Them or Us

place—a redundant relic of the past. Protected from the ocean on one side by a strong seawall, this used to be a seafood processing plant and was probably a major local employer churning out tons of food every day to be shipped around the world. Even now after it’s lain dormant and useless for the best part of a year, the stench of rotting fish still hangs over it like a poisonous cloud.
    I’ve heard rumors about what happens here. This is where Unchanged kids like the ones in the back of this van end up. I don’t know what they do to them, and I don’t want to know, either. A long time back I heard that they could be “turned” to be like us, but I don’t know if that’s true. More to the point, does it even matter, now the Unchanged are all but extinct? I look at the children in the cage—still cowering, still crying—and I wonder whether I should do them a favor and kill them now. Put them out of our misery. I must be getting soft. I don’t think I’d be able to do it.
    We come to an abrupt halt in the middle of the road that runs parallel with the seawall, well short of the factory. The wind is fierce tonight, and immense waves batter against the sides of the wall, sending huge plumes of spray shooting up into the air, then crashing back down again. The noise and the water and the constant rocking of the van in the swirling breeze make me feel like I’m trapped in the eye of a hurricane, the full might of which is, for some reason, focused on me alone.
    “Out,” the driver shouts, and it takes a couple of seconds before I realize he’s talking to me. I get up and move toward the back of the van. The kids panic again because they think I’m coming for them, but I’m the least of their problems tonight.
    I jump out of the van and land hard on my weak right leg. My feet have barely touched the ground before the driver accelerates away again, the back door still swinging open. He swerves around to the right onto a narrow access road, then disappears away into the bowels of the factory complex.
    Suddenly I’m alone: soaking wet and freezing cold, just me and the sea and no one else. I haul my backpack up onto my shoulders and start walking along the seawall back out of town, welcoming the isolation.
    An enormous, motionless wind turbine towers above everything in this part of Lowestoft, and I gaze up at it as I pass. Hinchcliffe thinks he’s going to get it operational again one day soon, so the town will have a steady power supply rather than having to rely on generators and the like. I hope he’s right. For now it just stands here useless: one of its massive blades broken, its internal mechanics and wiring no doubt completely fucked. It’s a huge white elephant: a constant reminder of what this place used to be.
    I pull my coat tight around me, put my head down, and walk. The house is still more than a mile away. I could live with the chosen few in Hinchcliffe’s compound if I wanted to, but I’d rather not. I prefer to remain at a cautious distance on the very outskirts of town, well away from everyone else. Out there I’m close enough to Lowestoft to be able to get in and take what I need, but still far enough away to stay out of sight and out of mind of everyone else.

 
    3
    OUT OF HABIT I follow the same route each day, using the footbridge to cross the empty road from town and get into the housing development. I’m out of shape. The steep steps are always that much steeper than I remember, and I have to stop halfway across to catch my breath.
    The world is dark tonight—no streetlamps, house lights, or lines of traffic producing the ambient glow of old—and the center of Lowestoft behind me is easy to make out. In the midst of the darkness of everything else is a clutch of blinking lights and burning fires, their brightness concentrated around Hinchcliffe’s compound. It’s hard to believe that this is what passes for a major center of population now. The same thing has no doubt happened around the country: minor towns becoming major towns by default because they’re the only habitable places left. It reminds me of a medieval settlement. I remember watching TV documentaries when I was a kid about social experiments where people stepped back in time and tried to live in anything from Iron Age settlements to Tudor houses. This place feels like that but in reverse. Today it’s as if people from the past have moved in and taken over the ruins of the present. Hard to believe that