'And I add – seeing as how you're bein' so hardass about it – that my price just went up. I get bodily protection, plus one blanket, one can dog food.'
'You want all my shit too? For what?'
He smirked, white teeth electric beside me.
'Travelling medic.' He said. 'Keep you outta trouble.'
And then it was too late, and he was perched on the pillion and pointing ahead like a general giving the order to advance, and that was that.
Good, I tried to tell myself. He's a resource. He can help. He knows the area.
But always the itching. Always the uncertainty. Always the suspicion.
What's your ulterior motive, doc?
And even deeper than that, drummed-in at a genetic level, the angry lectures splitting open my head; a tac- command feed direct into my skull.
Don't you let yourself owe anyone anything. You hear me, soldier? Don't you get yourself in arrears. Don't you feel obliged to take care of anyone.
'Oh, hey,' he grinned. 'And throw in them rubbers, too.'
My train of thought derailed itself in a blur of disbelief. 'You want condoms?' I gaped.
He seemed vaguely affronted. 'Damn straight! You think I wanna be a daddy aga…'
He stopped himself, mouth open, then blinked once or twice and started over; coughing his way through the hesitation. 'You think I wanna be a daddy, my time of life?'
I stared at him for a moment, wondering what to say, how to react, then shrugged and tossed him the rubbers.
'Fine,' I grinned. 'Clean me out.'
He scrambled onto the saddle's pillion like a scarecrow mounting a horse, and I gunned the bike along the Mart's central promenade with a fierce sensation of freedom, letting the customers still pouring in take responsibility for not getting run down. Even so, as I stopped to retrieve the rifle and pistols I'd lodged with the goons at the check-in, there was something grinding in my mind. Cogs interlocking, memories grinding. Something about Nate. Something he'd said, maybe.
Something not quite right…
We churned through the Mart's main gates, bobbing uncomfortably over untended tarmac and roadside debris, and took a sharp right. Nate leaned down and shouted over the roar of the wind.
'What I said!' He called, voice hoarse. 'Earlier on! About the Clergy!'
'What about them?'
'About… About what if they catch up to me! They… They got these… what's it called, man! Jesus- Cross!'
'Crucifix?'
'Yeah! Right! They got a shitload! All ready for any motherfucker pisses them off!'
Visions of medieval tortures and Inquisitorial nastiness slipped through my head. I kept seeing that scene from Spartacus; the main road flanked on both sides by crucified rebels, and saw me and Nate swinging in the breeze. 'Oh yeah?' I shouted. 'Where's that?'
'Midtown, man! Manhattan! Biggest territory there is! Centre of the fucking universe!'
I let the quadbike bring itself to a trundling halt, feeling the engine die-down, forming words carefully.
'What you doing?' Nate blurted, prodding the quadbike. 'Is it busted?'
'No, no, it's… ah.'
'What?'
I tried to grin. Failed.
'Well, it's just… you'll never guess where we're headed.'
CHAPTER NINE
Interlude
Raymond – or Ram – caught up with Rick somewhere in the city suburbs. The first he knew about it was a speck in his single remaining wing mirror, gathering size as it tore toward him at top speed.
At first he thought nothing of it. He'd seen little of anyone during this last leg of the journey, but the few people he'd spotted were enough to relax his nerves, where before he would have stiffened and fled from anyone. Out here, beneath the ever-changing sky (one hour burning bright, the next choked with fog, the next boiling with turbulent clouds; but always on a scale that seemed somehow too big, defying the eye) his only company were the occasional figures distantly glimpsed across the hills, tending fields or felling dead trees. Once or twice he'd even passed vehicles, always heading west. Mostly monstrous pickups and HGVs crammed to the gills with filthy-looking people, who stared at him with dead eyes as the trike gunned by, manoeuvring awkwardly around the abyssal potholes and gaping cracks that striated the roads. Some of these travelling groups were surrounded by little clusters of motorbike outriders, who glared suspiciously as they hurried all other traffic off the road. Each time he saw them Rick stiffened, expecting more silver-jacketed Collectors, imagining Slim's bloodless body stretched-out in the hardware store back in Snow Hand.
None of the bikers so much as looked at him.
Other trucks bristled with quills like porcupines: men with rifles and swivelling arms-mounts, suspicious of everything that moved. He wondered who they all were, where they were all going, what they did all day long – then promptly forgot them as soon as he reached the next corner.
He was in a slightly fragile state of mind.
The I-80 was an endless grey snake, cracked and mud-drenched, pocked with deep wells and unexpected fissures that crept-up on the unprepared traveller, wending its way through hills and fields of green and brown. Here and there old heaps stood and rusted – breakdowns that no one ever bothered to tow clear – and only the twittering of unseen birds, and rabbits scampering for cover, disturbed the hypnotic progress of the tarmac serpent.
Rick was beginning to relax about the Harley too. At first it had seemed an unnecessarily flashy addition to his equipment: a mid-life-crisis on three tyres. It roared like the end of the world every time he gave it some throttle, and along with its dayglo paintjob in yellow and red, it conspired to be the absolute opposite of 'inconspicuous.'
The clan mothers would not have approved.
On the other hand, it was fast. It was far sturdier than the Yamaha, and in odd moments between small towns he'd begun to fancy he was riding an armchair; hovering across forests and lakes. With the stolen shotgun strapped across his back and a veritable cornucopia of other weapons stashed in the saddlebags, he kept seeing himself in some tacky Schwarzenegger moment. Crashing through flaming debris with a pithy one liner and a minigun blazing.
In fact, Rick – nee Hiawatha – kept imagining himself and his environment in all sorts of outrageous new ways. This had something to do with the boredom of cross-country travel, something to do with his natural imaginativeness, and a lot to do with the enormous quantities of the sachems' weed he'd been smoking since his run-in with the colossal bear-like sodomite who attempted to kill and eat him the night before.
He figured he owed it to himself.
He'd spent the night in a mid-sized town called White Deer, two hours or so down the interstate from his fateful encounter with Slim in Snow Hand. The place had been mostly deserted, but a pocket-sized population had set up a sort of commune around the central square, and Rick was too exhausted and too nervy to risk breaking-in somewhere else. He traded one of the 9mms and a box of ammo for a comfy bed and two pouches of dried rabbit, and even got a bowl of vegetable soup into the bargain. The people were polite, eager to please, but ultimately empty. He could see the terror in their eyes; the way they kept looking back and forth from him to the Harley, to the bulging saddlebags.
At one point a little girl appeared – precociously smiley – and asked him if he was a Collector come to take her away to the bad men in dresses. He was about to tell her 'no' – to tell the whole goddamn town he was nothing
