knife.
I nodded and lifted an empty skewer off the makeshift fire, and jabbed at the slimy morsel he held out. Second only to pigeon.
Over by the plane dark shapes crossed in front of the dancing fires, like inky puddles of moving shadow.
'Still a lot of guns aboard.' I said, tense.
And Bella's body.
Nate said the scavs wouldn't be doing any shooting. 'Relax,' he said, and passed me the vodka with only the tiniest reluctance. He said that whatever the scavs found, they'd present immediately – with all due ceremony and cringing deference – to their bosses in the Klans. He said that if any of the poor fuckers dared waste a single bullet, and word got back to their bosses, they'd be in the hunt pens or skewered on territory poles before they knew it.
I asked him what the Klans were.
He smiled and bit into his rat.
The wind got colder.
Nate said he'd been a doctor, once.
'Kind of,' he said.
He said he'd been born in the Bronx and miseducated in Harlem, and but for a lucky seduction in a downstate disco would've wound up still there, scrabbling for cash and crack. He said that twenty years ago – or so – he got lucky with a rich white chick who fell for his unmistakable charms and took him along to England when her company reassigned her. He said she paid through the nose to set him up. He said she enrolled him in night school to finish his basic, then community college, then – pushing harder – medical training. He said every step of the way he worked his balls off, because it turned out he could handle failure and addiction and crime and poverty, but the one thing he couldn't handle was seeing her disappointed.
It was all a bit 'soap opera,' but I didn't like to break the flow.
Nate said he flunked the final exams so bad he would've done better to leave the question papers blank.
'Morphine addiction,' he explained, staring off into space.
And that, he said, was that.
'Couldn't you resit?' I asked, picking out rat bones from between my teeth. 'Get cleaned-up, try again? Seems a bit late in the day to go throwing it all away.'
'Yeah.' he said, and his voice was quiet. 'Yeah, you're right there. Except Sandra – that's the lady, the… the one who took me over there – she sorta caught me with my pants down.'
'Ah.'
'Yeah. With her secretary.'
I looked away, unsure whether to cringe or snigger. 'Ah.'
When I looked back, Nate's expression was… well, sad – obviously – but something else too. Like the face an exec gets when the deal falters at the last meeting. Like the face I used to see on missions, when the grunts and agents round me realised it'd all gone to tits, and people were probably going to die, and it just wasn't fair. Like… frustration, maybe. A sense of annoyance at circumstances beyond one's control.
Which is sort of weird, given that it was all his fault.
Something dark flitted through the shadows outside the circle of light cast by the fire. Nate stared at it for a moment, utterly untroubled, and spat into the flaming logs.
He said – the story rumbling on as if uninterrupted – that the money dried up pretty quick after that. He said he only realised how much he'd appreciated her (and/or her cash, depending on how you wanted to interpret it) when it was too late. Sandra cleared off, heartbroken. He let things slide. His Visa hiccupped and lit-up alarms on a Home Office computer and before he knew it he was Nathaniel C. Waterstone of no fixed abode, with a deportation warrant next to his name and a brand new shiny heroin addiction to support.
I coughed as politely as I could, aware that this man had just sewed me up. 'So when you said you'd been a doctor…'
'Yeah.' He shrugged. 'Kind of.'
He looked away and sighed, as if he could see all the way across the Atlantic from where he sat. 'London, man. Docklands, Tower Hamlets, the East End. Plenty of places they pay good money for a guy knows what he's doing with needles. Someone… unofficial. You know?'
Nate said he'd been a backstreet sawbones. Mob cutter. Bullets removed, knife wounds cleaned, bodies disposed: no questions asked. I guess I believed him, mostly.
He had an honest face.
Out across the roughage bordering the airstrip, somebody yelped. There were voices out there too – masked by the crackling of our little fire, muttering and arguing. More shapes darting in the dark.
'Scavs.' Nate shrugged.
I kept a hand on the M16 and asked what would happen to the bodies of the men aboard the plane. I didn't mention Bella. I wasn't sure why, at the time, but I know now. Even then, sitting with Nate in the cold, the scratching at the back of my head was gearing-up…
Something about him.
'Depends.' He said.
'On what?'
'On what Klans they're with. Mostly they'll just… steal clothes, leave the bodies. Coupla tinpot tribes up west got a thing for fresh meat, way I heard, but no way we'll get that shit down here. Guy I knew once – you'll like this – said you go through Ess-Eye these days – that's Staten Island, you know? – you're a… heh… a goddamn moveable feast. They got crossbows and arrows, man, he says. They got fuckin' spit roasts, and I don't mean like in no porno.
'Up here, nah. Nah. Civilised, man. Welcome to Queens.'
His grin lit up his face. With Nate, you never knew how serious he was being.
I asked him again to tell me about the Klans. He chuckled and lit a cigarette.
When The Cull started, he said, and folks started dying in the streets of London, he was holed-up with a gang of Albanians. He said up 'til then he'd been passing from group to group – Triads, Afghans, Jamaicans, even the old-school suit-wearing Pie and Chips brigade. He said these Kalashnikov-waving psychos took him on as a kind of examiner: checking the girls they ferried-in from the continent, making sure they'd last in the massage parlours and interactive peep-booths. Nate said he'd never stared at so much pussy in his life, and there came a point where it sort of stopped having any attraction.
He said at around the same time, he decided to go cold turkey.
He looked away again.
I got the impression there was more to it than that. But sitting out there in the cold with a fresh bandage on my arm and a half-digested rat inside me, listening to human filth arguing in the dark over guns and knives and all the other shit I'd left behind on the plane, I didn't have the heart to probe.
The thing was, someone almost certainly made Nate give up the skag. Maybe someone helped him, nursed him through it, whatever. I don't know. But the thing about Nate was, the thing I could tell within seconds of meeting the guy; he wasn't the kind who made decisions. Not on his own. He wasn't the kind to lead the way.
'Was eight days into the detox when the… the virus, you know? When it got as bad as it got. I had me a… a tee-vee, little one, in the room. News shows, back to back. Bodies on the streets, hospitals over flowing. Pretty much all the Albanians dropped right there. Spat blood, hit the deck. I'm telling you, man, the stink… Rest of them upped and gone. Tried to get home, maybe. Everyone's got a family, huh?'
He sighed.
'I tell you, man… I was scared. There's me, pissing outta my ass, shivering, puking, all that shit, immune system fucked to hell, and the end-of-goddamn-times plague outside my door. Just about gave up.'
I remembered too. London. Chaos. Panic. It was weeks before they could tell why some people survived. Why most didn't. Revealed little by little on garbled TV shows and home-printed leaflets, in that spasmodic time before the media gave up the ghost.
'But I survived.' Nate said. 'Fuck, yeah. Came out clean.'
And so did I.
What I remember most is, the unfairness.
