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"No proble toaroundinto

Ten seconds and nothing&039;s happened

Don&039;t look back

Another ten seconds Have they moved on?

I turn the corner and I know I&039;m safe

Millenniuht in the crossfire between groups of armed police officers who had suddenly found the with hundreds of other people, each person as scared and confused as the next That was the day, I recall, when everything really changed That was the day the Hate took over Strange hoas such a terrifying experience now see out of the ordinary I&039;er Back then I was just one of the crowd, trying to blend in with the masses and not be noticed Today I&039;m here to kill theer the empty, underused space it always used to be For as far as I can see the ground is covered with a sea of temporary shelters of endless different colors, shapes, and sizes I can&039;t help looking into a few of those that I pass, and inside each of the that their flimsy cardboard, wood, and polyethylene structures will keep them safe inside and everyone else out The occupants of one shelter are both dead The green-tinged corpses of a ether motionless, entwined and unnoticed The stale air inside the small space is thick with flies

Squatters have taken over the public toilets and et vandalized every other week and were usedelse Aand queen surveying their particularly gri tied up with rope keeps everyone else at bay

There&039;s a patch of land up ahead that&039;s unexpectedly eet closer I see that the road there is covered with streaks and puddles of dryingit look like a dried-up riverbed Flash-flood water seee nu an expanse of aps between the slabs The council used to spend a fucking fortune on this place-I re about it-now it&039;s just as godforsaken as everywhere else Incredibly, though, a street clock I walk past is still working It says it&039;s co up to 3:00 pm and it&039;s a Thursday, for a fraction of a second I feel an instinctive swell of relief because the weekend&039;s co Christ, how stupid is that? Ited, the effects of years of conditioning are going to take more than afew months to disappear Has the clock been maintained purposely for precisely that reason? Does it help the Unchanged masses cope if they knohere they are in relation to their old routines?

Sohtvirtually the full width of two adjacent buildings froht of about six feet are what looks like hundreds of posters As I get closer, I see that it&039;s a huge collage of photographs of people that have been pinned, nailed, and stapled to s Iit&039;s safe to do so because there are other Unchangedout of the ordinary I&039;ve seen similar displays in filether to share their grief and build an improvised shrine to remember the friends and family they&039;ve lost Maybe Lizzie&039;s picture is here so the rain-blurred and sun-bleached pictures

I stop and stare at a random face, one of hundreds, no more or less remarkable than any of those above, below, or around it It&039;s a man in his late forties with a ular-fra in the space below his face It says, "Jahter Claire" There&039;s a sie on the next picture: "Marie Yates Murdered everyone that mattered to me" These aren&039;t the faces of victims, I realize, these are their killers Christ, isthe display, suddenly self-conscious, hoping I&039;ll find my picture before anyone else does Wish I hadn&039;t shaved my head like Sahota said I should have stayed hidden beneath that layer of stubble and shaggy hair Then, bizarrely, I find e to find raph because that, I tell myself, would be proof positive that Lizzie&039;s been here

It won&039;t make any difference

I forcethat I can&039;t afford to waste tiienic, overcroreck of a city, the wo And if I can track her down, she&039;ll be able to tell hter