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 grafitied 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 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 middleclass 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 whilst 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 boot falls on the ceiling, and Tora's dangling rig swivelled round and round 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 1 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 Sliiiiip!" he growled, knife held above the boy's eyeball, wrestling and grunting and rolling. "Ffffucking 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 sheets 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. N.A.T. O liaison officer.
Assigned 4332/GGfT/332-099#1
PROJECT PANDORA.
It was a lot like watching a film. Like the trigger on a projector, immersing the viewer immediately in a cannonade of scenes, shots, impressions, memories. The only difference was, it was all inside his eyelids.
It all came right back to him, and for the fiftieth time he struggled with the desire to vomit. Soon he'd have to tell the driver to stop, to get the Acolytes up here, to prepare the Host.
It was a lot to take in.
And this, at his age. At his time of life. In his current state of health. Oh, was there no end to the tests he must pass?
He mumbled a prayer and tried to ride out the nausea.
He'd seen his empire shaken to its roots. He'd seen his fortress invaded by heretics and filth, his perfectly structured city ripped away from his grasp and – oh, worst of all – his link with the world denied to him. The great satellite dish on the banks of the East River, the great studios and broadcast suites his loyal children had pieced together inside the General Assembly buildings. The means of speaking to the world.
The means of reaching out.
Spreading the Good Word.
All of it taken away. Destroyed, ripped apart, trampled underfoot by the ignorance and hatred of those who could never hope to understand his Divine Plan; who were led by The Man. The Stranger. The…
The fucking Devil.
John-Paul muttered a second prayer, shocked at the crudity of his own thoughts. Perhaps, though, it didn't matter. Perhaps… Mm. Perhaps being reawakened to his past was no simple coincidence, but an act of the Lord in itself?
Yes. Yes, that was it.
His tribe was beaten, but not destroyed. His home was taken from him.
What better time to recall another place? A better place. A hidden place, where once he'd served a far lowlier authority than the Lord. A place with communications facilities of its own. With defences and secrecy.
A place to start again, and grow strong.
He found himself clenching his jaw.
And if, in the course of this Holy Exodus to new lands and new futures, he should come across that same troublesome bastard, that Limey cumrag, if that should occur – and the Collectors had been sent out to make fucking sure it did -
Then fine.
Fine. Whatever the Lord willed, of course, but… Yes. Mm.
If. If they met him…
There would be a reckoning.
Hiawatha was real again. Curled on the floor, shallow breathing, fighting tears and trauma, the dead Collector hunched over beside him with his brains leaking out.
This was how the poor kid must have been, before. Before he came all the way to find me, in a city he'd never visited, with a head full of mumbo-jumbo and a mission I still wasn't any closer to understanding.
It was like the whole thing with the psycho and the knife – the guy with his face scraped off – had been the last straw, and whatever weird-arsed personality he'd been hiding behind these last few days, inhaling it up through each of his sweet-smelling spliffs, it was comprehensively gone.
Thank fuck.
In the sudden silence after the fight, as we traded glances and worked ourselves over to find wounds and scars, as we eyed the horde gathered outside the truck with growing anxiety, Hiawatha wiped his eyes and started to laugh.
We all stared at him. Even Nike, crippled on the floor, fussed over by Moto (who clearly had never expected to be the one to do the fussing), looked up from his pain and misery in shock. Even Nate, curled in smacked-up otherworldly confusion, stared and muttered.
Hiawatha took one look out the window, grinning at the hordes of silent figures standing there. Just standing, staring. He smiled like he'd overcome constipation and shat a gold brick, then rummaged in his bag for the dope he'd been smoking and threw it with undisguised satisfaction through the mangled hole where Tora had been taken.
Like he didn't need it any more.
"We're home," he said. "We're fucking home."
"But. Uh. Hiawa…"
"Rick." He said, shaking my hand warmly. "My name's Rick. Everything's going to be fine now. Come on."
He wriggled up and out through the gun-perch. I glanced significantly at Malice and checked the load in the M16. Then I went after him.
"Careful!" Nate giggled, eyes rolling. "Injun's a… Injun's a fucking liability."
Junkie.
Hiawatha was down on the ground, walking away. I went to follow him, then stopped.
There was a man on the roof of the Inferno.
I don't know how long he'd been there. I hadn't heard footsteps since the Collectors fucked off, and he didn't look the sort to go anywhere quietly. The wind moved in his hair, and the beads under his ears, and the feathers on his shoulders.
Which was sort of weird.
Because.
(what the fuck is going on?)
Because there wasn't any wind.
The sky smiled.
"Welcome," he said. And his face moved as he talked in ways I didn't understand, and the skin beside his eyes was a red desert that shifted with continental patience, and his eyes sucked in the universe, and the great decorated robe he wore, furled like the wings of a bat, danced in my eyes.
Messages in patterns.
The smile on the corners of his lips.
The The walkie-talkie poking out of his cloak.
What?
It hissed.
The man looked away for a second.
"kkk… llo..?" The radio said.
This vision before me, this ancient God of plains and prairies, this magnificent man with skin like leather and whorls of black and white across the bridge of his nose, with a great feather-totem spread across his shoulders and a long war-club held in his hand, he shifted from foot to foot, and said:
"Uh."
"kkk…cking talk to me, asshole motherf…kkk… said, is he there yet?… llo?… kkk… oddamn food's nearly ready an…"
The man rolled his eyes and sighed.
"C'mon," he said, turning away with a despondent beckon, reduced abruptly from awesome Earth Deity to an old bloke with a crazy costume. "Let's get a beer before the old bitches get pissy."
The Haudeno… Haudanosaw… Haw… oh, fuck, the Iroquois weren't what I expected at all.
Listen: I'm English. Only exposure I ever got to indigenous life was a school trip to a Stone Age village when I was a kid, and a whole shitload of John Wayne movies. You ask me, a Native American lives in a wigwam, says "How" a lot, and has a name like Two-Ferrets-Fucking. I know, I know. It's despicable, stereotypical and downright unforgivable. But I yam what I yam.
Still, I was ready to be educated, you know? As the quiet tribesmen loaded us all into cars and trailers, patching up Moto as best they could, and swarmed around the Inferno in our wake, I was prepared to have my eyes opened. Rick – Hiawatha, whoever he was – babbled the whole away about the 'new' Iroquois. About how, in a cruel post-Cull world, the Old Ways worked best. He said the people who'd come out here, they forgot all that bullshit we used to call 'society' and went back to the land. Back to basics.
Funny thing is, he sounded sort of bitter as he said it.
Rick told me it was a popular movement. Sure enough at least half the tribesmen around us – variously wearing scavenged trousers, leather jackets or woolly jumpers, all with beads and mouse-skulls and intricate tattoos decorating heads and faces – were whiter than white. It was funny to see them like that. Embarrassing, in a way; like being seen in public with a raging tourist who doesn't mind stopping to take a photo every five seconds, and wears a hilarious T-shirt saying something like:
I CAME TO LONDON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY STD
But they looked so earnest, smoking their cigarettes and hefting their guns, and they acted so friendly as we drove, that I kept myself from pointing and laughing. It was a struggle.
The point is, I guess I was ready to be… impressed. Stunned by the allure of this atavistic lifestyle. I was awaiting nomadic groups, great tribal fires, comfy lodges made of wood and mud.
Oh, piss… I admit it: I was expecting a spectacle.
Instead I got thirty caravans, assorted Winnebago clones, two dozen pickups and one of those prefab mobile homes, like a cheap Swiss chalet, on the back of a lorry. I almost choked. They stood formed together in a rough circle around the prefab, on the banks of a clean-looking reservoir, in the shade of a huge bridge carrying the I-80 to the opposite bank.
The old man who'd greeted me, who'd introduced himself as we clambered into the waiting car as a 'Sachem' named Robert Slowbear, caught my look of vague disappointment. He seemed to bristle.
"Just a mobile base," he said, defensively. "Not regular at all. We're a long way from home too, stranger."
"Yeah?"
He settled back and smiled. "You should see the lodges, Englishman. Fields giving crops. Herds of swine all through the forests. More people coming every day…"
Hiawatha muttered under his breath. "Caravans as far as the eye can see…"
Slowbear threw him a shuddup, kid look.
"You all live in the same area?" I said, intrigued by the vision of some sprawling trailer park in the middle of Indiana.
The Sachem shook his head. "No, no… The Haudenosaunee is a… a Confederacy, not a state. Settlements with the right to roam. Mostly they stay still… farm, raise livestock, fish… Others move with seasons. We come together, now and then. Trade news. Share stories and lessons."
"Party…" Rick murmured, slightly more enthusiastic.
Slowbear ignored him. "The means of living vary, stranger. That is my point. Does it matter if a man sleeps beneath a pelt or a… a duvet? In a wooden lodge or a… hah… a TrekMaster 3000? The circumstances by which he acquired items do not lessen their value. It is the ways that matter. The councils. The families. The beliefs."
I felt my fists tighten, just a tad. Bugbear.
"What beliefs?"
He met my gaze, and we held eye-contact for a long time, without any sense of threat or status. It was an extraordinary sensation.
"Consider," he said, pausing to slurp on a flask of something that smelt like lager. "What is unchanged?"
He passed it to me. It tasted okay.
"What do you mean?" I said, wiping froth off my lip.
"This… this Blight. The 'Cull'. Call it what you like. What didn't it affect?"
I wasn't in the mood for a guessing game. "Tell me."
"Ha. The world."
I scowled.
"Do the animals care?" He said. "Did the deer fall down and die? Or the crows in the trees? Did the soil turn barren, or the rains stop? Did the earth care?"
"I guess not. Unless you count the minor case of nukage…"
"I don't."
"Figures."
"The point is, why look to some… heavenly God? Some crucified idiot born of mortal man." He stretched his arms out wide and gestured across the fields and hills, the glittering water of the reservoir and the clear sun in the sky. "Isn't this enough?"
I gave it some thought. It was a cute speech. Tempting, even. But still…
"Sounds a lot like just another faith-specific boys' Club to me." I said. "You don't believe, you don't get to play along."
He didn't look offended.
"You must understand," he smiled. "It's not the tasks a man performs that defines who he is. That's just staying alive. That's just being. It's what sings in his heart as he does so."
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Rick rolling his eyes.
"And what sings in these peoples' hearts?" I said, only a little wry, gesturing around me at the beered-up white-man-Injuns with their polished guns and rattling pickups.
Slowbear smiled faintly, and took a long time to answer.
"Freedom." he said.
I stared at him. Worked my jaw. Thought about it. Said:
"Just another way of saying 'nothing left to lose'…"
We finished the journey in silence.
They took Moto away to be looked after and sat the others down to eat and drink. Pork, bread, freshly harvested vegetables, thick soups and wooden bowls of porridgey-paste and whiskey. I eyed it all longingly as Slowbear led me away. Nate tried to follow, shivering as he came-down off whatever he was on, but a couple of big guys wearing freaky blue masks politely told him to get some food in his belly, and steered him back towards the campfire.
I made a mental note to have a word with the guy. He looked like death warmed-up, and things had been far too crazy for far too long for me to find out what he was taking.
Where he'd got it from.
What the hell he was doing…
The big mobile home was a lot more impressive on the inside than the out. Someone had stripped out most of the dividing walls and blanketed the floor in a cosy mish-mash of cheap Persian rugs, animal skins, fur-coats and a thick pile of carpet off cuts. It was like wading through the shaggiest patchwork in the world, and contrived to give the structure an earthy, russet-brown air; helped along no end by the chipboard walls. Each panel was so industriously graffitied with a swirling combination of text, iconic drawings and childlike scribbles that each component ceased to have any meaning on its own, and became just a part. A raw splat of language, of culture.
I caught myself getting abstract again, and noted the thick pall of smoke in the air, the sweet-sour smell of something that wasn't just tobacco.
Ah-ha.
It was weird. It was like I'd stepped through the door of this whitewashed suburban kitschism and entered some magical beaver-lodge. Some ancient cave, or skin covered bivouac. It just happened to have a few more right angles than you'd expect.
Slowbear lurked at the door and waved me inside.
"Who'm I looking for?" I asked, irritated by the mystery.
"The boss." He grinned, and closed the door.
At the end of the hallway I came to a large chamber, where the windows were boarded-up and the high ceiling lost behind a canopy of drooping skins and weird shapes. Knotted ropes and dyed fabrics, a mournful cow-skull and a stuffed eagle turning on a string tied to the roof-joists. There was a very old man sitting beneath it, hunched over an electric fire, wearing a bland little chequered shirt with a brown waistcoat. His hair was almost white, and pulled back in a silvery ponytail that left his face uncovered; magnificently under lit by the glowing heat. Each line on his face was a fissure in a great glacial surface; ruddy-red but still somehow icy, like it radiated age and a slow, unstoppable determination.
There was absolutely no doubt at all that this man was in charge, in every sense, and despite the lack of gaudy costumes and outrageous symbols, I had to wrestle with my own desire not to dip my head.
He was smoking a pipe in the shape of a bear-totem. It looked cheap.
"Please," he said, and waved to a low chair placed opposite him. I made a move towards it, not thinking, and hesitated. Call me shallow, but the memory of the food cooking outside and the hole in my stomach was more powerful than I'd expected.
"No offence," I said. "But is this likely to take a while? I'm fit to fall down, here."
And then I smelt it.
Rich. Gamey. Good enough to kill for.
Vegetable aromas mixed with the smoky emanations of the old man's pipe, underscored at all times by the unmistakable scent of cooking meat. I realised with a stomach-gurgling jolt that the chamber led – via an archway in the corner – into a kitchen, and from inside caught the shadow of movement and a fresh burst of steam and smoke.
I almost dribbled.
"It is on its way." The old man smiled. He had a kind voice, and spoke with the thoughtful enunciation of a man to whom English is a second language.
I sat.
"Who are you?"
"Tadodaho." He said. "You would say… Chief. Over all the Haudenosaunee. Over the sachem council."
"And why have you brought me here, Chief?"
He puffed on the pipe, letting white coils billow upwards with that curious slowness of silt sinking through water, but reversed; rising to the surface, lifting up to Abstract bollocks.
Hold it together.
"You are here for a talk with the highest authority within our great Confederacy." He smiled, rotating the pipe in nimble old fingers. "The Haudenosaunee have been waiting for you."
"You knew I was coming?"
"Yes."
"You sent that kid to fetch me."
"Yes."
"How did he know where to look?"
He held out the pipe.
"A better question is: how did he know how to look?"
I pursed my lips. Stared at the pipe for a long time, then slowly shook my head.
"No thanks."
Clear head.
Know everything.
Cover the angles.
If my refusal constituted some big bloody cultural insult, or whatever, the old man gave no sign; shrugging good-naturedly and continuing to smoke himself.
Eventually, as the silence was killing me and the desire to blunder through to that kitchen and go crazy was starting to hotwire my muscles, he sighed through eddying clouds and said:
"My blood is not like yours."
"Excuse me?"
"Blood, Englishman. Blood types. I assume you are normal? Type 'O'. Rhesus negative. Yes?"
It was fucking weird, I don't mind telling you; sitting there in that warm lodge with a genuinely creepy tribal mystic, listening to him go off on one about bloody pathology. Like a brontosaurus with an MP3 player.
"Well…" I said, a touch too sarcastic. "You'll notice I'm technically alive..?"
"Mm."
"Then obviously I'm O-neg… What the fuck is th-?"
"I, on the other hand, am not."
He stared at me. His face was still. And in his eyes, oh fuck, I could see, I could just tell:
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-off the bastards?"
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 alrrrrrdy…"
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.