Them or Us

just put my head down and keep moving.
    *   *   *
    “You seen Hinchcliffe?” I ask a remarkably fresh-faced fighter who’s on guard duty at the checkpoint at the end of the road into the factory. He’s slumped down on a chair inside what looks like half a garden shed, buried under blankets, hardly guarding, and hardly threatening. It’s no surprise, really. No one in their right mind would want to come here. Apart from some of the more vicious kids (who’d kill you as soon as look at you), there’s nothing here worth taking.
    “He’s up with Wilson,” the guard answers. “He said you’d probably turn up.”
    The fact that Hinchcliffe’s with Wilson, his chief kid-wrangler, is a relief. That means he’s at the opposite end of the factory complex from where Rona Scott does whatever she does to the Unchanged kids. I can see a handful of flickering lights in the distance up ahead, and I wrap my coat around me even tighter as the wind whips up off the sea and blasts through the gaps between buildings. Eventually I reach a set of metal gates behind which the useful kids are kept. There’s another guard here—an irritating little shit who takes himself too seriously and blocks my way through. When I tell him I’m supposed to be meeting Hinchcliffe he disappears. He’s gone for a couple of minutes before eventually returning and begrudgingly letting me pass.
    I find Hinchcliffe waiting for me in a small courtyard, surrounded on three sides by a series of squat, metal-walled, box-shaped buildings which probably used to be industrial units, storage sheds or something similar. The roofs of the buildings are covered with curls of razor wire.
    “Forgot about you, Danny,” Hinchcliffe says, and that’s as good an apology as I’m going to get. “I was just checking the stock.”
    “The stock?”
    “The kids,” he explains. “I’ve been thinking more about what we were saying earlier.”
    “And?” I press hopefully.
    “And maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m not looking as far forward as I should be.”
    “So what’s that got to do with the kids?”
    “Everything, you dumb fuck! No kids, no future.”
    “That doesn’t bode well, does it? All the kids I’ve seen since the war started have either been Unchanged or are wild animals.”
    “You lost kids in the fighting, didn’t you?”
    “Three,” I answer.
    “One like us?”
    “My little girl.”
    “Where is she now?”
    “Dead, I expect. Last time I saw her she was running toward the base of a fucking mushroom cloud, looking for an Unchanged to kill.”
    He thinks for a moment. “Look at this,” he says, gesturing to a narrow window in the front of the nearest metal building. I notice something’s been written in chalk on the door. It’s hard to make out, but I think it says BOY 5–7. Is that a serial number or an age range? I bend down to look through the window. It takes my eyes a couple of seconds to adjust to the negligible light levels inside. Can’t see anything …
    “What am I supposed to be looking at—”
    Something smashes against the glass. It’s a young boy, and he hits the strengthened window so hard that he bounces off and crashes back down onto the floor. He immediately picks himself up again and starts hammering on the window, scratching at it with his fingers, trying to claw his way out and get to me. He moves with the same speed and animal-like agility that Ellis had before I lost her. He’s feral. Wild. His blue eyes lock onto mine, and after a few seconds he stops struggling. As soon as he realizes I’m not Unchanged he slopes back into the corner, dejected. I keep watching him, unable to look away.
    Hinchcliffe shines a flashlight around. Christ, the room the kid’s being held in is like an animal’s cage. There are yellow-tinged puddles of piss on the floor, chunks of half-chewed food lying around, smears of shit like tire tracks …
    “This one like your daughter?”
    “Just the same.”
    “Thought so. Now come over here.”
    I follow him across the square patch of asphalt toward a similar-sized building, almost directly opposite the first. There’s writing on the door of this unit, too. It says BOY 10–12. I’m hesitant to get too close to the glass this time, but Hinchcliffe shoves me forward. I tense up, expecting another kid to hurl itself at me. When it doesn’t happen I start to relax. I can’t see any movement at all through the window.
    “Is there anything in here?”
    “Over