Simon Spurrier - The Culled

The road ahead glowed.

A patch – nothing more – of purple fire and green smoke, with a knot of make-believe birds circling above it, igniting on the tarmac ahead. It wasn't real. It shifted and shimmered, changing directions and breaking form. It was on the far right of the highway, pressed up against the verge, like a patch of spilt oil, set alight by a passing rainbow.

Hiawatha laughed, and the world laughed too.

He understood.

The walls dropped down, the dream passed, and he was awake again. The world still streaked-by. Ram was still shouting at him to hold his line, to smear himself against the truck, to do himself in, to get dead, to make up for Slim, to just-fucking-die!

Slowly, without even looking, Rick angled the trike towards Ram. Ten seconds or so, maybe, before he hit the truck. A gradual drift, tectonically slow, towards the psycho, closing the gap between the choppers.

The machine gun poked against his cheek.

He smirked, imagining himself. Racing at top speed, bike-to-bike, with a gun to his head.

"Arnie," he whispered to himself, "eat your heart out."

"You get back over there!" Ram snarled, so close that even the wind couldn't diminish the force of his voice. "You get back or I'll shoot, I swear to Jesus, and when you're roadkill I'll fucking do you in every goddamn hole you got, boy!"

The distance to the truck was swallowed up. The massive vehicle was slowing, braking hard, but it didn't matter. He'd still hit it. There wasn't room for both bikes to pass.

The glowing mirage passed at the edge of the road. The birds shrieked. The trees groaned. The buffaloes snorted and rutted and screamed in the night, and Rick jerked the trike, hard, to the right. The gun-barrel dug in to the meat of his cheek, the choppers locked briefly then parted, sparks spat, Ram shouted, and then they were separating out, jerking outwards: Rick straight back into the path of the truck, Ram slinking outwards towards the verge of the road, smirking and laughing at Rick's dismal attempt to push him aside.

He was too busy laughing to notice the enormous pothole at the edge of the interstate.

The dream cleared totally. The coloured smoke and fire that had marked the cavity vanished, and the birds dissolved into the air.

Ram's bike nosedived, and made a noise a lot like:

Klut.

The front wheel dipped against the edge of the pothole. The forks crumpled. The rear segment flipped upright – a green horse bucking – and Ram sailed, asshole upright, out of the saddle and onto the tarmac, to scream and grind his filthy leathers away, tumbling and skidding.

Rick swerved perfectly into the vacated space, and braked hard.

The truck rumbled past, horn moaning into the distance.

Silence descended bit by bit, and the last thing to shut the fuck up was the roaring in Rick's ears.

Ram lay on his back, breathing shallowly, a bloody trail of skidmarks marking his slide across the floor. His face was half gone. His bike was a crippled mess, lodged and broken in the pothole's leading edge, and Rick took his time – feeling strangely dispassionate about everything – to siphon off the remains of its fuel into his own chopper's tank.

He felt like he'd seen the 'real' world, and this bland reflection of it was trivial by comparison. He gazed out to the east, and for the first time noticed that same purple-green haze, like an echo of the bright fire inside his dream, hanging above the endless city. Showing him where to go.

"…get you…" Ram whispered. "F-fucking… fucking get you…"

"You don't even know who I am."

"Tell me," the rat-like freak snarled. "Tell me who. Find you." There was blood trickling out of his mouth where he'd bitten his tongue.

"I'm Hiawatha," said Hiawatha.

Then he drove into New York, and stopped only once en-route for a smoke, just to keep the dream fixed in his mind.

Five hundred miles west, in a place that was once called Fort Wayne, the Tadodaho glanced around the circle of assembled Sachems – faces masked in the smoke-thick air of the Dreaming Lodge – and the shrewd-eyed women-folk standing behind each one, and nodded. The communal pipe at the centre (it looked like it had been carved out of a single piece of wood in the shape of an impressive bear totem, but in fact was a resin cast of a completely meaningless sculpture made in Taiwan in 1998) gave out the last few sputters of smoke and died, its usefulness complete.

"He's through." the Tadodaho said, leathery skin crumpling as he smiled sagely. "Be in the city in a hour or two. Get the war party together. We need to get to the meeting place."

"Now?" One of the others said, peevishly.

The Tadodaho pursed his lips, then shrugged.

"Weee-ell… Soon, then. Who's for a beer?"

The air in the tunnel was almost tropical. Damp too, musty, like you'd get in a cave whose only visitors were incontinent foxes and a less hygienic class of beetle. Indistinct stuff – unexpectedly cold in the muggy darkness – dripped on my head, and in the gloom I had to force down the shivers and keep telling myself it's just water, it's just water.

The lights had died long ago – shattered lamp heads good now only for rat holes and bat-roosts – so Nate and I revved along the barren tube slowly; relying on the quadbike's stammering headlights and the fluttering flames of tiny hammock-dwellings, strung-up in odd corners and service-nooks. The clapped-out engine sounded painfully loud, and more than once I saw pale faces eyeing us from the shadows, squinting at the sudden brightness then burying themselves back beneath nest/beds of rags and cardboard.

"More scavs?" I asked Nate, unnerved by the feral look of these troglodytes.

He shook his head. "Flips. Worse'n scavs." Their eyes caught at the light as we streaked by. "No Klans, no homes. Mostly they're… outcasts. Crackheads, maybe. Some loonytoons. Lot of folks went nuts, straight after The Cull. Happens, you know? Happens when you see your whole family puke up their lungs."

I shivered and shut the thought away.

Passing us by with their pale faces streaked by moisture, slack jaws mumbling, they put me in mind of salamanders. Fat, grub-like, nocturnal.

"The Clergy don't mind them being here?" I asked, eyeing yet another scarlet 'O' marked on the outer wall of a corner ahead. Someone had even formed a crude crucifix out of bicycle reflectors, which sat in the centre of the circle and blazed in the onrushing light. I felt like a dart, arcing towards a target.

Behind me Nate shrugged, as if to say the Clergy had far more pressing things to be minding than a few reprobate squatters.

Signs of the ownership of the Queens Midtown Tunnel were all around us. Even before we'd entered it, back on the other side of the East River, the territory markers had stood in long rows down either side of the approach-road; brittle white and topped in each case by a wide scarlet ring.

Three heavily-armed goons had stood on the outer perimeter of this abstract border. Two men and a woman, each wearing nothing but arctic camo trousers and braces, jointly conducting a heated discussion with a shambling host of raggedy scavs. Some of them were pointing at us.

"Mickeys," Nate had grunted, voice muffled. I noted with narrowed eyes how the tallest of the men – a swarthy giant with arctic white hair and livid red rank-stripes scarred onto his shoulders – broke-off from the argument to glare as we rumbled by. It wasn't until we'd passed beneath the tunnel's arch that I realised Nate was hiding his face.

As the tunnel roof had closed over us, our last sight was of a carefully hand-painted sign, hanging above the on-ramp, which read: AND HE SHALL FIND THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

"Yeah," Nate had spat. "One way or the other."