Them or Us

there in the corner,” Hinchcliffe says, shining his flashlight toward the far end of the squalid rectangular space. Then I see it: a figure slumped up against the wall. It’s another boy, older than the first. He stands perfectly still, staring back at me but not reacting. “The older ones are starting to show more control,” Hinchcliffe explains. “Show them one of the Unchanged and they’ll still pull its fucking arms out of its sockets, but when they’re not fighting, they’re more lucid than they were. The older they get, the more control over their urges they seem to have.”
    “What point are you making?” I ask, not taking my eyes off the child.
    “That maybe the kids can be rehabilitated. That there might still be hope for them. Pure instinct made them fight the Unchanged with as much ferocity as they did. Now the Unchanged are gone, we might be able to straighten them out again.”
    “You think so?”
    He leads me away from the cells.
    “I’m convinced these kids are as wild as they are because they’ve just lived through the worst of the war. When things calm down again, so will they. We’ll teach them how to be human again, how to control themselves.”
    “Be human?” I laugh. “What, human like your fighters? Christ, Hinchcliffe, hardly the best role models for them. Anyway, these children have spent the last year killing. Do you really think you’re going to be able to make them stop?”
    “What use are they to us if we can’t?”
    “So what are you suggesting? Are you going to keep all newborns locked up until they’ve grown out of their viciousness?”
    I think he’s confused being controlled with being catatonic, but I don’t want to risk antagonizing him. It says something when his idea of progress is producing a kid that doesn’t immediately want to kill everything in the immediate vicinity. These children are hardwired to fight now. They’ve had a year of running wild, and their immature, prepubescent brains either don’t know or don’t want to know anything else.
    “It’s been less than twelve months,” he continues. “We’ll keep studying the ones we’ve got here. My guess is that newborns won’t be like this, because they won’t have lived through the fighting that these kids have. It might be that we end up with a missed generation or two, but there’s nothing anyone can do about that.”
    The guard lets us back out through the gate, and we walk on down the road.
    “So what about the other end of the factory?” I ask, stupidly prolonging a conversation I never actually wanted to have, realizing I still don’t know why Hinchcliffe wanted to see me.
    “What about it?”
    “What have you got going on there? Is it the reverse of all this? Have you got Rona Scott provoking Unchanged kids until they fight back?”
    “Something like that. It’s not so much about making them fight as it is getting them to be like us.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “They’ve got to be able to survive and hold their own.”
    Hinchcliffe increases his speed. Heading north, I follow him past the farthest end of the complex and then continue along a wide footpath which runs parallel with the seawall. The last light of day is beginning to fade. I don’t think I’ve been out here before. To my left is a sheer drop of several yards down onto another walkway, beyond it the remains of a long-since-abandoned RV park. There are numerous equally spaced rectangular slabs of concrete visible through the overgrowth and weeds where RVs used to stand, looking like oversized graves. It’s an eerie place, silent but for our footsteps and the sea battering the rocks on the other side of the wall to my right.
    “There’s so much I need to know the answers to, Danny,” he explains as I catch up with him, “things you probably haven’t even considered. For a start, what do we do if any of the women give birth to Unchanged kids? A kid’s just a kid, that’s got to be the position we get to. It’ll get easier over time.”
    “Will it?”
    “Rona Scott thinks so. She says when there’s absolutely nothing left but us, they won’t know any different. We still don’t know why we are like we are, and we probably never will. We don’t know if what happened was because of some physical change or a virus or germ or just something we saw on TV. Thing is, kids who are inherently Unchanged are going to have to adapt and become like us to survive. Either that or they’ll be killed.”
    I