Them or Us

know whether this place is the beginning of something new or the very end of everything. Either way, it’s not looking good.”
    I start moving toward the door. I’m freezing and tired of wasting my breath. Hinchcliffe won’t listen to anything I’ve got to say. I’m about to open it when he speaks again.
    “You’ve met this Ankin,” he says, getting up and walking toward me. “Tell me, Danny, would things be any different if he was in charge here?”
    “I can’t answer that. What does it matter, Hinchcliffe?”
    I reach down for the handle again. He grabs my wrist and won’t let go.
    “Don’t,” he says. “You’re staying with me, Danny. I still need you. You’re not going anywhere.”

 
    39
    THE LONGER HINCHCLIFFE WAITS and does nothing, the more likely it is that Ankin will be forced to make a move. Maybe that’s what he’s hoping?
    Hinchcliffe’s tactics—if any of what’s happening now is actually planned—are strange, almost unreadable. Unable to get out of the building, I head up onto the roof of the courthouse again and use the binoculars he’s left up there to scan the streets below. They’re virtually deserted. Most of Hinchcliffe’s remaining fighters have been ordered to either congregate around this building or guard the gates and the food stores. There are about a hundred of them downstairs, armed with every last weapon they can lay their hands on. Is he really planning to defend his territory like this? Sticks and stones against tanks and guns?
    There’s a quiet buzzing sound that steadily increases in volume. I can see Ankin’s plane in the distance now, approaching quickly from the general direction of Norwich, here to report back to Ankin and to whip the crowds around town into a nervous frenzy. There’s no doubt it’ll work. The noise coming from the fighters below me begins to grow louder and more fractious. These men want to fight, but what can they do when their perceived enemy is out of reach a couple of thousand feet above them?
    I feel exposed up here. I go back inside through Hinchcliffe’s chamber, then look for him in the courtroom. I hear his voice echoing through the otherwise empty corridors as he barks orders at his fighters, suddenly sending groups of them off in different directions. I creep closer to the main entrance and peer outside, and there I see him, right out in front of the building, coordinating the chaos.
    As I watch, a car screeches around the corner and pulls up in front of the courthouse. Curtis gets out.
    “The whole fucking place is surrounded, Hinchcliffe,” he says. Hinchcliffe says nothing, but plenty of other questions come from elsewhere in the crowd.
    “Surrounded by what? How many are there?”
    “Someone said tanks. Have those fuckers got tanks?”
    “Should have stuck with Llewellyn—”
    “Defend the positions I’ve told you to defend,” Hinchcliffe says, his voice suddenly louder than the rest. “Food stocks, the gates, this building.”
    “What’s the fucking point?” someone stupidly asks. “We’re outnumbered. There’s ten times as many people on the other side of the barrier, and that’s before—”
    The fighter doesn’t finish making his point. I watch from around the side of the door as Curtis drags him out into the open and attacks him with his machete. Taken by surprise, the other fighter drops to the ground. He raises his arm to protect himself, but Curtis keeps chopping down regardless, slicing his flesh and virtually removing the man’s arm, then rams his boot down onto his chest and starts to hack at his head and neck. I step back into the shadows and disappear into a room off the main entrance corridor. There’s a street-level window, and I watch as a range of reactions spreads through the fighters with lightning speed. Someone jumps Curtis, smacking him across the back of the legs with a metal bar and dropping him to his knees. Someone else then attacks Curtis’s attacker. Then another fighter wades through the crowd to get to Curtis’s car. Someone else cuts him off and tries to take the car for himself. Others turn and run for cover—
    I press myself flat against the wall as I see Hinchcliffe start to slowly slip back into the courthouse. As the chaos outside quickly increases in ferocity, spreading like a brush fire, he quietly reenters the building and shuts and bolts the door behind him. I hold my breath and stay perfectly still, listening to his footsteps moving along the corridor