The Culled Page 13

  It was all a big goddamn joke. Hiawatha smirked, then started to giggle. It had never been like this, before. Oh, shit, he’d been stoned a million times. He’d tried to... to commune with the fucking spirits as often as any of the Haudenosaunee. But always he’d felt like a fraud; like peering-in on something from the outside, like he was trying to be serious and spiritual about something deeply stupid.

  “That’s just it,” one of the Sachems said, head inflating like a balloon. “Who told you to be so damned serious?”

  They all started laughing too.

  The road ahead glowed.

  A patch – nothing more – of purple fire and green smoke, with a knot of make-believe birds circling above it, igniting on the tarmac ahead. It wasn’t real. It shifted and shimmered, changing directions and breaking form. It was on the far right of the highway, pressed up against the verge, like a patch of spilt oil, set alight by a passing rainbow.

  Hiawatha laughed, and the world laughed too.

  He understood.

  The walls dropped down, the dream passed, and he was awake again. The world still streaked-by. Ram was still shouting at him to hold his line, to smear himself against the truck, to do himself in, to get dead, to make up for Slip, to just – fucking – die!

  Slowly, without even looking, Rick angled the trike towards Ram. Ten seconds or so, maybe, before he hit the truck. A gradual drift, tectonically slow, towards the psycho, closing the gap between the choppers.

  The machine gun poked against his cheek.

  He smirked, imagining himself. Racing at top speed, bike-to-bike, with a gun to his head.

  “Arnie,” he whispered to himself, “eat your heart out.”

  “You get back over there!” Ram snarled, so close that even the wind couldn’t diminish the force of his voice. “You get back or I’ll shoot, I swear to Jesus, and when you’re roadkill I’ll fucking do you in every goddamn hole you got, boy!”

  The distance to the truck was swallowed up. The massive vehicle was slowing, braking hard, but it didn’t matter. He’d still hit it. There wasn’t room for both bikes to pass.

  The glowing mirage passed at the edge of the road. The birds shrieked. The trees groaned. The buffaloes snorted and rutted and screamed in the night, and –

  Rick jerked the trike, hard, to the right. The gun-barrel dug in to the meat of his cheek, the choppers locked briefly then parted, sparks spat, Ram shouted, and then they were separating out, jerking outwards: Rick straight back into the path of the truck, Ram slinking outwards towards the verge of the road, smirking and laughing at Rick’s dismal attempt to push him aside.

  He was too busy laughing to notice the enormous pothole at the edge of the interstate.

  The dream cleared totally. The coloured smoke and fire that had marked the cavity vanished, and the birds dissolved into the air.

  Ram’s bike nosedived, and made a noise a lot like:

  Klut.

  The front wheel dipped against the edge of the pothole. The forks crumpled. The rear segment flipped upright – a green horse bucking – and Ram sailed, asshole upright, out of the saddle and onto the tarmac, to scream and grind his filthy leathers away, tumbling and skidding.

  Rick swerved perfectly into the vacated space, and braked hard.

  The truck rumbled past, horn moaning into the distance.

  Silence descended bit by bit, and the last thing to shut the fuck up was the roaring in Rick’s ears.

  Ram lay on his back, breathing shallowly, a bloody trail of skidmarks marking his slide across the floor. His face was half gone. His bike was a crippled mess, lodged and broken in the pothole’s leading edge, and Rick took his time – feeling strangely dispassionate about everything – to siphon off the remains of its fuel into his own chopper’s tank.

  He felt like he’d seen the ‘real’ world, and this bland reflection of it was trivial by comparison. He gazed out to the east, and for the first time noticed that same purple-green haze, like an echo of the bright fire inside his dream, hanging above the endless city. Showing him where to go.

  “...get you...” Ram whispered. “F-fucking... fucking get you...”

  “You don’t even know who I am.”

  “Tell me,” the rat-like freak snarled. “Tell me who. Find you.” There was blood trickling out of his mouth where he’d bitten his tongue.

  “I’m Hiawatha,” said Hiawatha.

  Then he drove into New York, and stopped only once en route for a smoke, just to keep the dream fixed in his mind.

  FIVE HUNDRED MILES west, in a place that was once called Fort Wayne, the Tadodaho glanced around the circle of assembled Sachems – faces masked in the smoke-thick air of the Dreaming Lodge – and the shrewd-eyed women-folk standing behind each one, and nodded. The communal pipe at the centre (it looked like it had been carved out of a single piece of wood in the shape of an impressive bear totem, but in fact was a resin cast of a completely meaningless sculpture made in Taiwan in 1998) gave out the last few sputters of smoke and died, its usefulness complete.

  “He’s through,” the Tadodaho said, leathery skin crumpling as he smiled sagely. “Be in the city in a hour or two. Get the war party together. We need to get to the meeting place.”

  “Now?” one of the others said, peevishly.

  The Tadodaho pursed his lips, then shrugged.

  “Weeell... Soon, then. Who’s for a beer?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE AIR IN the tunnel was almost tropical. Damp too, musty, like you’d get in a cave whose only visitors were incontinent foxes and a less hygienic class of beetle. Indistinct stuff – unexpectedly cold in the muggy darkness – dripped on my head, and in the gloom I had to force down the shivers and keep telling myself it’s just water, it’s just water.

  The lights had died long ago – shattered lamp heads good now only for rat holes and bat-roosts – so Nate and I revved along the barren tube slowly; relying on the quadbike’s stammering headlights and the fluttering flames of tiny hammock-dwellings, strung up in odd corners and service-nooks. The clapped-out engine sounded painfully loud, and more than once I saw pale faces eyeing us from the shadows, squinting at the sudden brightness before burying themselves back beneath nest/beds of rags and cardboard.

  “More scavs?” I asked Nate, unnerved by the feral look of these troglodytes.

  He shook his head. “Flips. Worse’n scavs.” Their eyes caught at the light as we streaked by. “No Klans, no homes. Mostly they’re... outcasts. Crackheads, maybe. Some loonytoons. Lot of folks went nuts, straight after the Cull. Happens, you know? Happens when you see your whole family puke up their lungs.”

  I shivered and shut the thought away.

  Passing us by with their pale faces streaked by moisture, slack jaws mumbling, they put me in mind of salamanders. Fat, grub-like, nocturnal.

  “The Clergy don’t mind them being here?” I asked, eyeing yet another scarlet ‘O’ marked on the outer wall of a corner ahead. Someone had even formed a crude crucifix out of bicycle reflectors, which sat in the centre of the circle and blazed in the onrushing light. I felt like a dart, arcing towards a target.

  Behind me Nate shrugged, as if to say the Clergy had far more pressing things to be minding than a few reprobate squatters.

  Signs of the ownership of the Queens Midtown Tunnel were all around us. Even before we’d entered it, back on the other side of the East River, the territory markers had stood in long rows down either side of the approach-road; brittle white and topped in each case by a wide scarlet ring.

  Three heavily-armed goons had stood on the outer perimeter of the abstract border. Two men and a woman, each wearing nothing but arctic camo trousers and braces, jointly conducting a heated discussion with a shambling host of raggedy scavs. Some of them were pointing at us.

  “Mickeys,” Nate had grunted, voice muffled. I noted with narrowed eyes how the tallest of the men – a swarthy giant with arctic white hair and livid red rank-stripes scarred onto his shoulders – broke off fr
om the argument to glare as we rumbled by. It wasn’t until we’d passed beneath the tunnel’s arch that I realised Nate was hiding his face.

  As the tunnel roof had closed over us, our last sight was of a carefully hand-painted sign, hanging above the on-ramp, which read:

  AND HE SHALL FIND THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

  “Yeah,” Nate had spat. “One way or the other.”

  Back in the dark, a quarter hour or so later, I swerved to avoid a lump of congealing debris – a much-rusted car wreck, probably – and considered the tunnel roof above us. Back in London, a year or so after the Cull, I ventured down into the underground, just to see. Back there the place had been busy; thronging with communities trying to stick together, trying to stay warm. But the effect was the same. In the lightless depths you started to think...

  About all those thousands of tons of rock and soil and water pressing down above your head. About ant colonies in zoos – with walls made of glass – and thousands of thoughtless creatures going about their business in the arteries of the earth.

  The Queens Tunnel was kind of the same, except this wasn’t an artery. It was a vein; sluggish, deoxygenated, blue with worthless blood. Nate pointed ahead to another sharp turn and we cruised towards the faintest glimmerings of light – an illusion of day, always lurking beyond the next corner. Nate said this was the route he took whenever he was bringing kids from the airport. He said he knew the way like the back of his hand.

  I asked him how many people really knew what the backs of their hands looked like.

  He ignored me.

  I was glad of his knowledge anyway. The number of rusting obstacles and dangling patches of ruined tunnel were prodigious, and without his instructions we would have collided with something straight away.

  I asked him again what happened to the kids when they’d been delivered. Did they grow up to become priests? Did they go off to some secret place to begin building the future?

  I couldn’t see his face, but it took him longer than usual to answer.

  “I told you,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  The tunnel cornered and re-cornered in defiance of all obvious directional architecture. I’d been under the impression it joined Queens to Manhattan with the minimum of fuss, directly across the strait, but evidently its sinuous course took us deeper into the island, below the knot of blocks and stores of Murray Hill, before curving back on itself to spit us out into the daylight up a debris-strewn ramp shadowed by overarching blocks. The muggy humidity retreated, and it would almost have been a relief to enter the sunlight had the quicksmog not slunk back during our time underground, covering the blunt buildings of Midtown in an unsettling, gloomy whitewash. Over my shoulder the distant peaks of the financial district were masked – just the ghostly suggestion of needles penetrating the earth – and every street corner had become a cheap special effect.

  Just as before, the Clergy markings were everywhere. Territory poles, graffiti-tags of scarlet and red, banners strung across empty streets. An enormous mural showing a smiling John-Paul Rohare Baptiste regarded us from the gable-end of an apartment block. For some reason I couldn’t have found it any more menacing, even had the grinning Abbot been clutching at an AK47 or wearing a balaclava like the terrace-markers in Belfast. He just radiated... wrongness.

  The whole place was still. Static. No distant movement, no scavs, no dogs, no rats. Even the birds hadn’t bothered to hang around, and from the empty horizon to the north – Central Park, I guessed, beneath the level of the rooftops – to the haze-choked shadow of the Empire State that rose above us over our left shoulders, the whole uncomfortable place more than deserved its epithet: Hell’s Kitchen.

  After the communal degradation of London, and the noise of the Wheels Mart, it felt a lot like the surface of the moon. Silent as a graveyard, with its own vacant atmosphere and a sort of giddying gravity; like nothing was real and would all spin away into the universal haze at any moment. I let the quad trundle to a stop at an intersection, and morosely scanned the skyline.

  “There,” Nate said. “Manhattan.”

  I’d expected something busier. Some sectarian commune, perhaps, filling the entirety of the midtown district, swarming with children abducted from across the ravaged world. I imagined a glowing paradise. An industrious enclave of forward-thinking radicals, blocks wide, staffed with the young and the enthused, building and rebuilding, working hard on the civilisation of tomorrow.

  What a load of old bollocks.

  There were cars, frozen in time, bumper-to-bumper. Dead tyres and shattered windows. Skeletons slumped in front seats, or curled in skinless patterns on the sidewalk. Here and there fire-damage had blackened a rusty hulk, or scoured a section of street of its rough surface. Flamewagons, I guessed; burning the bodies of Blight victims, trundling by five long years ago.

  Newspapers flapped. Colourful litter sat like bright decorations speckling the rusting, filthy morass.

  The sun was sinking to the west. It even made the whole thing sort of beautiful.

  I asked Nate where everyone was, and caught myself whispering. He glanced around at the rooftops, sniffed noisily, then shrugged.

  “Two answers to that.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. First one is: all holed up. Central office. See, your Clergyman, he’s not a regular Klanner. No scavs and Klansmen, like that, no no no. This crew, they got the clerics, the soldiers, the pilgrims, the trustees.” He tapped the tattoo on his face, eyes grim. “Whole different hierarchy. Besides, these fucks got more on the mind than the usual. Territory. Drugs. Guns. Whatever. These assholes got faith. Whole worlda complications.”

  I glanced around again, unnerved by the quiet. I slipped off the quadbike and rummaged in my increasingly empty pack, producing the battered city map and unfolding it carefully. “So... they don’t mind strangers strolling about up here?”

  “Ah, well... there’s that mind again. Do they mind? Yeah, yeah, I figure they do. But they ain’t gonna do anything about it until someone raises a hand. Then you better believe they’ll go Krakatoa on your hairy white ass.”

  I looked up from the map, trying to get my bearings.

  “My arse isn’t hai...”

  “Not the point. Point is, depending on whatever the fuck it is you’re doing here, as long as it ain’t to do with pissing off the Clergy, we’ll be fine.”

  There was something strange in his eye. I pretended not to notice and rotated the map, staring off into the east.

  Nate cleared his throat.

  “So?” he said.

  “So what?”

  “So are you?”

  “Planning on going up against his nibs there?” I nodded at the smirking mural on the wall. “Nope. None of my business. Couldn’t give a rat’s tit, mate. I’m just here for some information.”

  Nate looked relieved. I glanced down at the heavy red ring marked on the map’s surface, then back at the eastern horizon, feeling an unexpected shiver of anticipation. Then I folded the booklet away and clambered back onto the quad, suddenly remembering something.

  “You said there were two answers.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I did. Answer number two is: they’re all around us.”

  And he was right. I could feel it. Eyes peering out of the shadows, regarding me from half-boarded windows on either side, squinting from rooftops. I couldn’t see anyone.

  That just made it worse.

  I gunned the quad towards Forty-Second Street and turned a sharp right, winding my way north-east in a series of step-like diagonals, working hard to create the impression I knew what I was doing. Nate had gone quiet. On the horizon, a shape swarmed slowly out of the haze. A blank slab of stone – vast and wide but skinny along its third dimension – like a cereal packet built to colossal proportions.

  Nate seemed to be fidgeting, suddenly, throwing looks in all directions. I still hadn’t told him where I was headed, and certainly not why I was headed there, but as the brooding shadow of the bui
lding loomed ever nearer, I guessed it was pretty obvious.

  I should say something to him, I guessed. Ask him if it was safe. Ask him his opinion.

  But:

  Something not right...

  Something not right about him...

  Something to do with his story, with his name, with London...

  It was the same old confusion. The same old contradiction between the information supplied by my senses – that Nate was easy to trust, a fun guy, a diamond in the rough – and my instincts; which grated against some tiny snippet of subconscious knowledge and made me wary.

  But then, I’d been wrong before.

  Eventually he leaned forwards on the saddle and called out over the noise of the quad’s angry little engine, voice thick with trepidation despite the volume.

  “You remember I told you how come none of the robe-wearin’ fucks’re on the street?” he called. “All in the... the central office, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  He pointed at the black building.

  The quad roared. The buildings blurred-past, the black monolith got bigger.

  “Oh,” I said. “Fuck.”

  “AND NOW, HIS holiness Abbot John-Paul shall demonstrate yet again the miracle of his bein’, that those who do not believe may be enlightened, and those sons and daughters who cleave already to the bosom of our great community may be strengthened further by his diviniteh!”

  Deep-south accent. Nothing better for delivering a bit of sermonising showmanship.

  The tragic thing is, when the robe-wearing bastard said the word “bosom” I glanced round the fringes of the crowd to make eye-contact with some likely-looking kid, to titter conspiratorially at the naughty word.