He wasn’t lying.
“You’re...? I don’t underst...”
“Nor do we. Not fully. I tell you this because it will help you to understand why we have brought you here. We know you have desires of your own. Agendas. It is our hope that ours might briefly... compliment your own.”
I swallowed. My mouth suddenly felt dry.
“Tell me more. About the... about how come you’re still alive.”
“I cannot. I do not understand such things. What I know is that of all my people alive before the Cull – my true people, stranger, by blood and birth – less than one half perished. Regardless of blood type.
“This, we hope, is welcome news to you.
“This, we hope, will give you some hope of your own.”
He knows.
The old bastard, he knows what I’m looking for...
But if he’s right. If he’s telling the truth, then couldn’t it mean that –
– don’t even THINK it! Don’t even dare to hope –
– that there’s a chance?
That I didn’t come here for nothing?
I must have looked thunderstruck. Sitting there, mind back-flipping. The Tadodaho was tactful enough to say nothing, watching my face, and when five old ladies magically appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, each bearing a wooden bowl, each bowl smelling like it’d come direct from an all-angels edition of Masterchef, even then my excitement at the feast couldn’t quite sever my thoughts.
Some people. Some people lived through it, who shouldn’t have.
Look at these folks.
Look at John-fucking-Paul.
Wasn’t it possible?
I started eating like a man possessed, nodding thankfully to each woman as they delivered venison, sweet-potatoes, beans, sour-bread... In the confused fug of my thoughts – made sluggish by surprise and smoke – I noticed the last of the entourage wore flowing robes of a particularly vibrant red and had a cute little radio-mic clipped to what passed for her lapel. I squinted, trying to remember why this was significant, but couldn’t. I thought the group might shuffle out of the room as they’d come in, but they gathered instead in a huddle of smiling faces and crinkled skin behind the Tadodaho, and stood there staring at me.
“The men of the Church,” the old man said, watching me eat, “have their own interest in our survival.”
I scowled, wiping sauce off my chin. “Why?”
“We don’t know. All we understand is that their Collectors come to our lodges every day. In greater numbers. With guns and bikes and metal cords. Every day they come, every day they steal away our people.”
“They take your kids?”
“There are no children left to take, Stranger. They have... widened their attentions. Any Iroquois, by birth. Any redskin. Any who survived the Cull, who should not have.
“They are killing us, little by little, Englishman. And we would like your help.”
I stopped eating. I hadn’t expected him to wrap up so soon, and it felt like every eye in the room was boring into me.
Worse, the eyes shifted. Swirled. I shook my head to clear the sensation.
“And... and that’s why you brought me here?” I mumbled, trying to stay focused. “To help you beat the bastards off?”
The room suddenly seemed far less angular. Tapestries became rocky walls. The steam from the kitchen was an underground river, spilling through sweaty caves.
“Sorry,” I said, shaken. “My fight’s not with the fucking Clergy. They got in my way, I took what I wanted. End... end of story.”
Somewhere, a million miles away, I felt the bowl fall from my hands and spill across my legs. I felt the room move sideways. I felt the skins drooping from the roof writhe and flex.
“We understand,” the Tadodaho said. “We know. And do not think us so crude that we would attempt to convince you otherwise. You are a stubborn man, Stranger. We have always known it.”
“Then... thuh... then why... brng... me here...?”
Slurring.
Not good.
Something in the food.
Drugged.
Panic.
“I told you,” the old man’s voice said, from far, far away. “You are here to talk with the highest Authority within our Great Confederacy.”
“Buh... But...” Every word was a struggle. Every syllable a living beast that fluttered from my mouth and scuttled across the air, leaving trails of purple and green fire. “But we bin... bin talking alrrdy...”
Somewhere out in the soup of my senses, the Tadodaho’s face coalesced.
“Not me.” He smiled. “Not me.”
And then five shapes – five woman-faces that rippled like ploughed earth and swarmed with a host of stars and fireflies – bulged together around me, hooked soft fingers beneath the skin of my mind and dragged me down to the past.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THEY’RE WATCHING ME, but maybe there’s not much I can do about that just now.
They’re in every detail. Flaws, mainly. Like when you remember something with such crystal-clarity that you know every line, every shape, every resonance...
...and then you look up expecting to see London’s grey skies, and there’s a face looking down instead.
...and then you shake the blood off a knife, or finish retching with the force of your anger, and the droplets splattered across the floor form eyes, and stare right at you.
These memories, they’re full of rage and violence and weirdness. And the thing with weirdness is, there’s always room for more.
Things keep changing. Time keeps jumping. There’s a roar in my ears like I’m underwater, but I’m not scared. They’re watching me – those withered injun women – but so what? They’re talking to me, too, and their voices are pretty, and maybe I’m talking back or maybe I’m not, but either way: they’re in here with me. Spying on my past.
Back to the start.
Back to London.
After I got the signal, in the comms room of the old MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross – where I’d whored myself to the SIS for years – I sliced up some people good. Clergy. I don’t recall how many. I was too focused.
We’d all seen the planes. Every rat-human crawling in the filth of London knew they were there. Blue-painted, marked with the red ‘O’ of the Church, going up, coming down. Why? Who knew? Who cared?
I went to Heathrow. My mind was a needle. Too angry to speak. Too focused to negotiate.
Pandora, Pandora, Pandora... like a mantra, see?
Nothing would turn me. I’d impale anything that dared get in my way.
And I waited. Cut and slashed in the night. Hacked open necks. Cut off fingertips. Made grey robes run red.
Not because I hated the Clergy.
Not because they had anything to do with anything.
Not for any reason except they were convenient, and they had something I wanted.
Took me three days of torturing to work my way up to a Clergy-bastard of sufficient hierarchical power to be worth taking hostage. I think – I know – I stopped being me for a bit there. Let the animal thing take over too much. Let the rampage-instincts out of their box.
It was a weird time.
I made sure everything felt significant, everything felt like a step in the right direction, and by God’s own piss it felt good. I let everyone I came across seem responsible, took it all out on them, mixed up the anger with the focus, just like they taught me in training:
Made it personal.
So what I did, back at the start, I strolled into the airport as bold as brass, with this pigshit priest under my knife, telling every gun-wielding arsehole who came near to back off or get splashed.
And this guy, this hostage, this high-up canon or whoever he was, he leaned down so the knife was pressed up against his neck... and he shook his head.
Slit-slat-slit.
Faith. That’s what. Obvious, really. Never take any wanker prisoner who’s prepared to die for his beliefs.
Cue running away, hiding, rethinking.
Cue a realisation or two: doing it alone wasn’t going to work. Focus wasn’t enough.
Enter Bella.
I found her waiting outside the airport, just standing and staring. Like she was shellshocked, maybe, except it looked like she’d been that way for years. Watching every plane, mumbling to herself. Waiting for something to happen.
I happened.
Cut forwards in time.
Bella telling me she knew how to fly.
Recon of the airport.
Preparing. Arming up.
Getting drunk one night and fucking, and not caring except to feel the guilt, and letting down the shields for five seconds and discovering – holy shit – I’m still human after all.
Telling myself I didn’t care what her story was. Listening anyway.
They took her kid.
They took a thousand kids. Every week, another load. Off across the ocean. Off to be with the skeletal bastard Abbot off the TV. Off to a better life, or a worse one, or who knew what, except that it was OFF.
Scared. Crying. Can’t you just imagine them?
(The faces in the clouds are watching and nodding, and saying yes we can, and wiping tears and telling me to get on with it.)
And then there was Bella, saying:
“Doesn’t matter. Not your problem. But that’s why I’m going.”
And then the time comes and we make our move, and con our way inside, and kill our way further, and gather guns and steal drugs, and then it’s sprinting across tarmac, and guns opening fire, and pain in my shoulder, and Bella dragging me up the steps, and then –
And then away. Stateside-bound.
And then the story started.
And Bella died in fire and pain and chaos.
And Nate and the city and blah-blah-blah.
“Doesn’t matter,” Bella told me, as we clung to each other in the dark. “Not your problem.”
After everything she did for me. After she flew me and died for me. After she gave me back my humanity, and stuck a booster up my hope.
“Not your problem.”
And all the others. The people of London who bartered and fed me, and said hello every day, and didn’t care that I didn’t say hello back. The scavs of New York, who died and cried and followed me, despite my lies, into the jaws of hell. The Iroquois, who sent their scared little envoy to watch over me, then saved me themselves on the road.
All of them. Children stolen away. Tears long since run-out. Dead inside, but still fit to help. Still fit to see hope for a better tomorrow. Still fit to smile and think the best, and do something good.
And here’s me. Here’s me pursuing my own goal and forgetting the rest. Damn the world. Damn every motherfucker alive. Ignore it. Let it happen. Be selfish, why not?
Nothing to do with me.
“Not your problem,” she said.
Well, shit.
About time I made it my problem.
THEY WERE COMING. So said the Tadodaho.
(Or, rather, so said the matriarchs, who whispered and sighed in dark corners then told the chief what to say and do. It amounted to the same thing.)
I didn’t bother asking how they knew. Scouts, surveillance, divine-bloody-intuition, I didn’t know. Or care. I’d just taken a lazy stroll through the psychedelic bullshit of my own mind, and if the weirdest thing to greet me on my return was the rock-solid assertion that the Clergy were coming, here, en masse, then frankly it was a taste of reassuring normality.
They were following me, I guessed. We’d got past their psychotic Collectors, but it didn’t matter. Their base in NY was overrun and they’d came pelting out here in my wake. Why?
Revenge?
Maybe. But it sounded like a lot of hard work to go to, just to kick the arse of the guy who’d rattled them up. So why else? Unless...
Unless they were going to the same place as me.
“What’s the plan?” Nate said, hours later, when my head stopped spinning from its heavy barrage of hallucinations and synaesthetic memories. We were still sat at the fire between the caravans, watching the evening roll-in, just the two of us. Nike was laid up in one of the ’vans, dosed out of his skull, and Moto refused to leave his side. Tora... Tora’s body had been found near where the Collectors caught up with us. I didn’t like to ask what state it was in. Malice went and oversaw a quiet cremation outside the camp, and I’d figured it would be rude to invite myself along. She hadn’t said anything, but there was an unspoken accusation in her eyes as she wandered off:
You brought us out here.
This is your fault.
I told myself I’d imagined it. I told myself they were all mercenaries who’d known the dangers, and it was a little late in the day to start complaining about the risk when two were already dead and one mangled to shit.
It didn’t help.
So. Me and Nate. Warm and full of food (still chowing, in fact, on a second portion of everything to make up for the stuff I puked first time round). And again the old bastard’s jaw was lolling, cheeks pinned-back in a rictus-smile, pupils dilated big enough to turn his eyes inside-out.
“What’s the plan, what’s the plan, what’s the plaaan?” he said, giggling, wobbling around like he was dancing to some silent beat. “Got any more burns? Need a burn? Needaburn-needaburn?”
I stopped chewing. Looked at him and shook my head.
I guessed... oh, sod it. I guessed now was as good a time as any.
I put down my bowl.
“Look at you,” I said. “Nate. Seriously. Look at yourself.”
“Eh?”
“You’re bombed. You’re off your face, mate.”
It took him a while to react, and his smiling face crumpled like a hollow mountain.
“Am not!” he shouted, far too loud, standing and pointing. “Am fucking not!”
I just stared, getting bored. Eventually he sat down.
“We had a deal,” I said quietly, slurping on more of the homebrewed beer. He reacted jerkily, like he couldn’t control his own defence.
“Yeah? Yeah, so?”
“So I paid you good scav and I kept you alive. Right? You were in pigshit up to your neck after the airport.”
“I know that! Did I say I didn’t know it? Fuck you, m...”
“And all you had to do in return was play at being a doctor.”
I picked up my bowl again and spooned some potatoes into my mouth. Tasted good. Ignored the old man’s rolling eyes and hurt silence.
“And... and I have!” he yelped, like a kicked puppy dog. “Didn’t I? Didn’t I? I’ve done good! Patched you up over and over. You know it, you know it, you know it!”
I glared.
“Yeah. And Nike’s in a Winnebago over there with his legs shot to shit, and you haven’t lifted a hand to help.”
Nate’s lips moved. Searching for words.
“But... h-hold it, he’s... but...”
“But he’s not part of the deal? Is that it?”
“No! No, I just... I thought your, your injuns here would take care and...”
“Some doctor, Nate.”
We sat in silence for a long time then; darkness spreading above us, fire drooling embers upwards.
“The Secretariat,” I said, eventually.
“Wh... what?”
I sighed, shaking my head. “Oh, nothing. Just thinking. Our little deal. Never seemed quite right to me.”
“But... I don’t understand. What’s – ?”
“You didn’t seem to get much out of it, I mean. I was wondering why you were sticking with me, to be honest. Now I know.”
He looked suddenly angry, thick sarcasm souring his voice. “Oh, you know. You
know, do you? The fuck do you know? You gonna make shit up and say you know, then you can kiss my –”
“The Secretariat. I sent you downstairs. Told you to go help the others find the kids.”
His eyes went narrow. Chin jutting. “S-so?”
“So that’s the only time you could’ve found that shit.” I pointed at the pack next to his knees, unsurprised to see his fingers coiled securely through its handle. “Stole it from the Choirboys, didn’t you?”
He almost exploded, hugging the bag to himself as he stood and shrieked, irrational and embarrassing. “The fuck’s wrong with that?” he snarled. “You saying, you saying I shouldn’t steal from them assholes?”
“Course not. I’m saying don’t steal shit that’ll turn you into a prick. Sit down.”
“Fuck yo –”
“Or, don’t steal shit that’ll bring an army of motherfuckers chasing after you. Sit down, Nate.”
“That’s not why they’re comi –”
“Or even better, don’t steal shit when you’re an ex-junkie.”
Quiet.
He sat.
“Tell you what I think,” I said, feeling sharp things moving in my words but not caring. Bella’s face was swimming behind my eyelids, and for some reason it made me angry. “I think you never quit.”
“What?”
“Back in London. You used to live there, you said. You said you quit, remember?”
He didn’t say a word.
“I think maybe you were telling half a truth there, mate. I think what actually happened is, the supply ran out. Tough call, getting smack right after the Cull.” His white eyes dipped, firelight reflecting. “But then along comes the Clergy and tells you they can fix you up, sort you out. All you got to do is clear off stateside and look after some kiddies on the way through...”
“That’s... wasn’t like that...”
“And for a couple of years it’s all gravy. Probably wasn’t even smack they gave you, right? Some weird new military shit. Am I right? Even better. Double the high.
“Then some dumb English fuck arrives and screws the whole gig, and before you know it you’re out on your ear. Right? Am I right?”
The Culled Page 25
