I couldn't help smiling. The heat coming up from the fires, the smell of unpleasant things cooking, the acid stink of gun smoke.
Yeah. Let it out. Let the grin break through. You're so close. Enjoy. You deserve it.
Then with the guilt. Screams and blood and desperate people cutting chunks out of each other, just because I told them to. Just because I needed to get past those big fucking gates. I lied to them. Worked them up like a sculptor hammering clay.
Monster. Manipulator. Don't you care about anything? Don't you Then with the irritation at the guilt.
You trained for this. This is what you DO. This is who you ARE.
Round and round and round.
Fuck it. Fuck them all.
Don't feel guilty.
Look at what you did. Enjoy it.
From the third floor, looking down through the Secretariat's shattered mirror glass, it was quite a sight. Barely visible in the darkness, the undulations of the throng could easily have been mistaken for a gloomy sort of fog; wafted about by contrary breezes, lit internally by wyrd lights and wil-o-the-wisps; all of it sped-up by a factor of ten and replayed to a BBC Sounds Of War effects tape. Now and then something solid differentiated itself from the melee – a moonflash along the edge of a blade, a torn strip of pale robe, an effervescent burst of cranial fluids. Little details, like individual brushstrokes discernible within a completed painting.
They didn't last. Big, crazy spectacles have a way of homogenising like that. Little by little everything was sucked inside; reabsorbed by the heaving, living, collective amoebic monstrosity that was the crowd.
"Jesus," I muttered, not really thinking.
Being stuck in a fight on ground-level, that's a messy, brutal, untidy sort of shit. No time to think. No time to gauge the way it's going. Just act, react, dodge, stab, duck, shoot. Gunfire ripping from left to right, contrary angles of devastation, panicky shouts and thoughtless responses, friendly fire.
But from above…
Oh yes. From above you get a pretty good idea of why generals get to be such arrogant arseholes. Why politicians don't talk about individuals, just 'the people'. Why the guys who make decisions – the top dogs, the head honchos – get to be sadistic fucks with no concept of human expenditure whatsoever. From above, it's all…neat. Tidy. Like playing war games with over expensive models, rolling dice to determine movements, accuracies, wounds.
Nobody ever rolled a dice to determine how many sobbing loved ones each dead model leaves behind. How much the poor bastard suffered before he was removed from the playing table.
It takes a funny sort of brain to see a crowd of people, and mentally note them down as a 'diversion'. 'Cannon fodder'. 'Acceptable losses.'
Guilty as charged.
Again with the guilt.
Something exploded down below, and lit them all up. Just for a fraction, they were people. Different faces, contorted in anger and pain and fear. Individuals, locked together. All unique.
For just a fraction, fat with guilt and empathy and all that other bollocks, I wasn't the cold-hearted manipulative scheming fuck I thought I was.
Then the light faded and the mob coalesced in the shadows, and I was back to enjoying the spectacle, congratulating myself on getting inside the Secretariat without a scratch, being me.
"You… ah… You don't want to go help 'em?" Nate rumbled from somewhere behind me. He'd followed me up here like a puppy dog. He looked even worse now, twitching and sweating and jerking. I couldn't be bothered to ask what was wrong. Not when I was this close. Not when nothing else mattered.
I ignored him.
The fight was all but over anyway. Still a few pockets of resistance. Clergymen scrabbling behind improvised cover to mow down scavs in their dozens, stuttering cones of perfect light drizzling lead into onrushing walls of black rag and snarling flesh. The bodies piled up like human ramps, twitching and groaning, but there was more to come, more plugging the gaps, more stolen vehicles blasting away with heavy weapons.
Little by little the Choirboys were becoming isolated; cut-off from buildings, rounded-up in coils of the mob and gradually ringed in, hemmed, set upon.
None of them went quietly. And after the first few who tried to surrender were torn apart – limbs wrenched clean-away, eyes put out, scalps sliced off and ribs broken – none of the others bothered to fall on the scavs' mercy. They'd seen the look in their eyes. The excitement, the primal joy of being caught-up in… in something.
The pack-instinct. That old-brain thing, rustling inside my head, howling to go and join its brothers. But no mercy. None of that.
One or two of the Choirboys sang hymns as their ammunition ran out and the crowds seethed forwards. Mostly they didn't get past the first line.
There were fewer robes out there than I'd expected.
Where are the others?
I turned away. Pretty soon the big, spectacular part would be over and the scavs would be slinking inside the buildings. Kicking down doors under the auspices of finding their lost children; secretly yearning for nests of resistance, dorms piled with sleeping Choirboys, easy targets.
Let them.
Oddly enough, the Secretariat itself was almost deserted. On floor after floor the plush offices of another time – structured with the all the ergonomic ingenuity of too much money, in broad stripes of grey and beige and airy spaces and comfy sofas and padded swivel-chairs and blah blah blah – sat silent; deserted. It reminded me, in a homesick sort of way, of Vauxhall Cross; my base for the past five years, where once the SIS had controlled its agents all across the world, keeping fingers on the pulses of foreign threats, adjusting and prodding regimes they didn't like, sneaking about with a distinct absence of Martinis, pithy one-liners, Q-Department gadgets and obscenely horny chicks.
Well. Mostly.
The difference was that the offices back in London had a dangerous sort of mystique lacking here in the Secretariat. Sharper edges, maybe. Deeper shadows. Tight corners and internal windows. Em-Eye-fucking-Six, the place said. Don't you cock-around with us.
The Secretariat just looked like an expensive software corporation.
Still, at least it felt lived in. Most of its airy floors had been comprehensively violated. Desks and waiting-sofas used as sleeping palettes, walls covered in neat lines of devotional graffiti (Book of Revelations, mostly, which I guess is sort of de rigeur amongst insane apocalyptic cults). I figured the Clergy used them for sleeping dorms, store-rooms, pantries, whatever.
Which sort of begged the question: Where were they all?
The battle outside was still raging, still going strong, but there was no way in hell the scavs had overrun every last Choirboy in this place. It was enormous.
So where were they?
Nate and I had bumped into a few of the little shits on the stairwell on the way inside. Mostly they were sprinting down from above, guns and heavy packs stowed on their backs and crooked beneath overladen arms, and I'd been obliged to shoot them as they came clattering down the last flight without waiting for them to arm-up. I'd be discreetly ashamed, if I could be bothered. No; more worrying was the reason for the sudden evacuation. These grunts weren't dashing off to join the defence of the outer gate, or form a second layer of repulsion. They were getting out. All possessions carried; scampering off through the vast lobby (now strewn with military netting and a blotchy mural of John-Paul) and out, towards the wide shape of the General Assembly Building.
Something was going down.
I couldn't give a flying fuck.
On the third floor we came across a shattered desk covered in telephone switchboard pins, and I rummaged through piles of discarded paperwork whilst Nate stood watch with that same nervous foot-to-foot hop. Amidst crumbling cards and files I found, finally, a yellowing printout of floor designations. Thirty-nine levels; thirty-nine busy little worlds dedicated to 'World Peace'.
A spray of stray bullets knocked out the windows beside me. Kind of ironic.
'32-35', the printout said. 'SCI/TECH RESEARCH ADMINISTRATION,' with a list of departmental names as long as my arm and the telephone extensions of each. Someone had ringed one of the entries in green ink, with the bored assiduousness of someone who was tired of being asked for the same department over and over.
Towards the end, I guessed, as The Cull turned the city outside into a ghost town, the phones would never have stopped ringing.
Fl 34. Ext 34033. Epidemiology.
"Right," I said.
"You found what you been looking for?" Nate grunted, trying not to look too interested. He'd been pretty good so far, I supposed, at not asking out loud what the hell I'd dragged him into. He'd got his payment. He'd got his protection, and a little sliver of fame as the guy who's with the stranger. He was doing okay, and the Clergy hadn't tried to kill him yet.
But you could see it in his eyes. The curiosity was killing him.
I wondered if I should take him with me.
But.
Something not quite right…
Still that sensation of disquiet. His eyes twinkled over his soggy dogend, his teeth sparkled with every smile. He cooked a fine rat. He told a fine story. He looked a clown and acted a clown, and his shaky-handed approach to medicine had saved my life at least twice. Nothing to dislike about the guy, right?
Right.
But no. No. Something not right.
Something besides this new twitchy, sweaty routine he was going through, something besides the weird behaviour since yesterday.
A little tentacle of memory uncurled. A voice cut-through with exhaustion and inebriation, curdled with heavy breathing and fresh sweat.
Bella.
I only knew her a couple of weeks. Planning for the airport, mostly. Getting provisions, working out where to hit, how to get through, who to target. Mostly.
Except the one night we got smashed on whatever brain-killing homebrew the local survivors had been cooking up in their bathtub stills. Lost track of our conversation.
Ended up fucking on the bar in the abandoned pub we'd been using as home.
Even off my face, even after five years of hardcore celibacy, even in a world as careless and repercussion-free as this one, the guilt!
Didn't matter, in the end. We fell asleep all cuddled-up on the trapdoor behind the bar, and as I dozed-off I got confused and kept kissing her forehead, like she was someone else. And she started telling me things. Stuff I hadn't asked about, hadn't expressed any interest in. Stuff I barely bothered to listen to.
When she was finished there was a long silence, then she said:
"Doesn't matter. Not your problem. But that's why I'm going."
Back on the fifth floor of the United Nations Secretariat building, with people shouting and dying outside, I turned to Nate and said:
"Go help the others. Find the kids. Look everywhere."
He stared at me like I was mad. Half relieved, half terrified.
"But…" He waved a hand, searching for the right words. "Why, man? Ain't like you care. Ain't like you expect 'em to find anything. Why the sudden ch…"
Doesn't matter, she'd said, sweat making the grime on her face streak and run. Not your problem.
I snapped. Just a little.
"Fucksakes, Nate! Just fucking… Just…"
His eyes bugged. I looked away.
Took a breath.
"Just… Just go help them, will you? Please? I'm going upstairs. Might be dangerous. Just give them a hand."
Outside, a fireball licked at the edges of the building and blew-in the rest of the windows, letting in the screams from outside. Nate grunted.
I started to climb the stairs.
From the thirty-fourth floor I couldn't even see the fight outside. This high up, the green-glass windows were all intact, and I couldn't hope to angle my vision down to the base of the tower without bashing my head in the process.
I was sweating heavily, by the time I arrived. Not a good sign. Since The Cull robbed us all of a functioning power grid, elevators had been a survivor's wet dream. Judging from the lack of empty food cans and discarded sleeping-mats, very few Clergy goons had taken the trouble to come this high. Even the walls were mostly free of nonsensical graffiti, and any plundering of office supplies appeared to have been more a matter of overturning desks and causing a mess, than looking for useful stuff. If I'm honest, as I climbed the stairs I was quietly entertaining the suspicion that sooner or later I'd come across floor-after-floor of children, packed together in tiny bunks, poring over mass-produced bibles and reciting the day's lessons like good little acolytes.
Bella's words, getting to me.
"Not your problem."
It's a funny thing, convincing a horde that something was a lie whilst dimly suspecting it might just be true. I guess, deep down inside – maybe – there was a little bit of me expecting that the scavs would find their kids. Behind the carefully maintained disinterest, behind the rock-solid focus on my own goals (Don't you fucking give up, soldier!), it was lurking there like an irritating little piece of humanity.
The looks in the eyes of the women, standing outside the gates last night.
The way Malice rocked her child to sleep in the midst of the Wheels Mart, knowing she had four more years before the little mite was whisked away.
The edge in Bella's voice.
Was it so unlikely that they'd find them, after all?
Why did the Clergy want the kids, if not for their grand future-shaping scheme? Why fly the little buggers in from overseas, from all over the bloody world, if not to train them in the ways of the Lord, to fill their heads with destiny-based-bollocks? It's not like the Clergy were running a secret sportswear sweatshop, or mass-producing child meat pies…
No. They had to be here somewhere, somewhere inside the compound, hidden away.
But not here. Not a soul. Just the dim moonlight through thick plate glass, a morass of overturned desks and stalwart filing cabinets, and endless silence.
I started searching.
Once or twice I heard voices from the stairwell, torches wobbling in the gloom, puddles of hard light wafting past walls and windows. I froze every time, hands reaching for the M16, convinced they'd followed me. They knew what I was after.
Then they went clattering past – upwards – and were lost to the endless silence. I half-wondered what was on the roof that was so bloody important, then rammed my head into another heap of cluttered files and forgot all about it.
I found it forty minutes later.
Tucked away in a chrome cabinet (locked, but fortunately not bullet-proof), inserted between vile-green separators like the most unimportant thing on earth, rammed between bulging files marked PAL-, PAM-, PAO-, PAP-, it was a slender, unremarkable thing. A faded project-report, listing funding allocations, resources, classification levels, diplomatic passes, locations, and personnel.
I had to sit down.
Take a breath.
Look away. Out across the dark landscape and that brightening patch of sky to the east, promising – eventually – a new sun.
Then I looked back and re-read the title: PROJECT PANDORA
It made me shiver, which is quite a thing to admit when you've spent most of your adult life killing people in secret.
I rifled through the loose sheets inside like a man possessed, fingers trembling, spilling useless documents and paper clipped photographs. It all seemed like it was happening to someone else.
I found the name I was looking for near the back.
Vital statistics. Origins. Code numbers. Re-assignment location.
There was a photo pinned to its rear.
I stared at it for twenty minutes.
The sun edged higher.
And then abruptly I was ready to leave, and stuffing the papers into my pockets, and staggering upright, fighting the shivers, and casting my eyes across the photos I'd dropped, stopping to retrieve my rifle, and Oh shit.
And there he was. Staring at me. Pictured in black and white, a decade or two younger, smart in dress-uniform and sergeant's stripes, smiling with officious intensity at the camera.
JOHN P. MILLER.
Lacking only for a vast white mitre, a snowy robe, and an exaltation to the Lord on his lips.
John-Paul Rohare Baptiste.
Why the fuck was he in the file? What the hell was he doing th Snkt.
This is a sound I have heard many times. This is a sound I am acquainted with intimately, and have been responsible for creating in the vast majority of cases.
This is the sound of a semi-automatic pistol being armed, in close proximity to someone's head.
The head was mine. The pistol was Cardinal Cy's.
"Fuck." I said.
"Yeah," he said.
Nobody moved.
"How did you find me?"
"On the way up. Heard a shot. Took it nice and slow."
Opening the filing cabinet. Bugger.
Still the same, strange voice. Little stammered bursts of thought, tones just a touch too high for comfort.
"Given us a chase. Haven't you? Troublemaker. Caused all sorts."
"What's on the roof?" I said. Stalling. It didn't matter. He had no reason to keep me alive now. Just showboating. Just being curious. Just playing with me.
"No concern." He said. "What you looking for? Up here, huh? What's got you into this?"
"None of your business," I deadpanned.
He punched me in the kidneys, giggling horribly and as I went down I made it look good, cried out, and staggered, and threw up my hand to ward him off, letting the photo of John-Paul flap about, and – and in the confusion sneaked my other hand onto the Uzi in my pocket, and – and the gun was back on my scalp, only this time I was kneeling.
"Fuck."
"Hands. Lemee see. On head."
He giggled again. Not right in the head.
I did what he said. The Uzi clattered to the ground beside the photo of John-Paul, and somewhere behind those impenetrable red specs I guess he snatched a glance.
"That who I think?"
"Yeah."
"Looks young."
"Yeah."
"What you doing here?"
"Looking for something."
"What?"
"Information."
"What information?"
"You really want to know?"
"What information? Fuck! What information?" The muzzle jabbed against my temple.
I sighed.
Tensed.
"I'm after the location of a secret UN funded research-team sent to find a…"
And I struck. Always mid-sentence. Always unexpected.
Turned. Arms swiping across the pistol muzzle. Knocking it to one side.
He got off a shot – angry and loud and shocking in the silence – and the muzzleflash vanished in the wrong direction, and I was standing and snarling, and then wrestling with the gun between us, and oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck…
He was laughing.
He was stronger than me.
The gun came up slowly like the sunrise outside, like a perfect black 'O' opening to swallow me, and I pushed and fought and put everything into it, and Don't you fucking give up soldier!
Sir, no sir! Etc etc.
– and it still wasn't enough.
Hooked a leg behind his knee. Tipped us up. Rolling on the floor. Grunting, dribbling, spitting, sweating. The cords in his neck stood out like ropes, and still he wasn't going to stop laughing, the bastard, still he was giggling like his sides had bust.
He took a hand off the pistol, and for a second I thought I'd won. Redoubled my efforts. Forced everything I had into snapping his wrist.
But it made no difference, and he was still laughing, and he was still stronger than me.
With all the time in the world, he picked up my own rifle in his spare hand – fat fist wrapped round the muzzle – and hit me so hard on the head that my teeth rattled, my lips went cold, my eyes burned with a sudden whiteness then faded back to an awful half-gloom, and the sound that reached my ears shivered around inside my empty skull like an endless echo.
Still laughing. Standing over me, gun in hand.
Still laughing in between telling me he's going to shoot off my kneecaps and let the Abbot have his fun. Spitting on my forehead. Warm rain.
Still laughing when he aimed the pistol and took a breath.
Still laughing when the blurred shape that had been creeping up behind him for the past thirty seconds – tall and dark, dappled with stripes and patches in blue and red – swatted his wrist to one side, ignored the spastic misfire of the pistol, and jabbed a hunting knife so hard into his skull that it slid inside with a crack and stayed there.
And then he stopped laughing, the shit.
Which is about when I lost consciousness, and went skidding off into my own head.
From somewhere, the sounds of engines. Big engines. A lot of engines.
People were shouting ("They're going! They're getting out! Stop them!"), guns were chattering like woodpeckers in a distant forest, and two voices were arguing.
"Fuck were you doing?"
"You mind your business, man! The hell are you, anyways?"
"What's in the pack? Hey! Hey, I'm talking to you!"
"You back off, Tonto!"
"What did you call m…"
And so on.
Oh, and an ugly throb of motorised something, slinking off into silence.
…thrpthrpthrpthrp…
I didn't even bother opening my eyes. It was all too much trouble.
"I had a kid." She said. "That's all."
She was beautiful, I suppose, in a stretched-out way. Gangly almost, but not clumsy. Not my type, but I could appreciate her. With little beads of sweat catching the fire on her compact little breasts, and her legs sort of wrapped over-then-under mine, any man could.
The sex had been… okay. Nice.
A little awkward, maybe. Heart-not-quite-in-it, but…yeah. Nice.
"They took her last year. Just turned five. I hid out for months, moving about. Eventually some small-town fuckwit sold me out for a bottle of meths and a new shirt. I kicked his bloody teeth in, when I could walk again."
I pressed my nose against her hair. It smelt of dirt and damp and woman.
Oho, the guilt…
"You're lucky they didn't kill you," I said. "The Clergy. Not big fans of tithe-dodgers."
"Nah." Her shoulders shrugged against my chest. "Why bother? Another woman left alive, another baby-machine to spit out more brain-dead bible-thumpers."
Then quiet. She was a deep-breather and didn't fidget quite as much as As some people do.
"Who was the father?" I said, trying to sound interested. In truth the guilt was eating me up, chewing on my stupid prick-controlled-brain and cursing the nettle brandy (or whatever the hell it was) I'd been drinking all night.
Not that I wasn't interested in what she had to say, exactly. Just that I'd heard it – or something like it – a hundred times before. Just that I had my own worries.
Shit, five years since The Cull it was still a selfish motherfucking world.
"No one," she said, and her voice said otherwise. "Just some… guy."
"Before The Cull, right?"
"Yeah. Year or so. Prick." She sighed and nuzzled her way backwards until her bum was squidged up against my groin, and pulled the blanket we'd found tighter round herself "Seemed like he knew everything, at the start. Smart guy, capable. Knew everyone.
"You get to feel like you're safe with someone like that. You know? I mean, Jesus… I was only… what? Twenty one? Living on the street. Spoilt rotten as a kid, I was. Ponies, swimming pools, four-by-fours, you name it. Thus the flying lessons. Got bored of that too. Same as anything."
I was already tuning out. I know, I know. I'm scum. "I only got halfway through uni," she said, building up momentum for an entire bloody life-story. "Had a bit of a… hiccup. Took a look at myself. All the money, the materials. Probably got a bit too far into the whole student thing, if I'm honest. Just kind of… backflipped. Dropped off the radar. Wound up on the streets, getting by. That's where I met Claystone."
"That's the father?"
"Yeah. And then the baby came. A-and… and give him his credit, you know…he hung around. Brought in some money, once in a while. Knew who to ask, get favours. Fingers in all sorts of pies. We got ourselves a little place, no questions asked – proper little family. Even tried to clean ourselves up. Stop using, y'know?"
I tangled a finger through the ringlets of hair next to her ear, then realised what I was doing and stopped. All these little betrayals, all these guilty little things.
If she noticed, she didn't show it.
"Then The Cull."
"He died?" I said.
She laughed, bitter.
"No. No, he didn't die. Stuck about for a while. Just long enough to see little Shayla hit one. Went out every day for food and togs, came back… now and then.
"Then one day he just didn't come back at all. Left a note. 'Couldn't handle the responsibility'. Prick."
More quiet.
"Sodding cliche, ain't it?" She said. I jerked back awake, realising I'd been slipping off.
"What?"
"Single mother, whingeing on."
"Yeah. Maybe. Though it's kind of different when you can't just nip to the local supermarket for nappies."
"Exactly. Anyway." She shrugged again. "We survived. Me and Shayla."
"And Claystone?"
"Pfft. Saw him about, once or twice. Heard about him all the time. Everyone knew Claystone. He worked for everyone, sooner or later. Had a way of… of finding the best groove. Like… things got tough, he knew a comfier slot. Gold fucking medallist at living an easy life."
Her voice dripped bitterness.
"But he never came looking for me. Vanished, eventually. Wound up in the river for all I know. All I care.
"Prick. Prick! Well shot of him."
Somewhere outside the pub's shattered windows, a fox loped by with its weird baby-scream call. Bella shivered.
"You know what it's like, when your whole world is focused on one thing?"
I scowled, uncomfortable with the thought. "Yeah." I decided. "Yeah, suppose I do."
"And then six men in robes come one day and take it away from you, and kick the crap out of you into the bargain, and put things in your mouth, and tell you to behave and do what you're told, then scuttle off into the night. And then you hear that thing – that… that centre of your universe – get loaded aboard a plane and fucked-off to Yankland.
"What then, mate? What do you do then?"
I didn't answer.
We lay like that for a long time, and I could tell from her breathing she wasn't asleep.
Eventually she mumbled:
"Doesn't matter. Not your problem. But that's why I'm going."
I was already asleep, and heard it only on the fringes of a dream.
I woke up, and almost shat.
There was a face about a foot from my eyes; curved nose sharp like the edge of a scimitar, mouth tugged down at each corner, lost across a jutting chin to a network of weather-lines. Its hair – long, perfectly dark – was trussed-up in loops of red and yellow PVC-tape, so it stood upright like a tower then spilled down on either side to box me in.
From the hairline to the bottom of the eye sockets, the man was black. Not just Afro-Caribbean black, but black like ink, pressed-up tight against dark eyes that shimmered inside their puddle of shadow. But below the eyes – face bisected in a straight horizontal line across the bridge of the nose and down each angular cheekbone – the man's skin was tanned a ruddy red. He looked savage. He looked terrifying.
He looked like an ancient God of war (or rather, how I assumed an ancient God of war might look, never having met one), and in the fuzzy moments of half waking, with my whole head throbbing from the sharp pain in my scalp, I remembered the wax figures in their diorama displays in the museum, and wondered if one of them had come back to teach me a lesson for using him as a decoy.
The only detail that somewhat spoilt this scowling character's prehistoric spectacle, was the head-to-foot biking leathers in blue, black, red and white.
"He's awake." The effigy proclaimed, rising up and away from me. At a distance, he stopped being the most terrifying thing I've ever seen, and became a young man wearing face paint. I relaxed my sphincter.
"What? You what?" A familiar voice. I felt myself smiling, happy at the note of familiarity in the midst of all this oddity. Nate appeared on the edge of my vision like a man possessed, pushing the boy aside and stooping down to poke and prod at me. He was no longer sweating or shivering; a total transformation that left him grinning massively and mumbling to himself.
"Ow," I said, as he pressed his crinkled fingers against my temple. He did it again.
"Miracle." He said, grinning, cigarette hanging off his bottom lip. "That's what it is. Damned miracle. Asshole all but opened you up."
He tittered to himself.
I picked myself up slowly, fighting the urge to vomit every inch of the way. My head felt like a meteor had hit it – or possibly a speeding elephant – and judging by the dry tightness of my cheek it was appropriately blood-splattered. Added to the bandaged remains of what had once been an ear, the slashes and scars across cheeks and forehead, the aching wounds – messily fixed-up – in my left arm, right shoulder and nape of my neck, I imagined I was starting to look just as patchworked as my coat. One of these days, I decided, I was going to have to find a functioning shower.
I tottered to my feet, lost the battle with my gyrating inner-ear, and barfed like a trooper. I was hungry enough to consider asking someone for a spoon.
Nate watched me cautiously, like he expected me to fall down any second. His pupils looked even bigger than usual, pushing against the bright whites of his eyes, and he was clinging to a red plastic box – like a power drill case – like it was a lifeline. Where he'd got it and what the hell it was were queries I never got around to asking. My surroundings swam into focus, and my senses came online.
The prevailing sound was: engines.
I was back at the Wheels Mart. The same raggedy little tent, by the looks of it, that Malice met me in before. Through the tattered openings I could hear the braying crowds and see the spastic danglings of the MC, shouting out his endless stream of nonsensical bid-acceptances. The smell of cooking meat underwritten by the heady chug of noxious fumes, the whooping and arguing of punters. It made my head hurt, if possible, even more than it already did.
"Brought you here in a car!" Nate whooped, doing a little dance. He was clearly on something. "Borrowed it, yes we did. Fucking Clergy, heh!"
"What… what happened?" I murmured, wincing at my own voice. "What happened to the priests?"
"Fucked off!" Nate sat down suddenly, cross-legged, and nodded like a flapping wing. "Trucks, hidden-away. Took-off all at once. You scared 'em off! City's free!"
Then he slumped against the wall of the tent with no warning and just… switched off, smirking. He dribbled a little.
High as a kite.
Hmm.
The young man in the leathers stood nearby, leaning against a tall wooden pole, arms folded; watching it all without movement. I found myself looking for the bow and quiver of arrows over his shoulder – hating myself – and dipped my eyes back up to his own to cover the up-and-down staring.
He didn't move a muscle.
"You saved me, huh?" I said, remembering the red and blue blur behind Cy, the knife cracking through his skull.
He shrugged. "You needed saving."
Nate tsked quietly behind me, then giggled again.
I held out a shaky hand to the boy, which he took with a suspicious sort of glance and shook firmly.
"Hiawatha," he said.
I nodded. "Pleasure. Want to tell me what you were doing on the thirty fourth floor of a hotly-contested building swarming with insane priests, Hiawatha?"
He smiled. Sort of. I don't think there was much humour there.
"Saving you." he said.
Uh-huh.
Which is around about when Malice came in. Different.
She looked bigger, for a start. It took me a while to figure she wore body armour beneath the black threads. Pointy football-pads over each shoulder, skateboarding shields on elbows and knees, and a bloody enormous anti-stab vest that made her look like a samurai. Guns and knives poking from belts and straps on every conceivable surface – and that included the baby's wicker support-cage, still humping from her back like a dorsal fin.
She looked like an ice hockey player who was too hardcore to bother with a helmet.
Oh, and someone had beaten the shit out of her.
"Still alive then," she said, not even bothering to make eye contact. She sounded disappointed, dumping an angular bag on the floor with a metallic crash.
"Uh. Yeah. Yeah, I guess." I tried to stop staring at her bruised face. "What happened?"
She rummaged industriously in a couple of crates nearby, then paused to glower at me. "Clergy happened, retard. You're a popular guy."
I suppose I should've guessed. Back before The Tag and the siege and all that, when Cy dragged the big Mickey-chief back to the UN with tales of the Limey psycho driving about on a clapped-out quad. Wouldn't have taken the Choirboys long to work their way back to the Wheels Mart.
I wondered whether she'd told them anything worth a damn.
"Sorry," I said.
"Skip it. We're ready to roll when you are."
"Excuse me?"
"We're loaded-up and ready. Awaiting your pleasure, your majesty. And payment, of course."
"Sorry, I'm… I'm not with you…"
"I said," Nate grumbled. "Didn't I say? Let him wake up, I said! Just goddamn wait! Let him decide himself!"
Malice ignored him, hooking a thumb towards Hiawatha. "Last of the Mohicans here said you'd want a ride. Long distance. Heavy protection. No expense spared."
Hiawatha stared at me.
"But…"
"North-west," Malice said. "That's what he told me. You saying he's been wasting my fucking time?"
She didn't look in the mood for games.
I groped in my pocket and felt the crumpled sheet of paper I'd taken from the Secretariat with its REASSIGNMENT LOCATION and the smooth photograph. Undisturbed, right where I'd left them.
I stared at Hiawatha.
"How did you know that?" I said, off-balance. "What's…how… how did you know?"
"Lucky guess," he said, then turned back to Malice, pointing a finger at the bag she'd brought with her. "That's mine."
"And?"
"They confiscated it at the door."
"And now I'm bringing it back Tonto. Keep your fucking scalp o…"
"No, I mean… I mean you might as well keep it. It's for you anyway."
He strolled over and kicked open the drawstrings, letting dozens upon dozens of glossy guns – rifles, pistols, autos, semis, weird spiky things I didn't recognise and antique bloody revolvers – spill into the dirt.
"Figure that'll cover the rental costs," he said, into the silence.
Malice gaped.
The Inferno was waiting for us outside.