Them or Us

him up and down. She probably doesn’t even realize she’s doing it. It’s an instinctive, settling, protecting movement.
    “That boy,” he says, his voice suddenly lower and the tone noticeably different, “is my grandson.”
    “Your grandson? But how…?”
    He moves me away, turning me around so I’m not staring. I can’t help looking back.
    “Please … they don’t know. None of them know.”
    “I don’t understand. How?”
    “I don’t know what it was like for you, Danny, but I had my doubts about the war from the very beginning. I kept fighting because I thought I had to, because I thought I had to choose a side and if I didn’t kill them they’d kill me, but I didn’t get swept up on the wave of it all like everybody else did. I started to wonder whether there really was a difference between us at all, or whether the Hate and the Change were just the results of some massive, manufactured social paranoia.”
    “You think? After all that’s happened?”
    “Why not? How many people did you know who were religious? There used to be thousands of religions with barely a shred of evidence between the lot of them, all of them the product of overactive imaginations, superstitions, and fear. People used to kill each other because they believed in different versions of stories that could never be proved or disproved, used to let themselves die because some book said they shouldn’t have blood transfusions, used to cut their hair a certain way or grow their hair or cut off their foreskins or abstain from sex … None of the divisions between them were a million miles from what happened with the Hate, were they? Intangible. Inexplicable. Pointless.”
    I don’t bother to reply. This isn’t the time for theological debate. If there ever was a God, he’s long since packed his bags and moved on.
    “After a few weeks,” he continues, rant over, “I ended up back around the area where I used to live and where what was left of my family still were. That was where I fell in with Simon Penkridge and Selena, and they helped me learn how to hold the Hate. It was a logical progression. It felt natural and right.”
    “But you didn’t get sent into the cities?”
    “Like I said, I didn’t buy into the fighting like everyone else. I got out before it was too late. I don’t know, maybe people like you and me have got some predetermined setting that’s different from the rest. I think more people could have learned to hold the Hate if they’d stopped fighting long enough to be shown how. Maybe not the worst of the fighters, but the rest of them.”
    “The underclass?”
    “Yes. The people who only fight when they absolutely have to, not because they want to. Problem is, most people like that have been crushed or killed and all we’re left with now are dumb feral bastards like this guy Hinchcliffe and his crew. You and me, Danny, we can see beyond the battle and look toward other things, bigger things…”
    I agree with him to an extent, but right now all I’m trying to do is look beyond being trapped in this bunker. Regardless of anything Sutton might say (and he hasn’t actually said a lot so far), I still want out of here. I don’t need any of this. It’s another dangerous and unnecessary complication I could do without. I’ve only been here a few minutes and already I feel like I’m caught between Sutton trying to pull me in one direction and Hinchcliffe the other. If I don’t do something about it fast I’ll be torn in half: ripped straight down the middle.
    “I found an Unchanged camp and I was scavenging food from them,” Sutton continues. “I watched them from a distance for days, scared to get too close. I didn’t trust myself, didn’t know what I’d do. All I knew was that there were faces there I recognized … friends, people I used to see in the street … and then I saw Jodie with little Andrew.”
    “Andrew?”
    He nods back across the shelter again.
    “My grandson. Jodie was my daughter-in-law. My son was already long gone, either dead or lost fighting somewhere, but those two were both Unchanged. Eventually they were picked up by the military. They were being evacuated to one of the refugee camps when the convoy they were traveling in was attacked. I’d been following them because I didn’t know what else to do. Jodie was killed, but some of the others managed to get away, and they took Andrew with them. I waited until I was completely sure of myself, until I