Dog Blood

fighting with us is almost as bad as fighting against us. You don’t have a choice whether or not you want to be a part of this war. There’s no opt-out clause for anyone.”
    “That was his wife, you know,” Paul says, following me out onto a small veranda that overlooks what’s left of my hometown. I’ve been out here for a while, just getting some air.
    “What?”
    “The guy Keith did in, that was his missus lying on the bed next door.”
    “How d’you know?”
    “Found a photo of the pair of them together. Lovely couple,” he murmurs sarcastically.
    “Was she like us?”
    “Nah, one of them.”
    “But he couldn’t let go?”
    “Looks that way. Probably killed her, then regretted it. True love, eh?” he jokes. “Never runs smooth.”
    “You’re not wrong. My other half was…”
    “I know. Bad luck, man.”
    “What about you?”
    “Good question.”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “I’ve been with my girlfriend for three years now. Then all this happened…”
    “Was she Unchanged?”
    “No, nothing like that. We stuck together for a while after the Change, then just drifted apart. Just didn’t need each other like we used to.”
    I glance across at him. He’s hanging his head out over the high balcony next to me, staring into the distance.
    “I guess relationships and stuff like that have had to take a backseat with all this going on.”
    “You’re not wrong,” he sighs. “You know, I was thinking the other day, I haven’t had a hard-on for weeks.”
    “Thanks for sharing.”
    “I’m not complaining,” he says quickly. “It just hadn’t occurred to me before. I’ve stopped thinking about sex, stopped looking at women… hope to God this is just temporary.”
    I’m the same, although I don’t bother telling him. It’s just a question of priorities, I expect. When the fighting’s over, things will get back to normal again.
    I look out toward the city center in the distance, glowing like the embers of a dying fire. There’s a strange beauty to the devastation tonight. This place always seemed ugly and oppressive to me before, but these days I see wonder and detail in things I used to look straight through. The Hate has opened my eyes. The area immediately around this high-rise-the place I used to call home-is dark and largely silent, just a few small fires and the odd flash of movement visible through the early evening gloom. From up here tonight the world seems vast and never-ending. There are clouds looming on the horizon, swallowing up the stars. There’s rain coming.
    “What’re you thinking?” Paul asks after a couple of minutes have passed. “Not still thinking about my dick, I hope!”
    “Just how massive the world feels tonight,” I answer honestly as I watch a lone helicopter leading a distant convoy of Unchanged vehicles across their so-called exclusion zone. “First time I’ve been back here in months. From up here I can see where I lived and where I worked and everything in between. Can’t believe I used to spend virtually all my time in the same few square miles of space. Kind of makes you feel insignificant, doesn’t it?”
    “The best thing about this life of ours now,” he tells me, “is how open it’s made everything. All the walls and barriers that used to hold us back have gone.”
    “I’ve been thinking about my apartment. It was just barely bigger than this place, and there were five of us living there. Five of us! How the hell did we ever manage to cram that many lives into such a small space?”
    “That wasn’t living, that was just existing.”
    “I can see it now, but when you’re in the middle of it you just make do, don’t you. You try to make the most of what you’ve got…”
    Paul nudges my shoulder, and I look across at him. He gestures out over the city.
    “All of this, my friend,” he says, “is ours now.”

ii

IN A SITUATION WHERE everybody was either on one side or the other and there was no in-between, ascertaining who was who was a priority. A DNA-based “test of allegiance” had been developed early on, and from it the Central System had been born. It was little more than an electronic checklist-a massive summary of names cribbed from the electoral roll, voters’ roll, and births, deaths, and marriages records. The details held on each person were sparse: name, sex, date of birth, last known address, whether the person was dead or not, and, most importantly, whether he or she was Hater or