Simon Spurrier - The Culled

The clan mothers would not have approved.

On the other hand, it was fast. It was far sturdier than the Yamaha, and in odd moments between small towns he'd begun to fancy he was riding an armchair; hovering across forests and lakes. With the stolen shotgun strapped across his back and a veritable cornucopia of other weapons stashed in the saddlebags, he kept seeing himself in some tacky Schwarzenegger moment. Crashing through flaming debris with a pithy one liner and a minigun blazing.

In fact, Rick – nee Hiawatha – kept imagining himself and his environment in all sorts of outrageous new ways. This had something to do with the boredom of cross-country travel, something to do with his natural imaginativeness, and a lot to do with the enormous quantities of the sachems' weed he'd been smoking since his run-in with the colossal bear-like sodomite who attempted to kill and eat him the night before.

He figured he owed it to himself.

He'd spent the night in a mid-sized town called White Deer, two hours or so down the interstate from his fateful encounter with Slim in Snow Hand. The place had been mostly deserted, but a pocket-sized population had set up a sort of commune around the central square, and Rick was too exhausted and too nervy to risk breaking-in somewhere else. He traded one of the 9mms and a box of ammo for a comfy bed and two pouches of dried rabbit, and even got a bowl of vegetable soup into the bargain. The people were polite, eager to please, but ultimately empty. He could see the terror in their eyes; the way they kept looking back and forth from him to the Harley, to the bulging saddlebags.

At one point a little girl appeared – precociously smiley – and asked him if he was a Collector come to take her away to the bad men in dresses. He was about to tell her "no" – to tell the whole goddamn town he was nothing to do with the fucking Clergy, or any other troublemaking scum they might be afraid of – when her mother swept her away with a dozen fearful glances over her shoulder and a muttered warning for him to "stay the hell away from her!"

Point taken, he kept himself to himself after that: got as stoned as is it physically possible to get, sat staring at a fire with all the usual bullshit thoughts of spirits and voices that he only ever got when he 'wasn't himself', and cleared off in the morning before the sun was fully up.

Two hours down the road, he passed a place called Kidder. There were three bodies strung-up on builder's scaffolding beside the turnoff; old and dried-out, almost skeletal now, dangling by their wrists on sharp cords of barbed wire. A spray-painted plaque below each one declared their crimes to the passing world.

THIEF

MUSLIM

INJUN

Each Tag had a scarlet circle sprayed below.

Rick decided against visiting Kidder.

He paused only once during the morning – another narcotic stop, to top-up the fuzziness that had insulated him from the terrors and confusions of the night – and now as he flew along the ridged spine of the grey snake road, sweeping in lazy arcs from left to right, his mind wandered in all the beautiful, empty places the Sachems would have been proud to lead him.

Endless valleys of sound.

Broken wildernesses, with great gnarled trees standing lonely on ancient barrows.

Horizon-spanning herds of buffalo (or at least, great shaggy monstrosities with horns like scimitars, which is how – never having seen one – he imagined buffalo must look), oozing across grassy plains and moaning, deep down where sound stops and feeling begins, to each other.

Ghost-dancers, capering from side to side, seething and hissing as the chalk-dust coating their dusky skin dripped away with their sweat.

They were singing a song, he could tell. All of them. The landscapes, the buffalo, the trees, the dancers. He'd never learned the language of his people – too busy playing the white kid, turning his back, ignoring the Tadodaho's patient sermons – but somehow he understood. Deep in his bones, it made a sort of sense. In his back pocket, the silver needle wrapped-up in its rags became a tuning-fork: humming a single note of crystal beauty that shivered all through him, connecting him to the world, to the sky, to the Song.

It was a hate-hymn, he understood, to drive the bad ghosts away; shrouded and tattooed, with their dusty god and their scarlet demagogue.

The sky was talking to him. The grass was tugging at his leather legs, whispering in great wind-driven susurration, and the boughs of an ancient vine – sagging over the Interstate as he drifted by on the back of the magnificent thunderbird – told him to "watch out, boy… watch out…"

It was a heavy-ass dream-vision, and the matriarchs would have been proud – it just wasn't very good timing.

Something slapped him in the face; waking him from the foggy dreamsleep to find grasses and leaves fap-fap-fapping against his chest and head, and the trike scrambling – almost on its side – along the verge at the edge of the interstate.

"Fuck!" he yelped, waking up in a hurry. "Fuck!"

He wound his way back into the centre of the road, negotiating more potholes, gulping for air and promising himself to stay awake – even considered getting rid of the remaining pot – when the black speck appeared in the mirror.

It got big quick.

And yeah; at first it didn't worry him. The relaxing tendrils of the smoke soothed away all his tension and he even found himself giggling, without quite knowing why, at the swiftly growing reflection. Just another biker, he figured – travelling even faster and more recklessly than him – soon to sweep-past on his way to the smoking blot on the horizon that would, eventually, become New York. Descending from the hills, the city was a spillage of brown and grey paint, washed-through with QuickSmog graffiti and chalk dust scribbles.

"Haha!" It was hard not to laugh. Not just at the other biker, oh no: at everything.

Everything was good. Everything was funny.

"Haha!"

In fact, so vast and smudge-like was the endless plain of industry and smutty air on the eastern horizon, that Rick's narcotically liberated consciousness completely forgot about the pursuing rider and went flashing off down a million new tangents, to get wrapped up in wonder at the patterns a smoking chimney made against the sky; the curious sweep of a green park amidst the urban sprawl; the flight of a bird overhead; the The roar of another Harley.

The flash of a silver jacket in his mirror.

Deep inside, at some cold rational level untouched by the cloying comfort of the drug, Rick was screaming and shouting in half-grasped terror. But outside, on the surface of the chilled-out shell containing him, he did nothing but giggle and make lion roaring sounds under his breath, trying to out-growl the approaching bike, trying inwardly to wrestle himself into some semblance of conscious control.

Swearing over and over that he'd never smoke dope again.

He watched a tiny flash-flicker in the mirror, like a speed camera shuttering open in his wake, and shouted "Say Cheeeeeese!"

At this distance, squinting carefully into the fly-spattered mirror, he could just make out something long and cumbersome poking at odd angles off the rider of the other chopper, and a corkscrewing contrail snarling-up the air between them.

The rocket launcher.

Fuck.

"Haha!"

He would have died, but for his sluggish reactions. The idea of swerving furiously to his left gripped him by lazy degrees, so that when finally he twisted the forks of the trike's front wheel a whole second had already passed. A vicious grey blur – venting heat and smoke – squealed past him like a localised earthquake, directly beside his left ear. Right where he would've been if he'd managed to get his act together sooner and swerve.