, but where else is Warner getting all this food I keep hearing about, and why is he so eager to share it? I push the wheelbarrow over to the mound of earth that’s already been dug up and empty it out. The distance I’ve covered is short, but I’m exhausted and I take my time so I can get my breath back. I pause and look out over a low stone wall. I can see another working party in a field in the distance, and I decide I’m glad I ended up over here. Looks like the people there really drew the short straw. They’re plowing a huge, odd-shaped field by hand. There is a single horse, but it’s painfully thin, its ribs exposed like it’s swallowed a xylophone. It hardly seems able to support its own weight, let alone do anything else. It’s the first time I’ve seen a horse in as long as I can remember. I watch as it bends down, tired legs shaking, and begins nibbling at the weeds on the edge of a sandy pit. There are other pits dotted around, and I realize that I’m looking at what’s left of a golf course. The people working there don’t appear to have made much progress, and I’m not surprised. Even though it’s approaching the warmest part of the day, the soil here is still frozen hard.

  When I return to the others, almost everyone else is taking a break. As I was late to the party (and also because my dawdling and lack of effort have been noticed), I’ve been told in no uncertain terms to keep working. One other man is left working with me. He’s a strong, thickset fighter who continues digging at the bottom of the pit. His head glistens with sweat, his thinning silver hair slicked back. He looks like the type of man who’s done this kind of work all his life: solid and muscular but not particularly athletic. He’s hardly said two words since I’ve been here, but as the others are a safe distance away and I’ve got my back to them, I risk trying to make conversation. It’s not easy. He’s buried chest deep in the large, six-foot-square pit, and he digs constantly, only pausing to either swap his shovel for a pick or pass up another bucket of soil for me to dump into the wheelbarrow.

  “You been here long?”

  “Couple of weeks,” he says, barely acknowledging me. I try offering information to get him to talk.

  “I just got in this morning. Looks like a pretty well organized place.”

  “Warner does okay,” he says, grunting with effort as he shifts another bucketful of dirt.

  “You get much trouble here?”

  “Only from people who ask too many questions.”

  “Sorry.”

  A handful of sheep have wandered into the field and are milling around, as hungry looking as the horse. Their fleeces are patchy and mangy looking. They drop their heads and try to graze, but the grass is thin and unsatisfying. They barely look up when I push the wheelbarrow past them to empty it, too weak to run away. When I return to the pit I take a chance and try again.

  “Look, I heard what you said about asking questions, but what exactly are we doing out here?”

  “Digging a fucking big hole,” he answers, no hint of sarcasm in his voice.

  “I know that, but what’s it for?”

  He stops working momentarily and looks over the lip of the pit, back across the field. No one’s looking at us. They’re far enough away for him to feel comfortable enough to talk.

  “You won’t do yourself any favors if you keep asking questions like that, I already told you.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  He glances around again.

  “We lost a few people over the last couple of weeks,” he finally explains. “We would have burned them like usual, but Warner’s got this idea that things here have gone too far the wrong way. He said he wants them buried like we used to. Says if someone doesn’t start making a stand, we
’ll be living like savages again before we know it. We’ll end up going the way of the Brutes.”

  “So what happened?”

  “A few of them got sick…”

  “And the others?”

  “An accident,” he tells me reluctantly. “A handful of people got hurt, two were killed.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  I know instantly from the expression on his face that I’m pushing too hard.

  “You really need to stop talking and get working. I’ve told you all I’m going to.”

  10

  THE SUN HAS SET by the time I’m finally allowed to stop. I’m exhausted; weak with effort and numb with cold.

  The pit was finished a while back. Warner, his right-hand man Ben, and a crowd of others pulled a trailer loaded with corpses into the field. I tried to watch from a safe distance and I counted at least five bodies. They were wrapped up in blankets and black plastic, so it was impossible to tell who they were or how they’d died. I’m sure one of them must have been Casey, Hinchcliffe’s missing soldier. I even volunteered to help fill in the grave so I could get a better look. That was a mistake. A load more unnecessary effort and I couldn’t see a damn thing.

  Something’s definitely not right here. Warner and several others stood silently around the edge of the pit, watching the dead being buried and muttering and whispering to each other. I can’t make up my mind whether Warner is genuinely hankering back to prewar values of respect and dignity, or whether this was a mock burial to throw people off the scent. Is all of Southwold just an elaborate facade? Were they burying evidence and trying to hide their crimes?

  After they’d buried the bodies, a couple of us were sent into a copse of trees to fetch firewood, which we loaded onto the back of the trailer. Virtually everything’s dead, so it took less time than expected to gather up a large enough load. Other people arrived from the center of the village a while back to take the firewood away, and I’ve been called over into a nearby house with the rest of the group I was working with.

  The house is just a shell. There are a couple of faded photographs hanging on the walls, but those are the only traces I can see of the people who used to live here. Everything else—the furniture and all their belongings—has gone. A fire has been built in the hearth, and most of the others are already sitting around in its orange glow, trying to get warm, staring silently into the flames and waiting for a dented pot of water to boil. I find myself a space on the muddy, threadbare carpet and lean back against the wall. The floor’s cold but I’m too tired to care. What heat the fire provides is negated by icy drafts sneaking in through broken windows and the gaps beneath doors. I wrap my arms around myself to try to keep warm and look around at the six other people here with me.

  A large, straw-haired woman (Jill, I think, one of the work gang leaders) eventually gets up and makes hot drinks, which she hands around in chipped mugs. The wood on the fire crackles and pops as it burns. The chimney’s blocked, and the house is filling with smoke.

  “There’ll be food in the square outside the hotel later,” she says. “It won’t be much, but it should help keep the cold out.”

  “What about tomorrow?” the man with the tape-repaired specs and the comb-over asks, sitting opposite, leaning back against the wall.

  “No work here,” she answers, “but Warner will find you something. There’s always the fields.”

  “This place is well organized,” I say to her, taking advantage of a natural gap in the conversation to try to push for information again.

  “You just arrived?”

  “Got here this morning.”

  “Then you might want to think about staying. You’ll not find anything better around here. You’ll probably not find anything better anywhere.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because John Warner’s a good man. Because the things he’s planning are going to give people like us our lives back.”

  “People like us?”

  “People who don’t want to keep fighting for everything,” she explains. “The war’s over, and it’s time to start picking up the pieces. Time to stop all the killing and start remembering what it’s like to be human again.”

  She’s obviously never been to Lowestoft, I think to myself, trying not to smirk at the thought. I suddenly feel like I’ve wandered into a hippie commune from the sixties. Thing is, peace and love and all that bullshit never really counted for much, and as far as I can see, they count for absolutely nothing now. Remorse, compassion, regret … publicly demonstrate any of those emotions and you’re likely to get torn apart. Give someone an inch, and they’ll take ten miles. Hold your hand out to help someone, and some nasty bastard will tear your arm off and beat you to death with the bloody limb. That’s how it is in the rest of the world outside Southwold, anyway. Everyone I’ve so far seen is stuck in a rut—no one wants to go back to the lives they had before, but there are no new roles or routines for people to move into. The violence that brought us all to this point has become the norm.

  “So how’s Warner planning to change things, then?” I ask, genuinely curious. “By making you bury bodies? By getting people to plow fields where nothing’s ever gonna grow?”

  She shakes her head angrily. “If you don’t like it, just fuck off.”

  “It’s not that,” the silver-haired pit digger I spoke to earlier says from another corner of the room. “Warner’s just trying to pick the pieces up again and restore some order. It’s not so much what we’re doing, the important thing is the fact we’re doing it at all.”

  “Sorry,” I say quickly, backpedaling fast and realizing that publicly bad-mouthing Warner was a stupid move, “I didn’t mean to sound so critical. It’s just that it’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything like this. This is the first place I’ve been in weeks where people aren’t constantly at each other’s throats.”

  “We’ve all done more than our fair share of that,” Jill says quietly, swirling the dregs of her drink around in the bottom of her mug, then knocking it back, “and chances are we’ll all have to fight again someday.”

  “You don’t always have a choice,” someone else says, his face hidden by the darkness.

  “There’s always a choice,” Jill says. “That’s what John’ll tell you.”

  There’s an underlying tension and emotion in this woman’s voice that I didn’t expect. Am I the only one who’s picking up on it? She sounds like she genuinely supports Warner and believes in what he’s doing, whatever that might be. I guess the fact she’s here at all is proof that Warner’s chosen not to echo Hinchcliffe’s “management model.” Were she in Lowestoft, unless she was a particularly strong fighter or had a particular skill that Hinchcliffe needed, she’d most likely have been swallowed up with the rest of the underclass, not assuming any position of authority or worth. Could this place and its leader actually be for real? I’m still not convinced. How can Warner find enough food to feed around thirty people regularly when most people can’t even feed themselves?

  “Someone I passed on the road said something about another settlement? A little farther up the coast from here?”

  “That’ll be Lowestoft.”

  “What’s it like there?”

  “Don’t rightly know,” she answers quickly, “and I don’t want to know, either. Warner talks to the people in charge up there when he has to, but he ain’t got a lot of time for them. We keep our distance. He says they’re going about things the wrong way.”

  “How so?”

  “What’s your name, friend?”

  “Rufus,” I reply, remembering at the last second that I used a false name when I arrived this morning.

  “You ask a lot of questions,” she says. That’s the second time I’ve been warned today. I need to make it the last time, too.

  “Sorry. I’ve been on my own for too long. I’m just looking for somewhere to stop for a while, and if I’ll get a better deal here than in Lowestoft, then—”

  �
�It’s not about deals,” she interrupts angrily. “That’s the difference between us here and them up there. We’re small enough and sensible enough to work together. Up in Lowestoft Hinchcliffe keeps people dangling on pieces of string. He uses them. Tempts them with promises and stuff, then gets rid of them when they don’t do what he says. He’s the only one who benefits. It might work for him, but he’s a bastard, and we don’t want that here.”

  “Sounds bad.”

  “It is bad. Fighting has replaced thinking, if you hadn’t already noticed—and until people start thinking again, we’re all in trouble.”

  I drink more coffee to stop myself from speaking, sensing that I’ve pushed as far as I dare. She’s absolutely right about Hinchcliffe, and I’m precisely the kind of person she was talking about, sitting here in the cold and being manipulated by him from a distance while he sits in the relative comfort of his courthouse throne room. What choice do I have? Are things really any better here? Is Warner as honest and decent as she’s making him out to be? I doubt he is. I don’t think anyone really gives a damn about anyone else anymore. I certainly don’t. My gut feeling is still that Warner must be profiting from this somehow. Whatever he’s doing, he’s playing with fire. I wouldn’t want to risk doing anything that might piss Hinchcliffe off unless I had a foolproof contingency plan and an untraceable escape route mapped out first.

  “I’m off,” Jill says suddenly, getting up and walking toward the door. “Got things to do. See you all later.”

  Now my paranoia is going into overdrive. Have I said too much and is she going to see Warner to rat on me? Is it time to get out of here? I wait for a moment longer, staring into the embers of the fire, then glance up and see that the man with the comb-over and broken glasses is watching me from across the room. He looks away as soon as we make eye contact, and I know that I’ve aroused suspicions. I’ll shut up and keep to myself from now on. They’ll be watching me now. Despite all the bullshit I’ve just heard, I know that like everywhere else, no one here trusts anyone else.