The truck rumbled past, horn moaning into the distance.
Silence descended bit by bit, and the last thing to shut the fuck up was the roaring in Rick's ears.
Ram lay on his back, breathing shallowly, a bloody trail of skidmarks marking his slide across the floor. His face was half gone. His bike was a crippled mess, lodged and broken in the pothole's leading edge, and Rick took his time – feeling strangely dispassionate about everything – to siphon off the remains of its fuel into his own chopper's tank.
He felt like he'd seen the 'real' world, and this bland reflection of it was trivial by comparison. He gazed out to the east, and for the first time noticed that same purple-green haze, like an echo of the bright fire inside his dream, hanging above the endless city. Showing him where to go.
'…get you…' Ram whispered. 'F-fucking… fucking get you…'
'You don't even know who I am.'
'Tell me,' the rat-like freak snarled. 'Tell me who. Find you.' There was blood trickling out of his mouth where he'd bitten his tongue.
'I'm Hiawatha,' said Hiawatha.
Then he drove into New York, and stopped only once en-route for a smoke, just to keep the dream fixed in his mind.
Five hundred miles west, in a place that was once called Fort Wayne, the Tadodaho glanced around the circle of assembled Sachems – faces masked in the smoke-thick air of the Dreaming Lodge – and the shrewd-eyed women-folk standing behind each one, and nodded. The communal pipe at the centre (it looked like it had been carved out of a single piece of wood in the shape of an impressive bear totem, but in fact was a resin cast of a completely meaningless sculpture made in Taiwan in 1998) gave out the last few sputters of smoke and died, its usefulness complete.
'He's through.' the Tadodaho said, leathery skin crumpling as he smiled sagely. 'Be in the city in a hour or two. Get the war party together. We need to get to the meeting place.'
'Now?' One of the others said, peevishly.
The Tadodaho pursed his lips, then shrugged.
'Weee-ell… Soon, then. Who's for a beer?'
CHAPTER TEN
The air in the tunnel was almost tropical. Damp too, musty, like you'd get in a cave whose only visitors were incontinent foxes and a less hygienic class of beetle. Indistinct stuff – unexpectedly cold in the muggy darkness – dripped on my head, and in the gloom I had to force down the shivers and keep telling myself it's just water, it's just water.
The lights had died long ago – shattered lamp heads good now only for rat holes and bat-roosts – so Nate and I revved along the barren tube slowly; relying on the quadbike's stammering headlights and the fluttering flames of tiny hammock-dwellings, strung-up in odd corners and service-nooks. The clapped-out engine sounded painfully loud, and more than once I saw pale faces eyeing us from the shadows, squinting at the sudden brightness then burying themselves back beneath nest/beds of rags and cardboard.
'More scavs?' I asked Nate, unnerved by the feral look of these troglodytes.
He shook his head. 'Flips. Worse'n scavs.' Their eyes caught at the light as we streaked by. 'No Klans, no homes. Mostly they're… outcasts. Crackheads, maybe. Some loonytoons. Lot of folks went nuts, straight after The Cull. Happens, you know? Happens when you see your whole family puke up their lungs.'
I shivered and shut the thought away.
Passing us by with their pale faces streaked by moisture, slack jaws mumbling, they put me in mind of salamanders. Fat, grub-like, nocturnal.
'The Clergy don't mind them being here?' I asked, eyeing yet another scarlet 'O' marked on the outer wall of a corner ahead. Someone had even formed a crude crucifix out of bicycle reflectors, which sat in the centre of the circle and blazed in the onrushing light. I felt like a dart, arcing towards a target.
Behind me Nate shrugged, as if to say the Clergy had far more pressing things to be minding than a few reprobate squatters.
Signs of the ownership of the Queens Midtown Tunnel were all around us. Even before we'd entered it, back on the other side of the East River, the territory markers had stood in long rows down either side of the approach- road; brittle white and topped in each case by a wide scarlet ring.
Three heavily-armed goons had stood on the outer perimeter of this abstract border. Two men and a woman, each wearing nothing but arctic camo trousers and braces, jointly conducting a heated discussion with a shambling host of raggedy scavs. Some of them were pointing at us.
'Mickeys,' Nate had grunted, voice muffled. I noted with narrowed eyes how the tallest of the men – a swarthy giant with arctic white hair and livid red rank-stripes scarred onto his shoulders – broke-off from the argument to glare as we rumbled by. It wasn't until we'd passed beneath the tunnel's arch that I realised Nate was hiding his face.
As the tunnel roof had closed over us, our last sight was of a carefully hand-painted sign, hanging above the on-ramp, which read: AND HE SHALL FIND THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
'Yeah,' Nate had spat. 'One way or the other.'
Back in the dark, a quarter hour or so later, I swerved to avoid a lump of congealing debris – a much-rusted car wreck, probably, and considered the tunnel roof above us. Back in London, a year or so after The Cull, I ventured down into the underground, just to see. Back there the place had been busy; thronging with communities trying to stick together, trying to stay warm. But the effect was the same. In the lightless depths you started to think…
About all those thousands of tons of rock and soil and water pressing down above your head. About ant colonies in zoos – with walls made of glass – and thousands of thoughtless creatures going about their business in the arteries of the earth.
The Queens Tunnel was kind of the same, except this wasn't an artery. It was a vein; sluggish, deoxygenated, blue with worthless blood. Nate pointed ahead to another sharp turn and we cruised towards the faintest glimmerings of light – an illusion of day, always lurking beyond the next corner. Nate said this was the route he took whenever he was bringing kids from the airport. He said he knew the way like the back of his hand.
I asked him how many people really knew what the backs of their hands looked like.
He ignored me.
I was glad of his knowledge anyway. The number of rusting obstacles and dangling patches of ruined tunnel were prodigious, and without his instructions we would have collided with something straight away.
I asked him again what happened to the kids when they'd been delivered. Did they grow up to become priests? Did they go off to some secret place to begin building the future?
I couldn't see his face, but it took him longer than usual to answer.
'I told you,' he said. 'I don't know.'
The tunnel cornered and re-cornered in defiance of all obvious directional architecture. I'd been under the impression it joined Queens to Manhattan with the minimum of fuss, directly across the strait, but evidently its sinuous course took us deeper into the island, below the knot of blocks and stores of Murray Hill, before curving back on itself to spit us out into the daylight up a debris-strewn ramp shadowed by overarching blocks. The muggy humidity retreated, and it would almost have been a relief to enter the sunlight had the QuickSmog not slunk back during our time underground; covering the blunt buildings of Midtown in an unsettling, gloomy whitewash. Over my shoulder the distant peaks of the financial district were masked – just the ghostly suggestion of needles penetrating the earth – and every street corner had become a cheap special effect.
Just as before, the Clergy markings were everywhere. Territory poles, graffiti-tags of scarlet and red, banners strung across empty streets. An enormous mural showing a smiling John-Paul Rohare Baptiste regarded us from the gable-end of an apartment block. For some reason I couldn't have found it any more menacing, even had the grinning Abbot been clutching at an AK47 or wearing a balaclava like the terrace-markers in Belfast. He just radiated… wrongness.
The whole place was still. Static. No distant movement, no scavs, no dogs, no rats. Even the birds hadn't
