“And why the fuck would I do that?”
“Because there are two men approaching the truck from two different directions, and we’re sitting ducks up here.”
Even in the gloom, I could see her eyes go big. Disbelief, maybe. Surprise.
“They pulled up a mile out on motorbikes. Probably from that crew that passed by earlier on. Listen.”
“But I don’t he –”
“There. A twig. And another bird. Fucking amateurs.”
She just stared.
“Don’t worry,” I said, and I smiled again because I couldn’t help it, and I couldn’t be bothered to stop. “I won’t be long.”
And I slipped off the edge of the truck and onto the concrete, panther quiet, and went out into the shadows with a savage joy.
Don’t you fucking give up, soldier!
It snarled. It burned.
Sir, no sir! etc, etc.
WHEN I GOT back Hiawatha was sitting on the roof, waiting, fiddling with something small and silver.
“You get ’em?” he asked.
I wiped blood off the knife and stared.
Letting the humanity come back into me. Slowly.
Reluctantly.
First rule of stealth combat. Advanced training, third year:
Don’t fear the predator in the dark.
Be it.
“I can see you,” Hiawatha said, conversationally. “Properly, I mean. All that... conditioning. All those changes. You’re a wolf, mister Englishman. You know that? Inside your head. They made you a wolf.”
The adrenaline was still up. Heart still going. Beast still just below the surface.
I spat on the ground. Couldn’t be fucked with any more mystical bollocks.
Hiawatha smiled and said nothing.
“Who were they?” I said, not bothering to sound impressed or spooked out or anything but bored. My hands were shaking with the desire to hunt and hurt, and this snotty little idiot was getting on my tits.
“Collectors,” he said, after a pause.
“And they are?”
“They’re... I mean...” He stopped and scowled, and I could see again the person coming through, the scared kid chipping away at the know-it-all straitjacket. Then it was gone.
“They’re scouts,” he said, voice rising and falling in that same lilting chant. “Men of money and misery. Mercenary filth. Cells of aggression, unfaithful, unloyal, sent ahead of the crucified god and his robed horde to...”
“Cut the crap, yeah? Just tell me who they are.”
He blinked.
And slowly, boyishly, smiled.
“Fuckheads,” he said.
“Fuckheads. Right. And what do these fuckheads want with us?”
He shrugged.
“Clergy sends them, mostly. Or at least, that’s where they get their shit. Trading with the Clergy. They... roam around. Outside of cities. Finding things the Church’ll pay for.”
“Things like what?”
“Like guns. Food. And... mostly... mostly kids.” He looked away. Jaw tightening.
“Kids.”
“Yep. No Klans out here, see? No loyal fucking scavs to hand over their own kin. Only the Clergy and the scum they pay, helping themselves. That’s... that’s what this is all about. You being here.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I know. But you will.”
I huffed and shook my head, too tired to push it. “Whatever. Doesn’t explain what they want with us.”
“No... but they came from behind, on the road. From the city, probably.”
“And?”
And then the boy was gone, and fucking Hiawatha was back, smiling and staring and rolling his eyes.
“And perhaps this holy man, this John-Paul, this withered thing... perhaps he knows where you’re headed. Perhaps he sent word to slow you down.”
“How the fuck would he know?”
I remembered the personnel file. The name. The photo.
Cy, staring over my shoulder.
Hiawatha ignored the question and stared off into the night.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll find the rest tomorrow. They sent out these two to take us in the dark. Explosives, yes?”
I grunted, patting the pockets of my coat. There’d been four sticks of C4 on each corpse, with some surprisingly sophisticated remote detonators. Out in the dark, when the fat fucks had stopped shivering and bleeding and trying to shout with their windpipes torn-through, I’d helped myself.
“So if we’re lucky, the rest won’t know we survived.”
Hiawatha smiled and nodded.
We weren’t lucky.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WE HIT OHIO first thing, and they were waiting for us.
Outside a town called Hubbard, rammed up against the edge of the I-80 like a gaudy reminder of a long lost time, was Truck World. Truck World did exactly what it said on the tin.
There must have been twenty or so vehicles. Vast things, these fuckers; like whales built for the road, basking outside a long derelict burgers-n-barf joint and a once-snazzy truck wash. And not the poky little beasts we used to get in the UK either, but monsters. Bloody great behemoths with bulging engines and recurved exhausts, chrome snouts and brightly painted bodies. And yeah, they’d been graffitied and smashed up – what hadn’t? – but they were still awesome to see, lined up like that. Like hibernating ogres, waiting for a wake-up call.
I was still staring at them through the window when Malice hit the brakes.
Still staring when Hiawatha – who had his eyes closed – shouted: “Fuck! Fuck, they’re waiti...”
Still staring when Tora – bless her cotton socks – opened fire with the Mk19 and everything went nuts.
The Collectors weren’t stupid. Their two boys didn’t come home to them with the dawn. They’d taken precautions – obvious, really – and big dumb Precaution Number One was to block the road.
Truck World, when all was said and done, had represented one big sodding barricade on wheels. They’d strung them out across the interstate, those road-whales, two deep and three across, with no room to edge the Inferno past and no hopes of ramming through.
And the Collectors – leather junkies with artfully matted hair and once-expensive sunglasses, silver jackets patched and frayed, bowler hats arrayed like a long line of tits, lounging back on purring choppers like middle-class morons who’d watched Easy Rider once or twice too often – they swarmed.
The day before, when the little gang went zipping by, there’d been maybe six or seven. Lightly armed. All mouth and no trousers.
Now there were twenty, easy, and as the Inferno squealed to a halt and Malice wrestled to reverse, swearing inventively as she went, the windshield blew in like a metaphysical fart, glass frothed through the air, bullets rattled like drumbeats on the firetruck’s skin, and everything shook.
Bikes. Engines growling in every direction. Smoke-bombs and sound overkill. Voices whooping and shouting, closing in. Someone with a fucking boom-box, playing Metallica at double speed.
Thump-thump. The Mk19.
Thump-thump, then – distantly – the hard-edged crack of a detonation, tarmac spewing and smoke gushing. One of the bikes fell apart, lifting up and out on the rim of a fireball, and Tora shrieked like a joyful psycho, chugging-out lead with the autos and re-sighting with the grenades.
Nike and Moto opened fire, which meant the arseholes had surrounded us. Heavy things thumped against the walls of our dark little cell, and I found myself torn between the frustration of sightlessness to the rear, and confronting the ugly situation through the windows at the fore. The Inferno twisted and flexed on the road, three-point-turning under a withering storm, and every whirligig impression through the flying glass and shifting landscape was a scene of spinning rubber, gun flare and snarling faces with too many piercings. Nate started screaming – fucking junkie probably didn’t even realise what was happening – and outside, Tora found another target. Another shuddering clash
of sparks and steel, and a scream lost to the rolling thunder.
But it wasn’t enough, wasn’t enough, wasn’t enough...
One of the tyres exploded.
The Inferno pitched to one side, wobbled. Malice shouted. A deeper growl came out of the tumult and Spuggsy was yelling like a kid – “No! Oh, no, no! No!” – staring through his window, eyes wide.
Then he was just...
Paste.
It was another juggernaut – though I didn’t figure it out until the world stopped rushing backwards and the Inferno went back to standing still. They’d taken the opportunity as we crept sluggishly away from the blockade, firing up the nearest HGV and ploughing directly into the cockpit; an acute angle that left the ramming truck speared on the Inferno’s jagged nosecone – driver chuckling insanely through shattered glass and bloody teeth, his ride mashed all to fuck and venting radiator steam into our cab – but it’d done its job. Spuggsy was crushed, with barely time to scream, and as the impact shunted us away he was a thing of fractured angles and limp bones, head lolling, skull slack, porn mags fluttering uselessly amidst broken glass.
And then footsteps. Heavy thumps on the roof. Collectors scrambling off the cab of their own truck onto the Inferno’s back. One hopped down onto the hood, sleek black auto ready to fill the interior with lead, but Malice calmly shot him in the forehead and watched him sag out of view.
Not enough. Not enough.
The baby started to cry.
Moto and Nike were firing continuously now, screams and shouts intermingled with stamps and bootfalls on the ceiling, and Tora’s dangling rig swivelled around and around like a drunken ballerina, spitting grenades and bullets at whatever target she fancied. She was shouting too, high voice clearly discernible above the racket – “Too many! Too many!” – and a world away, Malice was fighting to restart the truck, its engine coughing uselessly.
“We’re screwed,” she said, quietly, calming the baby in a maternal little bubble of her own.
“Fuck that!” Tora wailed. “Fuck thaaaat!”
Thump-thump, thump-thump.
Bikes detonating. Men screaming.
Didn’t matter.
Faces leering at windows, batons crashing against reinforced glass. I leaned out the window and emptied the last clip of the mini-Uzi into the fuel tanks of a dirty red Harley, smirking as the rider was shredded, his whooping comrades doused in burning gas, his bike reduced to a rubberised shrapnel-bomb.
But it wasn’t enough.
Then Tora was just gone. Vanished upwards through her circular lookout, feet thrashing, screaming and spitting and calling for help. The voice was carried off, away from the truck, dwindling to an echo of a scream on the smoky air.
And then they came in.
Three of them. Bullet-vests under leather, hockey-masks over heads. A knife and a pistol each. Shock troops.
Repelling assault-squads. Kill the last one first.
Advanced training, year two.
He’s the best. He’ll send cannon-fodder ahead. Useless rookies.
He’ll come last, wait ’til you’re tied up.
So you kill him first.
Nice thought. But the Inferno wasn’t a big space, and by the time Bastard Number Three slid down the chute, I was up to my elbows in the first two goons.
Savage again. Reacting without thinking.
“They made you a wolf...”
Well woof-the-fuck-woof.
I killed Number One pretty quick. Only fired once – back on the M16 again – but the startled motherfucker grew a hole in his forehead and another in his cheek, knocking out his lower jaw and spraying us all, so I figured Malice was playing along too over my shoulder.
The second guy was luckier. Used his mate for cover, even held him up like a human shield – hand on the hem of his jeans – and pumped three panicky rounds into Nike’s legs, hanging from the gun mount above, before I pushed up close and shot him through his buddy’s throat. Even then he took his sweet time, bashing about, trying to get a bead on my head as he squirted from his neck and screamed like a bullhorn. I had to bash his fucking brains out against the heavy iron edges of the gun-mount above, and he stared at me – eyes burning, accusing; lips spitting and frothing – all the way.
Somewhere a great noise went up. Like... like an army of hyenas, all laughing at once. I had no time to think about it, no time to try and place it, no time even to notice – in any sense except one of pure instinct – that outside the Inferno the gunfire had stopped...
The third man to tear into our little space, the man I should have killed first, he was hollering.
Ignoring everyone.
Throwing down his gun in contempt.
And leaping onto Hiawatha with an inhuman scream.
“K-k-kiiilled Sliiip!” he growled, knife held above the boy’s eyeball, wrestling and grunting and rolling. “Fffucking kill you!” Beneath the Cullis of his helmet his face was a mass of festering wounds, skin scraped clear, bloody welts from chin to brow, nose a smeared mess.
Hiawatha was babbling, eyes wide, tears on his cheek, both hands wrapped around the hilt of the blade, shrieking “sorries” and “pleases” and “ohGoddon’tkillmes.” Human again. A boy, scared and lonely and pissing himself and –
And I placed the muzzle of the M16 against the man’s head, feeling abruptly calm, and said:
“Hey.”
He looked at me. I shot him through the eye. So it goes.
And then everything was quiet. At least, quieter. As quiet as it could be with Hiawatha sobbing for his mother, Nike yelling and moaning, Malice’s kid screaming like a dying cat, and my own heart pounding in my ears.
But no more gunfire. No more biker engines. No more grenades detonating or trucks rumbling towards us.
I stared out the window – through the crazy spider web shatter-patterns on what little glass remained – and saw why.
“Fffuck,” said Malice.
The Collectors had been scared off. I knew how they felt.
There was an army. Hundreds upon hundreds of men and women.
Guns.
Bikes. Cars. Horses.
They looked kind of pissed.
HIS HOLINESS JOHN-PAUL Rohare Baptise closed his eyes and kneaded his temples.
Inside his head a sealed gate was opening wide. Every time he stopped to think, every time there was no distraction – nothing to stare at, nobody to talk to, nothing to think about – it was like... like stepping into a great bazaar, full of painful exhibits he’d never seen before.
Or... worse, like a labyrinth. Yes. That was it. The memories didn’t come pouring out, exactly. He had to go in and explore, hunt them down, look for them. Afraid, tentatively digging into dark corners.
Never too sure what he’d find.
He’d always known there had been buried treasures. Always felt, instinctively, that for whatever reason, his mind had shut him away, closed itself down to him. He’d called it, privately, a gift from ‘Above.’ A purification designed solely to plant him firmly in the Now and the tomorrow. Never concentrating on ‘then.’ Never looking back. It was as if everything that had existed about him, from before five years ago, had been stripped away in a rush of balefire. God had severed his past, he felt, because he was no longer a creature of history. His was a role of divine prescience. Shaping the world for the new dawn.
Why should he need a personal past for that?
And now this.
“Hmm.”
It was all terribly confusing.
John-Paul Rohare Baptiste was remembering what it was to be something he hadn’t been for a very, very long time, and it was giving him a headache above and beyond the state of near-intolerable pain he spent the majority of his life experiencing. The ‘something’ he was slowly remembering was:
Normality.
The car shuddered – just another pothole, probably, or at worst a car wreck being bumped aside by the snaking convoy – and he straightened out the crumpled sh
eets of paper in his lap. He supposed it could have been a coincidence... the English scum, the destroyer who’d come so close to finishing the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn, rummaging about in old records... coincidental that he’d just happened to find... this...
This.
This sheet. This crumpled personnel dossier with its clipped photograph and personal details, its family affiliations, service history, recommendations and citations.
One of the Cardinals had brought it to him. Found in some nameless file in some empty part of the Secretariat.
There was a story attached, he recalled – something about a struggle, a death? He couldn’t remember. It hardly seemed important, now. Compared to this file, nothing seemed important.
John-Paul fingered the sheets and licked dry lips.
He’d always known his real name, at least. That had never been a shock. Back at... at the start, when he wandered into the city out of the west, alone and confused, filled only with the certainty of his own divinity and the exact requirements of his body in order to preserve it, even then he’d known. He’d had his birth certificate with him, hadn’t he? Or... or maybe he faked it? Maybe he...
Anyway.
Anyway, it didn’t matter. He’d known he was John P. Miller, somewhere at the back of his skull. He just hadn’t cared, until now. Didn’t want to remember where the name had come from, who he’d been, what he’d done, what he’d been like as a person before he became more than a person; before he became John-Paul Rohare Baptise, Abbot of the greatest institution existing in the world today, architect of Tomorrow’s Civilisation.
In a roundabout sort of way.
Another group of robed outriders swept past the limousine on his left. The driver was being boringly silent – probably star-struck, the poor devil – and John-Paul found himself craving conversation, or distraction. Something of interest to stare at, perhaps, rather than the bland hills and blander roads of suburban nowhere. Something, anything, to take his mind off the sheet.
But no.
Sergeant John P. Miller. NATO liaison officer.
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