Dog Blood

away from us, then run straight into the next battle. Christ, it’ll be beautiful. It won’t take much, you know; just the minimum of coordination from us will be enough to start it off, and they’ll do the rest themselves. It’ll be a chain reaction. We’ll be able to sit back and watch them killing each other.”
    I know I should keep my mouth shut, but I can’t.
    “Except we won’t, will we?”
    “Won’t what?”
    “Once we’re in there, there’s no way back out.”
    “Doesn’t matter. All that’s important is wiping out the enemy.”
    “But at what cost?”
    “We can’t coexist, end of story. The cost is irrelevant.”
    I’m making things worse for myself, but I can’t help it.
    “What good is winning if you’re dead? What did they used to call that, a Pyrrhic victory?”
    “A what?” Parsons asks.
    “A Pyrrhic victory,” Julia sighs. “It’s when you win the battle, but the end result leaves you fucked, too.”
    “Great,” he grunts.
    “You’re wrong,” she says to me, putting down the binoculars and standing up, “and you need to stop talking like that.”
    “How am I wrong? Once we’re in the city, there’s very little chance of any of us getting out alive, is there?”
    “It’s a sacrifice we have to make.”
    “And where will your pal Sahota be when all of this is going on? Watching from his office? When we’re gone, who’s left? Just kids and Brutes?”
    She shakes her head. “You come up with an alternative and I’ll listen. Do you want the Unchanged to survive?”
    “Of course not, but-”
    “But what?”
    “But there’s got to be a better way.”
    “If there was, don’t you think someone like Sahota would have come up with it by now? If there was any alternative, don’t you think we’d have tried it? None of us wants to die.”
    “My point exactly.”
    “But if your death results in the death of hundreds of the enemy, thousands even, then it has to be worth it.”
    I don’t bother to respond. She’s bought into this completely, like a brainwashed old-school terrorist about to embark on a jihad. Even if my death were to result in tens of thousands of Unchanged being killed, I still don’t want it to happen. And what about Ellis? I’d rather fight steadily and have this war drag on for years than sacrifice myself today. I can’t stand the thought of not seeing her again.
    Julia’s not going to let this go.
    “You need to focus on what’s coming,” she says, a sneering, threatening tone in her voice. “Craven said you were looking up information about your family earlier. Forget them, whoever and whatever they were. Your only allegiance now is to us. Nothing else matters apart from what we do when we get back into the city.”
    She stares into my face, then walks away, stopping before she disappears down the stepladder.
    “If you screw up when we’re in there,” she warns, “then so help me, I’ll kill you myself. This is too important for an idiot like you to fuck up.”
    I watch her go, shaking my head in disbelief. Parsons quietly takes her place in the now empty deckchair. I forgot he was here.
    “Thanks for the support.”
    “I’m with you, pal,” he says, shielding his eyes from the sun, “but I’ve got enough sense to keep my mouth shut.”

32
    HEAVY CLOUD FILLED THE sky during the late afternoon and early evening. As darkness fell we were called into the main upstairs function room and weapons were handed out. I was given a gun, a few rounds of ammo, and several grenades, but I don’t think I’ll use them. More to the point, I don’t know how to use them, even though Julia and one of the others tried to show us. I’ll stick to my blades.
    Since this war began I’ve fought alongside hundreds of men and women, maybe even thousands. Who they were and what they were capable of didn’t seem to matter until now. But, standing in the bizarre surroundings of the run-down social club, I looked at the ten other fighters heading into town with me and tried to imagine how each of them would fight and kill. The two women-Julia and Sophie-seemed totally unfazed, ready to face anything. Most of the others were similarly focused. Only Parsons and a guy called Harvey seemed as nervous and agitated as I felt. Harvey is a huge, lumbering bulk of a man. He wears glasses with ridiculously thick lenses, and he suffers from acute asthma. He sounds like Darth Vader, and he has appalling halitosis. You can smell him and hear him long before