Them or Us

and went through. Please let me find food, he thought to himself. He started making desperate contingency plans just in case, for a while even considering trying to creep back to the van, steal some of what the others had already found, then hand it back in again as his own and try to make it look like it was newly discovered stash.
    The kitchen was disappointingly—but not unexpectedly—empty. It had obviously been ransacked like the shop next door, and subject to the same ferocious vermin infestation. McCoyne checked every cupboard and shelf, desperate to find something that might appease Hook, but there was nothing. He walked along a hallway into a small and compact living area behind the kitchen and stared out into the overgrown back garden. He was trying to decide whether he had enough strength (or desire) to try to get back to Lowestoft by himself, and avoid facing that bastard Hook altogether, when he heard something. It was directly above his head—footsteps in a room upstairs.
    McCoyne quietly laid down his bag, unsheathed one of his knives, then crept slowly toward the bottom of the staircase. Whoever or whatever was up there, he knew it might be enough to help him avoid a battering. There was silence now, but he hadn’t imagined it. With his pulse racing and his mouth dry, he climbed the steep steps to the second floor. It was dark, but he didn’t need to see to know that there was someone up here with him. The smell gave it away—a pungent, inescapable whiff of sweat and fresh human waste. He needed to take his time and not screw this up. It was either someone like him who’d turned their back on what was left of society (and he’d come across several people like that before now), or it was one of them .
    The room above the kitchen was empty. There was a bed that looked like it had been recently slept in, and a pathetically small store of supplies. Whoever had been staying here had shown some initiative and had been living off the vermin who were living off the food downstairs and next door. Three dead rats were hung by their tails from a clothes drier, and next to them was the deflated husk of something that had been either a cat or a small dog, he couldn’t tell. Regardless of what else turned out to be here, this pathetic stock of meat meant that McCoyne did at least now have something to give to Hook. He opened a pair of threadbare curtains, filling the room with dull morning light, and looked around for something to put his booty into.
    As McCoyne walked back toward the top of the stairs to check the other rooms, he noticed that a wooden chest of drawers he’d just passed was in an unusual position. There was a gap of a couple of inches between the back of the unit and the wall. Curious, he leaned over the top of it, looked down, and saw that there was a small hole in the wall between this building and the next, just wide enough for someone to crawl through. Clever little fucker, he thought to himself as he carefully pushed the chest of drawers out of the way. Whoever he’d disturbed in here had got their escape route planned, and that was no doubt how they’d survived undetected for so long. By now they’d probably either have disappeared out through the back of the building next door or locked themselves away in some other equally devious hidden hideaway. He crouched down and looked through the gap but couldn’t see anything other than complete darkness on the other side. He leaned farther in and was about to crawl right through when he heard scurrying footsteps running up fast behind him. He tried to back out and turn around but couldn’t move quickly enough in the confined space. He heard someone give a grunt of effort, then felt sudden, intense pain as he was cracked across the back with a plank of wood. He screamed out in agony and managed to roll over in time to see a scrawny figure sprinting out through the bedroom door.
    “Up here!” he yelled, hoping that someone outside would hear him and help. “Unchanged!”
    He limped out of the room, legs weak and back throbbing, then staggered downstairs. By the time he got outside, Hook and another fighter had already caught and killed the Unchanged man. His body was spread around the front of the restaurant, bright bloodred splashes of dribbling color among the dust-covered gray. Hook was standing on the sidewalk, the euphoria on his face clear even from a distance.
    “Bastard was hiding,” McCoyne said, groaning and stretching