Simon Spurrier - The Culled

Mostly we sat by the fire – silent – though Tora stayed on the roof of the Inferno, keeping one eye on the road, and the man who called himself Hiawatha took it upon himself to perch, cross-legged, some distance away. He looked like he should have been meditating – communing with some indefinable infinite – but instead was smoking an enormous spliff and starring at the sky, nodding or shaking his head at random intervals. I still wasn't too sure what to make of him.

Earlier on, when all my questions were exhausted and his enigmatic bullshit responses were getting right on my wick, I'd got bored and asked him where he got the weed from.

He smiled mysteriously and said it wasn't just weed.

Moron.

"Surely," I said, with just a tiny guilty hint of pomposity, "there are more important things to be growing?"

"Yes," he said. "We grow them too."

I left him to it, after that.

It was around then that Malice decided she'd had enough sulking and sat down next to me, only slightly frosty. She offered me a flask of water.

"Ta."

"Your friend," she said, too quiet for anyone else to hear. She nodded towards Nate. He was picking gristle out of his teeth, fiddling with the red case he'd had with him ever since the Wheels Mart.

"What about him?"

"He okay?"

I scowled, glancing at him again for any obvious signs of damage. It occurred to me that in all the excitement and strangeness of beginning this weird journey, I'd barely spoken to him. Certainly I hadn't asked him if he was sure he wanted to come along. He just… had.

"He looks okay," I said.

"I mean… is he trustworthy?"

I stopped chewing and stared at her. Skin prickling.

I don't know why I didn't blurt-out "of course he is" straight away. I don't know why I didn't tell her he'd saved my life a bunch of times since I'd met him, had expected nothing in return but a few condoms and a pot of dog food, and was even more in danger from the fucking Clergy than I was. I don't know.

"Why do you ask?" I said, intrigued despite myself. Was she getting it too? That feeling. That sense of…

Not quite right…

"'Cause the motherfucker's been outta his tree all day on whatever shit he's got in that pack and he ain't slowing down."

I scratched my chin, brain flopping over. "There a problem with that?"

(Actually, there was a problem with that. Two problems. The first was, I hadn't noticed. Hadn't being paying attention. Too busy watching the road, watching the others in the group. Letting myself down.

The second was, where the hell did the sneaky old bastard get it from?)

"No," she said, wobbling the harness on her shoulders. "No, I guess not. Only he keeps staring at my baby. All the time. All the time."

I told her not to worry.

Highway 80.

We hit Pennsylvania pretty soon afterwards. It looked a lot like NJ.

Towns. No longer paying attention. Letting the names roll together, like some great American gestalt; an obese vehicle with a thousand names that used cheeseburgers for fuel and liposucked fat for tyres.

I get surreal when I'm bored, and boy was I bored!

Stroud.

Kidder.

Black Cross.

Out across the fields, unlikely contraptions wobbled and smoked and steamed; hybrids of a hundred combine harvesters tended by hordes of miserable locals. At one point a bunch of guys on motorbikes overtook us, not even slowing to stare or glare. They wore strange silver puffer-jackets and jauntily-positioned bowler hats, gunning Harleys with hair flapping behind them. Each vehicle had skulls bouncing in its wake, like cans tied to the back of a bridal limo, and a smattering of guns hoisted on its pillion.

Tora tracked them the whole way over the horizon.

Hiawatha, who hadn't moved from his corner since we came aboard, except to roll and smoke occasional joints, twisted his whole head to watch them go by. I wondered what he was seeing. I wondered how he'd even known they'd been there in the first place, when he wasn't sitting anywhere near a window.

Actually, there was a lot I wondered about that boy.

He said he came from a place that was once called Fort Wayne. He said, actually, it was just outside the city; the rolling plains of Ohio where the Haudenosaunee convened once a year, with all its scattered lodges coming together to plan and barter and talk.

He used long words that I'd never heard before and didn't understand. All the time.

He spoke with a natural sort of rhythm which was as off-putting as it was hypnotic. Like a mother reading a nursery rhyme or a poet picking his way through pentameter.

Like an evangelist, too. Like a mantra.

The weirdest thing was, every now and again there was a crack in what he said. Just a little fissure, a hint of something beneath. You notice that shit when you're me.

The voice changed, the eyes blinked. For a second or two he was just some kid; confused and wrapped up in something too big to understand, who didn't believe his own mumbo-jumbo any more than I did and had all the attitude of a scared young thing caught in the company of double-hard bastards. Too much testosterone for his own good, too much insecurity for his own safety.

I preferred him, in those tiny moments.

He said someone called the 'Tadodaho' had decided that my course and his were… well, he used the word "aligned". It seemed too weird, to me. I'd never heard of this guy and he already knew where I was headed, what area I'd be passing through, who I'd be up against.

Hiawatha said:

"It's all been seen. It's all been dreamed."

Enigmatic Bullshit.

Listen: I believe in moving fast, taking opportunities, focusing on what's ahead and getting the job done. I believe that anyone who gets in my way is dead. I believe in my own ability to deal resourcefully with any situation, and kill the fuck out of any stupid wanker who tries to stop me.

I believe in:

Don't you fucking give up, soldier!

I believe in:

Know everything.

Cover the angles.

What I don't believe in is Thunderbirds and dream-quests and voices on the wind and patterns in the sky, which is the sort of stuff Hiawatha talk/recited about right after he'd smoked one of his spliffs. Outside a town called Mifflin, as the afternoon wore on, Malice lost her temper and shouted at him to quit murdering her baby with his second-hand cancer gas. He smiled, shrugged, and blinked once or twice at the baby, like he was about to deliver some quasi-wise rebuttal.

Instead he just looked somehow… sad.

"Yeah," said the real-life-insecure-boy lost behind all that mystical arsebilge. "Yeah."

He climbed up to smoke on the roof, after that, and every time he went Nate watched him go, muttering and rolling his eyes, groaning in pleasure.

I caught him shooting-up, once or twice – sat in the dark corner at the back of what had once been the Inferno's pump-housing. Hey, I told myself, as long as he's happy.

But still. But still.

Lamar.

Boggs.

Lawrence.

Pine Creek.

Place names harder and harder to read with every mile. Eventually the sun slid like an old turd behind the hazy west and even the road signs – decorated variously in graffiti, dangling bodies and hungry looking crows – vanished into the ocean of dark beyond the Inferno's lights. At some unspecified moment, ducking and weaving between the mangled remains of some long-gone pileup, Spuggsy declared out loud the road was "covered in more shit than a nuthouse wall," and declined to go any further until it was light.

We pulled up and ate again, in silence.

Up in the hills, and across the landscape to either side, tiny embers of light shivered away, like fireflies. Families, maybe. Cannibals, psychotic mountain-men, diseased brain-dead mutants or whatever. But most probably just families – normal people, or as good as – trying to stay warm and stay together.