Dog Blood

Truth was, the only reason they were still in business was because they drip-fed provisions, literally a mouthful at a time. Perversely, the sheer mass of desperate refugees both protected the distribution center from the threat of militia attack and isolated it from the military authorities and supply routes.
    This morning, the last remaining functioning distribution center-housed in a long-empty factory building-collapsed. The food supplies had finally run dry, and the news predictably caused a riot. The military commander responsible, overseeing the center from a safe distance, wasted no time in locking the site down and ordering the execution of the three hundred or so rioting civilians trapped inside. The public had to be controlled, whatever the cost. Disorder like that couldn’t be allowed to spread. The implications were unthinkable.
     
    ***
     
    Three-quarters of an hour ago, Mark had left the cramped hotel room for the first time since returning from his final shift as a volunteer. Kate had pleaded with him not to go, but what choice had he had? He had a duty to provide for her and his unborn child, not to mention the other family members they’d found themselves unwillingly imprisoned alongside.
    Walking the streets was a bizarre and frankly terrifying experience, and he quickly realized how much he missed the security of traveling with the military. Even being outside the exclusion zone with the army, surrounded by Haters, felt safer than this. He desperately tried to keep himself to himself, looking at the ground whenever he passed anyone else or looking over the heads of the crowds he walked through. He didn’t know where he was going or what he was hoping to achieve, but he had to keep trying. He couldn’t just sit there with the rest of them and wait for something to happen. They were starving, cold, and frightened, and he begrudgingly felt responsible for all of them.
    Mark made his way in the general direction of the factory building where he, Kate, and the others had collected their rations in the past. He walked via Leftbank Place, an area of waste ground that had been planned for redevelopment for years. That was never going to happen now. He struggled to see through the never-ending mass of temporary shelters that blanketed the ground, making it look more like a third-world slum than anything else. The remains of entire families sat huddled together under polyethylene sheets, desperately clinging to their last few belongings and each other. For a while it made him almost feel grateful for the relative comfort and security of the hotel room where he and the others had been billeted.
    It was obvious as soon as he got near the distribution center that it had closed down. Where he’d expected to find uneasy, virtually silent lines of people he now saw only an empty space. Any space was at a premium now, so the fact that people were completely avoiding the site was a bad sign in itself. He’d already decided to turn around and head back to the hotel before he saw bodies being dragged away. A drifting plume of hazy gray smoke drifted up from behind the large, boxlike building. He knew that was the smoke from a funeral pyre-a typical military cleanup operation. They burned all dead bodies now to stop, or rather slow, the spread of disease.
    He changed direction gradually, so self-conscious and afraid of everyone else that he didn’t dare make any sudden alterations to his route, paranoid that people were watching him. He found himself at the base of the McIver Tower -the building where he used to work-and he allowed himself to look up just for a moment and remember. Up there, on the seventh floor, was where he’d spent endless hours before all of this had happened. Up there, alongside around one hundred and fifty co-workers, all sitting in front of identical computers, wearing identical headsets and working toward identical targets, he’d sold insurance and dealt with people’s claims. Those were the days, he thought, almost daring to smile, when a burst pipe or a broken window was considered an emergency… It all seemed so trivial and unimportant now, but it had mattered then. Not just to him, but to everyone. He’d struggled with the monotony of the job at times, but he’d have given anything to return to the boredom and routine of his former life now. He stopped by a telephone booth to look a little longer and tried not to look suspicious, avoiding making eye contact with the man who