The Culled Part 13

Everything was good. Everything was funny.

"Haha!"

In fact, so vast and smudge-like was the endless plain of industry and s.m.u.tty air on the eastern horizon, that Rick's narcotically liberated consciousness completely forgot about the pursuing rider and went flas.h.i.+ng 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 sh.e.l.l 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 c.u.mbersome poking at odd angles off the rider of the other chopper, and a corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g contrail snarling-up the air between them.

The rocket launcher.

f.u.c.k.

"Haha!"

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 pa.s.sed. 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n idea where he was going. The Schwarzenegger stunt s.h.i.+t suddenly looked pretty f.u.c.king 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 "Rrrrrraaaaabies!" Because it seemed sort of appropriate.

"Killed... f.u.c.king... 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 cras.h.i.+ng 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, s.h.i.+mmering 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 gra.s.s 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 at the ground.

"We told you," one of the matriarchs hissed, peevish, "to stick with the f.u.c.king 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 moans of 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 ma.s.s of rusted debris on its own carriageway, and was now occupying two third 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 Slim, you f.u.c.k! You hold your line! You chicken that motherf.u.c.ker 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 s.h.i.+ft out the way, to f.u.c.king clear the r- 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 amus.e.m.e.nt and the gra.s.s... the gra.s.s just rustled its quiet t.i.tters into nothingness.

It was all a big G.o.dd.a.m.n joke. Hiawatha smirked, then started to giggle. It had never been like this, before. Oh, s.h.i.+t, he'd been stoned a million times. He'd tried to... to commune with the f.u.c.king 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 d.a.m.ned 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 s.h.i.+fted and s.h.i.+mmered, 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 pa.s.sing rainbow.

Hiawatha laughed, and the world laughed too.

He understood.

The walls dropped down, the dream pa.s.sed, 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 Slim, to just-f.u.c.king-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 f.u.c.king do you in every G.o.dd.a.m.n hole you got, boy!"

The distance to the truck was swallowed up. The ma.s.sive vehicle was slowing, braking hard, but it didn't matter. He'd still hit it. There wasn't room for both bikes to pa.s.s.

The glowing mirage pa.s.sed 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, a.s.shole 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 s.p.a.ce, and braked hard.

The truck rumbled past, horn moaning into the distance.

Silence descended bit by bit, and the last thing to shut the f.u.c.k up was the roaring in Rick's ears.

Ram lay on his back, breathing shallowly, a b.l.o.o.d.y 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 dispa.s.sionate 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-f.u.c.king... f.u.c.king 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 a.s.sembled 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.

"Weee-ell... 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 cla.s.s of beetle. Indistinct stuff - unexpectedly cold in the muggy darkness - dripped on my head, and in the gloom I had to force down the s.h.i.+vers 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 then 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 s.h.i.+vered and shut the thought away.

Pa.s.sing 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 onrus.h.i.+ng 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 owners.h.i.+p 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 this 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 m.u.f.fled. 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 from the argument to glare as we rumbled by. It wasn't until we'd pa.s.sed 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...