The Culled Part 8

He looked at me for a second - proper eye contact, for the first time - then away again. Someone screamed playfully out by the wreck.

"Same as before, more or less. Ironic, huh? Just like the Albanians. Checking over the produce when it arrives. Making sure it's fit to travel. No sickness, no frailty. Clergy only wants the best."

"You inspected the kids?"

"Right. s.h.i.t, I was in charge of them. Clumsy old guy with a friendly face and a dumb costume. Made jokes. Patched up cuts and sc.r.a.pes. Told 'em all everything would be just fine. Drove the bus into the city, came right back for the next batch. London, Paris, Moscow. Planes comin' in from all over."

"So you're the ferryman to the New Dawn?" I said, trying out a little sarcasm; seeing how the old man would react.

Know everything.

Check the angles.

He smiled, a little too slowly, then nodded. "I like that." He said. "Yeah, I like that."

Something rustled nearby. A spreading whisper of cloth and feet. My hand tightened on the M16, eyes scanning the shadows, but Nate waved a laconic hand in my direction and grinned.

"No need, man."

Not rea.s.suring.

Something oozed out of the dark. Something hesitant and filthy, matted and feathered down each flank of its raggedy form. Something that broke-up as the firelight caught it; separated down by degrees into an aggregate. A crowd of people.

Staring, all as one, at the meat roasting over the flame.

They came into the light like a single ent.i.ty, scuttling on far too many legs. They looked - random thought here - like extras from the set of a war film: recognisably human but coated in the makeup department's finest emulations of soot, dirt and dried blood, scampering with that expression of people who don't know what they're doing or why they're doing it. Several had fresh wounds - nicks and cuts from knives and teeth - and eyed each other warily.

The ones at the front carried themselves with a seniority based on whatever Byzantine pecking order was at work, clutching in their dirty hands stolen guns, sc.r.a.ps of clothing, bundles of chemical ephemera and all types of other salvage taken from the plane. One was holding a seatbelt buckle, smiling with the smug expression of someone who'd outperformed herself. Another one - a young man - had Bella's jeans slung over his shoulder.

The M16 felt good in my hand.

Let it go, soldier.

Sir, yes sir, etc etc.

"Well, then..." said Nate, reclining back against the compound wall with as much disinterested ease as he'd shown before the darkness disgorged them. "What can we do for you?"

I think I half expected them to speak in grunts and moans, if at all. They looked so devolved, so f.u.c.king prehistoric, that at that point it wouldn't have surprised me if they'd dropped down and worshipped the 'Great Fire Makers'.

It sounds arrogant, now I come to say it. I mean... why should they be any less coherent than me? Why should their five years of hardship and filth be any less dignified than mine?

"We smelt the rat," a tall woman said, near the front. She reminded me of someone, and a shiver worked its way along my spine.

Shut that s.h.i.t down, soldier. Job to do.

Nate shrugged. "And?"

"And we thought maybe you'd trade."

Nate shook his head. "No trades."

"But... see?" The woman plucked a plastic drinking beaker out of a raggedy pack, brandishing it like a jewel. "Good, see? Perfect for trading, that is. See what I've g..."

Nate's voice hardened a little. His face stayed the same. "No. Trades."

The scavs flitted a few awkward glances back and forth, then the tall woman's eyes went sneaky. Heavy-lidded and intense, like a child conspiring to do mischief.

"We could take..." she said, quietly, acting nonchalant.

Nate chuckled to himself.

"You could," he said. "Yep."

The scavs shuffled, shifted their weight from foot to foot. Here and there a blade twinkled in the firelight, and my heart twisted in my chest: speeding up, blurring time.

Endorphins washed down me.

Muscles tensed.

An old man shuffled to the front, dark blue sweater decorated with stripes of white paint, and I watched him with the targeted eye of a predator.

"What Klan?" He wheezed. "Mm?"

"I'll show you mine if you show me yours." Nate ginned. The M16's grip was warm now, heated by my own palm.

All at once the scavs twitched; a great roiling ball of motion, and without a single conscious thought I was lifting the gun and reaching for the arming bolt and...

Nate's hand sat on the barrel, holding it down. He gave me a look, shook his head, and grunted towards the scavs. They hadn't been attacking at all.

They stood brandishing themselves, like a medical examination taking place en ma.s.se. In each case the proffered elbow, shoulder, arm, stomach, neck or ankle was decorated by a small mark. A burnt branding-scar in the shape of a smiling face, eyes like double-arches above a mountainous nose, with a pair of satellite ears protruding on each side.

"Mickeys," said Nate. He gave me a doting smile, like an old man discussing the merits of different chess pieces, and said: "Respectable Klan, that."

"Trade now?" The woman said. "Or we'll help ourselves."

"What Klan?" the old man whispered, hopping from foot to foot. "What Klan what Klan what Klan?"

Nate tilted his head back, letting the fire chase away the shadows beneath the brim of his cap. The scarlet semicircle seemed to blaze on his cheek.

"Clergy..." went the whisper. A fearful susurration rushing around the crowd. "G.o.ds.h.i.ts... Choirboys... f.u.c.kin' Clergy..."

And then they were gone.

Nate and I sat in silence. Eventually I coughed under my breath and asked him, third time lucky, if he'd tell me about the Klans.

He gave me a funny look, smirked quietly, and said: "s.h.i.t, man. What you think I bin doing?"

CHAPTER SIX.

The Consolidated Edison Power Plant facility, directly off Astoria's 20th Avenue, was a continental wedge of pipes, cables, depots, spinal chimneys, blocky storage tanks and stark structures like geometric skeletons made from girders. All of it pressed up against the same polluted, watery banks as the airport. There was something undeniably sepulchral about it. A knotted tangle of hip-like joists, vertebral chains linking moving a.s.semblies, and skull-like containers that had long since lost their sheen.

Nate had brought me here at first light, when I'd told him I needed transport.

He hadn't asked me why. He hadn't asked me what I was here to achieve.

Hadn't told me why he was tagging along.

Hmm.

Standing outside the power plant, it was plain to see the whole place was inactive. Rusted to f.u.c.k; plundered for raw materials, stripped apart in a million acts of petty vandalism and selfish salvage.

There was red bunting dangling above the concourse as we stepped off the street - giving the whole thing an air of ludicrousness - and the corrosion-melted gates slumped awkwardly, reminding me of reclining figures watching the world go by. The health and safety signs above their heads had been neatly crossed through with red spray paint, and someone had erected a billboard above the entrance, which read simply: WHEELS.

I felt someone staring, that same old prehistoric instinct, and glanced around, with hairs p.r.i.c.kling, for the culprit. Only when I looked directly up did I find him: a dead head, sockets empty, skin tattered, lipless jaws set in a timeless grin. This grisly voyeur sat mounted on a telegraph pole; cables stripped away and its solid girth painted in stripes of tar and red paint.

"The f.u.c.k does that mean?" I said, nodding up at it.

"Territory marker," Nate mumbled, smoking a straw-like cigarette. One of mine. "Black and red means this is En-Tee."

I gave him a blank look. The acronym thing was starting to p.i.s.s me off.

"Neutral Territory," he grinned, pointing further into the plant's network of alleys and avenues, all festooned with the same black and red flags and bunting. "No Klan business."

"So the dead guy...?"

Nate shrugged, drooling smoke. "Maybe picked a fight. Got outbid, tried to pull pecking rank. Who knows? Maybe just an unlucky schmo inna wrong place when someone wanted to make a point. Folks that run the En-Tees don't take kindly to rule-breakers. They can afford to enforce, y'see?"

Like so much that poured from his mouth, Nate's casual explanations mixed the common sense with the bewildering. Pecking ranks, territory markers... it was all the stuff of just another drug-dream. A revisit to the malleable memories and landscapes of the Bliss trip. But still, I wasn't entirely in the dark. I'd spent much of the morning at the airport dozing and thinking, listening to the old man snore, picking his brains about the Klan-system whenever he deigned to wake.

If I understood one tenth of what he'd said, during the Culling year, New York - not to put too fine a point on it - had gone straight to h.e.l.l. He'd painted a picture of streets clogged up with empty cars, skeletons tangled along sidewalks. Of the military running out of control with water cannons and teargas. Of riots like full scale wars and whole blocks burning to ash on the grounds of a single suspected infection. He hadn't been there - he was still in London at that point - but leaving aside the narrator's propensity for hyperbole it still wasn't easy listening.

What was certain was the Klan system. In a weird sort of way, despite everything, I was impressed by it. It was easy to see how it must have started, and at the back of my mind - beyond the doubts and disapprovals - it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Like some new species released onto the savannah, frightened herds running together; accreting like s.h.i.t flowing into a bowl.

Strength in numbers.

Pack mentality.

The oldest instincts in the book.

The way Nate told it, the Klans all had their origins in different places. Maybe some grew up round whichever politicians survived the Cull and got lucky, outside of Washington when the nuke skyburst. You can imagine that happening, maybe. Little guys in suits, standing on stone steps, kicking up a fuss. Like you used to get in Hyde Park, like Speakers' Corner every Sunday. Angry men and women on stools and ladders, spouting fire and brimstone. Since the Cull, they would have been Kings.

Still... It's a big step from there to gang colours, to skin brandings, to closed territories and aggressive expansion and nightly raids and sallying-forth and midnight skirmishes and blood in the gutters...

The night before, as Nate explained this stuff, as I told him I just didn't see rational people acting so dumb, sinking so low, he stopped with a grin and said: "Desperate times, man."

The main driveway along the interior of the power plant took a sharp corner, every inch of the way draped in swatches of fabric and makeshift adverts. Most carried the names of food stalls and barter points (promising FARE TRADE, WIDE SELECSION, ALL SCAV CONSIDERD), branded in each case with iconic images of bygone snacks; hotdogs, burgers, bagels. I found my mouth watering at the memory of such extravagant-seeming meals, and asked Nate what the stalls really traded.

"Rat." He said, not looking around. "It's all rat."

Some of the Klans, maybe, came up from less obvious sources. Lantern-jawed drill sergeants discovering they had no country left to fight for, n.o.body left to shriek at, no way of draining off the dynamo-level testosterone. Civic leaders, celebrities, lawyers. The local b.l.o.o.d.y postman. It didn't take much, back at the start, to be the centre of a pack; to let something comfortable and secure grow around you. Maybe some of those putative mobs - coalescing and running together - could even claim they'd formed their miniature little states for all the right reasons. Nate told me one of the Klans, back at the start, was called the 'Thin Blues.' Bunch of NYPD grunts, he said, banding together, facing down the chaos. He said that to start with they even had a decent stab at maintaining the peace; driving about, making arrests, shooting looters. He used the word 'altruistic', which sounded weird when he said it, and tricky to take seriously.

He said it didn't last long.

He said ever since then, the Thin Blues had been one of the smaller Klans.

Inside the industrial sprawl of the Con Ed facility we reached a checkpoint, where two enormous blokes in black clothes and red bandanas stood divesting everyone of weapons. A small queue of raggedy scavs had formed, and beyond the canvas-draped checkpoint I could see the peristaltic movement of large crowds, deeper inside the facility. It made me nervous. In London, the only time you saw that many people gathered together was for the Abbot's sermons, and just thinking about those left a bad taste in my mouth.

I watched the guards frisking and checking, allocating each person a number to be used in recollecting their guns and knives, and tilted my head towards Nate.

"What Klan are they?" I asked, nodding towards the muscular goons.

"Right now," he said, "no Klan at all. Neutral Territory, remember? They're being paid to keep it that way."

As if to reinforce this point, the guards commanded each entrant to display his or her Klan marking. Elbows and shoulders were silently brandished, knees held out, necks craned, and I caught a few fleeting glimpses of the squiggles and meaningless icons depicting each different group. In every case the guard quickly tied a black rag, plucked from a filthy basket, around the scar; hiding the brand from sight.

"Neutral." was all that Nate said.

We reached the front of the queue and caused something of a commotion. For a start, Nate's branding could hardly be covered with a simple piece of rag - unless he was prepared to submit to blindfolding, which he wasn't - but it was the nature of the mark itself that really got them riled. They kept exchanging looks, clenching their jaws, wondering out loud if they should fetch the 'Em-Bee'.

More f.u.c.king acronyms. Nate seemed to be enjoying all the consternation.

He'd explained it to me last night, the instant that the scavs he'd called 'Mickeys' scuttled off into the dark.

"The Neo-Clergy," he said, "the mighty New Church, the holier-than-thou warrior priests of the New Dawn were really just another Klan."

Oh, a big one, to be sure. The biggest. The de-facto rulers of New York, whose powerbase gave them an administrative control over all the others, but still...

It hadn't seemed possible, somehow. How could something so mundane, so seedy, as this feudal mob have spread across the devastated world to make its claims of ushering-in a new future? From angry thugs to architects of tomorrow.

According to Nate, the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn started out as a band of raggedy-a.r.s.ed b.a.s.t.a.r.ds calling themselves The Choirboys. They had no particular defining features - besides a reputation for being twisted little s.h.i.ts - and would have languished in obscurity had they not encountered the man named John-Paul Rohare Baptiste.

No one knew much about him. No one knew where he'd come from or who he'd been. All they knew was that he shouldn't be alive, and he proved it to them over and over again, with tests and samples and nothing-up-his-sleeves, just as he had continued to do every week on his detestable f.u.c.king TV show.

The Blight should have got him. He should have been Culled.

But he lived anyway.

Under his guidance, and the fluttering banner of his self-declared divinity, the Klan swelled like a tumour. It came to the point they could have challenged and annihilated any other group they chose, but they didn't. They simply tuned out from the power struggle, announced that their intentions had transcended the merely territorial, and elected themselves into a position of magisterial arbitration.

Nowadays they monitored the others, like proud parents adjudicating the play fighting of toddlers. They formalised the squabbles and scuffles, they leant their backing to whichever Klans they favoured, they provided weapons and drugs (their most valuable currencies), and in return they demanded The t.i.the.

Oh yeah...