to loading ammo-belts into the truck's hold. I'd half expected her to be vaguely grateful – it was arguably thanks to me that the Clergy had been kicked out of the city – but evidently she either refused to believe the news coming out of Manhattan or was a grudge bearer of championship standards. She pretty much ignored me after that.
The kid, for the record, never even made a sound.
Ten minutes out of the Wheels Mart, as the solid wall of noise thrown-up by the engine started to normalise inside my head, the diminutive gunner who called herself 'Tora' – fast-talking, flirtatious as hell, mad as a box of badgers – leaned close to my ear and whispered:
'She left her kid behind once before. That's all. Rental mission just like this. Some moron trying to get to Miami, I forget why. Figured we'd run into some crazies en route – 'specially with the DC hole, shit – so she laid out the responsible mother bullshit, left him behind. No way the Clergy gonna try collecting tithes inside the Mart.'
'And?'
'And that's why she's only got one kid, 'steada two. And ain't a fan of the Choir.'
Ah.
Still. Tensions aside, cramped and sweaty lack of comfort aside, snarling engine-volume aside, this was travelling in style. The Inferno slipped through New York like an icebreaker; stately and magnificent, oozing don't- mess-with-us torment and explode-your-ass-muthafucka intent. Weaponry on prominent display, promising instant overkill.
I kept catching myself wishing I could get out and have a look; standing in the street like all the wide- mouthed scavs and Klansmen, who bristled and hid as it slunk past like a nuclear armadillo. We wended our way in silence, across the meandering Triborough bridge – its girdered pillars flaking paint, flocked with hundreds of gulls that picked and squabbled over a dead sheep hung, upside down, for no appreciable reason – and skirting the edge of the Bronx on Highway 87, peering solemnly into a deserted wilderness that seemed to have been frozen in time. Cars packed together in cryogenic traffic-jams, skeletal shadows sealed within.
Now and then we passed territory poles – or the remains of them – and gaudy wall murals where the local gang wars were meticulously chronicled: long lists of names, each one crossed through where some other mob had taken over. At some point the internecine squabbles had ended, and some thoughtful soul had added a broad scarlet circle to the foot of each list; unquestionably proclaiming the true rulers, regardless of which banana- republic Klans they allowed to govern in their stead. Every time we passed such ownership tags a fresh round of spitting, swearing and tutting would circulate round the truck's interior.
That was about as close as we got to conversation, in those first hours.
There were eight of us altogether, not counting the baby. Malice drove, mostly; the wicker basket transferred to a special harness on the cab wall beside her. Even in the city, where she was obliged to take it easy to avoid vehicle wrecks and pits in the macadam, I could tell she wasn't about to make it comfortable on her passengers. She throttled where any sane person would have braked, skewed the machine at hairpin corners round ancient riot-control vans with their panels stripped off and their remains burnt to slag, and every time I stared in horror at her recklessness there was a savage smile on her face.
Great.
She never hit anything and the rest of her crew were entirely at ease. Eventually I stopped staring ahead and decided to take in the scenery, just as the Yankee Stadium went sailing by on my right. Gone, mostly – just a few shards of tangled black spaghetti at the heart of a splintered parking-lot continent – but the determined observer could just about make out the sagging segments of an aircraft's tail hanging over the edge of the burnt-out shell. I wondered what had happened, then decided I'd rather not know.
Someone had painted 'THICKER THAN WATER' in black tar across a fifty-foot expanse of the parking lot. I wondered if it would be visible from space.
Next to Malice, in the cab, was where Spuggsy sat. Well, reclined anyway. Lazed.
Slobbed.
Spuggsy, from what little I'd seen, wasn't much of an engineer. Granted, he had a gift for smoothing-out the most angular of mechanical kinks, though I couldn't help noticing his technique tended to involve hitting things hard with a spanner until they started making the right noises. He was short and plump, as bald as a cueball and sat there flicking lazily through porno mags with an expression of unconquerable boredom. His one concession to arousal was the copious sweat oozing off his chubby face, but given that it remained even when he wasn't browsing Anal Carnage, Wet Domination or whatever the hell it was, that didn't mean much. When he spoke it was with an enthusiastically sleazy good nature – like a mischievous schoolboy who discovered German hardcore before he discovered snot-eating contests – and I found myself liking him and wanting to disinfect him in equal measure.
The Cross Bronx Expressway petered-out in a fug of chipped road segments – mottled like they'd been in a firefight – and then the Hudson was below us, wide and shimmering and almost passable for clean. The George Washington Bridge stood just as solid and untroubled as always, as if this 'End Of Humanity' business was a passing fad by which it was neither impressed nor concerned. A couple of scavs had hanged themselves from the rails on one side (I like to think it was a tragic death-pact between lovers despairing of this cold new world… but it could just as easily have been a drunken dare) and a crowd of others was tugging them down as we passed by. Tugging a little too violently, actually, with knives and roasting-sticks in hand and a fat man building a campfire, waving-away the gulls like the unwanted competition they were.
Tora kept them covered from the pintle-cannons all the way past.
'Fucking cannies,' she spat.
Tora was sort of weird. She came from Japanese stock she said – a heart-shaped face and dark hair (dyed deep blue at its tips), with a delicate sweep to the edges of her eyes and a nose like a button – and was one of the most mixed-up women I've ever known. Not beautiful exactly, but she knew how to move, had an attitude you wouldn't believe and could easily have flirted for her country. But it was skewed – the whole thing – like you knew somehow she was damaged; fucked-up deep inside, and everything she did was just a facade to create the impression of humanity. She used sexual friendliness like a battering ram. Like an act of aggression. Her arms were covered – wrist to shoulder – in thin little scars where she'd cut herself, and she sat in the dangling canopy above our heads – half poking-out to man the guns – singing a pretty song and carving new tally-marks into her skin. I asked her about it, later on. She shrugged and said:
'Why do you scratch when you've got an itch?'
'To make it feel better.'
'Uh-huh.'
I never found out what had happened to her – shit, maybe she was just born that way – but you could see it every time she looked at you, or spoke to you, or smiled. Like… just behind the veil, behind the spunky playful bollocks and cleavage-jutting body language, she was eyeing that scalpel and wondering just how deep she'd have to cut to make all the itches go away.
We bounced into New Jersey in a blur; Malice finally able to throttle-up all the way. Fort Lee, Leonia; names on crooked signs that drifted by without any sensation of reality. Just echoes of something that might once have had some significance, but now… Nothing. Skeletons on the edge of the road – picked clean – and blasted wrecks that jutted and trailed, forcing us to slow. Highway 80, place names fogging-by.
Hackensack.
Saddlebrook.
Elmwood Park.
At one stage Malice muttered something darkly to Spuggsy – spotting something ahead – who huffed and dropped his magazines then scrambled back towards us, poking Nike and Moto awake from their nest of sleeping bags and telling Tora to stand-by. The Inferno jinked hard to one side; overtaking.
It was strange to see another vehicle on the open road; but even stranger to see one so… normal. I'd expected dune-buggy gangs, flame-jobs, hotrods and… oh, I don't know. Nuclear-fucking-powered bulldozers, maybe. Skull-hurling catapults. Something a little more… survivalist.
Passing an HGV hauling a trailer marked Cheesy Snax was pretty surreal.
A couple of heads poked warily from the roof – guns arrayed cautiously towards us, just in case – and I spotted square slits in the corrugated sides of the container, bulging with naked flesh and squinting eyes.
'Workers,' Tora told me, swinging in her harness. ''Burb klans. Scavs work the fields, different shifts going back and forth all the time.'
'Dangerous?'
