Just outside the south gate, on the approach to the bridge, there’s an old man who lives in an ambulance. I pass him often when I go to or from the house, and I saw him on my way here today. He’s clearly not a fighter—he can barely stand—but he seems able to switch on an angry, violent facade at will, using it as a deterrent to anyone who approaches him. He’s well known, and Hinchcliffe’s fighters often taunt him for sport, trying to get him to react and bite back. He collects rocks and chucks them at anyone who gets too close. Fucker almost got me today. His ambulance is useless—just a battered wreck with a blown engine and only a single wheel remaining—but it seems to symbolize everything that’s wrong here. All around this place, people have taken things that used to matter and turned them into nothing. I’ve stayed here because this place looked like my best option, but maybe it’s time to reconsider. The longer the violence here continues, the further we seem to regress.
“What d’you want?” Curtis asks as he thunders out through the courthouse door, knocking into me.
“I’m supposed to be meeting Hinchcliffe.”
“He’s not here.”
“I know that, I—”
“Factory,” he says, shoving me out of the way.
Typical. I immediately start walking, hobbling the first few steps, my legs stiff and painful. It’s a relief at last to be moving. My body aches and my face is frozen, completely numb with cold.
It’s not far from the courthouse to the factory, but I always get distracted when I walk this route. I always end up imagining what this place was like before the war … seaside shops selling worthless junk and kitsch, pandering to the hordes of vacationers who used to come here (hard to believe this was a destination of choice once). There are the usual main street chain stores, supermarkets, banks, real estate agents, doctors’ and lawyers’ offices—all just shells now, their unlit signs the only indication of what they used to be. Now these wildly different buildings, those which are still safe enough to be used, all look the same. They’re dark and uninviting, stripped of anything of worth and occupied by squatters who stare out from the shadows. I just put my head down and keep moving.
* * *
“You seen Hinchcliffe?” I ask a remarkably fresh-faced fighter who’s on guard duty at the checkpoint at the end of the road into the factory. He’s slumped down on a chair inside what looks like half a garden shed, buried under blankets, hardly guarding, and hardly threatening. It’s no surprise, really. No one in their right mind would want to come here. Apart from some of the more vicious kids (who’d kill you as soon as look at you), there’s nothing here worth taking.
“He’s up with Wilson,” the guard answers. “He said you’d probably turn up.”
The fact that Hinchcliffe’s with Wilson, his chief kid-wrangler, is a relief. That means he’s at the opposite end of the factory complex from where Rona Scott does whatever she does to the Unchanged kids. I can see a handful of flickering lights in the distance up ahead, and I wrap my coat around me even tighter as the wind whips up off the sea and blasts through the gaps between buildings. Eventually I reach a set of metal gates behind which the useful kids are kept. There’s another guard here—an irritating little shit who takes himself too seriously and blocks my way through. When I tell him I’m supposed to be meeting Hinchcliffe he disappears. He’s gone for a couple of minutes before eventually returning and begrudgingly letting me pass.
I find Hinchcliffe waiting for me in a small courtyard, surrounded on three sides by a series of squat, metal-walled, box-shaped buildings which probably used to be industrial units, storage sheds or something similar. The roofs of the buildings are covered with curls of razor wire.
“Forgot about you, Danny,” Hinchcliffe says, and that’s as good an apology as I’m going to get. “I was just checking the stock.”
“The stock?”
“The kids,” he explains. “I’ve been thinking more about what we were saying earlier.”
“And?” I press hopefully.
“And maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m not looking as far forward as I should be.”
“So what’s that got to do with the kids?”
“Everything, you dumb fuck! No kids, no future.”
“That doesn’t bode well, does it? All the kids I’ve seen since the war started have either been Unchanged or are wild animals.”
“You lost kids in the fighting, didn’t you?”
“Three,” I answer.
“One like us?”
“My little girl.”
“Where is she now?”
“Dead, I expect. Last time I saw her she was running toward the base of a fucking mushroom cloud, looking for an Unchanged to kill.”
He thinks for a moment. “Look at this,” he says, gesturing to a narrow window in the front of the nearest metal building. I notice something’s been written in chalk on the door. It’s hard to make out, but I think it says BOY 5–7. Is that a serial number or an age range? I bend down to look through the window. It takes my eyes a couple of seconds to adjust to the negligible light levels inside. Can’t see anything …
“What am I supposed to be looking at—”
Something smashes against the glass. It’s a young boy, and he hits the strengthened window so hard that he bounces off and crashes back down onto the floor. He immediately picks himself up again and starts hammering on the window, scratching at it with his fingers, trying to claw his way out and get to me. He moves with the same speed and animal-like agility that Ellis had before I lost her. He’s feral. Wild. His blue eyes lock onto mine, and after a few seconds he stops struggling. As soon as he realizes I’m not Unchanged he slopes back into the corner, dejected. I keep watching him, unable to look away.
Hinchcliffe shines a flashlight around. Christ, the room the kid’s being held in is like an animal’s cage. There are yellow-tinged puddles of piss on the floor, chunks of half-chewed food lying around, smears of shit like tire tracks …
“This one like your daughter?”
“Just the same.”
“Thought so. Now come over here.”
I follow him across the square patch of asphalt toward a similar-sized building, almost directly opposite the first. There’s writing on the door of this unit, too. It says BOY 10–12. I’m hesitant to get too close to the glass this time, but Hinchcliffe shoves me forward. I tense up, expecting another kid to hurl itself at me. When it doesn’t happen I start to relax. I can’t see any movement at all through the window.
“Is there anything in here?”
“Over there in the corner,” Hinchcliffe says, shining his flashlight toward the far end of the squalid rectangular space. Then I see it: a figure slumped up against the wall. It’s another boy, older than the first. He stands perfectly still, staring back at me but not reacting. “The older ones are starting to show more control,” Hinchcliffe explains. “Show them one of the Unchanged and they’ll still pull its fucking arms out of its sockets, but when they’re not fighting, they’re more lucid than they were. The older they get, the more control over their urges they seem to have.”
“What point are you making?” I ask, not taking my eyes off the child.
“That maybe the kids can be rehabilitated. That there might still be hope for them. Pure instinct made them fight the Unchanged with as much ferocity as they did. Now the Unchanged are gone, we might be able to straighten them out again.”