'Pulled 'em out. Best bits. Juicy. Likealikealikea lychee, Ram says.'
Oh yeah. That was the other thing.
Collectors.
Weren't too fussy where the next meal came from…
'You… uh…'
'Sucked 'em out. Et 'em. Fucked the holes. Fucking catamite Jake asshole. Fucked him good, heh heh heh.'
The weird thing, Rick discovered, was that it was a relief. Accidentally blowing off someone's hand who'd just been trying to protect their property would've tested even his powers of conscious amorality. Discovering said mutilatee was a cannibalistic psychopath took the edge off the guilt, and the confirmation that his unintentional victim had been dealing with the Neo-Clergy was enough to leave Rick positively elated. It was all he could do not to spit on the guy's bristly jowls as the blood pumped out of him and his life rustled away.
He went downstairs, feeling a little dazed, and helped himself to as many guns and as much ammo as he could carry.
He went outside.
He went back inside and dumped the shoulder-launched rocket, cursing under his breath. It turned out 'as much as he could carry' wasn't as much as he thought.
He went outside again, and stared at his bike. The clan mothers had been quite specific.
Don't you lose it, they'd said. Don't you leave it behind. It'll only bring you grief.
The cat was still glaring at him from across the street, reminding him of his dream and the withered-faced old Tadodaho whispering about the Ancestors.
'Fuck that.' Rick said, out loud.
Then he threw a stone at the cat, slung a leg over the monstrous Harley Davidson trike his would-be murderer had kindly left parked beside the Honda, and gunned his way back towards the I-80 with the purr of a zombie tiger.
He had an appointment in New York, and he intended to meet it in style.
CHAPTER FOUR
Back in London, every Sunday, if you had the time and the inclination and something to barter your way inside, you could watch a little entertainment. Of sorts.
John-Paul Rohare Baptiste, basking in directed light: a beacon of divine purity in white robes and towering mitre, marked with the simple scarlet 'O' of his order.
Offering prayers. (Ranting, if you ask me, but then I'm not the target audience.)
Performing miracles. (Staged, if you ask me.)
Evangelising, enthusing, speaking in tongues, convulsing in communion with angels, dribbling and shrieking. Reading snippets from the bible, sometimes. Sometimes from other books, as the whim took him. Standing stock- still, like a rabbit in the headlights, as his underlings snuck into frame and proclaimed, accents Noo-Yoik thick, that the 'Holy Spirit has come upon him…'
Nobody else seemed to find that as funny as I did.
The man was as mad as a stoat, in my professional opinion, not that anyone ever asked. This, after all, was entertainment. This was, in some dimly understood part of the survivors' 'society', one last link with the past. Media. Broadcast signals. Something civilised…
This was back in London. All over the UK as far as I could work out. Christ, all over the whole world, for all I knew.
They called it The Tomorrow Show.
The luckiest people – scratching out a survival in the suburbs, or holed-up in automated offices like me – had the remnants of electricity. Enough to plug-in for the requisite one-hour session every week, entranced like a spectator at the advent of the moving image. It felt like that, sometimes. Like something that had become mundane – the broadcast of sounds and shapes – had rediscovered the awe of its inception.
No one expected there to be TV in the aftermath of The Cull. It was almost magnetic.
Other people pilfered rusting generators from abandoned worksites and derelict studios, summoning the juice required to bring their equipment to life, be it knackered B amp;W antique or plasma screen treasure. They'd set up in debris-covered squares and graffiti-pocked warehouses, charging the great crowds who gathered to gawp in food or fags or favours, to squint up at the fuzzy image and await the broadcast.
Every Sunday, at four o'clock in the afternoon (that's eleven EST), it came on. Since The Cull London had become a silent city anyway, but never more so than in that crystalline moment before the show began. Breaths held, fists clenched. I guess not many of them had been overly spiritual before it all happened, but having the word of God disseminated directly into your eyeballs still beat hunting pigeons and scavenging in the underground. No contest.
'Abbot!' they'd shout, as the crowds gathered. 'Abbot's on! Trade tickets! Tins, meat, fresh water, fags! Abbot Baptiste on soon!'
I'd been to a few, down through the years. Just out of interest. Just to see what all the fuss was about, maybe even (whisper it) just to be around other people.
It was always the same routine. They'd flick the switches one minute before four. Hush fell, and eyes focused on that bright oblong of swarming white noise, like a blizzard in zero-gee. Time dragged, and before you knew it people were muttering, trading worried glances, adrenaline overflowing. Is he coming? Have we missed it? Has something gone wrong? Oh, Jesus, pray for him! Pray for him to come! Don't let him desert us!
Idiots.
Bang on four: the signal. A test card marked with a spectrum colour-check, enclosed in the same scarlet circle that decorated everything the Neo-Clergy ever touched, and that included the clothes of their audience. A ragged cheer from the crowd, a tinny burst of recorded organ music, and there he was.
Smiling. Serene. Wrinkled like a geriatric prune. Wobbling mitre slipping down over a frail brow, nose classically aquiline, chin jutting proudly from the abyssal folds of a robed collar. I always thought he looked like an albino vulture. Like a friendly old granddad with a secret perversion. Like a war criminal, trying to fit in.
Saying so out loud probably wouldn't have gone down well.
The sermons always began the same way. Push hard into a close-up – friendly eyes and soft smile filling the screen – slip into a vague soft focus that could have been intentional or technical inefficiency, and let the old goat speak, deep-south drawl sincere and stupid, all at once.
'Blessed,' he said, 'are the children.'
'Where,' the voice roared, loudspeaker whining with painful distortion, 'are the children?'
'Please!' I shouted, bracing myself against the ragged tear where the plane's tail had parted company with the fuselage. 'I… I'm hurt! I'm bleeding! I need help!'
'The fucking children!'
Too much to hope the despairing nobody routine would work twice in a row. This was going to get messy.
In snatched glances, staying low against the tortured edges of the fuselage, I figured there were ten men out there, give or take. Wafting through haze-coated patches of burning fuel and smoking debris, creeping forwards like sodding commandos assaulting a hostage siege. The tail was the obvious way in, but there were others. Smaller rents in the metal walls, the shattered panes of the cockpit, up through the sagging crater halfway down the cabin, leading into the gloomy luggage hold; now resting on the horizontal.
I was, to put it bluntly, screwed.
'You come out!' the loudhailer squealed, changing tack; the speaker's voice gratingly high and delivered in uncomfortable bursts. 'You get your ass out! Mister! Arms high!'
Diversionary tactics. Keep me standing here at the rear, trying to buy time, whilst the kamikaze crew popped in somewhere else. Subtle.
I hefted the dead man's rifle and checked the setting. The wasteful idiot had it on a three round burst.
