The Culled Part 12

Progressive layers of sheet-iron had been built-up from a sort of conical crest along the truck's nose, like the scales of a dagger-like fish. Below its new snout a shallow dozer-scoop clamoured with spikes and barbed wire, whilst wide f.l.a.n.g.es protected the windshield above.

All four tyres wore heavy swaddles of chains, canvas padding, rubber coils and thick iron rims, and a set of spares were lashed carefully beneath a wire and sheet gurney on the left flank. Halfway down the truck's 30-foot length an angle-poised turret reclined its muzzles towards the sky, its firing position enclosed on all sides by a low bal.u.s.trade of welded plate steel. At one time it'd been a water cannon, easily hitched to a tanker truck and fired in great arcing loops. Now it had been modified. Converted in ways I couldn't easily see, so the central cannon stood surrounded in a clutch of cables, secondary devices and dangling controls. I think I picked out a Mk19 grenade launcher amongst the oily barrels, which told me everything I needed to know.

You did not f.u.c.k with the Inferno.

Secondary and rear-angle tertiary gunmounts were placed further along the vehicle's spine, each one protected by small forests of steel jags and corrugated shields. The whole thing was painted as black as sin, except the rims of the wheels and the hood above the windshield, which stood out in vibrant red like the belly of a Black Widow.

It was something of an effort to form words. "How many... does...?"

"Four crew. Five if you want the big guns out, but that's extra. Room for as many pa.s.sengers as can hold on."

"And how much... ah. How much would it cost to...?"

She stared at me. She wasn't smiling.

"A lot more," she said, "than you've got."

So that squished that one.

Long story short: I ended up embarking on my perilous quest on the back of a f.u.c.king quadbike, which sputtered and farted every time I throttled it, and it cost me everything I had except a single can of dog food, a sodding cashmere blanket and a packet of condoms. Malice said I'd got myself a bargain, and filled the whiny little vehicle up for free.

I settled into the driver's seat - feeling pretty good, letting the engine tick over - and turned to thank her for her help. She was already walking away, disappearing into the tent, and the last I saw of her was her baby staring at me owlishly from her shoulders, dribbling with a smile. I sighed, wondering what I felt.

Attraction? Loss?

Guilt?

Nate was staring at the quad with a sort of disgusted fascination. I sat back in the seat and folded my arms. Let him choose, I thought, feeling nasty. Let him ask.

"So, ah..." he shifted from foot to foot.

Then tsked.

Then started clambering on.

"Whoa, whoa... hang on..." I waved him off. "You're coming just like that?"

"Too d.a.m.n right."

"But, you're... I mean..." I gaped, earnestly astonished. It felt a little like a limpet had attached itself to me, and no matter how long I held it over the fire it wasn't going to let go. "You don't even know where I'm headed!"

I watched his face.

There. There it was again.

The hesitation.

The eyes flicking to the pack on my back, then away again.

"Don't matter." He said, forcing a smile. "I'm game."

"And if I wanna go on alone?"

"Then I remind you how I saved your life."

"But..."

"And I add - seeing as how you're bein' so harda.s.s about it - that my price just went up. I get bodily protection, plus one blanket, one can dog food."

"You want all my s.h.i.t too? For what?"

He smirked, white teeth electric beside me.

"Travelling medic." He said. "Keep you outta trouble."

And then it was too late, and he was perched on the pillion and pointing ahead like a general giving the order to advance, and that was that.

Good, I tried to tell myself. He's a resource. He can help. He knows the area.

But always the itching. Always the uncertainty. Always the suspicion.

What's your ulterior motive, doc?

And even deeper than that, drummed-in at a genetic level, the angry lectures splitting open my head; a tac-command feed direct into my skull.

Don't you let yourself owe anyone anything. You hear me, soldier? Don't you get yourself in arrears. Don't you feel obliged to take care of anyone.

"Oh, hey," he grinned. "And throw in them rubbers, too."

My train of thought derailed itself in a blur of disbelief. "You want condoms?" I gaped.

He seemed vaguely affronted. "d.a.m.n straight! You think I wanna be a daddy aga..."

He stopped himself, mouth open, then blinked once or twice and started over; coughing his way through the hesitation. "You think I wanna be a daddy, my time of life?"

I stared at him for a moment, wondering what to say, how to react, then shrugged and tossed him the rubbers.

"Fine," I grinned. "Clean me out."

He scrambled onto the saddle's pillion like a scarecrow mounting a horse, and I gunned the bike along the Mart's central promenade with a fierce sensation of freedom, letting the customers still pouring in take responsibility for not getting run down. Even so, as I stopped to retrieve the rifle and pistols I'd lodged with the goons at the check-in, there was something grinding in my mind. Cogs interlocking, memories grinding. Something about Nate. Something he'd said, maybe.

Something not quite right...

We churned through the Mart's main gates, bobbing uncomfortably over untended tarmac and roadside debris, and took a sharp right. Nate leaned down and shouted over the roar of the wind.

"What I said!" He called, voice hoa.r.s.e. "Earlier on! About the Clergy!"

"What about them?"

"About... About what if they catch up to me! They... They got these... what's it called, man! Jesus-Cross!"

"Crucifix?"

"Yeah! Right! They got a s.h.i.tload! All ready for any motherf.u.c.ker p.i.s.ses them off!"

Visions of medieval tortures and Inquisitorial nastiness slipped through my head. I kept seeing that scene from Spartacus; the main road flanked on both sides by crucified rebels, and saw me and Nate swinging in the breeze. "Oh yeah?" I shouted. "Where's that?"

"Midtown, man! Manhattan! Biggest territory there is! Centre of the f.u.c.king universe!"

I let the quadbike bring itself to a trundling halt, feeling the engine die-down, forming words carefully.

"What you doing?" Nate blurted, prodding the quadbike. "Is it busted?"

"No, no, it's... ah."

"What?"

I tried to grin. Failed.

"Well, it's just... you'll never guess where we're headed."

CHAPTER NINE.

Interlude Raymond - or Ram - caught up with Rick somewhere in the city suburbs. The first he knew about it was a speck in his single remaining wing mirror, gathering size as it tore toward him at top speed.

At first he thought nothing of it. He'd seen little of anyone during this last leg of the journey, but the few people he'd spotted were enough to relax his nerves, where before he would have stiffened and fled from anyone. Out here, beneath the ever-changing sky (one hour burning bright, the next choked with fog, the next boiling with turbulent clouds; but always on a scale that seemed somehow too big, defying the eye) his only company were the occasional figures distantly glimpsed across the hills, tending fields or felling dead trees. Once or twice he'd even pa.s.sed vehicles, always heading west. Mostly monstrous pickups and HGVs crammed to the gills with filthy-looking people, who stared at him with dead eyes as the trike gunned by, manoeuvring awkwardly around the abyssal potholes and gaping cracks that striated the roads. Some of these travelling groups were surrounded by little cl.u.s.ters of motorbike outriders, who glared suspiciously as they hurried all other traffic off the road. Each time he saw them Rick stiffened, expecting more silver-jacketed Collectors, imagining Slim's bloodless body stretched-out in the hardware store back in Snow Hand.

None of the bikers so much as looked at him.

Other trucks bristled with quills like porcupines: men with rifles and swivelling arms-mounts, suspicious of everything that moved. He wondered who they all were, where they were all going, what they did all day long - then promptly forgot them as soon as he reached the next corner.

He was in a slightly fragile state of mind.

The I-80 was an endless grey snake, cracked and mud-drenched, pocked with deep wells and unexpected fissures that crept-up on the unprepared traveller, wending its way through hills and fields of green and brown. Here and there old heaps stood and rusted - breakdowns that no one ever bothered to tow clear - and only the twittering of unseen birds, and rabbits scampering for cover, disturbed the hypnotic progress of the tarmac serpent.

Rick was beginning to relax about the Harley too. At first it had seemed an unnecessarily flashy addition to his equipment: a mid-life-crisis on three tyres. It roared like the end of the world every time he gave it some throttle, and along with its dayglo paintjob in yellow and red, it conspired to be the absolute opposite of 'inconspicuous.'

The clan mothers would not have approved.

On the other hand, it was fast. It was far st.u.r.dier than the Yamaha, and in odd moments between small towns he'd begun to fancy he was riding an armchair; hovering across forests and lakes. With the stolen shotgun strapped across his back and a veritable cornucopia of other weapons stashed in the saddlebags, he kept seeing himself in some tacky Schwarzenegger moment. Crashing through flaming debris with a pithy one liner and a minigun blazing.

In fact, Rick - nee Hiawatha - kept imagining himself and his environment in all sorts of outrageous new ways. This had something to do with the boredom of cross-country travel, something to do with his natural imaginativeness, and a lot to do with the enormous quant.i.ties of the sachems' weed he'd been smoking since his run-in with the colossal bear-like sodomite who attempted to kill and eat him the night before.

He figured he owed it to himself.

He'd spent the night in a mid-sized town called White Deer, two hours or so down the interstate from his fateful encounter with Slim in Snow Hand. The place had been mostly deserted, but a pocket-sized population had set up a sort of commune around the central square, and Rick was too exhausted and too nervy to risk breaking-in somewhere else. He traded one of the 9mms and a box of ammo for a comfy bed and two pouches of dried rabbit, and even got a bowl of vegetable soup into the bargain. The people were polite, eager to please, but ultimately empty. He could see the terror in their eyes; the way they kept looking back and forth from him to the Harley, to the bulging saddlebags.

At one point a little girl appeared - precociously smiley - and asked him if he was a Collector come to take her away to the bad men in dresses. He was about to tell her "no" - to tell the whole G.o.dd.a.m.n town he was nothing to do with the f.u.c.king Clergy, or any other troublemaking sc.u.m they might be afraid of - when her mother swept her away with a dozen fearful glances over her shoulder and a muttered warning for him to "stay the h.e.l.l away from her!"

Point taken, he kept himself to himself after that: got as stoned as is it physically possible to get, sat staring at a fire with all the usual bulls.h.i.t thoughts of spirits and voices that he only ever got when he 'wasn't himself', and cleared off in the morning before the sun was fully up.

Two hours down the road, he pa.s.sed a place called Kidder. There were three bodies strung-up on builder's scaffolding beside the turnoff; old and dried-out, almost skeletal now, dangling by their wrists on sharp cords of barbed wire. A spray-painted plaque below each one declared their crimes to the pa.s.sing world.

THIEF.

MUSLIM.

INJUN.

Each Tag had a scarlet circle sprayed below.

Rick decided against visiting Kidder.

He paused only once during the morning - another narcotic stop, to top-up the fuzziness that had insulated him from the terrors and confusions of the night - and now as he flew along the ridged spine of the grey snake road, sweeping in lazy arcs from left to right, his mind wandered in all the beautiful, empty places the Sachems would have been proud to lead him.

Endless valleys of sound.

Broken wildernesses, with great gnarled trees standing lonely on ancient barrows.

Horizon-spanning herds of buffalo (or at least, great s.h.a.ggy monstrosities with horns like scimitars, which is how - never having seen one - he imagined buffalo must look), oozing across gra.s.sy plains and moaning, deep down where sound stops and feeling begins, to each other.

Ghost-dancers, capering from side to side, seething and hissing as the chalk-dust coating their dusky skin dripped away with their sweat.

They were singing a song, he could tell. All of them. The landscapes, the buffalo, the trees, the dancers. He'd never learned the language of his people - too busy playing the white kid, turning his back, ignoring the Tadodaho's patient sermons - but somehow he understood. Deep in his bones, it made a sort of sense. In his back pocket, the silver needle wrapped-up in its rags became a tuning-fork: humming a single note of crystal beauty that shivered all through him, connecting him to the world, to the sky, to the Song.

It was a hate-hymn, he understood, to drive the bad ghosts away; shrouded and tattooed, with their dusty G.o.d and their scarlet demagogue.

The sky was talking to him. The gra.s.s was tugging at his leather legs, whispering in great wind-driven susurration, and the boughs of an ancient vine - sagging over the Interstate as he drifted by on the back of the magnificent thunderbird - told him to "watch out, boy... watch out..."

It was a heavy-a.s.s dream-vision, and the matriarchs would have been proud - it just wasn't very good timing.

Something slapped him in the face; waking him from the foggy dreamsleep to find gra.s.ses and leaves fap-fap-fapping against his chest and head, and the trike scrambling - almost on its side - along the verge at the edge of the interstate.

"f.u.c.k!" he yelped, waking up in a hurry. "f.u.c.k!"

He wound his way back into the centre of the road, negotiating more potholes, gulping for air and promising himself to stay awake - even considered getting rid of the remaining pot - when the black speck appeared in the mirror.

It got big quick.

And yeah; at first it didn't worry him. The relaxing tendrils of the smoke soothed away all his tension and he even found himself giggling, without quite knowing why, at the swiftly growing reflection. Just another biker, he figured - travelling even faster and more recklessly than him - soon to sweep-past on his way to the smoking blot on the horizon that would, eventually, become New York. Descending from the hills, the city was a spillage of brown and grey paint, washed-through with QuickSmog graffiti and chalk dust scribbles.

"Haha!" It was hard not to laugh. Not just at the other biker, oh no: at everything.