Them or Us

and torn. Outside it’s snowing, but it’s not quite cold enough to settle.
    No matter how smooth the ride might once have been, today the surface of the road we’re traveling over is rough and uneven. Sutton drives straight over a pothole that’s full of water and deeper than expected. He doesn’t even bother to try to steer around it, and the sudden lurching downward movement makes the liquid in my stomach swirl and wash around again. I swallow down bile and try to concentrate on the music he’s playing. He tells me it helps calm his nerves, but it’s doing nothing for mine. The fact he still listens to music like me is a good sign, I guess, but this morning the uncomfortably loud noise just makes me feel even more unwell.
    “It must be because of the smoke from the bombs,” he says suddenly. He’s talked nervously for most of the journey without saying anything of any substance. I still don’t fully know why I’m here, but I keep telling myself it was worth agreeing because there’s the slightest chance he’ll show me something worth seeing before I leave Lowestoft forever. Another place like Southwold, or John Warner’s mysterious benefactor perhaps? Fact is, I need a way out.
    “What’s because of the smoke?”
    “The drop in temperature. All the snow and ice.”
    “It’s the middle of winter.”
    “I know, but it’s not usually this bad, is it?”
    “There are fewer people around than this time last year, fewer cars and no factories, hospitals, or schools. No emissions or exhausts. Think of all the fumes that aren’t being belched up into the atmosphere anymore.”
    Sutton glances across at me and nods enthusiastically, and something about the expression on his face makes alarm bells start to ring again. I’d put his sudden change of mood down to relief that I’d agreed to come with him, but I’m wondering now if I’ve made a huge mistake and he really is the psycho I’d first feared. I start silently plotting my escape. When he next slows the car down I’ll try to get out. I’ll roll away along the ground like they used to in action movies, then I’ll work out where the hell I am and try to get back to Lowestoft. If Sutton dares turn up on my doorstep again, I’ll introduce his face to my wrench, then dump his useless body. No one will miss him.
    “Be interesting to see what happens to the environment now, won’t it?” he says.
    “Will it?”
    “I think so. You’ve got all that pollution and contamination on one hand, and the fact that a huge number of people are dead on the other. Will they cancel each other out? Who knows, McCoyne, maybe genocide will turn out to have been a blessing in disguise!”
    He laughs manically, loud enough to drown out the music for a moment, and I want out of here. We pass through Wrentham and turn right at the junction I turned left at for Southwold yesterday. After another mile or so I see something at the side of the road that distracts me temporarily. I’ve been here before. It’s the site of a vicious battle that Llewellyn bragged about once. He said it was like something out of the movies. He was with a group of ex-soldiers that had been cornered by some Unchanged military. They were massively outnumbered, he’d said (although I’m sure he was exaggerating), and yet twenty or so of them had dug in and held off their attackers for hours on end. In frustration the Unchanged commander had requested air cover. Hearing bombers approaching, Llewellyn had ordered his fighters to attack, and then, as the bombs began to fall, they fled. The Unchanged, or so he told me, bore the brunt of their own side’s munitions; then Llewellyn’s people returned to finish them off. I’m sure he embellished the story with more than a liberal sprinkling of bullshit, but there’s no disputing the fact that something huge did happen here. When I first saw this place, the cratered ground was blackened by fire and still covered with the remains of the dead, the tangled blades of a downed helicopter sticking up into the air like the legs of a dead spider. Today it looks almost completely different—overgrown and wild. In a couple of years, no one will know that anything ever happened here. It’ll just look like part of the natural landscape.
    “Not far now,” Sutton says suddenly. I curse myself for allowing myself to become distracted, but I don’t respond. Instead I go over the route we’ve followed again so that I can get back to Lowestoft on my own