loaded-up. Used the numbers against them; kept the greasy little shit with the knuckleduster between us.
Told him: 'Scuse me.' Put a knife through his ribs (felt the blade notch – shit) and spat pistol fire over his collarbone, taking out the obese sod with a Kalash' two steps up. Then turned and kicked – boot to the throat of the punk behind. Scamper three steps higher in the muddle of limbs and shouts. No one wants to risk a shot. Too many bodies packed together.
No one but me.
Shot a lanky youngster holding a. 44. Probably would have broken his wrist anyway.
The ranking Klanners moved in, boxing me off from the honcho on the throne, shoving and snarling, letting space open-up for weapons to bear.
I let the knife play random patterns, spun behind the guard of a dog-faced woman with a fucking sword in her hand (amateur!) and hit step number four.
Shot out the knees of the biggest feather-wearing arsehole of the lot. Wasted another two rounds on his ham-hands when he smirked at the pain in his legs and tried to open up with his cute machine pistols anyway.
Time ticking by.
Ammo all gone. Bitch with a sword hacking at air.
Space blurring.
I shifted tack, rushing the downed giant and using my momentum; stamping on his shoulder to vault up (bloody Hollywood antics – amateurish! Pathetic!), and pushed him down the slope on the rebound, toppling like a bowling ball towards the indignant youngsters at my back.
Satisfying shouts of alarm and pain as the steps cleared behind me.
I came down on top of the last goon, the last guard, the right hand man. Small but fast, wiry as shit. My landing was messy; knocking us both down, tangling and tussling on the floor with knives pressed together. I felt a blade-tip kiss my cheek and angle up towards my eye. Ignored it. Pressed in towards his sides; a slow squeeze against the resistance of his arm, forcing him back, knife entering like a slow-mo javelin.
I stamped on him as I stood, and blinked the blood out of my eye.
And there was the boss. Seated. Eyeing me.
Impassive, the cool motherfucker.
'Who,' he said, and everyone else had gone still, and nobody wanted to shoot me because they'd hit him, and everything stopped, and the silence was thicker than the noise had ever been. 'The fuck. Do you think. You are?'
So I slapped him playfully on his big forehead, and shouted: 'Tag!'
Fun for the whole family and all part of the plan.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Tag went back a year or four.
The Tag was one of those little things the Clergy put in place as soon as it was obvious no other motherfucker was ever going to big enough to kick them off the top spot. The Tag was… a tradition. A ritual, if you want. A way for the robe-wearing arseholes to take charge of every dispute, every promotion, every powerplay.
Above and beyond all other things, The Tag was entertainment.
The way Nate had explained it to me, sitting in the dark outside the United Nations was:
'You're a chicken. You spent your whole goddamn life afraid of the wolves. What you want right now is freedom. Get away from the meat eating shitheads. Spend some quality time without carnivore assholes watching your back.
'But you know what? What you want so much more than that, is to have a go at being a wolf too.
'Tag's how you do it.'
The Tag was a pretty simple concept, all things considered. A tough sort of justice: survival of the fittest with a lopsided twist to favour the overdog. I guess when you're living in a pit, the rules need to be as nasty as everything else, which is scant comfort for the underdog.
That'd be me.
In a nutshell:
One man, or woman, challenged another. Rules varied from here to there on the nature of the challenge, but generally you're looking at punching, slapping, kicking, hair-pulling, whatever. Something publicly humiliating; an affront to the challengee's dignity. He or she was permitted to defend themselves by any means – as if in self- defence – up to and including muscle-bound lieutenants with machetes, machineguns and magnums.
Heh. For all the good it did.
But as soon as the challenge was made, everything stopped. No more violence allowed. Break the rules and the Clergy Adjudicators would be down like a ton of bricks.
The challenger was escorted away, told a place and time, and left to prepare whilst the disgruntled VIP who'd been tagged set about assembling a hunting party.
Five people. Any weapons, vehicles or gadgets they wanted, which amounted to whatever stuff they could get their hands on.
Five people, drugged to the gills, with territorial knowledge on their side and not a scruple in sight.
At the allotted time the challenger and the hunting party were placed in position, normally beneath the gaze of a thunderous crowd. In a world without TV, this was the Superbowl.
The challenger was stripped of all guns, tools and blades. An electrical tag was pinned beneath his skin (joyously provided by the friendly neighbourhood Clergy), and with all due ceremony, gravity and cheer, he was told to fuck off and get running.
The hunters were released five minutes later.
When you initiated a Tag, there was only one rule worth knowing:
Stay alive for two hours; you've won. Everything that belonged to the loser now belongs to you. Power. Privileges. Property. Rank.
I got the impression it didn't happen often.
And just for the record, just to make the whole shitty thing even more wonderful, it was overseen from start to finish by representatives of – take a wild guess – the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn.
The cleverest thing I'd done – and if I'm honest it wasn't until afterwards that Nate explained why it was such a smart move – was to wade-in heavy and cause some serious collateral along the way. At the time I'd done it as a path-of-least-resistance thing: I wanted to get to the boss, his goons were in the way – QED.
But no. I'd got lucky. It turned out that killing a Klansman in the normal course of life carried an immediate penalty of 'Oh-God-Make-The-Pain-Stop-Please-Please-Please' death. It was supposed to prevent gloryhunters from killing their way up to the top without effort, to stop disgruntled scavs getting mutinous around their overlords, and to deter internal arguments from spilling-over. It worked too – most of the time – and the only ones exempt were the Klanbosses themselves.
Which meant I'd accidentally carried-off a neat spot of playing the odds. If I won the Tag I'd be the new Boss, and they couldn't hold me accountable for all the chop-socky I'd caused en route. And if, Nate said, I lost, then it didn't matter then either.
I scowled. 'How come?'
''Cos you'll be dead anyway.'
I'd crippled, killed or incapacitated more of my potential hunters than seemed fair or decent. I'd wiped out the Klanboss's top dogs in one fell swoop. I'd left him with an untested rabble to try and catch me, and put the fear of god up them at the same time. They'd seen what I could do. They'd hesitate, I hoped, to corner me alone.
And, frankly, I needed every advantage I could get.
All this just to get into the UN building. It had better be fucking worth it.
They kept us waiting until ten o'clock. It meant that when things kicked off, the two hour limit would expire at midnight. I guess they thought it was more dramatic.
I wasn't about to complain. It gave me the rest of the day to sleep and prepare, whilst they – the Gulls –
