swatches of fabric and makeshift adverts. Most carried the names of food stalls and barter points (promising FARE TRADE, WIDE SELECSION, ALL SCAV CONSIDERD), branded in each case with iconic images of bygone snacks; hotdogs, burgers, bagels. I found my mouth watering at the memory of such extravagant-seeming meals, and asked Nate what the stalls really traded.
'Rat.' He said, not looking around. 'It's all rat.'
Some of the Klans, maybe, came up from less obvious sources. Lantern-jawed drill sergeants discovering they had no country left to fight for, nobody left to shriek at, no way of draining off the dynamo-level testosterone. Civic leaders, celebrities, lawyers. The local bloody postman. It didn't take much, back at the start, to be the centre of a pack; to let something comfortable and secure grow around you. Maybe some of those putative mobs – coalescing and running together – could even claim they'd formed their miniature little states for all the right reasons. Nate told me one of the Klans, back at the start, was called the 'Thin Blues.' Bunch of NYPD grunts, he said, banding together, facing down the chaos. He said that to start with they even had a decent stab at maintaining the peace; driving about, making arrests, shooting looters. He used the word 'altruistic', which sounded weird when he said it, and tricky to take seriously.
He said it didn't last long.
He said ever since then, the Thin Blues had been one of the smaller Klans.
Inside the industrial sprawl of the Con Ed facility we reached a checkpoint, where two enormous blokes in black clothes and red bandanas stood divesting everyone of weapons. A small queue of raggedy scavs had formed, and beyond the canvas-draped checkpoint I could see the peristaltic movement of large crowds, deeper inside the facility. It made me nervous. In London, the only time you saw that many people gathered together was for the Abbot's sermons, and just thinking about those left a bad taste in my mouth.
I watched the guards frisking and checking, allocating each person a number to be used in recollecting their guns and knives, and tilted my head towards Nate.
'What Klan are they?' I asked, nodding towards the muscular goons.
'Right now,' he said, 'no Klan at all. Neutral Territory, remember? They're being paid to keep it that way.'
As if to reinforce this point, the guards commanded each entrant to display his or her Klan marking. Elbows and shoulders were silently brandished, knees held out, necks craned, and I caught a few fleeting glimpses of the squiggles and meaningless icons depicting each different group. In every case the guard quickly tied a black rag, plucked from a filthy basket, around the scar; hiding the brand from sight.
'Neutral.' was all that Nate said.
We reached the front of the queue and caused something of a commotion. For a start, Nate's branding could hardly be covered with a simple piece of rag – unless he was prepared to submit to blindfolding, which he wasn't – but it was the nature of the mark itself that really got them riled. They kept exchanging looks, clenching their jaws, wondering out loud if they should fetch the 'Em-Bee'.
More fucking acronyms. Nate seemed to be enjoying all the consternation.
He'd explained it to me last night, the instant that the scavs he'd called 'Mickeys' scuttled off into the dark.
'The Neo-Clergy,' he said, 'the mighty New Church, the holier-than-thou warrior priests of the New Dawn were really just another Klan.'
Oh, a big one, to be sure. The biggest. The de-facto rulers of New York, whose powerbase gave them an administrative control over all the others, but still…
It hadn't seemed possible, somehow. How could something so mundane, so seedy, as this feudal mob have spread across the devastated world to make its claims of ushering-in a new future? From angry thugs to architects of tomorrow.
According to Nate, the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn started out as a band of raggedy-arsed bastards calling themselves The Choirboys. They had no particular defining features – besides a reputation for being twisted little shits – and would have languished in obscurity had they not encountered the man named John-Paul Rohare Baptiste.
No one knew much about him. No one knew where he'd come from or who he'd been. All they knew was that he shouldn't be alive, and he proved it to them over and over again, with tests and samples and nothing-up-his- sleeves, just as he had continued to do every week on his detestable fucking TV show.
The Blight should have got him. He should have been Culled.
But he lived anyway.
Under his guidance, and the fluttering banner of his self-declared divinity, the Klan swelled like a tumour. It came to the point they could have challenged and annihilated any other group they chose, but they didn't. They simply tuned out from the power struggle, announced that their intentions had transcended the merely territorial, and elected themselves into a position of magisterial arbitration.
Nowadays they monitored the others, like proud parents adjudicating the play fighting of toddlers. They formalised the squabbles and scuffles, they leant their backing to whichever Klans they favoured, they provided weapons and drugs (their most valuable currencies), and in return they demanded The Tithe.
Oh yeah…
The Tithe.
'Every child above age five,' Nate had said the night before, like reading from a scripture written inside his eyelids, 'and below age eighteen, to be inducted into the Ay-Cee-En-Dee.'
That's Apostolic Church of the etc etc.
They'd spread the good news across the oceans. They'd conquered the airwaves when all other frequencies had fallen silent. They'd taken responsibility for the future when all the starving, dribbling politicians and leaders and generals left behind could not, and then they'd made it their business to take charge of the children.
They'd made the people want to give up their own kids. And they were just another New York gang.
I found myself wishing I'd taken a little longer with the fuckers inside the plane.
Eventually, loving every minute of the guards' continuing bewilderment, Nate dug from his pocket a tattered eye patch and covered over his half-tattoo. He looked like he'd done this sort of thing before. The goons all but fainted in relief; apologising with twenty shades of uncharacteristic pomposity and explaining that members of 'The Great Klan' so rarely visited the Mart, they were unprepared. It's one of those sights that sticks in the mind: two seven-foot yetis fawning and scraping over a scrawny old git dressed like a tramp with a uniform fetish. Nate clucked and swaggered along the concourse.
The guards turned to me and let the panicky hysteria fade from their grizzled faces. They took my gun, glancing at it with suspicious eyes that said how inna hell did you come by this, little man? and told me to show them my Klan marking.
'Ah.' I said.
The way it worked, Nate had told me, was that you had your Klansmen, and then you had your scavs. The scavs were like livestock. Their loyalties determined by whichever mob happened to rule the territory in which they'd chosen to eke-out their lives. Some went wherever their Klans went, or chose the most profitable or benevolent of regimes to nuzzle up to. Others were just spoils, like land taken in territorial scuffles; unceremoniously re-branded as the occasion required.
It sounded feudal. It sounded fucking stupid.
'Why don't they just leave?' I'd said, in the airport, as Nate explained. 'Why don't they just rebel? There must be thousands of them.'
'They do.' Nate shrugged. 'All the time. Not a day goes by there ain't a little… revolution, uprising, whatever. Chaos on the streets, every fucking night. But here's the thing: you want a way to share out scavenged shit, or food, or whatever you got? Klans're the only way.'
'Bullshit.'
'Not bullshit. Good sense. And if not good sense then natural-fucking-order.' He'd licked his lips, waving a hand as he hunted down an example. 'Let's say you're a… a young girl, right? Only just escaped the tithe. No parents. No weapons. No friends or food. Who's gonna stick up for you? Who's gonna make sure that shitty squat you found to sleep in don't get raided, or burnt down, or torn-up by some crackhead rapist? Huh?'
I'd shaken my head, unable to bring myself to agree, but I could see what he was getting at. Just.
'And what if you're not helpless?' I'd said. 'You've still got to… toe the fucking line. Join up, act like a piece of
