Simon Spurrier - The Culled

There were no roofs to leap across to here. No secondary stairways to scamper back down.

And, if I'm honest, no energy to go on. The thing inside me curled up and went to sleep, exhausted, and left me alone. Only human. Outnumbered and outgunned.

Trapped.

"Fuck." I said. "Fuck fuck fuck."

From the open door I heard the huge scav shouting again – "My wife! Tha's my fucking wife!" – then a sharp little gunshot to shut him up.

Footsteps up the stairwell.

Time for the endgame.

Interlude

If he was honest, Hiawatha wasn't nearly as bemused as he felt he should be.

Or rather, as he felt Rick should be.

The name change had only been cosmetic at the beginning. Just a… a symbol of his willingness to embrace all the weirdness, to get stuck-in, to do as the Sachems asked. To drop all the moping angry-native-kid-trying-to-be-white crapola and cuddle up to the Old Ways, like a brand on his soul that said 'On A Mission'.

But it was purely temporary – always had been – and that was the point. When he got home he'd still be 'Rick'.

If. If he got home.

But then again, Rick wouldn't have sailed through the peculiarities of the last couple of days without feeling at least uncomfortable, whereas he – Hiawatha, whoever-the-fuck-he'd become – was taking it all in his stride. The sights and sounds, the little excursions into foggy dreamworlds, the blending of reality and legend.

At the back of his mind Rick ranted and raved about cod-mystical tribal bullshit, whilst at the forefront – in the driving seat – Hiawatha shrugged, listened carefully to the messages on the wind, passed a critical eye over the runic algebra decorating the stars, trailed a finger in bubbling brooks and paid close attention to the splinters of light – and the codes they inferred – on the surface of the water. He didn't even need to keep stopping to smoke dope any more. It was like he'd prised his brain through a sideways gap and – now that it was there – it could stay as long as it wanted.

The cynical part of Rick's mind told him he'd turned into a big dumb stoner expressing the classic idiocy of a drugged-up moron who suddenly decides everything is significant and the whole world resonates on some profound metaphysical level. If he'd been fully in charge, rather than just a morose little echo of a former voice, he would have rolled his eyes.

Hiawatha didn't give a rat's ass.

Hiawatha had suddenly decided everything was significant and the whole world was resonating on a profound metaphysical level.

Overall, Rick/Hiawatha was kind of messed-up in the head.

Out on the road the dream-visions were at least straightforward. Talking trees, rumbling skies, fluttering crows, yadda-yadda; the sort of stuff the tribal myths were packed full of. But here in the city things were different. None of the Haudenosaunee legends spoke of buildings that shuddered like horses dislodging flies; of smog-palls becoming faces and hands; of rats seething from clogged sewers to become corkscrewing whirls of smoke; of tenements making love by starlight – balconies locked together like slippery tongues – and skyscrapers cutting great intestinal scars across the belly of the clouds, where blood and shit oozed into the rain, and huge thunderbirds pecked at the wounds like vultures.

It was kind of cool.

The silver needle in his back pocket hummed to him.

The coloured smoke had brought him here. Just like out on the road; revealing the pothole that wiped-out Ram. All across the suburbs, through spaghetti-like turnpikes and graffiti-plastered tunnels, across the George Washington Bridge then down through the eerily silent West Side, it had hung above the city like an electric net; green and purple, narrowing itself down to a single column of hallucinogenic smoke. He discovered he could see it twice as well when he looked away, concentrating on the corners of his vision; like an optical illusion his brain tried to conceal whenever he stared directly at it.

It took him down Broadway, through Harlem and Morningside, places he'd heard of but never visited. A small part of him felt like he'd missed a chance; like the bustling human ratraces he used to see on bygone TV shows were lost forever, and when finally he'd got his dream and escaped his small-town roots to do what every youngster always claimed they would – leave for the big city – he'd arrived five years too late.

In the middle of a goddamn ghost town.

And now here he was, cross-legged on the roof of a colossal parking lot, in an unfamiliar part of an unfamiliar town, with the dark sky rippling like an inverted ocean, the moonlit streets pulsing with curious colours and stranger sounds; and the twisting column of smoke focusing down to a sliver of light above his head, before winking out.

Making him wait.

As ever.

As midnight approached engines growled below him, and he looked down with a sort of foggy indifference. He'd been hearing the distant chatter of gunfire on and off, but given the ungentle look of the city he'd dismissed it as 'not my problem', and even then hadn't been entirely sure whether it was a true sound or just another backflip of his brain. But now, glancing over the street side canyon, he could see a bulky armoured vehicle slipping to a hurried halt outside a low office block, and knew not only that it was real and solid, but that it made him shiver and his blood turn sluggish.

The car had been painted half-heartedly – a smear of messy red along both flanks – but from Hiawatha's vantage the redecoration couldn't hope to disguise the undercoat. The glossy skyblue sheen marked on the thick roof with a wide scarlet 'O'.

Clergy.

Here.

Hiawatha rushed to his bike to snatch-up an appropriate weapon, acting on automatic, scrabbling through pistols and automatics like a chef tossing salad. Finally his hand closed on a rifle – some crow-blasting farmer's friend, no doubt, stolen from a deserted homestead somewhere by Ram and his cronies – and raced back to the edge: just in time to see the AV's two occupants disappear into the office block.

He swore out loud.

And then he saw the man.

The man with green and purple fire tangled above him. With a great bird hovering over his head and wolves slinking past his legs. With rivers and grasses flowing in unreal ripples from his booted feet.

With one ear a tattered mess, with blood all down him, with rags on his back and an Uzi in each hand.

"You'll know him," the Tadodaho had told Rick. "You'll know him when you see him."

Everything stopped.

The man stood on the roof of the office block, opposite and below Hiawatha's own vantage point. He looked like he was breathing heavily, sweating buckets, bleeding from a dozen cuts; but even as Hiawatha watched the man seemed to force-down the exhaustion, eyes closed, face calm. When he reopened his eyes he was almost a different person, moving with predatory grace, stepping to the shadows on one side of the door.

A little part of the old Rick muttered: "Jedi, man…"

In his swirling dream-vision, Hiawatha watched the man change. Become something different. A puma-king of lank fur and subreal shadows; a primitive shade; a Walking Instinct. Reality kept adjusting around him; slowing down, jarring, highlighting its dangers and hazards, blazing along the edge of anything that could be used as a weapon, streaming into dark corners that offered cover, snaking in silvery beads along potential escape-routes, ambush points, blindspots…

Hiawatha realised with a start he was seeing the world as the stranger saw it, and shook his head in annoyance, wanting to watch the spectacle unclouded by the druggish haze.

Out on the rooftop, the two goons from the AV bundled through the stairwell door together, hands full of blades and barrels, and everything went crazy.