Simon Spurrier - The Culled

Yes. Yes, that was it.

His tribe was beaten, but not destroyed. His home was taken from him.

What better time to recall another place? A better place. A hidden place, where once he'd served a far lowlier authority than the Lord. A place with communications facilities of its own. With defences and secrecy.

A place to start again, and grow strong.

He found himself clenching his jaw.

And if, in the course of this Holy Exodus to new lands and new futures, he should come across that same troublesome bastard, that Limey cumrag, if that should occur – and the Collectors had been sent out to make fucking sure it did -

Then fine.

Fine. Whatever the Lord willed, of course, but… Yes. Mm.

If. If they met him…

There would be a reckoning.

Hiawatha was real again. Curled on the floor, shallow breathing, fighting tears and trauma, the dead Collector hunched over beside him with his brains leaking out.

This was how the poor kid must have been, before. Before he came all the way to find me, in a city he'd never visited, with a head full of mumbo-jumbo and a mission I still wasn't any closer to understanding.

It was like the whole thing with the psycho and the knife – the guy with his face scraped off – had been the last straw, and whatever weird-arsed personality he'd been hiding behind these last few days, inhaling it up through each of his sweet-smelling spliffs, it was comprehensively gone.

Thank fuck.

In the sudden silence after the fight, as we traded glances and worked ourselves over to find wounds and scars, as we eyed the horde gathered outside the truck with growing anxiety, Hiawatha wiped his eyes and started to laugh.

We all stared at him. Even Nike, crippled on the floor, fussed over by Moto (who clearly had never expected to be the one to do the fussing), looked up from his pain and misery in shock. Even Nate, curled in smacked-up otherworldly confusion, stared and muttered.

Hiawatha took one look out the window, grinning at the hordes of silent figures standing there. Just standing, staring. He smiled like he'd overcome constipation and shat a gold brick, then rummaged in his bag for the dope he'd been smoking and threw it with undisguised satisfaction through the mangled hole where Tora had been taken.

Like he didn't need it any more.

"We're home," he said. "We're fucking home."

"But. Uh. Hiawa…"

"Rick." He said, shaking my hand warmly. "My name's Rick. Everything's going to be fine now. Come on."

He wriggled up and out through the gun-perch. I glanced significantly at Malice and checked the load in the M16. Then I went after him.

"Careful!" Nate giggled, eyes rolling. "Injun's a… Injun's a fucking liability."

Junkie.

Hiawatha was down on the ground, walking away. I went to follow him, then stopped.

There was a man on the roof of the Inferno.

I don't know how long he'd been there. I hadn't heard footsteps since the Collectors fucked off, and he didn't look the sort to go anywhere quietly. The wind moved in his hair, and the beads under his ears, and the feathers on his shoulders.

Which was sort of weird.

Because.

(what the fuck is going on?)

Because there wasn't any wind.

The sky smiled.

"Welcome," he said. And his face moved as he talked in ways I didn't understand, and the skin beside his eyes was a red desert that shifted with continental patience, and his eyes sucked in the universe, and the great decorated robe he wore, furled like the wings of a bat, danced in my eyes.

Messages in patterns.

The smile on the corners of his lips.

The The walkie-talkie poking out of his cloak.

What?

It hissed.

The man looked away for a second.

"kkk… llo..?" The radio said.

This vision before me, this ancient God of plains and prairies, this magnificent man with skin like leather and whorls of black and white across the bridge of his nose, with a great feather-totem spread across his shoulders and a long war-club held in his hand, he shifted from foot to foot, and said:

"Uh."

"kkk…cking talk to me, asshole motherf…kkk… said, is he there yet?… llo?… kkk… oddamn food's nearly ready an…"

The man rolled his eyes and sighed.

"C'mon," he said, turning away with a despondent beckon, reduced abruptly from awesome Earth Deity to an old bloke with a crazy costume. "Let's get a beer before the old bitches get pissy."

The Haudeno… Haudanosaw… Haw… oh, fuck, the Iroquois weren't what I expected at all.

Listen: I'm English. Only exposure I ever got to indigenous life was a school trip to a Stone Age village when I was a kid, and a whole shitload of John Wayne movies. You ask me, a Native American lives in a wigwam, says "How" a lot, and has a name like Two-Ferrets-Fucking. I know, I know. It's despicable, stereotypical and downright unforgivable. But I yam what I yam.

Still, I was ready to be educated, you know? As the quiet tribesmen loaded us all into cars and trailers, patching up Moto as best they could, and swarmed around the Inferno in our wake, I was prepared to have my eyes opened. Rick – Hiawatha, whoever he was – babbled the whole away about the 'new' Iroquois. About how, in a cruel post-Cull world, the Old Ways worked best. He said the people who'd come out here, they forgot all that bullshit we used to call 'society' and went back to the land. Back to basics.

Funny thing is, he sounded sort of bitter as he said it.

Rick told me it was a popular movement. Sure enough at least half the tribesmen around us – variously wearing scavenged trousers, leather jackets or woolly jumpers, all with beads and mouse-skulls and intricate tattoos decorating heads and faces – were whiter than white. It was funny to see them like that. Embarrassing, in a way; like being seen in public with a raging tourist who doesn't mind stopping to take a photo every five seconds, and wears a hilarious T-shirt saying something like:

I CAME TO LONDON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY STD

But they looked so earnest, smoking their cigarettes and hefting their guns, and they acted so friendly as we drove, that I kept myself from pointing and laughing. It was a struggle.

The point is, I guess I was ready to be… impressed. Stunned by the allure of this atavistic lifestyle. I was awaiting nomadic groups, great tribal fires, comfy lodges made of wood and mud.

Oh, piss… I admit it: I was expecting a spectacle.

Instead I got thirty caravans, assorted Winnebago clones, two dozen pickups and one of those prefab mobile homes, like a cheap Swiss chalet, on the back of a lorry. I almost choked. They stood formed together in a rough circle around the prefab, on the banks of a clean-looking reservoir, in the shade of a huge bridge carrying the I-80 to the opposite bank.

The old man who'd greeted me, who'd introduced himself as we clambered into the waiting car as a 'Sachem' named Robert Slowbear, caught my look of vague disappointment. He seemed to bristle.

"Just a mobile base," he said, defensively. "Not regular at all. We're a long way from home too, stranger."

"Yeah?"

He settled back and smiled. "You should see the lodges, Englishman. Fields giving crops. Herds of swine all through the forests. More people coming every day…"

Hiawatha muttered under his breath. "Caravans as far as the eye can see…"

Slowbear threw him a shuddup, kid look.

"You all live in the same area?" I said, intrigued by the vision of some sprawling trailer park in the middle of Indiana.

The Sachem shook his head. "No, no… The Haudenosaunee is a… a Confederacy, not a state. Settlements with the right to roam. Mostly they stay still… farm, raise livestock, fish… Others move with seasons. We come together, now and then. Trade news. Share stories and lessons."