The Culled Part 3

Interlude The man had opted to change his name for the duration of his mission - not that he'd had a lot of choice. It was that or put up with the Sachems nagging him for the rest of eternity.

A week ago he was Rick. Today he was Hiawatha. Go figure.

He gunned the Honda along the main street of a picturesque everytown, enjoying the growl of the old engine - still a perfect melody, despite its hiccups and occasional coughs - and selected a sidestreet at random. n.o.body on the sidewalks. No curtains twitching or faces peering over tumbledown walls. n.o.body here to see the Mighty Hiawatha pa.s.sing through.

He supposed he ought to be honoured. It was, after all, a name dredged from the deepest troughs of tribal heroism - belonging first to the great warrior/prophet who reconciled the squabbling nations. Hiawatha - the original - had been friend and brother to the deific Great Peacemaker; a glorious ancestor-totem in his own right and the ill.u.s.trious architect of the first Great Confederacy. Four hundred years later and the white men still insisted on calling the Union of Five Nations by its insulting handle - the Iroquois - and never gave it another thought.

Ignorance and arrogance. So said the sachems, anyway.

(Cue dull lectures about the Confederacy's 'invention' of democracy, its influence on the US's own const.i.tution, and a hundred-and-one other details, hopelessly out of date, that the clan mothers and their chieftain pets meme-repeated every time anyone was dumb enough to ask a vaguely cultural question.) Iroquois meant 'Rattlesnakes'. The clan mothers hated it.

Rick (nee Hiawatha) rather enjoyed the description. It appealed to the youngster inside him, a sinister sort of moniker to match the leathers and war paints the Tadodaho had given him. Certainly it had more character than the t.i.tle the Confederacy gave itself - 'Haudenosaunee': the people of the long houses. Not exactly a name to strike terror into the hearts of one's enemies, particularly when most of the 'long houses' these days were Winnebagos.

Rick let the bike drift to a halt before an imposing building at a crossroads. It looked like maybe it'd been a courthouse or something grand and prestigious - long ago - but a glistening plastic sign announced its more recent owners to be RAY N' JAKE, this being their GENERAL STORE.

Bless.

Rick listened to the engine rumble itself away into silence, wondering if anything was left inside the boarded-up building. His stomach gurgled. He'd have to start worrying about fuel soon too. Either that or stay stranded out here in ghost-town suburbia forever - and a more h.e.l.lish prospect he could not imagine. He pocketed the keys, and swung himself down onto the sidewalk, flicking his long double-braid out of his eyes. Everything seemed quiet. An overgrown sign - hanging off its rusted pole on the far side of the street - let him know he'd strayed into the curiously-named town of Snow Hand (this on a day of glorious sun and only minor QuickSmog), and asked him to drive carefully.

He smirked.

On the subject of misinformative names, he also found it tricky these days to refer to the ubiquitous enemy (i.e.: a.s.sholes who persisted in calling the Haudenosaunee the 'Iroquois') by such a simple term as 'The White Man.' It seemed ridiculous. Some of his best friends inside the tribe were white, genetically speaking, and the council had supposedly granted them just as many rights, freedoms and opportunities as its trueblood members. It never ceased to amaze Rick that the 'new' tribesmen - who had eagerly joined the Confederacy since the Cull and were mostly paler than an anaemic goth - seemed utterly untroubled by the constant b.i.t.c.hing about the G.o.dd.a.m.n 'white man'.

It was like they'd resigned from their own species.

Lucky b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.

His silent perplexity brought a little smile, unbidden, to his face. He was remembering the last night before he left his home-village to embark on this ridiculous trip, and his good pal Leicester (formerly a whitebread bank clerk, now a hunter-scavenger with the Kanien'kehaka lodge), smoking an enormous hash pipe. The dumba.s.s had actually started griping, perfectly serious as only a raging pothead could be, about the 'Pale-Skinned Devils.'

Rick still found himself sn.i.g.g.e.ring at that one, a week later.

Snow Hand's unremarkable environs looked unlikely to yield much by the way of food or fuel. Small white and green houses, clad in sycamore and aluminium, nestled into the wooded hills on every side. Pretty much all the trees were dead, Rick noticed, which didn't help the sense of cloying not-quite-rightness. He'd stopped in enough places up and down the I-80 in the last few days to know this was hardly a rarity. Maybe some weird effect of the fallout had taken its toll along the eastern face of the Appalachians. Maybe a lack of rain, or just too much f.u.c.king sun, or something in the QuickSmog or... or whatever. The forests round here were dead. Not his problem.

Rick squared up to the door of the general store, not letting the little gang of crows squatting on its roof startle him. They - or others like them - had been keeping pace with him for a good fifty miles now, perhaps hoping he'd spontaneously drop dead. It didn't bode well for his hopes of finding food.

The wide window outside the shop had been comprehensively boarded up: first with planks (long since desiccated and crumpled), thereafter with an increasingly desperate array of corrugated iron, chicken wire and a long lost car door.

Impregnable. Ish.

"h.e.l.lo?" Rick called out, casually drawing a feather-pocked crowbar from his saddlebag, not entirely sure if he wanted to be heard. A fat cat, long since gone feral, glared impudently at him from a weed-choked driveway across the street. He shrugged. At least if there was nothing in the store he might find some lucky tins of pet food somewhere. Or...

He wondered how easy it was to skin a cat...

He had a half-hearted attempt at prising open the door - fat chance - then quickly and efficiently scrambled up the boarded window like a squirrel up a tree, coming to rest on the ledge of an upstairs window, scaring the choir of nosey crows from their holier-than-thou vantage. Iron bars, of all the luck, bisected the window, but the wood was so ancient and the plaster sealing the cavity so rotten that a few hefty swats with the crowbar and some hot-faced brute force was all it took to gain entry.

The way Rick saw it, the harder it was to get into one of these dismal places, the more likely it was there'd be something worthwhile inside. He slipped in, silent as death, gripping the crowbar like a samurai sword.

Whoever had occupied Snow Hand five years ago - Pale Skinned Devils no doubt, ha! - had either died or moved on. Same as most places. Uprooted families, the dead going unburied. Back at the start, when people began to die and the Government said conspicuously less and less about it every day, people had clued-up quicker than the suits had expected. Something big, going down, being kept quiet.

Maybe the townsfolk had even seen the flare-flashes in the night, out across the southeast horizon, as the Sovs or the Saudis or whoever-it-was took out Washington like bleach on a stain. That's the sort of thing that'll kill your community spirit, deader than disco.

Snow Hand. Some of them went east to NY, probably, and no doubt died there. Some went west, over the hills. Probably died too.

Some of the lucky ones maybe fell in with the Haudenosaunee, to stay alive and count their blessings and get on by.

(Yeah, the uncharitable voice of rebellion grumbled inside, just so long as they respected the G.o.dd.a.m.n old ways and didn't rock the f.u.c.king boat.) Rick checked the rooms of the first floor on automatic, adrenaline burning away like a barely-noticed light. Nothing. Not unless you could eat a child's rat-nibbled dollies, or run a Honda on the contents of a cologne drawer. Taking it as read that the place had been looted before it was still no surprise to find jewels and gold stashed away, untouched in makeup cases and bedside drawers. Who was going to steal something so useless, after all?

He shouldered the crowbar and made his way downstairs, into the store, sighing as his thoughts turned back to the tribe, wondering what would happen if he just turned around right now and headed home. f.u.c.k the mission. f.u.c.k the Sacred Duty.

Back in the Haudenosaunee, the sachems - forever peering cautiously over their shoulders to check the matriarchs approved - had told him all the 'Nationalistic c.r.a.pola' (his phrase, not theirs), all the white man/red man dogma, all the 'Them-and-Us' bulls.h.i.t: it was a state of mind. The Confederacy had found its place and its path in this topsy-turvy post-Cull world, and anyone who made the effort to stand in their way or interfere was designated 'The White Man' - whatever their skin tone. Simple as that.

Rick would have gone on to point out the flaws in this terminological mora.s.s - mainly that it was f.u.c.king stupid - except at this point in the conversation the sachems generally parroted the same trite plat.i.tude that inevitably cropped-up in the answer to any challenge to the status-quo: "If it was good enough for the ancestors..."

At the bottom of the stairs he could see the interior of the front door. A heavy-duty lock - well oiled, well tended - had prevented his entry from outside. Hmm.

Actual skin colour, the Confederacy maintained, didn't matter in the equation any more. How could it, when at least half the modern Haudenosaunee were as Caucasian as they came? They'd been welcomed into the tribes with open arms (altruism or smugness? Rick secretly wondered) and taught the interminable lessons of the past. What mattered, the matriarchs croaked, was not the ident.i.ty of those practicing the Old Ways, simply that they were being practiced.

Pushing open a connecting door into the service area, Rick reflected gloomily on how eagerly the new white Iroquois had embraced the lifestyle, the ceremony, the trappings of something culturally genuine. He'd been hearing the same old stories all his life - born and bred on a c.o.c.kroach-infested reservation - and couldn't remember it ever filling him with the same sense of childlike glee and religious satisfaction as Leicester and the others. Smearing their snowy skins with ash and paint, eschewing modern clothing - and there was plenty of that about, since the Cull - for old style jerkins and deerskin rags.

Somehow, deep down in the (plentiful) ocean of his immaturity, Rick had felt betrayed. Jealous, even. How dare they, these interlopers? How dare they show up out of nowhere, join the tribe, and get twice as f.u.c.king much out of it as he did?

The problem was this: He'd spent all his childhood, all his years of education, all his earliest years of adulthood, trying so hard to be white. How dare the world roll on its head? How dare every b.a.s.t.a.r.d suddenly want to be Iroquois!

The shop smelt of dust and cigarettes, with the faintest tang of ancient alcohol. He pushed through a mildewed bead curtain into the storeroom out the back, and paused to yank cobwebs out of his hair.

Whenever he was in a really bad mood, Rick tended to call the white Iroquois 'Tourists'. He'd call the quaint little village-lodge a theme park, and loudly offer to take photos of fat Yankees wearing branded ethnic costumes for a mere $5. Then he'd caper about trying to sell make-believe hotdogs, or guided tours of the casino complex cunningly disguised as a wooden longhouse.

Last time he pulled this routine, one of the Sachems had beaten him so hard he'd had to sleep sitting up for a week... but it had been worth it, just for the look on everyone's face.

The point was... The point was, it was all such a joke! The Confederacy existed - thrived! - because its way of life worked. In this twisted devolving excuse for a world, it worked. It worked because its infrastructure remained when everything else collapsed. It worked because it created ties that didn't rely on material benefits or familial ancestry. It worked because it was a shared equalitarian society that would only - could only - function when everyone was progressing together.

Rick was confident about this. He'd been studying social sciences when The Cull began.

That put a stop to that.

The point, the point, the point. The point was there were reasons for the good old Injuns to swap places with the Pale Skinned Devils as the most stable and viable community, and none of them had anything to do with the old stories and religions and myths. Running and dancing round fires, throwing clods of earth, chanting and smoking and yadda yadda yadda.

Theme park stuff.

Worse still, despite their voluble claims to the contrary, the council simply weren't playing it as fair as they said. Otherwise how in the h.e.l.l did he, Rick, a so-called 'pureblood' Onundagaono - who had never given a shrivelled rac.o.o.n's c.o.c.k for the history or religion of the Haudenosaunee - been chosen for a sacred role any number of the white tribesmen would have happily killed to fulfil?

It was, in a word, bulls.h.i.t.

They'd given him three gifts before they sent him out. That was a headache, too. Sort of mythic: three fabulous tools for a bold knight to take on his quest. Scant G.o.dd.a.m.n consolation for being thrown to the wolves, in his opinion. It wasn't like any of the gear was even worth much.

From the matriarchs who ran the Confederacy from the sidelines, the bike. XR650L Honda street bike with mismatched tyres, scavenged engine parts and highly unreliable homemade saddlebags. A clapped out piece of s.h.i.t, by any other name, but they'd been so proud as they wheeled it over. Rick remembered being mystified. The lodges had access to much better gear than that, but the womenfolk had stared at him so earnestly, puckered faces intense, and warned him of dire misfortune should he desert the vehicle.

Don't you lose it, they'd said. Don't you leave it behind.

Great.

From the sachem council, smiling toothlessly, nodding and gurning, he'd received a packet of the sickly weed the old b.a.s.t.a.r.ds smoked relentlessly in their shanty lodges. Rick would've appreciated that one, at least, if the stuff in question wasn't notorious amongst the Haudenosaunee as having some... strange properties. No one knew where the old men grew it (certainly not in the same carefully-cultivated beds as the dope the youngsters raised), or what they added to it, or how it worked. But it did... things.

Given that they'd sent him on a holy mission, Rick had been quietly astonished that they'd thought it was a clever idea to give him two ounces of dried Brain Death for the ride.

And finally, from the Tadodaho, a tiny bundle of fabric, with something hard at its centre. Rick had been a little more positive about this. He and the Tadodaho had always got along; the old man was alone in all the tribe in being prepared to listen to Rick's gripes and answer them - patiently, infuriatingly, correctly. Rick had fumbled open the fabric wrapping with excited hands to find...

A needle. A silver sliver of metal, like a sewing-pin.

"Should come in useful, that," the Tadodaho had said, nodding sagely. Rick had felt like the victim of an awful joke.

And now, days later, he could feel the same package, bundled-up in his back pocket. He gripped it vaguely through his leathers, blinking in the low lighting of the dusty store and glancing around himself with the trailing vestiges of his mental tantrum retreating.

He let his jaw hang open.

He'd never seen so many guns in his life.

An hour or so later - or so it seemed - in the upstairs bedroom full of mouldering dollies and toys, Rick awoke to someone shouting.

Footsteps on the stairs.

Not a good start.

Ungumming his eyelids carefully, the afternoon sun did its meagre best to p.i.s.s a few half-hearted rays through the QuickSmog, between the mouldering frames of the upstairs window, and onto his face.

"f.u.c.k..." Rick mumbled, wiping dribble off his chin. He hadn't meant to fall asleep.

Looking back over the tail-end of the dream he'd been woken from, he supposed he must have been vaguely aware of something coming; the grumbling tone of an engine, the creak of the General Store's front door: all incorporated into some rapidly-diminishing abstraction involving tomahawks painted white, flocks of shrieking crows with heads like hash pipes and a fat cat telling him, in the Tadodaho's whispery voice: "If it was good enough for the ancestors..."

Well, thanks. Thanks very much, oh glorious old ones. Now he was good and f.u.c.ked.

"Ram?" the voice snarled from halfway up the stairs, chain-smoker-deep and alcohol slurred. "Ram? That you? Where'd you get that pieceas.h.i.t f.u.c.king bike, man? Looks like it got squirt straight outta the junkyard's p.r.i.c.k!"

Rick visualised his battered ride. The voice had made a pretty fair a.s.sessment.

The footsteps on the stairs sounded, now that he thought about it, heavy.

He lifted himself upright as quickly and quietly as he could, still half asleep, and considered his options. None of them looked good.

After finding the cache of guns - pistols, rifles, Uzis, grenade launchers, shotguns, two dusty old mortars and a gargantuan shoulder-rocket hanging off the wall - he'd put two and two together and come up with a single word: Collectors.

Out here, outside the major cities, in the great field-strewn swathes of American Nowhere bisected and fed by cracked freeways, the Collectors were everywhere. Rick knew only too well who the mercenary b.a.s.t.a.r.ds worked for, gathering up supplies, weapons, drugs, and...

-he thought of the tribe, whittled-away little-by-little- ...and other things.

But Collectors were just collectors. That was the point. As long as you had nothing they wanted, as long as they weren't on some big-a.s.sed spree, they'd ignore you.

As long as you were over 18.

As long as you weren't red-skinned.

s.h.i.t.

Back in Fort Wayne, and across all the lands of the Haudenosaunee, every day was a spree. But out here things were quieter. Right? Out here, surely, the Collectors wouldn't know about the Blood Anomaly...

On the other hand, if some psychotic biker got home to his secret stash of hardware to trip over a sleeping Injun, it'd be fair to expect he's gonna be p.i.s.sed.

Rick had therefore placed himself in the upstairs room at the front of the General Store, exactly where he'd climbed in, stolen shotgun in hand. Just a short rest, he'd promised himself. There'd been no food or drink anywhere inside, and whilst an armoury groaning with enough hardware to take out a war party could only be considered an exciting find, it didn't go far to re-enlivening the flesh. He'd sagged like a nosebag to the floor beside the window, eyes already heavy.

He'd see anyone coming a mile off, he'd told himself. He had an easy exit if some a.s.shole tried sneaking up, and he'd always been a light sleeper. If something woke him, he'd have plenty of time to react.

Yeah, right. And in the meantime some vicious sounding colossus had pulled up outside, come in through the front door (which meant he came here frequently, which meant he knew about the guns, which meant he almost certainly had one), and come stamp-stamp-stamping up the stairs to find Goldilocks eating his porridge.

Metaphorically speaking.

"Ram! f.u.c.ksakes, man! You bin shootin' my s.h.i.t again I'll kick your a...."

The door burst open. Something vaguely bear-like - but somehow smart at the same time - reared in the entrance, a silvery covering shimmering. Rick barely had time to see it, let alone react intelligently, but somehow the shotgun was levelled and his finger was on the trigger while sleep was still fogging his thoughts.

In the spilt second or two before the muzzle roared, he realised the behemoth was human. Facial hair like a dead orang-utan pasted to his head, narcotically unfocused beetle-eyes peering out beneath red-weed eyebrows; a ridiculous bowler-hat perched jauntily atop the thatch. The creature's frame was encased inside an enormous silver puffer-jacket, covered in bright strips of cloth and fluttering pendants; pinstriped office-pants that looked utterly out of place but glaringly showcased tiger striped shin guards and gym socks; goth-spec boots like they'd been dragged off an astronaut in mourning, and - ironically the last thing his eyes fell upon - an outrageously f.u.c.king ma.s.sive machete.

The man looked like a Vietnam vet who'd got a job as a taxman, then gone cuckoo one day in a camping gear shop. It was a lot to take in. Rick didn't even bother.

"Hey!" the man grunted, eyes briefly finding focus.

The shotgun took his right hand off.

Rick was no stranger to firearms but he yelped quietly at the shotgun's kick and staggered backwards, fighting to line-up the second barrel. The grizzled creature barely slowed: fist reduced to a frothing stub of congealing paste and dangling tendons, machete shattered and bent out of shape, hurled away in an expanding cloud of meaty lumps and bony shards. From somewhere inside the crippled mess an artery squirted feebly.

"You're not Raaaaam!" was the freak's only concession to shock or pain. Even with half his knuckles popping greasily beneath his booted feet, he kept coming.

Totally and completely, Rick decided, out of his skull.

A paw wrapped around the barrel of the gun and yanked it, hard. A wad of sparks and smoke roared somewhere underneath the giant's armpit, knocking a head-sized hole in the plaster behind him and sending Rick jerking backwards again. The gun was wrenched out of his hand, swivelled expertly in the man's remaining fist like a baseball bat, and swatted him across his cheek. Despite the flashes of light and building pain - getting sharp quickly, now - Rick felt that this was somehow unfair.

"I... I shot your f.u.c.king hand off..." he muttered, as if trying to remind the roaring monolith above him. Somehow, at some point, his face had got itself stuck to the floor.

Above his head the shadow of the shotgun moved backwards and up; wooden stock brandished like the head of some arcane mace, ready to pulverise his skull. It almost seemed like too much bother to try and roll aside, but with a sort of half-hearted fatigue he flopped onto his back, curled his head downwards, and held his breath.

The stock bounced off the floor, above his scalp, with a thud.

Rick stared groggily upwards, peering through the misty haze of arterial ejecta, and kicked the bear as hard as he could right between the legs. This was all happening to someone else, of course: as disa.s.sociated from reality as the dream with the tomahawks and crows. Rick fought the urge to laugh.

Real or not, sheer overwhelming damage seemed to be slowly catching up with the giant. The groin trauma had done what no amount of shock or blood loss had managed: making him stagger, wretch, then topple to his knees with a sharp crack. The shotgun - empty - skittered away into the corner, and Rick felt himself, as if from a whole world away, pick himself up and dust himself down.

"Raaaamm...?" the stranger warbled, flopping onto his side like a greasy mudslide, squeezing at the pulsing abortion that had once been his fist, trying to stop the bleeding. Rick stared down at him - at his froth-flecked lips and buzzing eyeb.a.l.l.s - and decided that whatever the guy was on, he wanted some.

In fact, an unpleasantly guilty sensation was stealing over Rick like a fart in reverse: he'd broken into someone's home, wrecked their window, stolen their gun...