There didn't seem to be anyone else around.
CHAPTER THREE
Interlude
The man had opted to change his name for the duration of his mission – not that he'd had a lot of choice. It was that or put up with the Sachems nagging him for the rest of eternity.
A week ago he was Rick. Today he was Hiawatha. Go figure.
He gunned the Honda along the main street of a picturesque everytown, enjoying the growl of the old engine – still a perfect melody, despite its hiccups and occasional coughs – and selected a sidestreet at random. Nobody on the sidewalks. No curtains twitching or faces peering over tumbledown walls. Nobody here to see the Mighty Hiawatha passing through.
He supposed he ought to be honoured. It was, after all, a name dredged from the deepest troughs of tribal heroism – belonging first to the great warrior/prophet who reconciled the squabbling nations. Hiawatha – the original – had been friend and brother to the deific Great Peacemaker; a glorious ancestor-totem in his own right and the illustrious architect of the first Great Confederacy. Four hundred years later and the white men still insisted on calling the Union of Five Nations by its insulting handle – the Iroquois – and never gave it another thought.
Ignorance and arrogance. So said the sachems, anyway.
(Cue dull lectures about the Confederacy's 'invention' of democracy, its influence on the US's own constitution, and a hundred-and-one other details, hopelessly out of date, that the clan mothers and their chieftain pets meme-repeated every time anyone was dumb enough to ask a vaguely cultural question.)
Iroquois meant 'Rattlesnakes'. The clan mothers hated it.
Rick (nee Hiawatha) rather enjoyed the description. It appealed to the youngster inside him, a sinister sort of moniker to match the leathers and war paints the Tadodaho had given him. Certainly it had more character than the title the Confederacy gave itself – 'Haudenosaunee': the people of the long houses. Not exactly a name to strike terror into the hearts of one's enemies, particularly when most of the 'long houses' these days were Winnebagos.
Rick let the bike drift to a halt before an imposing building at a crossroads. It looked like maybe it'd been a courthouse or something grand and prestigious – long ago – but a glistening plastic sign announced its more recent owners to be RAY N' JAKE, this being their
GENERAL STORE. Bless.
Rick listened to the engine rumble itself away into silence, wondering if anything was left inside the boarded-up building. His stomach gurgled. He'd have to start worrying about fuel soon too. Either that or stay stranded out here in ghost-town suburbia forever – and a more hellish prospect he could not imagine. He pocketed the keys, and swung himself down onto the sidewalk, flicking his long double-braid out of his eyes. Everything seemed quiet. An overgrown sign – hanging off its rusted pole on the far side of the street – let him know he'd strayed into the curiously-named town of Snow Hand (this on a day of glorious sun and only minor QuickSmog), and asked him to drive carefully.
He smirked.
On the subject of misinformative names, he also found it tricky these days to refer to the ubiquitous enemy (i.e.: assholes who persisted in calling the Haudenosaunee the 'Iroquois') by such a simple term as 'The White Man.' It seemed ridiculous. Some of his best friends inside the tribe were white, genetically speaking, and the council had supposedly granted them just as many rights, freedoms and opportunities as its trueblood members. It never ceased to amaze Rick that the 'new' tribesmen – who had eagerly joined the Confederacy since the Cull and were mostly paler than an anaemic goth – seemed utterly untroubled by the constant bitching about the goddamn 'white man'.
It was like they'd resigned from their own species.
Lucky bastards.
His silent perplexity brought a little smile, unbidden, to his face. He was remembering the last night before he left his home-village to embark on this ridiculous trip, and his good pal Leicester (formerly a whitebread bank clerk, now a hunter-scavenger with the Kanien'kehaka lodge), smoking an enormous hash pipe. The dumbass had actually started griping, perfectly serious as only a raging pothead could be, about the 'Pale-Skinned Devils.'
Rick still found himself sniggering at that one, a week later.
Snow Hand's unremarkable environs looked unlikely to yield much by the way of food or fuel. Small white and green houses, clad in sycamore and aluminium, nestled into the wooded hills on every side. Pretty much all the trees were dead, Rick noticed, which didn't help the sense of cloying not-quite-rightness. He'd stopped in enough places up and down the I-80 in the last few days to know this was hardly a rarity. Maybe some weird effect of the fallout had taken its toll along the eastern face of the Appalachians. Maybe a lack of rain, or just too much fucking sun, or something in the QuickSmog or… or whatever. The forests round here were dead. Not his problem.
Rick squared up to the door of the general store, not letting the little gang of crows squatting on its roof startle him. They – or others like them – had been keeping pace with him for a good fifty miles now, perhaps hoping he'd spontaneously drop dead. It didn't bode well for his hopes of finding food.
The wide window outside the shop had been comprehensively boarded up: first with planks (long since desiccated and crumpled), thereafter with an increasingly desperate array of corrugated iron, chicken wire and a long lost car door.
Impregnable. Ish.
'Hello?' Rick called out, casually drawing a feather-pocked crowbar from his saddlebag, not entirely sure if he wanted to be heard. A fat cat, long since gone feral, glared impudently at him from a weed-choked driveway across the street. He shrugged. At least if there was nothing in the store he might find some lucky tins of pet food somewhere. Or…
He wondered how easy it was to skin a cat…
He had a half-hearted attempt at prising open the door – fat chance – then quickly and efficiently scrambled up the boarded window like a squirrel up a tree, coming to rest on the ledge of an upstairs window, scaring the choir of nosey crows from their holier-than-thou vantage. Iron bars, of all the luck, bisected the window, but the wood was so ancient and the plaster sealing the cavity so rotten that a few hefty swats with the crowbar and some hot-faced brute force was all it took to gain entry.
The way Rick saw it, the harder it was to get into one of these dismal places, the more likely it was there'd be something worthwhile inside. He slipped in, silent as death, gripping the crowbar like a samurai sword.
Whoever had occupied Snow Hand five years ago – Pale Skinned Devils no doubt, ha! – had either died or moved on. Same as most places. Uprooted families, the dead going unburied. Back at the start, when people began to die and the Government said conspicuously less and less about it every day, people had clued-up quicker than the suits had expected. Something big, going down, being kept quiet.
Maybe the townsfolk had even seen the flare-flashes in the night, out across the southeast horizon, as the Sovs or the Saudis or whoever-it-was took out Washington like bleach on a stain. That's the sort of thing that'll kill your community spirit, deader than disco.
Snow Hand. Some of them went east to NY, probably, and no doubt died there. Some went west, over the hills. Probably died too.
Some of the lucky ones maybe fell in with the Haudenosaunee, to stay alive and count their blessings and get on by.
(Yeah, the uncharitable voice of rebellion grumbled inside, just so long as they respected the goddamn old ways and didn't rock the fucking boat.)
Rick checked the rooms of the first floor on automatic, adrenaline burning away like a barely-noticed light. Nothing. Not unless you could eat a child's rat-nibbled dollies, or run a Honda on the contents of a cologne drawer. Taking it as read that the place had been looted before it was still no surprise to find jewels and gold stashed away, untouched in makeup cases and bedside drawers. Who was going to steal something so useless, after all?
He shouldered the crowbar and made his way downstairs, into the store, sighing as his thoughts turned back to the tribe, wondering what would happen if he just turned around right now and headed home. Fuck the mission.
