annoyance, wanting to watch the spectacle unclouded by the druggish haze.
Out on the rooftop, the two goons from the AV bundled through the stairwell door together, hands full of blades and barrels, and everything went crazy.
The stranger sort of… blurred. Maybe he kicked the door, or slunk around in front before it was fully open. Maybe he duck-sneaked across the open hatch, below the aim of their guns, and darted-in towards them before they could react. Maybe he took them on the full, twisting sideways between outstretched gun arms with fingers locked and lunging.
Hiawatha couldn't say for sure.
An arm jerked, a leg flicked-out. The scrawny goon shrieked and fell, the bigger man raised his gun Hiawatha gasped and struggled with the rifle. He'd save the stranger. He'd keep him alive! He'd Except the goon was already disarmed. Bleeding from his nose. A kitchen-knife up to its hilt in the soft meat of his leg.
He looked more pissed than hurt.
The stranger turned. Ducked. Flexed. Impacts raining on the swarthy thug, boots lashing out in balletic patterns. The smaller goon was back up now, pistol firing twice in the wrong direction, the stranger twist-turn- kick-duck-pouncing, then the little guy was back down again, all but launched off the roof; gun tumbling out into space.
Hiawatha sighted the rifle back on the big guy, adrenaline roaring, desperate to do something, to take part… But the stranger was too fast.
Didn't need any help.
He took the two shitheads apart like a surgeon, and when they both rocked back on the floor – disarmed, disoriented, slow like glaciers fighting fire – he scooped a single tiny Uzi out of his pocket, aimed it with the minimum concentration, and blew their surprised expressions right open.
The whole fight, from start to finish, took about five seconds. Hiawatha discovered he was still aiming at the dead goons and let his shaking arms relax by degrees.
'Fuuuuuuuuuck.' he hissed.
Which is when an enormous naked freak, bleeding from a hole in his chest, tore through the remains of the door with a meat cleaver in one hand and a limp sex-doll in the other, screaming for revenge upon the murderer of his wife.
The stranger had his back to the colossus. Taken by surprise. Unprepared.
Even he couldn't move that fast.
Hiawatha blew two new holes through the fat man's ribs, smiled a secret smile, and melted away into the shadows of the parking lot before the stranger even knew what had happened.
He wondered if he should go over. Tell the poor guy who he was.
What he was doing here.
What he wanted with him.
'Not time yet.' The sky told him. The needle sang in his back pocket. 'Not time yet.'
Hiawatha followed the stranger at a discreet distance. He seemed to be in a hurry; vaulting into the thugs' AV and tearing off into the east. Hiawatha stayed out of his sight, letting the signs and portents – the roiling purple fire – guide the throb of the Harley's progress; grumbling internally about relying on hippy bullshit to guide him.
It felt a lot like cheating.
Half an hour after the rooftop struggle, at the edge of a great blocked-in wilderness, encircled by dead trees and stagnant swamps – Central Park, he assumed – he deserted the Harley in a quiet alcove and ambled out across the browning lawns. He'd done his best to conceal it, but the whole area seemed to be crawling alive with knots of raggedy-looking people, and no amount of security was ever going to stop a truly determined thief. He searched his feelings for a moment or two – still not quite sure if he was seeking divine solutions, subconscious rationality or plain old trippy make-believe – and decided he wouldn't be needing the trike any more anyway.
(The defining moment in this decision was a fat bear, made entirely out of smoke, waddling past with a claw flicking dismissively towards the vehicle.
'Hope you're right,' Hiawatha said. If he'd been in a more rational state of mind, he might have felt slightly dumb addressing such an obvious figment of his imagination. As it was, it not only seemed utterly natural, but far more real than the mundane shit going on around it.)
He shouldered the sack of guns he'd taken from the general store, and followed the flow of the crowd.
Somewhere ahead, in a copse of spindly trees, a great cheer went up. It seemed to hang in the air. Hundreds of hands clapping, voices laughing and shouting, and a single booming tone raised above the others. The rodent-like people nearby seemed to be gravitating towards it, sticking to little groups of two or three for as long as possible, then awkwardly mingling as the numbers locked together. Hiawatha saw luminous tags hanging above each one's head, wrapping ethereal chains and brambles around each neck. He understood without knowing how that these vision were brands declaring each persons' ownership. Each to a different tribe; like the Beaver-Lodge tattoo on his own left shoulder, but far harsher – symbols not of familial ties but of property, like a name tag sewn into valuable clothes. The peoples' cautious movements marked them out as rivals, awkwardly picking their way into someone else's territory at the mercy of their curiosities, unaccustomed to mixing.
Hiawatha began to understand this was unprecedented. A crowd like this; a gathering like this. Hopeful glances traded between bitter enemies, slaves electing a new master…
In his mind, there was a blanket of gold hanging above the park.
It was all deeply peculiar.
Every now and again a better-dressed man or woman – most in red, with feathers pinned in their hair – would point and shout accusations, snarling 'you fucking Globies get outta the park!' or 'Gulls only! Gull scavs only! No fucking Mickies! No fucking Strips!' Their shouts meant little to Hiawatha, and went mostly ignored anyway. Eventually the crowd just surged around them, and they wandered off, forlorn, towards the edge of the park, casting hateful glances back towards the source of all the cheering.
He began to catch snatches of conversation as he picked his way through the trees, letting the cheers grow up around him; feeling the excitement of the hordes. But what little he overheard seemed nonsensical at best, and he scowled and forged on through the storm of random commentary.
'…figures he told 'em if they wasn't with him, they was out on they fuckin' ear, man…'
'…got fresh rat here, fresh rat, barter for clothing, barter for burns… fresh rat…'
'…says any 'n all welcome. Never seen nothing like, man, and I bin here years…'
'…wassa wassa wassa fucking Liiiiimey? Never hearda no Liiiiiimey…'
'… sent the rest to tear down the territory poles… got plans, he says…'
'…rabbit meat and rats, rats and rabbits, get 'em while they're hot…'
And so on.
On the shores of a truly revolting pond (which formed a great miserable face in Hiawatha's mind, moaning plaintively for aid) he found the stranger; stood on a ramshackle podium built of logs and sheets, set-up in front of a great ghastly building that sprawled across the lawns like a living ooze.
He also found the largest crowd he'd ever seen.
In the ravages of his memory – from a time before his mind was prised open by the expedient application of mystical mumbo-jumbo and hardcore perception-altering pot, from a time even before the great Cull – he remembered concerts he'd visited, student rallies, great gatherings where all personal differences were thoughtlessly disregarded in the shared reverence of a single band; a single demagogue, a single voice.
This was like that.
But more so.
The stranger spoke surprisingly softly. He had the look of a character unused to such attention; far better suited to the quiet application of force in secret, covert places. Hiawatha guessed that under other circumstances the man would have passed for utterly unremarkable. A forgettable face, cropped hair, a physique neither tall nor short, vastly over inflated or ultra-weedy. Just a guy with a crazy accent and a hopelessly British manner, whose words managed nonetheless to silence a crowd thousands strong.
If it hadn't been for the blood drying in thick streaks down his cheek, the matted tangle of gore-splattered rags on his back – once patched in every conceivable colour, now stained to a uniform brown-grey – and the glossy rifle hung nonchalantly over his shoulder, nobody would have looked at him twice.
'Where,' the man said, into a silence as deep and dark as the sky above his head, where the QuickSmog
