Them or Us

31

LLEWELLYN AND CHANDRA ARE whisked away, and Healey returns to the van. I’m left alone with Swales. He seems almost as bemused by events as I am, and I get the distinct impression he’s here just to make up the numbers. We watch from a ground-floor window as the new arrivals quickly set up camp. Some build fires and erect temporary shelters. Others are dispatched into what’s left of Norwich, presumably to look for fuel and supplies and anything else of value. They’re working together, no hint of aggression or any pecking order.

Swales notices a line forming outside a mess tent. He heads straight for it, and I follow him. We’re given a little food without question—some kind of bland, rice-based paste and a few thin crackers—and a mug of coffee each and left to our own devices again. It’s not great tasting, but it’s not half-cooked dog, either, and I manage to swallow a few mouthfuls. We sit on a bench in a sheltered alcove just outside the museum building, out of the way of everyone else but still close enough to watch. It’s funny, less than an hour ago Swales was definitely one of “them,” but now we’re thick as thieves, relatively comfortable in each other’s company because there’s someone new in town, neither of us having any immediate desire to mix with these strangers.

There’s controlled activity all around us still as these people, whoever they are, continue to establish their makeshift base. Each person is carrying out their allotted task without question or complaint, people who were obviously fighters working alongside people who obviously weren’t … it’s a pale imitation, but it’s almost like things used to be. This is like what I saw in Southwold, albeit on a much grander scale. So what’s the connection? Are they all stealing from Hinchcliffe?

“You gonna eat that?” Swales asks, nudging me with his elbow and nodding at my practically untouched food.

“You want it?”

He snatches the plate and starts scooping up the rice paste with clumsy fingers, smearing nearly as much of it over his face as he manages to get into his mouth.

“Good?”

“Good,” he answers, wolfing down a cracker. “I’ll eat anything, me,” he continues, showering me with crumbs.

“So I can see.”

Swales obviously isn’t the sharpest tool in the box, but his strength and size (and no doubt his track record and ongoing appetite for violence) have helped him become one of Hinchcliffe’s “elite.” He’s strong, impressionable, and, I expect, easily manipulated—perfect fighter fodder.

“So what do you think about all this, then?” he asks.

That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. These days it seems that something happens every few minutes that skews my perspective on everything again. Everything feels fluid. Nothing sits still.

“Depends what ‘all this’ is, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t get you.”

“First I thought we were out plane spotting, then I thought Llewellyn was going to kill me, and now I’m sitting having lunch with half an army. I’ll be honest with you, Swales, I don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on anymore.”

“I got told nothing. Llewellyn said he’d got a job for me, that’s all. Didn’t know nothing about all this.”

“So what do you think about it all?”

Swales has a naïveté and innocence that may well prove to be his undoing. He talks candidly, barely even thinking about what he’s saying. Still, that probably makes him more honest and reliable than most of the backstabbing bastards Hinchcliffe surrounds himself with.

“Got to be a good thing, ain’t it?”

“Suppose.”

“This is like things used to be.”

“I guess.”

He pauses to eat more food. Then, when his second plate’s almost clear, he speaks again.

“You know what I used to do for a job, Danny?”

“No.”

“I used to flip burgers ’cause that was the only job I could find. There’s plenty about the old times I miss—”

“But not flipping burgers?”

“Definitely not flipping burgers!” He laughs. “I miss my mom and my brother, even though he turned out to be one of them. Miss my buddies … Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t go back for any money, but I wouldn’t say I’m happy with the way everything is, you know?”

“Like what?”

“Like the fighting. You do it ’cause you have to, but that don’t make it right. You can’t just kick back and relax like you used to. You’ve always got to be on the lookout. Llewellyn says you got to stay one step ahead of everybody else, ’cause the one guy you’re not watching is the one who’ll creep up behind you and kill you.”

“So what do you think about that? Is he right?”

“Suppose. I’m just tired of it, that’s all. But what’s happening here, what that Chris Ankin guy’s doing, that sounds like a better option to me. Llewellyn says Ankin’s gonna see all of us right in the end.”

Poor bastard, he really does believe everything he’s told. Then again, I think to myself as I look around this place, maybe I’m the one who’s wrong. He may have been a long way from the front line of battle, but Ankin, more than anyone else, has been in control from the start. He’s not like Hinchcliffe. Hinchcliffe was just someone who just happened to be in the right place at the right time and took advantage of what he found to force himself into power. Ankin is different. And to have kept control for so long through so much, he must have done the right thing by his people. There’s a world of difference between the organized, uniformed people here and Hinchcliffe’s army of a couple of hundred individual fighters. Johannson, Thacker, and many others have proved how tenuous positions of power have become, and yet this weak-looking, white-haired politician has outlasted them all.

Maybe Peter Sutton was wrong and our species can take a step back from the abyss? Who the hell am I kidding? I’ll believe it when I see it.

“It’ll take more than this bunch to make everything right again.”

“That’s the best part,” Swales says excitedly, “there is more than this bunch. That’s what Llewellyn thinks, anyway. He says there’s thousands more of them on the way to Norwich. Thousands of them!”