"Figure that'll cover the rental costs," he said, into the silence.
Malice gaped.
The Inferno was waiting for us outside.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The kid came too.
Right before we left, I had a half-hearted sort of attempt at talking Malice out of it. Over the roar of the fire-truck's engines (extensively tinkered with, a sweaty little man called 'Spuggsy' told me, to "purr like a lion on stee-roids an' go like a cheetah got a rocket up its ass"), I appealed to her sense of responsibility, reminded her we were taking the Inferno instead of some suped-up speeder because we might easily blunder into trouble, and finally had a stab at convincing her the little brat would keep us awake at nights.
It was pretty lame.
Malice just glared, scratched absent mindedly at the split lip the Clergy's goons had left her with – as if to remind me whose fault it was, and who therefore had no fucking right to be suggesting anything – then went back to loading ammo-belts into the truck's hold. I'd half expected her to be vaguely grateful – it was arguably thanks to me that the Clergy had been kicked out of the city – but evidently she either refused to believe the news coming out of Manhattan or was a grudge bearer of championship standards. She pretty much ignored me after that.
The kid, for the record, never even made a sound.
Ten minutes out of the Wheels Mart, as the solid wall of noise thrown-up by the engine started to normalise inside my head, the diminutive gunner who called herself 'Tora' – fast-talking, flirtatious as hell, mad as a box of badgers – leaned close to my ear and whispered:
"She left her kid behind once before. That's all. Rental mission just like this. Some moron trying to get to Miami, I forget why. Figured we'd run into some crazies en route – 'specially with the DC hole, shit – so she laid out the responsible mother bullshit, left him behind. No way the Clergy gonna try collecting tithes inside the Mart."
"And?"
"And that's why she's only got one kid, 'steada two. And ain't a fan of the Choir."
Ah.
Still. Tensions aside, cramped and sweaty lack of comfort aside, snarling engine-volume aside, this was travelling in style. The Inferno slipped through New York like an icebreaker; stately and magnificent, oozing don't-mess-with-us torment and explode-your-ass-muthafucka intent. Weaponry on prominent display, promising instant overkill.
I kept catching myself wishing I could get out and have a look; standing in the street like all the wide-mouthed scavs and Klansmen, who bristled and hid as it slunk past like a nuclear armadillo. We wended our way in silence, across the meandering Triborough bridge – its girdered pillars flaking paint, flocked with hundreds of gulls that picked and squabbled over a dead sheep hung, upside down, for no appreciable reason – and skirting the edge of the Bronx on Highway 87, peering solemnly into a deserted wilderness that seemed to have been frozen in time. Cars packed together in cryogenic traffic-jams, skeletal shadows sealed within.
Now and then we passed territory poles – or the remains of them – and gaudy wall murals where the local gang wars were meticulously chronicled: long lists of names, each one crossed through where some other mob had taken over. At some point the internecine squabbles had ended, and some thoughtful soul had added a broad scarlet circle to the foot of each list; unquestionably proclaiming the true rulers, regardless of which banana-republic Klans they allowed to govern in their stead. Every time we passed such ownership tags a fresh round of spitting, swearing and tutting would circulate round the truck's interior.
That was about as close as we got to conversation, in those first hours.
There were eight of us altogether, not counting the baby. Malice drove, mostly; the wicker basket transferred to a special harness on the cab wall beside her. Even in the city, where she was obliged to take it easy to avoid vehicle wrecks and pits in the macadam, I could tell she wasn't about to make it comfortable on her passengers. She throttled where any sane person would have braked, skewed the machine at hairpin corners round ancient riot-control vans with their panels stripped off and their remains burnt to slag, and every time I stared in horror at her recklessness there was a savage smile on her face.
Great.
She never hit anything and the rest of her crew were entirely at ease. Eventually I stopped staring ahead and decided to take in the scenery, just as the Yankee Stadium went sailing by on my right. Gone, mostly – just a few shards of tangled black spaghetti at the heart of a splintered parking-lot continent – but the determined observer could just about make out the sagging segments of an aircraft's tail hanging over the edge of the burnt-out shell. I wondered what had happened, then decided I'd rather not know.
Someone had painted 'THICKER THAN WATER' in black tar across a fifty-foot expanse of the parking lot. I wondered if it would be visible from space.
Next to Malice, in the cab, was where Spuggsy sat. Well, reclined anyway. Lazed.
Slobbed.
Spuggsy, from what little I'd seen, wasn't much of an engineer. Granted, he had a gift for smoothing-out the most angular of mechanical kinks, though I couldn't help noticing his technique tended to involve hitting things hard with a spanner until they started making the right noises. He was short and plump, as bald as a cueball and sat there flicking lazily through porno mags with an expression of unconquerable boredom. His one concession to arousal was the copious sweat oozing off his chubby face, but given that it remained even when he wasn't browsing Anal Carnage, Wet Domination or whatever the hell it was, that didn't mean much. When he spoke it was with an enthusiastically sleazy good nature – like a mischievous schoolboy who discovered German hardcore before he discovered snot-eating contests – and I found myself liking him and wanting to disinfect him in equal measure.
The Cross Bronx Expressway petered-out in a fug of chipped road segments – mottled like they'd been in a firefight – and then the Hudson was below us, wide and shimmering and almost passable for clean. The George Washington Bridge stood just as solid and untroubled as always, as if this 'End Of Humanity' business was a passing fad by which it was neither impressed nor concerned. A couple of scavs had hanged themselves from the rails on one side (I like to think it was a tragic death-pact between lovers despairing of this cold new world… but it could just as easily have been a drunken dare) and a crowd of others was tugging them down as we passed by. Tugging a little too violently, actually, with knives and roasting-sticks in hand and a fat man building a campfire, waving-away the gulls like the unwanted competition they were.
Tora kept them covered from the pintle-cannons all the way past.
"Fucking cannies," she spat.
Tora was sort of weird. She came from Japanese stock she said – a heart-shaped face and dark hair (dyed deep blue at its tips), with a delicate sweep to the edges of her eyes and a nose like a button – and was one of the most mixed-up women I've ever known. Not beautiful exactly, but she knew how to move, had an attitude you wouldn't believe and could easily have flirted for her country. But it was skewed – the whole thing – like you knew somehow she was damaged; fucked-up deep inside, and everything she did was just a facade to create the impression of humanity. She used sexual friendliness like a battering ram. Like an act of aggression. Her arms were covered – wrist to shoulder – in thin little scars where she'd cut herself, and she sat in the dangling canopy above our heads – half poking-out to man the guns – singing a pretty song and carving new tally-marks into her skin. I asked her about it, later on. She shrugged and said:
"Why do you scratch when you've got an itch?"
"To make it feel better."
"Uh-huh."
I never found out what had happened to her – shit, maybe she was just born that way – but you could see it every time she looked at you, or spoke to you, or smiled. Like… just behind the veil, behind the spunky playful bollocks and cleavage-jutting body language, she was eyeing that scalpel and wondering just how deep she'd have to cut to make all the itches go away.
>
We bounced into New Jersey in a blur; Malice finally able to throttle-up all the way. Fort Lee, Leonia; names on crooked signs that drifted by without any sensation of reality. Just echoes of something that might once have had some significance, but now… Nothing. Skeletons on the edge of the road – picked clean – and blasted wrecks that jutted and trailed, forcing us to slow. Highway 80, place names fogging-by.
Hackensack.
Saddlebrook.
Elmwood Park.
At one stage Malice muttered something darkly to Spuggsy – spotting something ahead – who huffed and dropped his magazines then scrambled back towards us, poking Nike and Moto awake from their nest of sleeping bags and telling Tora to stand-by. The Inferno jinked hard to one side; overtaking.
It was strange to see another vehicle on the open road; but even stranger to see one so… normal. I'd expected dune-buggy gangs, flame-jobs, hotrods and… oh, I don't know. Nuclear-fucking-powered bulldozers, maybe. Skull-hurling catapults. Something a little more… survivalist.
Passing an HGV hauling a trailer marked Cheesy Snax was pretty surreal.
A couple of heads poked warily from the roof – guns arrayed cautiously towards us, just in case – and I spotted square slits in the corrugated sides of the container, bulging with naked flesh and squinting eyes.
"Workers," Tora told me, swinging in her harness. "'Burb klans. Scavs work the fields, different shifts going back and forth all the time."
"Dangerous?"
"To us? Pfft."
But still, but still… It was tense, as we passed them by, and Moto stared back at them – through the square porthole above the rear gun mount – for long minutes afterwards.
Moto and Nike kept themselves to themselves, mostly. The former was a well-built young man with startling white hair and an almost perfect face. I figured before The Cull he was maybe a model in cologne commercials, or a male escort, and he looked simply wrong – out of place, somehow – in the midst of all us raggedy bastards in the back of the Inferno. Actually, scratch that: he looked almost out of place. His one concession to chaos and ugliness was worn proud on his cheek. A mess, shredded and rippled in all kinds of gravely keloid contours, so that his lip and eye were all but joined by the matted tangle of scarring. He'd been whipped with barbed-wire, Spuggsy told me later with an indecent grin. Held down by a bunch of thugs and whipped carefully… lovingly, almost, by Nike. He didn't say why.
Towns went by. The QuickSmog came down, hid the distant rooftops and tree lined avenues, then went back up again.
Denville.
Roxybury.
Netlong.
Hills and gorge-blasted roads, the weak sun, the Inferno rumbling ever on.
That scar on Moto's cheek, I figured it was like a brand. Like some jealous tribal elder, maybe, defacing his young spouse to dissuade all thoughts of adultery. Maybe it was punishment. Some quiet misdeed, some jealous retribution. Fucksakes, who knows? The types of people out there these days, for all I knew Nike might have done it to improve the poor kid's face according to his own twisted tastes.
Either way, it was a mark – a signature – left by Nike, that said loud and clear:
Mine.
Moto said pretty much nothing to anyone except Nike for the whole journey, and when he did it was quiet and deferential, and he turned his face to one side so that all anyone ever saw of him was the scar. He seemed quite happy. They seemed quite happy.
Love, huh?
Nike, by comparison, was tall and skinny, quite old, I'd guess, and a perfect gentleman in every way. He nodded and smiled, and passed the time of day, and traded dirty songs with Nate. Towards the end of the first day, when Malice swapped with Spuggsy for a kip, Nike chatted to me about what sort of state London was in. He told me how he used to be a teacher – American history – and collected model aircraft for a hobby.
Everything about him oozed calm, rational, intelligent, polite decency.
And then you happened to glance at Moto, staring like a devoted dog at the older man, face all fucked-up like that, and you wondered.
We stopped for a bite to eat on the freeway, just outside a place called Knowlton. Nate cooked, giggling and dancing annoyingly. The Inferno carried a heap of supplies as part of the cost of rental, and amongst the tins and rats there were three actual chickens and a genuine, freshly baked loaf of bread. If it's possible for your tongue to have an orgasm, mine did.
Mostly we sat by the fire – silent – though Tora stayed on the roof of the Inferno, keeping one eye on the road, and the man who called himself Hiawatha took it upon himself to perch, cross-legged, some distance away. He looked like he should have been meditating – communing with some indefinable infinite – but instead was smoking an enormous spliff and starring at the sky, nodding or shaking his head at random intervals. I still wasn't too sure what to make of him.
Earlier on, when all my questions were exhausted and his enigmatic bullshit responses were getting right on my wick, I'd got bored and asked him where he got the weed from.
He smiled mysteriously and said it wasn't just weed.
Moron.
"Surely," I said, with just a tiny guilty hint of pomposity, "there are more important things to be growing?"
"Yes," he said. "We grow them too."
I left him to it, after that.
It was around then that Malice decided she'd had enough sulking and sat down next to me, only slightly frosty. She offered me a flask of water.
"Ta."
"Your friend," she said, too quiet for anyone else to hear. She nodded towards Nate. He was picking gristle out of his teeth, fiddling with the red case he'd had with him ever since the Wheels Mart.
"What about him?"
"He okay?"
I scowled, glancing at him again for any obvious signs of damage. It occurred to me that in all the excitement and strangeness of beginning this weird journey, I'd barely spoken to him. Certainly I hadn't asked him if he was sure he wanted to come along. He just… had.
"He looks okay," I said.
"I mean… is he trustworthy?"
I stopped chewing and stared at her. Skin prickling.
I don't know why I didn't blurt-out "of course he is" straight away. I don't know why I didn't tell her he'd saved my life a bunch of times since I'd met him, had expected nothing in return but a few condoms and a pot of dog food, and was even more in danger from the fucking Clergy than I was. I don't know.
"Why do you ask?" I said, intrigued despite myself. Was she getting it too? That feeling. That sense of…
Not quite right…
"'Cause the motherfucker's been outta his tree all day on whatever shit he's got in that pack and he ain't slowing down."
I scratched my chin, brain flopping over. "There a problem with that?"
(Actually, there was a problem with that. Two problems. The first was, I hadn't noticed. Hadn't being paying attention. Too busy watching the road, watching the others in the group. Letting myself down.
The second was, where the hell did the sneaky old bastard get it from?)
"No," she said, wobbling the harness on her shoulders. "No, I guess not. Only he keeps staring at my baby. All the time. All the time."
I told her not to worry.
Highway 80.
We hit Pennsylvania pretty soon afterwards. It looked a lot like NJ.
Towns. No longer paying attention. Letting the names roll together, like some great American gestalt; an obese vehicle with a thousand names that used cheeseburgers for fuel and liposucked fat for tyres.
I get surreal when I'm bored, and boy was I bored!
Stroud.
Kidder.
Black Cross.
Out across the fields, unlikely contraptions wobbled and smoked and steamed; hybrids of a hundred combine harvesters tended by hordes of miserable locals. At one point a bunch of guys on motorbikes overtook us, not even slowing to stare or glare. They wore strange silver puffer-jackets and jauntily-positioned bowler h
ats, gunning Harleys with hair flapping behind them. Each vehicle had skulls bouncing in its wake, like cans tied to the back of a bridal limo, and a smattering of guns hoisted on its pillion.
Tora tracked them the whole way over the horizon.
Hiawatha, who hadn't moved from his corner since we came aboard, except to roll and smoke occasional joints, twisted his whole head to watch them go by. I wondered what he was seeing. I wondered how he'd even known they'd been there in the first place, when he wasn't sitting anywhere near a window.
Actually, there was a lot I wondered about that boy.
He said he came from a place that was once called Fort Wayne. He said, actually, it was just outside the city; the rolling plains of Ohio where the Haudenosaunee convened once a year, with all its scattered lodges coming together to plan and barter and talk.
He used long words that I'd never heard before and didn't understand. All the time.
He spoke with a natural sort of rhythm which was as off-putting as it was hypnotic. Like a mother reading a nursery rhyme or a poet picking his way through pentameter.
Like an evangelist, too. Like a mantra.
The weirdest thing was, every now and again there was a crack in what he said. Just a little fissure, a hint of something beneath. You notice that shit when you're me.
The voice changed, the eyes blinked. For a second or two he was just some kid; confused and wrapped up in something too big to understand, who didn't believe his own mumbo-jumbo any more than I did and had all the attitude of a scared young thing caught in the company of double-hard bastards. Too much testosterone for his own good, too much insecurity for his own safety.
I preferred him, in those tiny moments.
He said someone called the 'Tadodaho' had decided that my course and his were… well, he used the word "aligned". It seemed too weird, to me. I'd never heard of this guy and he already knew where I was headed, what area I'd be passing through, who I'd be up against.
Hiawatha said:
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