Dog Blood

of the sense of scale and perspective it gives everything. In every other direction all I can see is abandoned buildings and immense swathes of empty land. Our land. No trace of the Unchanged.
    “Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?”
    Julia’s soaking up the view, staring with palpable hate deep into the city where hundreds of thousands of refugees are cowering in squalor. Their closeness still makes me feel uneasy.
    “Is this what you wanted to show me?”
    “It is, but don’t just look at it, think about it. Feel it, even. All across the whole country, our enemies are hiding together in places like this. Thousands of them crammed together in the space of just a few square miles at a time, stacked on top of each other, hardly able to breathe. Now turn around and look at what we’ve got. Out beyond the city boundary you can walk for miles and hardly see anyone.”
    “I went back to where I used to live,” I tell her. “Couldn’t believe what little space we had…”
    “And you know what makes it worse?” she continues, not listening. “Those idiots still have faith in the people who are supposed to be leading them, not that they ever see them or hear anything from them. Christ, they don’t even know who they are. They’re just clinging desperately to the structures and organizations that used to keep their pathetic little lives ticking along, trusting in a system that was dying long before we ever appeared.”
    “Can you believe we used to-” I start to say before she interrupts. Her over-the-top enthusiasm for all of this is frightening.
    “You know, some of those fuckers still think they’re going to be protected and that everything’s going to work out all right for them in the end. Thing is, you and me and everyone else knows different, don’t we?”
    “They’ll never win,” I answer quickly, standing my ground as an unexpected gust of wind threatens to blow me forward. “They can’t.”
    “And that’s why what we’re going to do is going to have such an effect. We’re gonna pull the carpet out from under their feet.”
    “How many of us are here?”
    “Including you, ten.”
    “Is that enough?”
    “We’re not the only group. There are others. I know Sahota wants to get more than a hundred of us in place when the time’s right.”
    “And you think this is going to work?”
    “No question. The Unchanged can’t trust each other. Christ, they can barely bring themselves to look at the person next to them anymore. I mean, there’s never been any real trust between strangers, but now they’ve got it into their heads that anyone could turn on them at any second. So there’s real fear in the air in there, a tension and uncertainty that’s never going to disappear. The more of them that cram themselves inside the city walls and the longer they’re in there, the more that fear increases.”
    “So we just walk in there…”
    “…and light the fuse. They’re right on the edge. I give ’em a week at most, ten days if they’re lucky, and that’s without us getting involved. No food, no sanitation, no medicine, the floods-”
    “Makes you wonder how they’ve lasted this long.”
    “Have you been in there yet?”
    “Coming here just now.”
    “So you know what it’s like?”
    “I saw enough…”
    “Thing is, they’re all out for themselves, whether they’d admit it or not. Every one of them will do all that they can to survive, screw everyone else. Self-preservation means everything to them. It’s all they’ve got left.”
    “So when do we do it? When do we go in?”
    “It’s up to Sahota. He’ll know when the time’s right.”
    “And how will we know?”
    “We’ll know, trust me.”
    “So do we just sit here and wait?”
    “We do tonight, maybe tomorrow, too. Then we’ll be told to get into position. Could be hours after that, might even be days. We get in, bury ourselves deep, then explode. It’s a small sacrifice to make.”
    Sacrifice? The word makes me go cold. I’ll fight alongside these people, but I don’t intend to sacrifice myself. Not while there’s a chance Ellis might still be out there.
    “So we do enough to push them over the edge, then get out?”
    “We do enough to push them over the edge, then keep pushing,” she answers quickly, sounding annoyed by my obvious lack of enthusiasm. “What we do in the city is all that matters. You don’t think about the future, getting out, leaving the fight… anything like that. If