Them or Us

then food, water, and fuel. Then anything else they could find.
    McCoyne stood behind the van in the middle of a dead village he didn’t even know the name of and looked around dejectedly. The hissing gray rain had stopped momentarily, and now all he could hear was the water dripping off roofs and trees and trickling down drains. It was already obvious that this was a lifeless place, and he silently cursed whoever it was who had decided to send them out this way. There were clear signs that numerous other scouting parties had been here before them. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference where they went, he thought to himself: Everywhere was like this now.
    Hook, the lead fighter who’d driven the van this morning, shoved McCoyne toward a row of buildings on the other side of the road, grunting at him to check them out. McCoyne stumbled forward but managed to keep his balance and didn’t protest for fear of provoking a reaction. A momentary scowl over his shoulder was as defiant as he dared to be. Grumbling under his breath, he wrapped his arms around himself and limped toward the buildings, chest rattling with the cold.
    He peered through a grubby, cobweb-covered window into the first of five narrow row houses. He couldn’t see anything inside and moved on, more interested in the takeout place next door and the newsagent’s next to that. The newsagent’s seemed the most sensible place to start. The door was stuck, but he managed to shove it open, the unexpected noise of an old-fashioned entrance bell ringing out and announcing his success at gaining entry. He stood still in the middle of the shop and waited for a moment, wondering if anyone was going to come to the counter. It was a dumb, instinctive reaction. The owners of this place were almost certainly long gone or dead, and judging by the stench in this gloomy, icy-cold building, he was betting on the latter.
    Once his eyes had become accustomed to the low light, he swung his empty backpack off his shoulders and started picking his way through the waste scattered all around the musty, enclosed space. He took everything he could find, no matter how insignificant: newspapers and magazines to help light fires, a couple of paperback books, some string, scissors, bits of stationery … Around the back of the counter he found some sweets—several bars of chocolate and a handful of lollipops, which he split unequally between Thacker and himself, shoving his personal hoard into the pockets of the trousers he wore under his baggy overtrousers, where Hook and the others wouldn’t find them. He checked the rest of the building but found little: some garden tools in an outhouse, some bedding, and a few pieces of cutlery. He briefly checked inside a half-empty storeroom but didn’t waste much time there. He could tell from the droppings that covered the floor and the holes that had been gnawed in the sides of the few cardboard boxes that remained on the shelves that he wasn’t the first scavenger to have been there. There was a body slumped against the back wall, and he could see the flesh of the corpse had been picked clean by rodents’ teeth. Yellow bone was visible beneath flaps of heavily stained clothing.
    McCoyne returned to the road outside to dump his stash. The rest of the party had busied themselves clearing out a service station and hotel, and by the looks of things they’d already found a damn sight more than he had. Hook, who just happened to be looking up at the wrong moment, stormed out to meet him and snatched his backpack. “This it?”
    “There’s nothing left. What am I supposed to do if there’s nothing left? I can’t magic stuff out of thin air.”
    Hook angrily shoved McCoyne in the chest. He tripped back and fell on his backside in the gutter at the side of the road, getting soaked with dirty rainwater. Hook grabbed another empty bag from the back of the van and threw it at him.
    “Keep looking,” he ordered. “Find more.”
    McCoyne wearily picked himself up again and trudged toward the takeout restaurant, praying he’d find enough stuff inside to avoid the inevitable beating that fucker Hook would give him if he came back empty-handed. His body ached and he felt permanently tired these days. He didn’t know how much more of this he could take.
    Inside the shop, a waist-high counter separated the public area from the rest of the building. He fumbled with an awkward brass latch, then lifted up a hinged section of counter