Sir, no sir! etc etc.
It was an effort to push down the shivery desire for action. I flipped the remaining blanket over the quadbike's body; trusting to the darkness to hide the confused shape. I needn't have bothered. Cy was barely conscious of his surroundings; so busy grilling his unhappy witness that he didn't so much as glance at the crowd.
When he'd calmed down, Nate hazarded that the convoy had returned from the airport. He said that coming home empty-handed wasn't going to help Cy's standing in the Clergy at all, and it stood to reason he'd bring a witness back with him. Evidence that he'd been doing his job.
Nate said the Church wasn't exactly renowned for being forgiving. Not towards guys who'd slaughtered entire companies of Choirboys, trashed functioning aeroplanes and rendered one of the three Clergy airports useless.
I told Nate: thanks for the good news.
He didn't mention how the angry-looking Cardinal would certainly also have noticed that he hadn't been amongst the dead. He didn't mention that the white-haired Mickey would certainly have reported an elderly black man clinging to a stranger, on the back of a clapped-out quadbike, entering the Queens Midtown tunnel.
He didn't mention that he'd just become an official enemy of the Church, right up there beside me, with the added epithet of 'traitor.'
But it was all over his face and heavy in his voice.
Somewhere deep inside me – somewhere petty-minded and sadistic, which didn't really understand its own motivations – I liked that he was worried.
Something about him.
Oh yeah, one other thing:
As the last vehicle in the convoy growled its way through the razor wire fences, just before the guards slid the tracked walls back into place, a group of the women in the crowd broke free from the shadows and rushed the guards, sobbing as they ran.
The guards shot a few – almost perfunctorily, just to prove they could – but did their best to keep the others alive; clubbing at them with rifle-stocks and batons. I almost mistook it for mercy.
But at first light, as the sun broke over the sooty limits of the river, there were six new bodies dangling and shrieking at the tops of the flagpoles, and three more turning black on a pyre inside the gates.
They were called the Red Gulls, though in defiance of all naming-logic their headquarters were black. Very black. Black in the same way the ocean is damp.
The whole thing was built of wood, laid down over shattered concrete. Cut and fixed lumber, crudely planed and inexpertly joined, sealed with sinuous rivulets of tar and vomit-patterns of wax, draped in layers of black bin- liners. Ultimately the whole thing looked not so much constructed as congealed; spreading out in a great glossy puddle like a drying cowpat.
Just as Nate had warned, the far perimeters were a tangled morass of razor wire, crude trip-alarms and grotesque territory-markers with picked-clean skeletons skewered at their peaks. It was almost embarrassingly easy to slink past.
The whole wretched thing stood near the heart of Central Park, set to one side of what had once been the great lawn, and where the twisted trees loomed out of the dappled sunlight they seemed to tangle and grow into the weird construction, as if its boundaries had little meaning. As if it intended to spread as far as it could, without human aid.
I worked my way towards a knotted entrance on the quietest face, using the shadows of the tree trunks and my own raggedy camouflage to avoid the traffic heading in and out in all other directions. To the south of the park the Clergy ruled absolute, so it didn't surprise me in the slightest that of all the scavs and muscular Klansmen striding out on their business – red feathers rising like spines from their scalps – hardly any did so in this direction. The guard at the door looked positively catatonic.
I opened his neck from the side – punching in and cutting forwards – oozing from the shadows before he could even call a challenge. I dumped the body on a natural shelf above the doorway, formed by a crook in a mouldy tree, and oozed inside like a ghost.
I love this shit.
Prowling. Slinking like an ethereal fucking tiger. Corridor by corridor, beaver-like nest chambers crossed in a doubtful blur, shadows adhered-to, every passing footstep used to mask my own.
It was beautiful.
The Red Gulls were the biggest Klan in the city, besides the Clergy itself.
This was important to my plan.
Years ago they'd put down a concerted coup by some long-gone uptown gang calling itself the NeverNevers, who thought they could take a crack at the Choirboys' power-base. Ever since the Gulls had been John-Paul's most favoured underlings. Permitted to spread through territories on the Clergy's own doorstep they were gifted with all the best weapons, all the choicest scav and all the craziest narcotics.
Maybe the boost made them sloppy. Like a spider invading a rabbit-warren, I was deep inside the labyrinth of sleeping chambers, food-stores, scav-holds and moonshine stills before the so-called 'guards' even became a problem. At a thickset corridor intersection Gulls stood posted at regular intervals (they might as well have pinned- up a sign saying 'you're near something important'), and for all the adrenal shivers and subconscious hunger for violence I was forced to consider something a little more subtle.
So I put my head down and walked past them, confident as you like.
Just another scav.
For the record, this sort of scam works more often than you'd think. Trust me on this. Afghanistan, Peru, even once in North Korea… You put you head down and walk like you're supposed to be there. Doesn't matter what you look like, where you're going.
Note that it doesn't work all the time.
Like for example when you're just passing the last red-feather-wearing wanker in the row, stepping out into the sweaty cavern at the heart of the rickety palace, and some despicable little piece of shit somewhere starts shouting about the south entrance being unguarded.
And then, a beat later, about poor old Crocksy lying with his windpipe torn all to shit.
Situation like that, suddenly everyone's hefting a gun. Suddenly everyone's wondering who the guy that just walked past actually was. Suddenly everyone's on edge, and shouting, and running up and down, and the whole fucking place is shaking from the noise.
The shutters came down in my head.
The old brain took over.
I stepped into the cavern and cut a hole in the face of the guy shouting at me.
Didn't stop. Heard him screaming on the floor. Moved on.
Another guy running my way, pistol gripped tight, calling for help. Stabbed him in the stomach, lifted upwards under the ribs.
The way to a man's heart…
His pistol-arm stuck out under my shoulder, already going limp, so I hooked a finger under the trigger-guard, beside his own, and took out the next suicidal motherfucker in line. Forehead splatter. Red froth on the air. Singed gull-feathers.
Something inside me, howling in joy.
I helped myself to the gun, letting its owner empty out his guts on my shoes. Echoes still flapping in the air. Shocked faces and sprinting legs. Stop for a situation recon.
Know everything
Cover the angles.
It was an audience chamber, like a medieval throne-room. Hordes of scavs and favoured women rushing out by other exits, hooting and spronking. Up the steps of a raised dais stood a succession of lieutenants and ranking Klansmen, each one in colours more gaudy than the next. Feathers, beads, bare skin with crimson tattoos, gull-feet headdresses and hands heavy with Uzis, AKs, machetes.
At the top sat a big fucking guy in a chair. He looked sort of startled.
I smiled at him.
First step. Ducked under a messy punch designed to slow me down whilst the other goons got themselves
