The Culled ac-1

by Simon Spurrier

  The me inside – rational, detached, cold, keeping the monkey-man in control… He loved it.

  Such focus!

  Such sensation!

  Don't you fucking give up, soldier!

  I ran like a steam train. Like a bloody Duracell bunny, with an amphetamine volcano up its furry arse. Like an animator's run-cycle stuck on a fast-forward loop. The same movements over and over, with a background cyclorama tumbling by and nothing but the throb, throb, throb to accompany the slapping of my feet. Puddles. Cracked tarmac. Weed-strewn sidewalks.

  What I'm getting at is, I ran like a robot. Never tiring, never feeling. I ran until I was sure my heart would pop, and smiled through frothing teeth and kept going.

  Fuck it, I kept thinking. Fuck it all.

  Down tight alleyways. Over dumpsters, through drifts of shitty litter. Sharp corners. Over wire fences and down labyrinthine passages. The vehicle-roar came and went, bashing and smashing at intersections, voices raised in curses.

  Hot breath, burning my lungs.

  The AV couldn't keep up. It kept trying to double-round, to sneak ahead; headlights blazing then jerking off on some random course. They might have had some luck, if I hadn't been a contrary bastard. If I hadn't been changing my mind about what direction to run every five minutes.

  The third man had a bike. Some suped-up Japanese travesty, whining like a prepubescent dragonfly, and he had no trouble sticking to me; negotiating alleys too tight for the four-wheeler. I took him down circuitous switchbacks and wide avenues, letting the skittish scavs confuse him, hiding behind dark corners and doubling-back every time he scorched past. Earning ten minute respites here and there, curled-up in dark rooms with terrified squatters moaning beneath soiled sleeping-bags. But he was good. Give him his due; he turned on a penny and came straight back the instant the sniffer-freak on the AV caught the scent, headlight tracking like a laser-sight, rubber squealing.

  It would be fair to say – in fact it would be a royal bloody understatement – that I got fed up with him. The bike was enclosed like a sleek little turtle with riot-shields and bullet-proof plex; caroming off angled walls that should have unseated him, slipping through the oil drum fires I pulled-down in my wake like a galleon through fog. And yeah, maybe he couldn't shoot me through the balustrades of shielding; but it worked both ways, and every time I found some perilous vantage point – dangling from a low-hanging escape ladder, peering like Oscar the Grouch out of a scav-nest dumpster – to open up with the Uzis and riddle him with lead, all it achieved was to let him know where I was.

  He was trying to make road kill. Exhaust me, flush me out in the open. Re-curved scythe-blades on the bike's front mudguard, ankle-breakers poking like twisted spokes from both wheels.

  He was running me down, and he was fucking good at it.

  So eventually what I did was: I stopped running.

  Stood in full view.

  Waited.

  (Took a moment to glance at my watch. 23:13hrs, yank-time. Not out of the woods yet, boyo.)

  He came round the corner like a flaming bullet, and pulled-up with unnecessary flashiness, propping himself on the far leg so I couldn't even blast open his knees.

  Cautious little cocksucker.

  I willed him to get on with it before the AV caught us up.

  He laughed behind his dusty shield and shouted:

  "Getting tired, little limey?"

  I opened fire. For all the good it did.

  He gunned the whiny engine like every mosquito in the universe shouting in unison, blurring tyres snagging at the floor with a smoky blast of inertia, and came for me.

  Bullets punching worthless craters in the glass.

  Laughing.

  Closing the gap.

  Scythe-blades looming.

  It was all deeply melodramatic. I rolled my eyes, took three steps backwards – down the flight of stairs lurking in the moonless shadows directly behind me – and lay down.

  He didn't see that one coming.

  "The fu-?"

  The stupid little prick went hurtling over my head, angled in mid-air, hit the wall of the subway stairwell, and just sort of…

  Came apart.

  No flashy fireballs or smoke-drenched detonations. Just a noise like a big cockroach, cracking under a swat, and a lot of debris.

  He was gurgling nastily when I walked away – like maybe he'd broken his back or something – and I should probably have put him out of his misery.

  Paint me bothered.

  The AV found me fifteen minutes later. The scrawny little freak doped-up on whatever military-grade tracking drugs Scrim had dished-out – clung to the roof like a surfer, rapping on the glass and snarling inarticulately, directing the Klan boss's crazed steering. Again with the sodding circling-round, slipping along too-tight alleyways. It felt good to begin with. Rushing past their clumsy attempts to get ahead, disappearing into the shadows to clamber up on this or that fire-escape, pausing to catch my bearings, trying to head back towards the park. It was time to begin the home-run.

  It took me a fair old while to realise they were herding me. They were smarter than I thought.

  I came upon an office block – nothing special; redbrick and shattered windows – with a door hanging open on a narrow stairwell. Sick and tired of the growl of engines, I rabbitted up the first few flights without any trouble, pausing to vomit discreetly before pushing myself onwards. Somewhere near floor five – or maybe six – a particularly large scav wearing Gull colours tried to axe me in the head, yelling for me to get the hell away from his wife.

  There was an inflatable sex-doll on the floor next to him, but it didn't seem like the right time to point this out. I shoved the Uzi up his nostril until he got the message and backed off, then carried on upwards towards the roof whilst he noisily comforted his wife' below.

  On the roof, I puked again. The throbbing in my ear was jacking about with my sense of direction, and it didn't help when the moonlit city put itself together bit-by-bit inside my topsy-turvy bearings.

  I was so far west of the park I could see the tiny fishing punts on the Hudson, beyond the tangle of docks and quays spread out below me. Taller buildings rose to my left and right – faint lights glimmering inside where innocent scavs struggled to get by with some semblance of a life.

  It was actually sort of beautiful. If it hadn't been about a mile in the wrong direction I might have paused to appreciate it.

  There were no roofs to leap across to here. No secondary stairways to scamper back down.

  And, if I'm honest, no energy to go on. The thing inside me curled up and went to sleep, exhausted, and left me alone. Only human. Outnumbered and outgunned.

  Trapped.

  "Fuck." I said. "Fuck fuck fuck."

  From the open door I heard the huge scav shouting again – "My wife! Tha's my fucking wife!" – then a sharp little gunshot to shut him up.

  Footsteps up the stairwell.

  Time for the endgame.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Interlude

  If he was honest, Hiawatha wasn't nearly as bemused as he felt he should be.

  Or rather, as he felt Rick should be.

  The name change had only been cosmetic at the beginning. Just a… a symbol of his willingness to embrace all the weirdness, to get stuck-in, to do as the Sachems asked. To drop all the moping angry-native-kid-trying-to-be-white crapola and cuddle up to the Old Ways, like a brand on his soul that said 'On A Mission'.

  But it was purely temporary – always had been – and that was the point. When he got home he'd still be 'Rick'.

  If. If he got home.

  But then again, Rick wouldn't have sailed through the peculiarities of the last couple of days without feeling at least uncomfortable, whereas he – Hiawatha, whoever-the-fuck-he'd become – was taking it all in his stride. The sights and sounds, the little excursions into foggy dreamworlds, the blending of reality and legend.

  At the back of his mind Rick ranted and rave
d about cod-mystical tribal bullshit, whilst at the forefront – in the driving seat – Hiawatha shrugged, listened carefully to the messages on the wind, passed a critical eye over the runic algebra decorating the stars, trailed a finger in bubbling brooks and paid close attention to the splinters of light – and the codes they inferred – on the surface of the water. He didn't even need to keep stopping to smoke dope any more. It was like he'd prised his brain through a sideways gap and – now that it was there – it could stay as long as it wanted.

  The cynical part of Rick's mind told him he'd turned into a big dumb stoner expressing the classic idiocy of a drugged-up moron who suddenly decides everything is significant and the whole world resonates on some profound metaphysical level. If he'd been fully in charge, rather than just a morose little echo of a former voice, he would have rolled his eyes.

  Hiawatha didn't give a rat's ass.

  Hiawatha had suddenly decided everything was significant and the whole world was resonating on a profound metaphysical level.

  Overall, Rick/Hiawatha was kind of messed-up in the head.

  Out on the road the dream-visions were at least straightforward. Talking trees, rumbling skies, fluttering crows, yadda-yadda; the sort of stuff the tribal myths were packed full of. But here in the city things were different. None of the Haudenosaunee legends spoke of buildings that shuddered like horses dislodging flies; of smog-palls becoming faces and hands; of rats seething from clogged sewers to become corkscrewing whirls of smoke; of tenements making love by starlight – balconies locked together like slippery tongues – and skyscrapers cutting great intestinal scars across the belly of the clouds, where blood and shit oozed into the rain, and huge thunderbirds pecked at the wounds like vultures.

  It was kind of cool.

  The silver needle in his back pocket hummed to him.

  The coloured smoke had brought him here. Just like out on the road; revealing the pothole that wiped-out Ram. All across the suburbs, through spaghetti-like turnpikes and graffiti-plastered tunnels, across the George Washington Bridge then down through the eerily silent West Side, it had hung above the city like an electric net; green and purple, narrowing itself down to a single column of hallucinogenic smoke. He discovered he could see it twice as well when he looked away, concentrating on the corners of his vision; like an optical illusion his brain tried to conceal whenever he stared directly at it.

  It took him down Broadway, through Harlem and Morningside, places he'd heard of but never visited. A small part of him felt like he'd missed a chance; like the bustling human ratraces he used to see on bygone TV shows were lost forever, and when finally he'd got his dream and escaped his small-town roots to do what every youngster always claimed they would – leave for the big city – he'd arrived five years too late.

  In the middle of a goddamn ghost town.

  And now here he was, cross-legged on the roof of a colossal parking lot, in an unfamiliar part of an unfamiliar town, with the dark sky rippling like an inverted ocean, the moonlit streets pulsing with curious colours and stranger sounds; and the twisting column of smoke focusing down to a sliver of light above his head, before winking out.

  Making him wait.

  As ever.

  As midnight approached engines growled below him, and he looked down with a sort of foggy indifference. He'd been hearing the distant chatter of gunfire on and off, but given the ungentle look of the city he'd dismissed it as 'not my problem', and even then hadn't been entirely sure whether it was a true sound or just another backflip of his brain. But now, glancing over the street side canyon, he could see a bulky armoured vehicle slipping to a hurried halt outside a low office block, and knew not only that it was real and solid, but that it made him shiver and his blood turn sluggish.

  The car had been painted half-heartedly – a smear of messy red along both flanks – but from Hiawatha's vantage the redecoration couldn't hope to disguise the undercoat. The glossy skyblue sheen marked on the thick roof with a wide scarlet 'O'.

  Clergy.

  Here.

  Hiawatha rushed to his bike to snatch-up an appropriate weapon, acting on automatic, scrabbling through pistols and automatics like a chef tossing salad. Finally his hand closed on a rifle – some crow-blasting farmer's friend, no doubt, stolen from a deserted homestead somewhere by Ram and his cronies – and raced back to the edge: just in time to see the AV's two occupants disappear into the office block.

  He swore out loud.

  And then he saw the man.

  The man with green and purple fire tangled above him. With a great bird hovering over his head and wolves slinking past his legs. With rivers and grasses flowing in unreal ripples from his booted feet.

  With one ear a tattered mess, with blood all down him, with rags on his back and an Uzi in each hand.

  "You'll know him," the Tadodaho had told Rick. "You'll know him when you see him."

  Everything stopped.

  The man stood on the roof of the office block, opposite and below Hiawatha's own vantage point. He looked like he was breathing heavily, sweating buckets, bleeding from a dozen cuts; but even as Hiawatha watched the man seemed to force-down the exhaustion, eyes closed, face calm. When he reopened his eyes he was almost a different person, moving with predatory grace, stepping to the shadows on one side of the door.

  A little part of the old Rick muttered: "Jedi, man…"

  In his swirling dream-vision, Hiawatha watched the man change. Become something different. A puma-king of lank fur and subreal shadows; a primitive shade; a Walking Instinct. Reality kept adjusting around him; slowing down, jarring, highlighting its dangers and hazards, blazing along the edge of anything that could be used as a weapon, streaming into dark corners that offered cover, snaking in silvery beads along potential escape-routes, ambush points, blindspots…

  Hiawatha realised with a start he was seeing the world as the stranger saw it, and shook his head in annoyance, wanting to watch the spectacle unclouded by the druggish haze.

  Out on the rooftop, the two goons from the AV bundled through the stairwell door together, hands full of blades and barrels, and everything went crazy.

  The stranger sort of… blurred. Maybe he kicked the door, or slunk around in front before it was fully open. Maybe he duck-sneaked across the open hatch, below the aim of their guns, and darted-in towards them before they could react. Maybe he took them on the full, twisting sideways between outstretched gun arms with fingers locked and lunging.

  Hiawatha couldn't say for sure.

  An arm jerked, a leg flicked-out. The scrawny goon shrieked and fell, the bigger man raised his gun Hiawatha gasped and struggled with the rifle. He'd save the stranger. He'd keep him alive! He'd Except the goon was already disarmed. Bleeding from his nose. A kitchen-knife up to its hilt in the soft meat of his leg.

  He looked more pissed than hurt.

  The stranger turned. Ducked. Flexed. Impacts raining on the swarthy thug, boots lashing out in balletic patterns. The smaller goon was back up now, pistol firing twice in the wrong direction, the stranger twist-turn-kick-duck-pouncing, then the little guy was back down again, all but launched off the roof; gun tumbling out into space.

  Hiawatha sighted the rifle back on the big guy, adrenaline roaring, desperate to do something, to take part… But the stranger was too fast.

  Didn't need any help.

  He took the two shitheads apart like a surgeon, and when they both rocked back on the floor – disarmed, disoriented, slow like glaciers fighting fire – he scooped a single tiny Uzi out of his pocket, aimed it with the minimum concentration, and blew their surprised expressions right open.

  The whole fight, from start to finish, took about five seconds. Hiawatha discovered he was still aiming at the dead goons and let his shaking arms relax by degrees.

  "Fuuuuuuuuuck." he hissed.

  Which is when an enormous naked freak, bleeding from a hole in his chest, tore through the remains of the door with a meat cleaver in one hand and a limp se
x-doll in the other, screaming for revenge upon the murderer of his wife.

  The stranger had his back to the colossus. Taken by surprise. Unprepared.

  Even he couldn't move that fast.

  Hiawatha blew two new holes through the fat man's ribs, smiled a secret smile, and melted away into the shadows of the parking lot before the stranger even knew what had happened.

  He wondered if he should go over. Tell the poor guy who he was.

  What he was doing here.

  What he wanted with him.

  "Not time yet." The sky told him. The needle sang in his back pocket. "Not time yet."

  Hiawatha followed the stranger at a discreet distance. He seemed to be in a hurry; vaulting into the thugs' AV and tearing off into the east. Hiawatha stayed out of his sight, letting the signs and portents – the roiling purple fire – guide the throb of the Harley's progress; grumbling internally about relying on hippy bullshit to guide him.

  It felt a lot like cheating.

  Half an hour after the rooftop struggle, at the edge of a great blocked-in wilderness, encircled by dead trees and stagnant swamps – Central Park, he assumed – he deserted the Harley in a quiet alcove and ambled out across the browning lawns. He'd done his best to conceal it, but the whole area seemed to be crawling alive with knots of raggedy-looking people, and no amount of security was ever going to stop a truly determined thief. He searched his feelings for a moment or two – still not quite sure if he was seeking divine solutions, subconscious rationality or plain old trippy make-believe – and decided he wouldn't be needing the trike any more anyway.

  (The defining moment in this decision was a fat bear, made entirely out of smoke, waddling past with a claw flicking dismissively towards the vehicle.

  "Hope you're right," Hiawatha said. If he'd been in a more rational state of mind, he might have felt slightly dumb addressing such an obvious figment of his imagination. As it was, it not only seemed utterly natural, but far more real than the mundane shit going on around it.)

  He shouldered the sack of guns he'd taken from the general store, and followed the flow of the crowd.