'Good, see? Perfect for trading, that is. See what I've g…'
Nate's voice hardened a little. His face stayed the same. 'No. Trades.'
The scavs flitted a few awkward glances back and forth, then the tall woman's eyes went sneaky. Heavy- lidded and intense, like a child conspiring to do mischief.
'We could take…' she said, quietly, acting nonchalant.
Nate chuckled to himself.
'You could,' he said. 'Yep.'
The scavs shuffled, shifted their weight from foot to foot. Here and there a blade twinkled in the firelight, and my heart twisted in my chest: speeding up, blurring time.
Endorphins washed down me.
Muscles tensed.
An old man shuffled to the front, dark blue sweater decorated with stripes of white paint, and I watched him with the targeted eye of a predator.
'What Klan?' He wheezed. 'Mm?'
'I'll show you mine if you show me yours.' Nate ginned. The M16's grip was warm now, heated by my own palm.
All at once the scavs twitched; a great roiling ball of motion, and without a single conscious thought I was lifting the gun and reaching for the arming bolt and…
Nate's hand sat on the barrel, holding it down. He gave me a look, shook his head, and grunted towards the scavs. They hadn't been attacking at all.
They stood brandishing themselves, like a medical examination taking place en masse. In each case the proffered elbow, shoulder, arm, stomach, neck or ankle was decorated by a small mark. A burnt branding-scar in the shape of a smiling face, eyes like double-arches above a mountainous nose, with a pair of satellite ears protruding on each side.
'Mickeys,' said Nate. He gave me a doting smile, like an old man discussing the merits of different chess pieces, and said: 'Respectable Klan, that.'
'Trade now?' The woman said. 'Or we'll help ourselves.'
'What Klan?' the old man whispered, hopping from foot to foot. 'What Klan what Klan what Klan?'
Nate tilted his head back, letting the fire chase away the shadows beneath the brim of his cap. The scarlet semicircle seemed to blaze on his cheek.
'Clergy…' went the whisper. A fearful susurration rushing around the crowd. 'Godshits… Choirboys… Fuckin' Clergy…'
And then they were gone.
Nate and I sat in silence. Eventually I coughed under my breath and asked him, third time lucky, if he'd tell me about the Klans.
He gave me a funny look, smirked quietly, and said:
'Shit, man. What you think I bin doing?'
CHAPTER SIX
The Consolidated Edison Power Plant facility, directly off Astoria's 20^th Avenue, was a continental wedge of pipes, cables, depots, spinal chimneys, blocky storage tanks and stark structures like geometric skeletons made from girders. All of it pressed up against the same polluted, watery banks as the airport. There was something undeniably sepulchral about it. A knotted tangle of hip-like joists, vertebral chains linking moving assemblies, and skull-like containers that had long since lost their sheen.
Nate had brought me here at first light, when I'd told him I needed transport.
He hadn't asked me why. He hadn't asked me what I was here to achieve.
Hadn't told me why he was tagging along.
Hmm.
Standing outside the power plant, it was plain to see the whole place was inactive. Rusted to fuck; plundered for raw materials, stripped apart in a million acts of petty vandalism and selfish salvage.
There was red bunting dangling above the concourse as we stepped off the street – giving the whole thing an air of ludicrousness – and the corrosion-melted gates slumped awkwardly, reminding me of reclining figures watching the world go by. The health and safety signs above their heads had been neatly crossed through with red spray paint, and someone had erected a billboard above the entrance, which read simply: WHEELS
I felt someone staring, that same old prehistoric instinct, and glanced around, with hairs prickling, for the culprit. Only when I looked directly up did I find him: a dead head, sockets empty, skin tattered, lipless jaws set in a timeless grin. This grisly voyeur sat mounted on a telegraph pole; cables stripped away and its solid girth painted in stripes of tar and red paint.
'The fuck does that mean?' I said, nodding up at it.
'Territory marker,' Nate mumbled, smoking a straw-like cigarette. One of mine. 'Black and red means this is En-Tee.'
I gave him a blank look. The acronym thing was starting to piss me off.
'Neutral Territory,' he grinned, pointing further into the plant's network of alleys and avenues, all festooned with the same black and red flags and bunting. 'No Klan business.'
'So the dead guy…?'
Nate shrugged, drooling smoke. 'Maybe picked a fight. Got outbid, tried to pull pecking rank. Who knows? Maybe just an unlucky schmo inna wrong place when someone wanted to make a point. Folks that run the En-Tees don't take kindly to rule-breakers. They can afford to enforce, y'see?'
Like so much that poured from his mouth, Nate's casual explanations mixed the common sense with the bewildering. Pecking ranks, territory markers… it was all the stuff of just another drug-dream. A revisit to the malleable memories and landscapes of the Bliss trip. But still, I wasn't entirely in the dark. I'd spent much of the morning at the airport dozing and thinking, listening to the old man snore, picking his brains about the Klan-system whenever he deigned to wake.
If I understood one tenth of what he'd said, during the Culling year, New York – not to put too fine a point on it – had gone straight to hell. He'd painted a picture of streets clogged up with empty cars, skeletons tangled along sidewalks. Of the military running out of control with water cannons and teargas. Of riots like full scale wars and whole blocks burning to ash on the grounds of a single suspected infection. He hadn't been there – he was still in London at that point – but leaving aside the narrator's propensity for hyperbole it still wasn't easy listening.
What was certain was the Klan system. In a weird sort of way, despite everything, I was impressed by it. It was easy to see how it must have started, and at the back of my mind – beyond the doubts and disapprovals – it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Like some new species released onto the savannah, frightened herds running together; accreting like shit flowing into a bowl.
Strength in numbers.
Pack mentality.
The oldest instincts in the book.
The way Nate told it, the Klans all had their origins in different places. Maybe some grew up round whichever politicians survived the Cull and got lucky, outside of Washington when the nuke skyburst. You can imagine that happening, maybe. Little guys in suits, standing on stone steps, kicking up a fuss. Like you used to get in Hyde Park, like Speakers' Corner every Sunday. Angry men and women on stools and ladders, spouting fire and brimstone. Since the Cull, they would have been Kings.
Still… It's a big step from there to gang colours, to skin brandings, to closed territories and aggressive expansion and nightly raids and sallying-forth and midnight skirmishes and blood in the gutters…
The night before, as Nate explained this stuff, as I told him I just didn't see rational people acting so dumb, sinking so low, he stopped with a grin and said:
'Desperate times, man.'
The main driveway along the interior of the power plant took a sharp corner, every inch of the way draped in
