CHAPTER FIVE

 

 

MY FIRST WORRY was that my eyes weren’t working properly.

Okay, so I’d just woken up. No need to panic yet, maybe, but the training and conditioning went deep, and the first thing you learn is be aware.

Know everything.

Cover the angles.

Right.

I had the vague idea I’d passed out from loss of blood. There was something about a... a bus? A plane? What the fuck? Maybe I was still hallucinating.

Maybe this hazy curtain obstructing everything I was seeing was just an effect of my traumatised mind, or something cloudy dripping in my eyes, or... or whatever.

Assume a worst-case scenario.

Sir, yes sir, etc, etc.

So: Major damage following oxygen starvation to the brain, leading to sensory corruption and an inability to effectively continue.

Solution: Abort mission.

I remembered where I was. I remembered the plane crash and the gunfight and was even starting to piece together the thing with the bus when the biggest puzzle-piece of all dropped into place: I remembered why I’d come here.

The Signal.

‘Inability to effectively continue’ wasn’t an option. ‘Abort Mission’ could, pardon my French, fuck off.

I mentally nutted the worst-case scenario and tried out a little optimism for a change. When I twisted my head to glance at the floor beneath me – I was lying on my right shoulder, aching from my own weight – the cracked tarmac of the airstrip came into perfect and unobstructed focus. It was only when I looked further afield that my vision became obscured, as if the horizon was playing hard-to-get.

“Stay still,” someone croaked. “Nearly done. Can’t finish-up if you keep moving.”

My skin prickled, and it took a moment or two to realise why. I was half naked. Lying on a mangled runway surrounded by debris and fuel, unable to see anything past a few dozen feet, in nothing but my underwear.

“H-hey...”

“Dammit! Stay still.” A wrinkled hand – dark brown knuckles and a pale palm – dipped briefly into my field of view and gave me a chastising flick on the forehead, not doing much for my sense of security. I felt my whole body rocking a little, as if a dog had got hold of my left sleeve and was tugging it from side to side, though I wasn’t wearing anything and consequently had no sleeves.

It was all very odd. There was no pain.

I poked my tongue around my mouth, half testing for the taste of blood, half summoning the strength to speak, and eventually tried: “What are you... uh...?”

“Sorting you out,” the speaker said. His voice was hard-accented – African-American, New York sharp – with an inbuilt semi cackle that turned every statement into a grandfatherly demonstration of humouring the kiddies. I felt vaguely patronised, and couldn’t work out why.

“And how,” I said, failing to focus yet again on the murky distance, “are you doing that?”

“Minor transfusion, first up.” The voice sounded matter-of-fact about this, despite the subject. “About the only good damn thing about the Cull. Everyone’s a donor, see?”

“Blood?”

“He’s a quick one!” I got the impression the guy, whoever he was, was squatting behind me. “Yeah, blood. Which is to say: you were seriously lacking for the stuff, pal.”

“A-and you gave m... From where?”

“No need to worry ‘bout that.”

I silently begged to differ, but the same tugging sensation from my left shoulder was distracting my attention and the voice – an old man, I’d decided – wasn’t finished.

“Then it was tidying up, see? I mean... who made this damn mess of your arm here?” There was a quiet tap-tap-tap, and I imagined a finger poking the skin next to the bullet hole – though again I felt nothing. “Might as well have poured a quart of mud in the hole and closed it down with knitting needles.”

“I... I did it.”

“Done it yourself?” The voice went quiet for a moment, then whistled softly. “Well... maybe that’s different. Still a fuckin’ mess, mind.”

“You’ve... You’ve sorted it?”

“Yep. Antisep, new stitches, new dressing.” He paused, considering my voice. “Limey, huh?”

“But I can’t feel it. My arm.”

“Lived over there myself, for a time. Nice place. But for the weather.”

“I said I can’t fee...”

“Yeah. That’d be the anaesthetic.”

I started to blurt: Anaesthetic? Where the fuck did you get tha – but my thought-process shifted rails with an inelegant clang and ran up against a far more obvious quandary.

“Why?” I said.

“Why what?”

“Why are you doing all this? What’s going on?”

“Ah.”

The syllable was pronounced with the sort of enigmatic significance that said:

More to follow.

There was a heavier tug on my left side, executed with a certain amount of rough finality and a breathless grunt – “There!” – and then a coarse hand rolled me onto my back. I felt a little like a turtle inverted in the sun, unable to lift myself upright. Not that I’d tried yet. I was far too busy staring up at my benefactor, wondering if I was still asleep and hadn’t realised.

“Evening,” the shadow said. “Name’s Nate.”

He was an older man. I think. Five years since the Cull it was already difficult to say, hard living took its toll on some worse than others; youngsters quickly hardened, faces became taught, lines (not laughter, obviously) gathered at corners of eyes and mouths. Plus fallout, starvation, exposure, injury. Who could say? My best guess put this guy at sixty, but he looked older and acted younger. His skin was a uniform teak that gave his face an unreal quality every time he smiled. Perfectly white eyes and teeth lighting up like bulbs set into a dark sculpture.

“Nate,” I repeated. He grinned.

He wore a strange getup, like he’d spent all his life pilfering clothes of a vaguely uniform bent. Tan and khaki camo combat trousers (sorry, pants), a pale blue shirt with an NYPD insignia stitched into the lapel and an outrageous jacket – dark blue, festooned with gold pips and double-buttons – which it took me a moment to recognise as an Union Army antique. I figured he’d looted it from some re-enactment society or fancy dress store, though admittedly – thanks to the scuffs, stains and frays – it did have a century-and-a-half-old look about it. Its effect was simply to add to the overall impression of a uniformed nutter, driven to steal anything vaguely official-looking like a magpie hording shinies.

I resisted the urge to salute.

This curious attempt to look authoritative was undermined somewhat by the accessories he’d chosen: bright red sneakers, a white New York Mets baseball cap and a vivid yellow belt with the most enormous buckle engraved with the legend:

 

POP BITCH

 

There was a dead guy sitting next to him.

Nate followed my glance and his grin faltered a touch. “Ah,” he said again.

The corpse was one of the Clergy-soldiers, though I didn’t recognise him from inside the plane. He didn’t have a hole through his face, for a start.

His grey robes were blackened and singed, spattered with blood and dirty water, and the patches of his skin I could see were just as soiled: peeled back in moist red welts or incised totally by razor-like fragments of shrapnel. One of his arms was hanging off at the shoulder by a few threads of gristle and a notched bony core, and his head was so tattered the scarlet tattoo around his eye was barely visible at all. He sat slumped, semi-upright, against the tangled remains of the same armoured school bus that prowled my recent memories. It reminded me, surreally, of a novelty firework: its front-end all but untouched; the remnants of its length blown-to-shit so totally that their remains barely made any physical sense at all.

The dead Clergyman had been the guy inside. The grenade chucker.

Nate coughed, embarrassed.

A thin rubber tube meandered from a grimy cannula thrust into the corpse’s wrist, out onto the floor where it coiled once or twice towards me, then vanished beneath the edge of my exhausted peripheral vision. I didn’t want to turn my head to confirm it, but I had a pretty good idea where it led.

It was full of blood.

“Not like he needed it...” Nate said, a little surly. “And I disconnected plenty of time before he died.”

Well that’s okay then.

Nate fussed beside me – lifting up the other end of the transfusion tube and waggling it like a glove puppet – and then started tidying away the various equipment he’d scattered on a mostly clean blanket beside me. Stitching needles, bloody rags, sealed packs of military-issue sterilisers and antiseptic pads, and a roll of off-white bandaging that’d come partly unrolled and scampered off along the oil-spattered tarmac.

The horizon still hadn’t come into focus. I was starting to worry.

“Why can’t I see properly?” I asked, finding that I could control my body – just – but was so exhausted it hurt even to think about moving.

Nate scowled for a minute, confused, and peered around us. If I’d had to guess, his expression was one of someone who’d just spent hours saving a stranger from bleeding to death, only to discover they were already vegetative in the brain department.

“Can’t see?” he said.

“It’s... it’s like a... a blur. Like... near-to things are okay, but the further away stuff gets...”

He looked at me like I was a retard.

“Well that,” he said, “is what’s sometimes called fog.”

Even despite the panicky relief, I still had some headroom for feeling like a fuckwit.

“B-but... but it was perfectly clear when the plane... when it...”

“Well, that’s New York for ya.” He waved a dismissive hand, gazing out into the wall of soupy white. “It’s called the quicksmog, eff-why-eye.”

“Eff... what?”

“Eff-why-eye. For Your Info. Sorry... Guy gets sorta used to talking in letters, hanging around with the grunts, you know.” He hooked a thumb towards the slumped body and shook his head. “Soldiers and monks, Jeez-us! Nary the twain should meet.”

I struggled to hang on to a single thread. Nate was the sort of guy who could hold three schizophrenic conversations at once, leaping from tangent to tangent like a monkey on speed. There was a shielded intelligence simmering away in those eyes, too, hiding behind the accent and the daft clothes, but watching everything. Paying attention.

“Quicksmog,” I repeated, bringing him back.

“Yeah, yeah. Guy I knew one time told me it started right after the camel-jocks zapped out dee-see. ’Cause, you know, I wasn’t stateside back then. Never saw the lightshow. But yeah, quicksmog... Comes in quick, goes out quick. Just like that. No rhyme or reason. Doesn’t seem to do much harm, though if you ask me right now it’s a good thing.”

“How come?”

“You kidding? Fucking great plane wreck, burning to shit... sending up a pillar of smoke higher’n a pothead’s prick.” He grinned. “And with your robe-wearin’ pals here gone away, nothing to stop the scavs from coming to take a look.”

Scavs. Robe-wearin’ pals. Camel-jocks zapping DC.

One fucking detail at a time.

Know everything.

Cover the angles.

“There was a sniper... a-and a driver. Guy in the bus. He dead too?” The effort of talking was becoming appalling now; even as the sensations started to return to my numbed arm, the rest of me was screaming for rest.

Nate sniffed, wiping a dewdrop off his nose.

“Well now,” he said. “Your sniper up there, that’s a mean pieceashit Cardinal name of Cy. Near as I can tell he wasn’t milit’ry before the Cull, so I guess something pretty damn nasty musta happened... Man’s fucked in the head but good. Gen-you-ine psycho. Heh.” Nate spat on the ground. “High-up too. Maybe take over from the Abbot some day. See, Cy’s in charge of bringing the freight from the airstrip back to the city. When the bird comes down all wrecked-up like that, and all the kids missin’, he knows straight away his neck’s on the line. That’s how come the Choirboys went in so hard. Cy wanted to have a... a body, whatever. Like: ‘yeah, the airport’s fucked and we didn’t get the Brit tithe, but I caught the guy who did it...’”

“Me?”

“Right. Only he didn’t. And then you come out killin’ every motherfucker left and right, and Cy starts to figure maybe he should stop worryin’ what his boss gonna say, and start saving his ass. So he sends out the bus, all packed-up with grenades and shit, to keep you busy. Maybe even kill you, if he’s lucky.” He nodded towards the shattered school bus. “Soon as old Bertha went kablooie you can bet your ass Cy was hightailing back for the city in the Outrider.”

“Just a diversion?”

“Right. Couple of... sacrificial lambs, you might say. Told to go die so Mister-Hat-Wearin’ fuck gets to breathe another day. I figure he’ll spend the whole journey wondering what to tell the boss. Ask for reinforcements – my guess. Be back here... maybe a day and half? Suggest you get yourself gone by then, huh?”

“And the driver?”

Nate grinned again, and leaned further over. Deep in the shadows of his left eye, all but indiscernible against the blackness of his skin, I could make out the long curve of a scarlet tattoo.

A half circle.

I stiffened.

He waved a set of keys playfully above me, then tossed them over his shoulder.

“Not much left to drive now.”

“You’re... you’re Clergy too?”

He chuckled to himself, lifting up a bundle of something ragged and stinking which I first assumed was a dead dog, and then realised were my clothes.

“Not really,” he said. “Not any more.”

 

 

AN HOUR LATER, Nate and I sat in the alcove beneath the front wall of the shanty-compound, hiding from the wind, listening to the great Welcome sign flapping above us. The quicksmog had surrendered to a sudden squall that darted up with no obvious warning, phasing away into the dark.

Out across the waters encircling the airport, the distant smudge that was the northern reaches of the city faded by degrees into darkness. I’d expected – stupidly – the same neon jungle I’d seen in every film, the same speckled star field of glowing tower blocks printed in every guidebook. The same scene of candle-like serenity glossily reproduced on the cover of the city map I’d plundered from a bookshop in Covent Garden, and sat studying for days and days back in Heathrow, as Bella and I planned the journey. It was still in my pack, that much-thumbed map; not that I needed to look at it any more. I knew all its lines, all its labels, all the red blotches marked on its surface...

But no. From a distance the post-Cull city, just like London, was a haunted place; an inky nothingness flecked here and there by the fragile, sputtering lights of nestled survivors, and the brazen fumes of miniature industry.

Nate had moved me into the shadow of the blue compound’s corrugated walls, across the grass and away from the wreck, as soon as I’d been strong enough to make the journey, bracing me with one arm and lugging my pack with the other. He said it would be best to get away from the plane before true darkness fell. The local scavengers would be slinking in to take a look at what had caused all the commotion, and it was all too easy to get caught up in the scraps and squabbles as they fought over the spoils.

I got the impression he wasn’t talking about coyotes and wild dogs.

Now, on the cusp of night, the air was getting cold and the view growing grim.

The plane still flickered. Things moved in the smoke.

Nate said he was a ‘trustee.’ He said this meant the Clergy sort of employed him, but didn’t expect him to do any of the shit stuff. No evangelising, no indoctrinating, and definitely no acting self-important about the Church’s self-assumed manifest destiny in ushering in the New Dawn of Civilisation.

Actually, what Nate said was, “Those dress-wearing assholes couldn’t get me down with that bullshit even when they were poking guns in my back,” but he meant pretty much the same thing. “Eventually,” he said, “they figured I was worth more alive, tried asking nice instead of just demanding. We’ve all been getting by just fine ever since.”

Until I showed up and slaughtered your mates.

Until your boss ran off like a robe-wearing pussy, and left you behind.

Until you decided to keep me alive rather than kill me whilst you had the chance.

Hmm.

The whole issue of why he’d helped hadn’t been entirely covered yet. I’d taken a bottle of supermarket vodka out of my pack to share with the guy – I figured it was the least I could do – and he was sinking it like a fish. I ought to have felt more grateful, I suppose.

Instead...

Those old instincts. Those old voices.

Know everything.

Don’t you let yourself owe anyone anything.

Sir, yes sir, etc, etc.

Nate said he’d been a little... uncooperative when Cardinal Cy told him to drive out onto the killing-strip just to keep me busy. He said he’d kicked up a fuss at the idea that he should go throw himself into the jaws of the wolf, whilst said Clergyman ran like a custard-coated cockerel. Nate said he’d protested vehemently at the treatment, that he hadn’t signed up as a trustee just to forfeit himself to let some vicious little prick live, and that he’d entered into a considerable argument with his fellow sacrificial lamb when ordered to play kamikaze.

He said eventually the guy chucking grenades out the back had to hold a gun to his head just to get the engine started.

That explained why he wasn’t in any hurry to rejoin the Clergy. Traitor to the cause. Coward. Deserter. Blah-blah-blah.

Fine.

It didn’t explain why he’d gone to so much trouble to keep me alive afterwards.

I asked him.

“More rat?” he said, ignoring me with a bright grin, hacking away at something small and furry with a skinning knife.

I nodded and lifted an empty skewer off the makeshift fire, and jabbed at the slimy morsel he held out. Second only to pigeon.

Over by the plane dark shapes crossed in front of the dancing fires, like inky puddles of moving shadow.

“Still a lot of guns aboard.” I said, tense.

And Bella’s body.

Nate said the scavs wouldn’t be doing any shooting. “Relax,” he said, and passed me the vodka with only the tiniest reluctance. He said that whatever the scavs found, they’d present immediately – with all due ceremony and cringing deference – to their bosses in the Klans. He said that if any of the poor fuckers dared waste a single bullet, and word got back to their bosses, they’d be in the hunt pens or skewered on territory poles before they knew it.

I asked him what the Klans were.

He smiled and bit into his rat.

The wind got colder.

Nate said he’d been a doctor, once.

“Kind of,” he said.

He said he’d been born in the Bronx and miseducated in Harlem, and but for a lucky seduction in a downstate disco would’ve wound up still there, scrabbling for cash and crack. He said that twenty years ago – or so – he got lucky with a rich white chick who fell for his unmistakable charms and took him along to England when her company reassigned her. He said she paid through the nose to set him up. He said she enrolled him in night school to finish his basic, then community college, then – pushing harder – medical training. He said every step of the way he worked his balls off, because it turned out he could handle failure and addiction and crime and poverty, but the one thing he couldn’t handle was seeing her disappointed.

It was all a bit ‘soap opera,’ but I didn’t like to break the flow.

Nate said he flunked the final exams so bad he would’ve done better to leave the question papers blank.

“Morphine addiction,” he explained, staring off into space.

And that, he said, was that.

“Couldn’t you resit?” I asked, picking out rat bones from between my teeth. “Get cleaned up, try again? Seems a bit late in the day to go throwing it all away.”

“Yeah,” he said, and his voice was quiet. “Yeah, you’re right there. Except Sandra – that’s the lady, the... the one who took me over there – she sorta caught me with my pants down.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. With her secretary.”

I looked away, unsure whether to cringe or snigger. “Ah.”

When I looked back, Nate’s expression was... well, sad – obviously – but something else too. Like the face an exec gets when the deal falters at the last meeting. Like the face I used to see on missions, when the grunts and agents round me realised it’d all gone to tits, and people were probably going to die, and it just wasn’t fair. Like... frustration, maybe. A sense of annoyance at circumstances beyond one’s control.

Which is sort of weird, given that it was all his fault.

Something dark flitted through the shadows outside the circle of light cast by the fire. Nate stared at it for a moment, utterly untroubled, and spat into the flaming logs.

He said – the story rumbling on as if uninterrupted – that the money dried up pretty quick after that. He said he only realised how much he’d appreciated her (and/or her cash, depending on how you wanted to interpret it) when it was too late. Sandra cleared off, heartbroken. He let things slide. His visa hiccupped and lit up alarms on a Home Office computer, and before he knew it he was Nathaniel C. Waterstone of no fixed abode, with a deportation warrant next to his name and a brand new shiny heroin addiction to support.

I coughed as politely as I could, aware that this man had just sewed me up. “So when you said you’d been a doctor...”

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “Kind of.”

He looked away and sighed, as if he could see all the way across the Atlantic from where he sat. “London, man. Docklands, Tower Hamlets, the East End. Plenty of places they pay good money for a guy knows what he’s doing with needles. Someone... unofficial. You know?”

Nate said he’d been a backstreet sawbones. Mob cutter. Bullets removed, knife wounds cleaned, bodies disposed: no questions asked. I guess I believed him, mostly.

He had an honest face.

Out across the roughage bordering the airstrip, somebody yelped. There were voices out there too – masked by the crackling of our little fire, muttering and arguing. More shapes darting in the dark.

“Scavs.” Nate shrugged.

I kept a hand on the M16 and asked what would happen to the bodies of the men aboard the plane. I didn’t mention Bella. I wasn’t sure why, at the time, but I know now. Even then, sitting with Nate in the cold, the scratching at the back of my head was gearing up...

Something about him.

“Depends,” he said.

“On what?”

“On what Klans they’re with. Mostly they’ll just... steal clothes, leave the bodies. Coupla tinpot tribes up west got a thing for fresh meat, way I heard, but no way we’ll get that shit down here. Guy I knew once – you’ll like this – said you go through ess-eye these days – that’s Staten Island, you know? – you’re a... heh... a goddamn moveable feast. They got crossbows and arrows, man, he says. They got fuckin’ spit roasts, and I don’t mean like in no porno.

“Up here, nah. Nah. Civilised, man. Welcome to Queens.”

His grin lit up his face. With Nate, you never knew how serious he was being.

I asked him again to tell me about the Klans. He chuckled and lit a cigarette.

When the Cull started, he said, and folks started dying in the streets of London, he was holed-up with a gang of Albanians. He said up ‘til then he’d been passing from group to group – Triads, Afghans, Jamaicans, even the old-school suit-wearing Pie and Chips brigade. He said these Kalashnikov-waving psychos took him on as a kind of examiner: checking the girls they ferried-in from the continent, making sure they’d last in the massage parlours and interactive peep-booths. Nate said he’d never stared at so much pussy in his life, and there came a point where it sort of stopped having any attraction.

He said at around the same time, he decided to go cold turkey.

He looked away again.

I got the impression there was more to it than that. But sitting out there in the cold with a fresh bandage on my arm and a half-digested rat inside me, listening to human filth arguing in the dark over guns and knives and all the other shit I’d left behind on the plane, I didn’t have the heart to probe.

The thing was, someone almost certainly made Nate give up the skag. Maybe someone helped him, nursed him through it, whatever. I don’t know. But the thing about Nate was, the thing I could tell within seconds of meeting the guy; he wasn’t the kind who made decisions. Not on his own. He wasn’t the kind to lead the way.

“Was eight days into the detox when the... the virus, you know? When it got as bad as it got. I had me a... a TV, little one, in the room. News shows, back to back. Bodies on the streets, hospitals over flowing. Pretty much all the Albanians dropped right there. Spat blood, hit the deck. I’m telling you, man, the stink...Rest of them upped and gone. Tried to get home, maybe. Everyone’s got a family, huh?”

He sighed.

“I tell you, man... I was scared. There’s me, pissing outta my ass, shivering, puking, all that shit, immune system fucked to hell, and the end-of-goddamn-times plague outside my door. Just about gave up.”

I remembered too. London. Chaos. Panic. It was weeks before they could tell why some people survived. Why most didn’t. Revealed little by little on garbled TV shows and home-printed leaflets, in that spasmodic time before the media gave up the ghost.

“But I survived,” Nate said. “Fuck, yeah. Came out clean.”

And so did I.

What I remember most is, the unfairness.

I suppose I always felt I was lucky. Due a fall, surely, but there I was, winning a lottery I never even bought a ticket for. Outside there’s priests and nurses and charitable souls rotting on the pavement, and here’s me – he’s a fucking killer – breathing clear.

It didn’t seem right.

It’s a weird thing, feeling guilty for being alive.

“Anyways,” said Nate, flicking a chunk of wood onto the fire from a stack beside the corrugated wall, “that put the cap on doctoring.”

He said he’d wandered in London for a year or two. He hinted he’d done his best to help where he could – triage, treatment, tidying – but I guess there was always a price.

Nate didn’t exactly radiate selflessness.

After two years the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn was up and running. I remember that too. The Abbot broadcasting his miraculous sermon every Sunday, the crowds gathering, the scarlet tattoos and chanted prayers.

The robe-wearing creeps strolled straight out onto the charred remains of the world stage, and declared that they alone – as an entity embracing values of community, integrity, intelligence and of course faith – could sweep aside the horrors of the Cull and work towards a new, restored civilisation.

They said that they alone could overcome the ‘inertia gripping humanity’ and rebuild, recreate, restart!

Those.

Arrogant.

Fucks.

They came to London and spread the word. I ignored them.

They said for most people it was too late. The world they’d known was long gone. They said the people could console themselves with living as best they could, embracing Jesus, making the most of their lives in the rubble. They said devoting oneself to the Neo-Clergy was the only expression of purity and hope for the average man.

But for the children... for the children, there was so much more. Innocent, unsullied by the calamities of the past, not responsible for the sins that had visited the Cull upon the world. For them the future was clear. So said the Clergy.

They must build a new dawn.

So the priests came and got them.

At gunpoint, sometimes. But mostly they didn’t even need to threaten, mostly it was parents waving goodbye, smiling, proud of their contribution to the world, and that was the worst thing of all.

The church ferried the kids off in blue-painted planes, and ignored the tears and shrieks, and told everyone, everyone involved:

Be grateful.

They were going somewhere better, the Clergy said.

Sitting there in the cold, listening to Nate’s story, my eyes plucked at the huge banner above me. I shivered.

“They brought them here,” I grunted, shaking my head. “The kids. Didn’t they?”

Nate nodded.

“Why? What do they do with them? Where’s this... this fucking new tomorrow?”

Nate shrugged, took a slurp of water from a screw cap cantina, and carried on with his story like he’d barely stopped to breathe.

Nate said the Clergy found him on the streets of London. They’d heard he was a doctor. They said they might have a need for someone like that. They might even raise him up to a state of grace. Besides, they said, he was already American.

They had two conditions:

“Number one,” he said, “they told me I got to have faith. I told them if they gimme a job and food and somewhere warm to sleep, I’ll believe whatever the hell they want.

“And number two, they said I gotta go back to New York.”

He stopped, and looked for a second or two like he wasn’t going to continue. It was strange to see. Nate’s natural state was ‘droning,’ and every time he stopped to stare off into the darkness with those spotlight eyes it was... disconcerting. “So you came back,” I said. “And did what?”

He looked at me for a second – proper eye contact, for the first time – then away again. Someone screamed playfully out by the wreck.

“Same as before, more or less. Ironic, huh? Just like the Albanians. Checking over the produce when it arrives. Making sure it’s fit to travel. No sickness, no frailty. Clergy only wants the best.”

“You inspected the kids?”

“Right. Shit, I was in charge of them. Clumsy old guy with a friendly face and a dumb costume. Made jokes. Patched up cuts and scrapes. Told ’em all everything would be just fine. Drove the bus into the city, came right back for the next batch. London, Paris, Moscow. Planes comin’ in from all over.”

“So you’re the ferryman to the New Dawn?” I said, trying out a little sarcasm; seeing how the old man would react.

Know everything.

Check the angles.

He smiled, a little too slowly, then nodded. “I like that,” he said. “Yeah, I like that.”

Something rustled nearby. A spreading whisper of cloth and feet. My hand tightened on the M16, eyes scanning the shadows, but Nate waved a laconic hand in my direction and grinned.

“No need, man.”

Not reassuring.

Something oozed out of the dark. Something hesitant and filthy, matted and feathered down each flank of its raggedy form. Something that broke-up as the firelight caught it; separated down by degrees into an aggregate. A crowd of people.

Staring, all as one, at the meat roasting over the flame.

They came into the light like a single entity, scuttling on far too many legs. They looked – random thought here – like extras from the set of a war film: recognisably human but coated in the makeup department’s finest emulations of soot, dirt and dried blood, scampering with that expression of people who don’t know what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. Several had fresh wounds – nicks and cuts from knives and teeth – and eyed each other warily.

The ones at the front carried themselves with a seniority based on whatever Byzantine pecking order was at work, clutching in their dirty hands stolen guns, scraps of clothing, bundles of chemical ephemera and all types of other salvage taken from the plane. One was holding a seatbelt buckle, smiling with the smug expression of someone who’d outperformed herself. Another one – a young man – had Bella’s jeans slung over his shoulder.

The M16 felt good in my hand.

Let it go, soldier.

Sir, yes sir, etc, etc.

“Well, then...” said Nate, reclining back against the compound wall with as much disinterested ease as he’d shown before the darkness disgorged them. “What can we do for you?”

I think I half expected them to speak in grunts and moans, if at all. They looked so devolved, so fucking prehistoric, that at that point it wouldn’t have surprised me if they’d dropped down and worshipped the ‘Great Fire Makers.’

It sounds arrogant, now I come to say it. I mean... why should they be any less coherent than me? Why should their five years of hardship and filth be any less dignified than mine?

“We smelt the rat,” a tall woman said, near the front. She reminded me of someone, and a shiver worked its way along my spine.

Shut that shit down, soldier. Job to do.

Nate shrugged. “And?”

“And we thought maybe you’d trade.”

Nate shook his head. “No trades.”

“But... see?” The woman plucked a plastic drinking beaker out of a raggedy pack, brandishing it like a jewel. “Good, see? Perfect for trading, that is. See what I’ve g...”

Nate’s voice hardened a little. His face stayed the same. “No. Trades.”

The scavs flitted a few awkward glances back and forth, then the tall woman’s eyes went sneaky. Heavy-lidded and intense, like a child conspiring to do mischief.

“We could take...” she said, quietly, acting nonchalant.

Nate chuckled to himself.

“You could,” he said. “Yep.”

The scavs shuffled, shifted their weight from foot to foot. Here and there a blade twinkled in the firelight, and my heart twisted in my chest: speeding up, blurring time.

Endorphins washed down me.

Muscles tensed.

An old man shuffled to the front, dark blue sweater decorated with stripes of white paint, and I watched him with the targeted eye of a predator.

“What Klan?” he wheezed. “Mm?”

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” Nate ginned. The M16’s grip was warm now, heated by my own palm.

All at once the scavs twitched; a great roiling ball of motion, and without a single conscious thought I was lifting the gun and reaching for the arming bolt and...

Nate’s hand sat on the barrel, holding it down. He gave me a look, shook his head, and grunted towards the scavs. They hadn’t been attacking at all.

They stood brandishing themselves, like a medical examination taking place en masse. In each case the proffered elbow, shoulder, arm, stomach, neck or ankle was decorated by a small mark. A burnt branding-scar in the shape of a smiling face, eyes like double-arches above a mountainous nose, with a pair of satellite ears protruding on each side.

“Mickeys,” said Nate. He gave me a doting smile, like an old man discussing the merits of different chess pieces, and said: “Respectable Klan, that.”

“Trade now?” the woman said. “Or we’ll help ourselves.”

“What Klan?” the old man whispered, hopping from foot to foot. “What-Klan-what-Klan-what-Klan?”

Nate tilted his head back, letting the fire chase away the shadows beneath the brim of his cap. The scarlet semicircle seemed to blaze on his cheek.

“Clergy...” went the whisper. A fearful susurration rushing around the crowd. “Godshits... Choirboys... Fuckin’ Clergy...”

And then they were gone.

Nate and I sat in silence. Eventually I coughed under my breath and asked him, third time lucky, if he’d tell me about the Klans.

He gave me a funny look, smirked quietly, and said:

“Shit, man. What you think I bin doing?”