Simon Spurrier - The Culled

He shrugged. "You needed saving."

Nate tsked quietly behind me, then giggled again.

I held out a shaky hand to the boy, which he took with a suspicious sort of glance and shook firmly.

"Hiawatha," he said.

I nodded. "Pleasure. Want to tell me what you were doing on the thirty fourth floor of a hotly-contested building swarming with insane priests, Hiawatha?"

He smiled. Sort of. I don't think there was much humour there.

"Saving you." he said.

Uh-huh.

Which is around about when Malice came in. Different.

She looked bigger, for a start. It took me a while to figure she wore body armour beneath the black threads. Pointy football-pads over each shoulder, skateboarding shields on elbows and knees, and a bloody enormous anti-stab vest that made her look like a samurai. Guns and knives poking from belts and straps on every conceivable surface – and that included the baby's wicker support-cage, still humping from her back like a dorsal fin.

She looked like an ice hockey player who was too hardcore to bother with a helmet.

Oh, and someone had beaten the shit out of her.

"Still alive then," she said, not even bothering to make eye contact. She sounded disappointed, dumping an angular bag on the floor with a metallic crash.

"Uh. Yeah. Yeah, I guess." I tried to stop staring at her bruised face. "What happened?"

She rummaged industriously in a couple of crates nearby, then paused to glower at me. "Clergy happened, retard. You're a popular guy."

I suppose I should've guessed. Back before The Tag and the siege and all that, when Cy dragged the big Mickey-chief back to the UN with tales of the Limey psycho driving about on a clapped-out quad. Wouldn't have taken the Choirboys long to work their way back to the Wheels Mart.

I wondered whether she'd told them anything worth a damn.

"Sorry," I said.

"Skip it. We're ready to roll when you are."

"Excuse me?"

"We're loaded-up and ready. Awaiting your pleasure, your majesty. And payment, of course."

"Sorry, I'm… I'm not with you…"

"I said," Nate grumbled. "Didn't I say? Let him wake up, I said! Just goddamn wait! Let him decide himself!"

Malice ignored him, hooking a thumb towards Hiawatha. "Last of the Mohicans here said you'd want a ride. Long distance. Heavy protection. No expense spared."

Hiawatha stared at me.

"But…"

"North-west," Malice said. "That's what he told me. You saying he's been wasting my fucking time?"

She didn't look in the mood for games.

I groped in my pocket and felt the crumpled sheet of paper I'd taken from the Secretariat with its REASSIGNMENT LOCATION and the smooth photograph. Undisturbed, right where I'd left them.

I stared at Hiawatha.

"How did you know that?" I said, off-balance. "What's…how… how did you know?"

"Lucky guess," he said, then turned back to Malice, pointing a finger at the bag she'd brought with her. "That's mine."

"And?"

"They confiscated it at the door."

"And now I'm bringing it back Tonto. Keep your fucking scalp o…"

"No, I mean… I mean you might as well keep it. It's for you anyway."

He strolled over and kicked open the drawstrings, letting dozens upon dozens of glossy guns – rifles, pistols, autos, semis, weird spiky things I didn't recognise and antique bloody revolvers – spill into the dirt.

"Figure that'll cover the rental costs," he said, into the silence.

Malice gaped.

The Inferno was waiting for us outside.

The kid came too.

Right before we left, I had a half-hearted sort of attempt at talking Malice out of it. Over the roar of the fire-truck's engines (extensively tinkered with, a sweaty little man called 'Spuggsy' told me, to "purr like a lion on stee-roids an' go like a cheetah got a rocket up its ass"), I appealed to her sense of responsibility, reminded her we were taking the Inferno instead of some suped-up speeder because we might easily blunder into trouble, and finally had a stab at convincing her the little brat would keep us awake at nights.

It was pretty lame.

Malice just glared, scratched absent mindedly at the split lip the Clergy's goons had left her with – as if to remind me whose fault it was, and who therefore had no fucking right to be suggesting anything – then went back to loading ammo-belts into the truck's hold. I'd half expected her to be vaguely grateful – it was arguably thanks to me that the Clergy had been kicked out of the city – but evidently she either refused to believe the news coming out of Manhattan or was a grudge bearer of championship standards. She pretty much ignored me after that.

The kid, for the record, never even made a sound.

Ten minutes out of the Wheels Mart, as the solid wall of noise thrown-up by the engine started to normalise inside my head, the diminutive gunner who called herself 'Tora' – fast-talking, flirtatious as hell, mad as a box of badgers – leaned close to my ear and whispered:

"She left her kid behind once before. That's all. Rental mission just like this. Some moron trying to get to Miami, I forget why. Figured we'd run into some crazies en route – 'specially with the DC hole, shit – so she laid out the responsible mother bullshit, left him behind. No way the Clergy gonna try collecting tithes inside the Mart."

"And?"

"And that's why she's only got one kid, 'steada two. And ain't a fan of the Choir."

Ah.

Still. Tensions aside, cramped and sweaty lack of comfort aside, snarling engine-volume aside, this was travelling in style. The Inferno slipped through New York like an icebreaker; stately and magnificent, oozing don't-mess-with-us torment and explode-your-ass-muthafucka intent. Weaponry on prominent display, promising instant overkill.

I kept catching myself wishing I could get out and have a look; standing in the street like all the wide-mouthed scavs and Klansmen, who bristled and hid as it slunk past like a nuclear armadillo. We wended our way in silence, across the meandering Triborough bridge – its girdered pillars flaking paint, flocked with hundreds of gulls that picked and squabbled over a dead sheep hung, upside down, for no appreciable reason – and skirting the edge of the Bronx on Highway 87, peering solemnly into a deserted wilderness that seemed to have been frozen in time. Cars packed together in cryogenic traffic-jams, skeletal shadows sealed within.

Now and then we passed territory poles – or the remains of them – and gaudy wall murals where the local gang wars were meticulously chronicled: long lists of names, each one crossed through where some other mob had taken over. At some point the internecine squabbles had ended, and some thoughtful soul had added a broad scarlet circle to the foot of each list; unquestionably proclaiming the true rulers, regardless of which banana-republic Klans they allowed to govern in their stead. Every time we passed such ownership tags a fresh round of spitting, swearing and tutting would circulate round the truck's interior.

That was about as close as we got to conversation, in those first hours.

There were eight of us altogether, not counting the baby. Malice drove, mostly; the wicker basket transferred to a special harness on the cab wall beside her. Even in the city, where she was obliged to take it easy to avoid vehicle wrecks and pits in the macadam, I could tell she wasn't about to make it comfortable on her passengers. She throttled where any sane person would have braked, skewed the machine at hairpin corners round ancient riot-control vans with their panels stripped off and their remains burnt to slag, and every time I stared in horror at her recklessness there was a savage smile on her face.

Great.

She never hit anything and the rest of her crew were entirely at ease. Eventually I stopped staring ahead and decided to take in the scenery, just as the Yankee Stadium went sailing by on my right. Gone, mostly – just a few shards of tangled black spaghetti at the heart of a splintered parking-lot continent – but the determined observer could just about make out the sagging segments of an aircraft's tail hanging over the edge of the burnt-out shell. I wondered what had happened, then decided I'd rather not know.