What did he have in there, I wondered? What had the idiot-goons missed when they went through our stuff, rifling for weapons? What cunning escape plan was he cooking up?
'Lord Almighty,' one of the Choirboys grunted, half reverential, half cursing, staring out into space, now almost completely choked with black smoke. The dancing light of flames lit his face from below, giving him and his comrades an eerie, devilish look. I imagined the tribal Matriarchs screaming as they burned. The Tadodaho coughing on the thick pall. Malice's baby, left in their care, breaking its silence and starting – briefly – to wail.
Rick drew a folded rag from his pocket. Manipulated it with careful fingers, unwrapping it millimetre by millimetre. The cloth fell away with a dreamlike slowness, and I discovered myself holding my breath; desperate to see what he'd squirreled away.
My heart dropped.
It was a silver needle. Long and sharp, barely thicker than a hypodermic, slightly distorted by its time in his pocket. Not quite the weapon of mass destruction I'd envisaged.
There was a time, once – somewhere in the Middle East, I recall, on business – when I got into some bad shit and found myself up against a knifeman with nothing to defend myself but a table fork. Don't laugh. This shit happens.
For the record, he perforated my right lung before I got close enough to stab him through his eyeball – and that was without having a bruised and battered body up-front. Without gun-wielding maniacs watching. Without sodding handcuffs. With a fucking hand missing.
Good luck, kid.
Rick was staring at me again, needle held concealed in his hand.
'Sorry.' He whispered. Then: 'Trust me.'
And then he was moving. Sudden and unexpected, face contorted, hefting himself off the floor and onto my back, flexing his legs to get towards me.
'Fucking limey asshole!' He snarled. 'Fucking prick! You said you'd stop them! You said you'd save us!'
'What? I hissed. 'But…'
'Kill you, sonuvabitch! Look what they did! You said you'd stop them! Just fucking die!'
And then he was pressed over me, and his mouth was next to my neck, and oh my god he was biting me. Trying to rip out my bloody throat. I shouted and hollered – more confused than anything – and tried to shake my body to get him off. The guards were reacting slowly, turning back from their sightseeing in a chorus of curses and exclamations, throwing horrified glances up and over my shoulder to the bulkhead that led into the chopper's cockpit.
From where – cold and forced, like steel scraping cobwebs – there came a voice.
'What.' It said. 'The fuck. Is going on?'
Rick's teeth dug in further, but in an abstract section of my brain – not actively shrieking and demanding answers of this ludicrous situation – it occurred to me that by now he could have killed me if he'd wanted to. He wasn't even biting that hard.
The guards grabbed him and tried to wrestle him off.
And between us, in the secret concealed shadows of the ruckus, something sharp and tiny punched into the fleshy meat of my right buttock, buried itself there, and went still.
What the-?
And then Rick was gone, hauled away, severed hand squirting blood through its disarrayed bandages. The guards clung to rails and handles, bracing him, facing the owner of that cold, grating voice.
'Sir?' one said.
'Hold him,' it hissed. I recognised it, sort of. It was sharper than before, more strained, like it'd been pushed through a filter of trauma and hate.
It can't be But it was. He stepped over me, dainty steps untroubled by the chopper's shuddering, and crouched down to stare directly into Rick's face.
The boy smiled. 'I should've pushed harder, huh?' He said.
Cardinal Cy snarled.
The knife was still embedded in his head. From behind, I could see its ghastly angle, hilt decorated with antiseptic patches and freakish lumps of bandaging. It had gone deep. Deep enough to fuck with his brain.
It didn't seem to have slowed him down.
He put a hand – almost tender – on Rick's cheek. 'Old man says… old man says. Bring troublemakers to him. Ones who caused all this. Fuss. Likes to tidy things up personal. Y'see?'
Rick spat on the surface of his red glasses.
'Mm.' Cy smiled, wagging a finger. 'Mm. Except, except, except. Never even saw you, did he? Doesn't even know. So. Maybe you're too much trouble, eh? Don't you think? Maybe I should tidy-up. Personally.'
He twisted Rick's face to the side, hand digging deep into his cheeks and brow, forcing him down and round, making him stare out into the empty sky below the chopper.
I stayed silent. Wondered at the weird pain in my arse – the silver needle, I supposed – and watched. Waited for Rick's face to contort in horror as he saw the remnants of his tribe's war party burning away.
I couldn't have been more wrong.
'Lake Eerie.' Cy said. 'Know what I heard? Used to be… So much shit came downriver, man could almost walk across. Some years, surface caught fire. Believe that?'
He pushed Rick's head further down, forcing him out, smoke billowing round him, held up only by the arms of the guards.
'Course… nowadays, all sorts. Weird shit pouring in. Oil from them… big refineries up north. All deserted. Gas, debris, timber. You name it. And pal… No fucker left to put out them fires.
'Now, the old man. When he kills a guy, just got one way. But me? I'm understanding. Got mercy. So what it is… Giving you a choice. How to die.
'Three options. Number one. You drown. Number two. You burn. And number three. You fall from on- high.'
The Cardinal put a hand on Rick's chest.
'Decide on the way down. Huh?' He said.
Rick said something in a language I didn't understand. His face changed.
Smoothed-out.
And then he smiled at me, and I cried out something wordless, and Cy pushed, and he was gone.
Below, wow!
Below, thunderbirds soared on fiery thermals. They keened and screamed as he fell, and squabbled to catch him.
And the trees sang and the wind murmured, and far away buffaloes grunted moronic greetings, and he settled as light as a feather on the back of the greatest fire-crow of all. It laughed and laughed, and so did he, and in its eye was lightning, and as it rose across the burning lakes Rick-Hiawatha felt something dull and insubstantial continue to fall away from him: something heavy and clumsy and solid, which he didn't need anymore.
The thunderbird kept pace with a garishly-painted helicopter for a moment, then veered off into the smoke, heading for the sounds of the plains.
It'd end here. I'd figured that much out already.
Don't call it a hunch, or a spooky sensation. Call it reality. Call it there's-no-fucking-way-I'm-getting-out-of- here-except-dead-orvictorious.
Call it: I know when to stop chasing.
It would end on this green-and-brown splat of land, choked-up by curtains of smoke that hid the horizon and denied the mainland ever existed. It would end, for better or worse – probably worse – in the middle of a sludge-like lake, whole patches of which were flaming-away happily, with a trail of dead people behind me, a psychotic cardinal with a knife in his brain bearing a grudge, and a throbbing pain in my right buttock.
Way to go.
They'd chained me to a sign. Mottled and half-cracked where a small golf-buggy had toppled into it (and indeed sat there still, crumpled and rusting in the tall grass) it was the only thing to keep me amused whilst the world turned-on blithely around me, and I'd read it several times already.
It announced that in 1813 a bloke by the name of Oliver Hazard Perry kicked the shit out of a fleet of British
