Them or Us

my perspective on everything again. Everything feels fluid. Nothing sits still.
    “Depends what ‘all this’ is, doesn’t it?”
    “Don’t get you.”
    “First I thought we were out plane spotting, then I thought Llewellyn was going to kill me, and now I’m sitting having lunch with half an army. I’ll be honest with you, Swales, I don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on anymore.”
    “I got told nothing. Llewellyn said he’d got a job for me, that’s all. Didn’t know nothing about all this.”
    “So what do you think about it all?”
    Swales has a naïveté and innocence that may well prove to be his undoing. He talks candidly, barely even thinking about what he’s saying. Still, that probably makes him more honest and reliable than most of the backstabbing bastards Hinchcliffe surrounds himself with.
    “Got to be a good thing, ain’t it?”
    “Suppose.”
    “This is like things used to be.”
    “I guess.”
    He pauses to eat more food. Then, when his second plate’s almost clear, he speaks again.
    “You know what I used to do for a job, Danny?”
    “No.”
    “I used to flip burgers ’cause that was the only job I could find. There’s plenty about the old times I miss—”
    “But not flipping burgers?”
    “Definitely not flipping burgers!” He laughs. “I miss my mom and my brother, even though he turned out to be one of them. Miss my buddies … Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t go back for any money, but I wouldn’t say I’m happy with the way everything is, you know?”
    “Like what?”
    “Like the fighting. You do it ’cause you have to, but that don’t make it right. You can’t just kick back and relax like you used to. You’ve always got to be on the lookout. Llewellyn says you got to stay one step ahead of everybody else, ’cause the one guy you’re not watching is the one who’ll creep up behind you and kill you.”
    “So what do you think about that? Is he right?”
    “Suppose. I’m just tired of it, that’s all. But what’s happening here, what that Chris Ankin guy’s doing, that sounds like a better option to me. Llewellyn says Ankin’s gonna see all of us right in the end.”
    Poor bastard, he really does believe everything he’s told. Then again, I think to myself as I look around this place, maybe I’m the one who’s wrong. He may have been a long way from the front line of battle, but Ankin, more than anyone else, has been in control from the start. He’s not like Hinchcliffe. Hinchcliffe was just someone who just happened to be in the right place at the right time and took advantage of what he found to force himself into power. Ankin is different. And to have kept control for so long through so much, he must have done the right thing by his people. There’s a world of difference between the organized, uniformed people here and Hinchcliffe’s army of a couple of hundred individual fighters. Johannson, Thacker, and many others have proved how tenuous positions of power have become, and yet this weak-looking, white-haired politician has outlasted them all.
    Maybe Peter Sutton was wrong and our species can take a step back from the abyss? Who the hell am I kidding? I’ll believe it when I see it.
    “It’ll take more than this bunch to make everything right again.”
    “That’s the best part,” Swales says excitedly, “there is more than this bunch. That’s what Llewellyn thinks, anyway. He says there’s thousands more of them on the way to Norwich. Thousands of them!”

 
    32
    AN UNEXPECTEDLY COMFORTABLE NIGHT’S sleep on the floor in a quiet corner of the museum is rudely interrupted at first light. Despite the fact that the first thing I see is Llewellyn’s foul, scowling face glaring down at me, I immediately feel different today. Optimism is too strong a word, but there’s no denying that, unexpectedly, things look more hopeful this morning than they have in months. The illusion doesn’t last long, when I start coughing my guts up and I remember what Rona Scott told me. If really this does turn out to be the dawn of a brave new world, I’m probably not going to get to see very much of it.
    Llewellyn is chaperoning me this morning. I manage to get outside to take a piss in the half inch of snow that’s fallen overnight, but before I’ve even finished shaking myself dry, he’s already dragging me back indoors. He seems uncharacteristically anxious as he herds me into a large, busy room on the ground floor of the museum