The Culled Page 12

“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 shitload! All ready for any motherfucker pisses 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 fucking 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 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 passed 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 clusters 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 Slip’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 sturdier 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, Hiawatha – née Rick – 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 quantities 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 Slip 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 goddamn town he was nothing to do with the fucking Clergy, or any other troublemaking scum 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 hell 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 bullshit 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 passed 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 passing 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 shaggy monstrosities with horns like scimitars, which is how – never having seen one – he imagined buffalo must look), oozing across grassy plains and lowing, 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 god and their scarlet demagogue.

  The sky was talking to him. The grass 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-ass dream-vi
sion, 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 grasses 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.

  “Fuck!” he yelped, waking up in a hurry. “Fuck!”

  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.

  “Ha-ha!” It was hard not to laugh. Not just at the other biker, oh no: at everything.

  Everything was good. Everything was funny.

  “Ha-ha!”

  In fact, so vast and smudge-like was the endless plain of industry and smutty air on the eastern horizon, that Rick’s narcotically liberated consciousness completely forgot about the pursuing rider and went flashing off down a million new tangents, to get wrapped up in wonder at the patterns a smoking chimney made against the sky; the curious sweep of a green park amidst the urban sprawl; the flight of a bird overhead; the –

  The roar of another Harley.

  The flash of a silver jacket in his mirror.

  Deep inside, at some cold rational level untouched by the cloying comfort of the drug, Rick was screaming and shouting in half-grasped terror. But outside, on the surface of the chilled-out shell containing him, he did nothing but giggle and make lion roaring sounds under his breath, trying to out-growl the approaching bike, trying inwardly to wrestle himself into some semblance of conscious control.

  Swearing over and over that he’d never smoke dope again.

  He watched a tiny flash-flicker in the mirror, like a speed camera shuttering open in his wake, and shouted “Say Cheeeeeese!”

  At this distance, squinting carefully into the fly-spattered mirror, he could just make out something long and cumbersome poking at odd angles off the rider of the other chopper, and a corkscrewing contrail snarling-up the air between them.

  The rocket launcher.

  Fuck.

  “Ha-ha!”

  He would have died, but for his sluggish reactions. The idea of swerving furiously to his left gripped him by lazy degrees, so that when finally he twisted the forks of the trike’s front wheel a whole second had already passed. A vicious grey blur – venting heat and smoke – squealed past him like a localised earthquake, directly beside his left ear. Right where he would’ve been if he’d managed to get his act together sooner and swerve.

  “Whup!” he shouted, half drooling in bowel-voiding terror, half whooping with stoned elation.

  The rocket dipped down a second or two ahead of Rick, then nothing but smoke and fire-flash and a bilious black-red-grey dome bulging up and out, and tentacles of soot and shrapnel curling down like the branches of a willow, and he was heading straight into the dark heart of the fireball and –

  – and this time he swerved with a little more presence of mind, banking the trike through the blind heat and soot on the rim of a seething crater, gunning his way forwards with his eyes closed, his hair singeing, and no goddamn idea where he was going. The Schwarzenegger stunt shit suddenly looked pretty fucking ridiculous in his mind’s eye.

  By the time the smoke was out of his face and pouring off the bike’s tyres, the other guy was almost on him; tearing an unconcerned hole in the wall of black smog and shouting something, deep and vicious, that Rick couldn’t understand. In momentary glimpses at the speckled reflection he could see the rocket launcher was gone – hurled casually onto the verge the instant it was empty – and now the slumped character was crouched low over the handlebars of his reptile-green chopper like a ghost riding a lizard, free hand filled with a compact, matte-black machine gun, long silver jacket flapping in his wake.

  Rick yanked the shotgun off his back and hoped he looked like he knew what he was doing. Riding one handed was all very well, and maybe he’d even be capable of firing a loaded weapon with the other, but doing both simultaneously whilst harried from directly behind by an indistinct psycho was quite another matter. He struggled for a second or two to twist and aim, almost hit an abyssal pot-hole, and swerved once again with a shriek.

  The world blurred past.

  The machine gun chattered somewhere over his shoulder, driving him low against the saddle, and for the second time he found himself driving blind. Miniature craters blossomed all across the tarmac below and before him, and something whined angrily as it ricocheted off some hidden part of the trike. Rick hoped it wasn’t anything important, then remembered he wouldn’t have known one way or the other anyway.

  He was still finding it sort of tricky not to laugh.

  The other bike drew level. Glancing to his side, Rick could see his attacker clearly for the first time – and wished he hadn’t looked.

  Ram wasn’t a big guy. He was wiry and pale, with greasy red hair that hung in bedraggled knots over the front of his sweaty, pointed little face. He put Rick in mind of a rat. A compact and bundled package of lank fur and corded muscles. Not the fastest or the strongest critter out there, maybe, but corner the little bastard in the wrong place and it’ll turn and fight and won’t ever give up.

  Ram had a look like he always felt cornered.

  Rick shouted “Rraaabies!” Because it seemed sort of appropriate.

  “Killed... fucking... Slip!” the gangly creature snarled, eyes blazing, tweaking his bike’s course to be perfectly parallel to Rick’s own, then raising the machine gun with theatrical slowness, yellowing teeth bared.

  He wore a head guard, of sorts. A football helmet with its visor removed and a pair of rotten, curled horns – ripped from the head of a ram – affixed on each side. And a bowler hat glued to the top.

  To Rick, despite the whole ‘impending death’ thing, the dribbling psychopath looked for all the world just like Princess Leia, complete with currant-bun haircoils on the sides of her head. Rick found this screamingly funny, and started laughing.

  Then he stopped, and started to whimper.

  That made him laugh too.

  It was all pretty pathetic, but at the very least it made Ram pause in tightening a finger over the machine gun’s trigger, fascinated by a piece of prey manifestly even more insane than he was.

  Rick closed his eyes and waited.

  And waited.

  And then there was music, and voices, and rustling.

  Abruptly he seemed to be half-asleep again; like a sudden wave crashing against his mind, prising open his eyes and altering everything in the subtlest ways. The world was still just as it had been, Ram was still riding there beside him, gun pivoting upright... but somehow everything was different. Everything was fluid and glacial, shimmering with a sort of hard-edged light that came from nowhere, and went to nowhere. Maybe it was the shadows, or the shape of the sky, or –

  The music, again. The chanting voices with their hymn of hatred. The grass rustling and the buffalo lowing. The Tadodaho surrounded by the oldest Sachems, and the clan mothers – the true leaders – huddled in cloaks beyond the light of the tribal fire.

  Another dream-vision, nuclear-bomb-bursting open in his pot-fuelled preconceptions.

  The great spirit, the Earth-Initiate; the trickster coyote and the turtle-man.

  Thunderbirds circled overhead, every wing beat a new calamity, every eye-flash a splinter of lightning to stab a
t the ground.

  “We told you,” one of the matriarchs hissed, peevish, “to stick with the fucking Yamaha.”

  Rick giggled. In his limited experience, dream-visions rarely cussed.

  “No time for that,” the Tadodaho croaked, folded-up in a bat-like shroud of leathery cloaks and feathered cords, hard-lined face bisected by sharp slashes of black paint. “Look.”

  He nodded out of the dream, and Rick stared past the hazy walls of his own subconscious back out into the real world, like a drive-in movie for his own skull. The lowing of the endless buffalo herds changed tone discreetly – modulated downwards into a synthetic blare, and became the panicky blast of a truck’s horn.

  Further along the freeway, a mile or so ahead of Rick and Ram’s helter-skelter rush, there was an HGV oncoming. It had ducked through a splintered section of the central reservation to avoid a black mass of rusted debris on its own carriageway, and was now occupying two thirds of the road directly ahead of Rick. Just like all the others; crammed with stained workers and glaring guards, horn screaming over and over.

  There was room to get past; but not much. And Ram’s bike, tearing along solidly at Rick’s side, wasn’t budging an inch.

  Rick flicked a glance across at the horned freak. His face had changed. He was smiling, twitchy and vicious, and victorious, gun raised but not fired. He’d spotted the juggernaut. He knew fun when he saw it.

  “You hold!” he shouted, eyes watering. “Killed Slip, you fuck! You hold your line! You chicken that motherfucker out, or I shoot!”

  Rick giggled, despite himself. At least the psycho was giving him the choice.

  A blast in the brain or a head-on collision. Tough call.

  The people in the truck’s container were waving arms, roaring at him to move, to shift out the way, to fucking clear the ro –

  The walls went back up, and the music carried him away again.

  In the dream, the Tadodaho wasn’t troubled. He eyed Rick – no, not Rick; Hiawatha – warmly, and said something that no one else could hear. The birds in the sky laughed and sang and rushed together. The trees bent down and doubled-over, chuckling so hard their trunks creaked and the ends of their branches snapped. The Thunderbirds roared their amusement and the grass... the grass just rustled its quiet titters into nothingness.