Them or Us

chest to try to get warm. Get out there, he told himself, get what you can, then get back.
    *   *   *
    The drive away from town was long, slow, and disorienting. Conversation in the back of the windowless truck was sparse, and the time dragged painfully. It reminded McCoyne of another journey he’d taken like this, many months ago now, almost a year. Back then his eventual destination had been a gas chamber, from which he’d barely managed to escape with his life. What the hell was he going to see when they opened up the back of the truck today? He felt bad—an uncomfortable mix of travel sickness and nerves. Or was it more than that? He knew that every mile they drove in this direction took them deeper into the deadlands with its poisoned, radiation-filled air.
    The journey ended abruptly. There were sudden murmurs from the people all around McCoyne, some of whom he could hear getting up and moving about. He stayed where he was, fingering the hilt of one of the knives he always carried attached to his belt, just in case.
    The roller-shutter at the back of the truck was thrown open, flooding the inside of the vehicle with unexpectedly bright light.
    “Out,” one of the fighters ordered, and the volunteers did exactly as they were told. McCoyne was the last to move. He jumped down onto gravel, then looked around and grinned, caught off guard by his unexpectedly bizarre surroundings.
    “What the hell’s this?”
    In front of him was a picnic area and an iced-over, duck-free duck pond, to his right a children’s playground.
    “I came here with the family once,” a stooping, painfully thin man next to him whispered, grinning wryly. “Place has gone downhill since then…”
    The group of volunteers and their fighter escort were stood in the first of several immense, interconnected, fieldlike parking lots. McCoyne shielded his eyes from the hazy sun and looked around. Behind him was a huge billboard covered with faded pictures of smiling kids’ faces, cartoon characters, roller coasters and rides, and other things he’d hadn’t thought about in what felt like an eternity. A theme park. He’d heard of this one. He’d even talked about bringing the kids here once with Lizzie, but he’d managed to get out of it because, as he’d told her at the time, it was too far from home, and the entrance prices were obscene, and then he’d have had to pay to feed them all, then the kids would have wanted to go to the gift shop and …
    “Hey, you!” an angry voice shouted in his direction. McCoyne spun around and realized he was on his own. The others were already shuffling away along an overgrown path that led through a copse of bare trees, deeper into the park. “Stop fucking daydreaming,” the fighter yelled at him. “You’re here to hunt, not fucking sightsee.”
    McCoyne ran after the others, legs already aching, struggling to catch up. He tried to focus on the job at hand, but it was all but impossible in these unexpectedly surreal surroundings. He crossed an artificially rickety wooden bridge over a murky stream, then caught his breath with surprise when he looked down and saw a frozen figure standing ankle deep in the water. It was a mannequin—a caricature of an old-time gold prospector with fading paint and exaggerated, cartoonlike features—but the plastic man still looked in better shape than he felt.
    Ahead of the group, the silent heart of the theme park began to appear through the trees. Initially all they could see was the tops of the tallest, long-since-silent rides, the occasional scaffolding tower or the curving arc of a stretch of roller-coaster track. Being in a place like this was unexpectedly painful. It wasn’t so much that it made McCoyne think about who and what he’d lost; rather, it made him realize what he’d never get back again. When finding the basic necessities to survive each day was such a struggle, would there ever be a time when places like this fulfilled a useful function again? Playing, laughing, time-wasting … it had been a long time since anyone had done anything even remotely pleasurable, and he thought it would be another age before any of them did again.
    The group stopped in an open courtyard at the edge of the theme park proper, crowding dutifully around Llewellyn as if he were their tour guide. There were numerous buildings around, small and insignificant beneath the erstwhile attractions, all done up in a mock gold-rush style. The prospecting theme