Simon Spurrier - The Culled

"Whup!" He shouted, half drooling in bowel-voiding terror, half whooping with stoned elation.

The rocket dipped down a second or two ahead of Rick, then nothing but smoke and fire-flash and a bilious black-red-grey dome bulging up and out, and tentacles of soot and shrapnel curling down like the branches of a willow, and he was heading straight into the dark heart of the fireball and – and this time he swerved with a little more presence of mind, banking the trike through the blind heat and soot on the rim of a seething crater, gunning his way forwards with his eyes closed, his hair singeing, and no goddamn idea where he was going. The Schwarzenegger stunt shit suddenly looked pretty fucking ridiculous in his mind's eye.

By the time the smoke was out of his face and pouring off the bike's tyres, the other guy was almost on him; tearing an unconcerned hole in the wall of black smog and shouting something, deep and vicious, that Rick couldn't understand. In momentary glimpses at the speckled reflection he could see the rocket launcher was gone – hurled casually onto the verge the instant it was empty – and now the slumped character was crouched low over the handlebars of his reptile-green chopper like a ghost riding a lizard, free hand filled with a compact, matte-black machine gun, long silver jacket flapping in his wake.

Rick yanked the shotgun off his back and hoped he looked like he knew what he was doing. Riding one handed was all very well, and maybe he'd even be capable of firing a loaded weapon with the other, but doing both simultaneously whilst harried from directly behind by an indistinct psycho was quite another matter. He struggled for a second or two to twist and aim, almost hit an abyssal pot-hole, and swerved once again with a shriek.

The world blurred past.

The machine gun chattered somewhere over his shoulder, driving him low against the saddle, and for the second time he found himself driving blind. Miniature craters blossomed all across the tarmac below and before him, and something whined angrily as it ricocheted off some hidden part of the trike. Rick hoped it wasn't anything important, then remembered he wouldn't have known one way or the other anyway.

He was still finding it sort of tricky not to laugh.

The other bike drew level. Glancing to his side, Rick could see his attacker clearly for the first time – and wished he hadn't looked.

Ram wasn't a big guy. He was wiry and pale, with greasy red hair that hung in bedraggled knots over the front of his sweaty, pointed little face. He put Rick in mind of a rat. A compact and bundled package of lank fur and corded muscles. Not the fastest or the strongest critter out there, maybe, but corner the little bastard in the wrong place and it'll turn and fight and won't ever give up.

Ram had a look like he always felt cornered.

Rick shouted "Rrrrrraaaaabies!" Because it seemed sort of appropriate.

"Killed… fucking… Slip!" the gangly creature snarled, eyes blazing, tweaking his bike's course to be perfectly parallel to Rick's own, then raising the machine gun with theatrical slowness, yellowing teeth bared.

He wore a head guard, of sorts. A football helmet with its visor removed and a pair of rotten, curled horns – ripped from the head of a ram – affixed on each side. And a bowler hat glued to the top.

To Rick, despite the whole 'impending death' thing, the dribbling psychopath looked for all the world just like Princess Leia, complete with currant-bun haircoils on the sides of her head. Rick found this screamingly funny, and started laughing.

Then he stopped, and started to whimper.

That made him laugh too.

It was all pretty pathetic, but at the very least it made Ram pause in tightening a finger over the machine gun's trigger, fascinated by a piece of prey manifestly even more insane than he was.

Rick closed his eyes and waited.

And waited.

And then there was music, and voices, and rustling.

Abruptly he seemed to be half-asleep again; like a sudden wave crashing against his mind, prising open his eyes and altering everything in the subtlest ways. The world was still just as it had been, Ram was still riding there beside him, gun pivoting upright… but somehow everything was different. Everything was fluid and glacial, shimmering with a sort of hard-edged light that came from nowhere, and went to nowhere. Maybe it was the shadows, or the shape of the sky, or The music, again. The chanting voices with their hymn of hatred. The grass rustling and the buffalo lowing. The Tadodaho surrounded by the oldest Sachems, and the clan mothers – the true leaders – huddled in cloaks beyond the light of the tribal fire.

Another dream-vision, nuclear-bomb-bursting open in his pot-fuelled preconceptions.

The great spirit, the Earth-Initiate; the trickster coyote and the turtle-man.

Thunderbirds circled overhead, every wing beat a new calamity, every eye-flash a splinter of lightning to stab at the ground.

"We told you," one of the matriarchs hissed, peevish, "to stick with the fucking Yamaha."

Rick giggled. In his limited experience, dream-visions rarely cussed.

"No time for that," the Tadodaho croaked, folded-up in a bat-like shroud of leathery cloaks and feathered cords, hard-lined face bisected by sharp slashes of black paint. "Look."

He nodded out of the dream, and Rick stared past the hazy walls of his own subconscious back out into the real world, like a drive-in movie for his own skull. The moans of endless buffalo herds changed tone discreetly – modulated downwards into a synthetic blare, and became the panicky blast of a truck's horn.

Further along the freeway, a mile or so ahead of Rick and Ram's helter-skelter rush, there was an HGV oncoming. It had ducked through a splintered section of the central reservation to avoid a black mass of rusted debris on its own carriageway, and was now occupying two third of the road directly ahead of Rick. Just like all the others; crammed with stained workers and glaring guards, horn screaming over and over.

There was room to get past; but not much. And Ram's bike, tearing along solidly at Rick's side, wasn't budging an inch.

Rick flicked a glance across at the horned freak. His face had changed. He was smiling, twitchy and vicious, and victorious, gun raised but not fired. He'd spotted the juggernaut. He knew fun when he saw it.

"You hold!" He shouted, eyes watering. "Killed Slim, you fuck! You hold your line! You chicken that motherfucker out, or I shoot!"

Rick giggled, despite himself. At least the psycho was giving him the choice.

A blast in the brain or a head-on collision. Tough call.

The people in the truck's container were waving arms, roaring at him to move, to shift out the way, to fucking clear the r The walls went back up, and the music carried him away again.

In the dream, the Tadodaho wasn't troubled. He eyed Rick – no, not Rick; Hiawatha – warmly, and said something that no one else could hear. The birds in the sky laughed and sang and rushed together. The trees bent down and doubled-over, chuckling so hard their trunks creaked and the ends of their branches snapped. The Thunderbirds roared their amusement and the grass… the grass just rustled its quiet titters into nothingness.

It was all a big goddamn joke. Hiawatha smirked, then started to giggle. It had never been like this, before. Oh, shit, he'd been stoned a million times. He'd tried to… to commune with the fucking spirits as often as any of the Haudenosaunee. But always he'd felt like a fraud; like peering-in on something from the outside, like he was trying to be serious and spiritual about something deeply stupid.

"That's just it," one of the Sachems said, head inflating like a balloon. "Who told you to be so damned serious?"

They all started laughing too.