CHAPTER SIX

 

 

THE CONSOLIDATED EDISON Power Plant facility, directly off Astoria’s Twentieth Avenue, was a continental wedge of pipes, cables, depots, spinal chimneys, blocky storage tanks and stark structures like geometric skeletons made from girders. All of it pressed up against the same polluted, watery banks as the airport. There was something undeniably sepulchral about it. A knotted tangle of hip-like joists, vertebral chains linking moving assemblies, and skull-like containers that had long since lost their sheen.

Nate had brought me here at first light, when I’d told him I needed transport.

He hadn’t asked me why. He hadn’t asked me what I was here to achieve.

Hadn’t told me why he was tagging along.

Hmm.

Standing outside the power plant, it was plain to see the whole place was inactive. Rusted to fuck; plundered for raw materials, stripped apart in a million acts of petty vandalism and selfish salvage.

There was red bunting dangling above the concourse as we stepped off the street – giving the whole thing an air of ludicrousness – and the corrosion-melted gates slumped awkwardly, reminding me of reclining figures watching the world go by. The health and safety signs above their heads had been neatly crossed through with red spray paint, and someone had erected a billboard above the entrance, which read simply:

 

WHEELS

 

I felt someone staring, that same old prehistoric instinct, and glanced around, with hairs prickling, for the culprit. Only when I looked directly up did I find him: a dead head, sockets empty, skin tattered, lipless jaws set in a timeless grin. This grisly voyeur sat mounted on a telegraph pole; cables stripped away and its solid girth painted in stripes of tar and red paint.

“The fuck does that mean?” I asked, nodding up at it.

“Territory marker,” Nate mumbled, smoking a straw-like cigarette. One of mine. “Black and red means this is en-tee.”

I gave him a blank look. The acronym thing was starting to piss me off.

“Neutral Territory,” he grinned, pointing further into the plant’s network of alleys and avenues, all festooned with the same black and red flags and bunting. “No Klan business.”

“So the dead guy...?”

Nate shrugged, drooling smoke. “Maybe picked a fight. Got outbid, tried to pull pecking rank. Who knows? Maybe just an unlucky schmo inna wrong place when someone wanted to make a point. Folks that run the en-tees don’t take kindly to rule-breakers. They can afford to enforce, y’see?”

Like so much that poured from his mouth, Nate’s casual explanations mixed the common sense with the bewildering. Pecking ranks, territory markers... it was all the stuff of just another drug-dream. A revisit to the malleable memories and landscapes of the Bliss trip. But still, I wasn’t entirely in the dark. I’d spent much of the morning at the airport dozing and thinking, listening to the old man snore, picking his brains about the Klan-system whenever he deigned to wake.

If I understood one tenth of what he’d said, during the Culling year, New York – not to put too fine a point on it – had gone straight to hell. He’d painted a picture of streets clogged up with empty cars, skeletons tangled along sidewalks. Of the military running out of control with water cannons and teargas. Of riots like full scale wars and whole blocks burning to ash on the grounds of a single suspected infection. He hadn’t been there – he was still in London at that point – but, leaving aside the narrator’s propensity for hyperbole, it still wasn’t easy listening.

What was certain was the Klan system. In a weird sort of way, despite everything, I was impressed by it. It was easy to see how it must have started, and at the back of my mind – beyond the doubts and disapprovals – it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Like some new species released onto the savannah, frightened herds running together; accreting like shit flowing into a bowl.

Strength in numbers.

Pack mentality.

The oldest instincts in the book.

The way Nate told it, the Klans all had their origins in different places. Maybe some grew up around whichever politicians survived the Cull and got lucky, outside of Washington when the nuke skyburst. You can imagine that happening, maybe. Little guys in suits, standing on stone steps, kicking up a fuss. Like you used to get in Hyde Park, like Speakers’ Corner every Sunday. Angry men and women on stools and ladders, spouting fire and brimstone. Since the Cull, they would have been kings.

Still... it’s a big step from there to gang colours, to skin brandings, to closed territories and aggressive expansion and nightly raids and sallying-forth and midnight skirmishes and blood in the gutters...

The night before, as Nate explained this stuff, as I told him I just didn’t see rational people acting so dumb, sinking so low, he stopped with a grin and said:

“Desperate times, man.”

The main driveway along the interior of the power plant took a sharp corner, every inch of the way draped in swatches of fabric and makeshift adverts. Most carried the names of food stalls and barter points (promising FARE TRADE, WIDE SELECSION, ALL SCAV CONSIDERD), branded in each case with iconic images of bygone snacks; hotdogs, burgers, bagels. I found my mouth watering at the memory of such extravagant-seeming meals, and asked Nate what the stalls really traded.

“Rat,” he said, not looking around. “It’s all rat.”

Some of the Klans, maybe, came up from less obvious sources. Lantern-jawed drill sergeants discovering they had no country left to fight for, nobody left to shriek at, no way of draining off the dynamo-level testosterone. Civic leaders, celebrities, lawyers. The local bloody postman. It didn’t take much, back at the start, to be the centre of a pack; to let something comfortable and secure grow around you. Maybe some of those putative mobs – coalescing and running together – could even claim they’d formed their miniature little states for all the right reasons. Nate told me one of the Klans, back at the start, was called the ‘Thin Blues.’ Bunch of NYPD grunts, he said, banding together, facing down the chaos. He said that to start with they even had a decent stab at maintaining the peace; driving about, making arrests, shooting looters. He used the word ‘altruistic,’ which sounded weird when he said it, and tricky to take seriously.

He said it didn’t last long.

He said ever since then, the Thin Blues had been one of the smaller Klans.

Inside the industrial sprawl of the Con Ed facility we reached a checkpoint, where two enormous blokes in black clothes and red bandanas stood divesting everyone of weapons. A small queue of raggedy scavs had formed, and beyond the canvas-draped checkpoint I could see the peristaltic movement of large crowds, deeper inside the facility. It made me nervous. In London, the only time you saw that many people gathered together was for the Abbot’s sermons, and just thinking about those left a bad taste in my mouth.

I watched the guards frisking and checking, allocating each person a number to be used in recollecting their guns and knives, and tilted my head towards Nate.

“What Klan are they?” I asked, nodding towards the muscular goons.

“Right now,” he said, “no Klan at all. Neutral Territory, remember? They’re being paid to keep it that way.”

As if to reinforce this point, the guards commanded each entrant to display his or her Klan marking. Elbows and shoulders were silently brandished, knees held out, necks craned, and I caught a few fleeting glimpses of the squiggles and meaningless icons depicting each different group. In every case the guard quickly tied a black rag, plucked from a filthy basket, around the scar; hiding the brand from sight.

“Neutral,” was all that Nate said.

We reached the front of the queue and caused something of a commotion. For a start, Nate’s branding could hardly be covered with a simple piece of rag – unless he was prepared to submit to blindfolding, which he wasn’t – but it was the nature of the mark itself that really got them riled. They kept exchanging looks, clenching their jaws, wondering out loud if they should fetch the ‘em-bee.’

More fucking acronyms. Nate seemed to be enjoying all the consternation.

He’d explained it to me last night, the instant that the scavs he’d called ‘Mickeys’ scuttled off into the dark.

“The Neo-Clergy,” he said, “the mighty New Church, the holier-than-thou warrior priests of the New Dawn, were really just another Klan.”

Oh, a big one, to be sure. The biggest. The de-facto rulers of New York, whose powerbase gave them an administrative control over all the others, but still...

It hadn’t seemed possible, somehow. How could something so mundane, so seedy, as this feudal mob have spread across the devastated world to make its claims of ushering-in a new future? From angry thugs to architects of tomorrow.

According to Nate, the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn started out as a band of raggedy-arsed bastards calling themselves The Choirboys. They had no particular defining features – besides a reputation for being twisted little shits – and would have languished in obscurity had they not encountered the man named John-Paul Rohare Baptiste.

No one knew much about him. No one knew where he’d come from or who he’d been. All they knew was that he shouldn’t be alive, and he proved it to them over and over again, with tests and samples and nothing-up-his-sleeves, just as he had continued to do every week on his detestable fucking TV show.

The Blight should have got him. He should have been Culled.

But he lived anyway.

Under his guidance, and the fluttering banner of his self-declared divinity, the Klan swelled like a tumour. It came to the point they could have challenged and annihilated any other group they chose, but they didn’t. They simply tuned out from the power struggle, announced that their intentions had transcended the merely territorial, and elected themselves into a position of magisterial arbitration.

Nowadays they monitored the others, like proud parents adjudicating the play-fighting of toddlers. They formalised the squabbles and scuffles, they leant their backing to whichever Klans they favoured, they provided weapons and drugs (their most valuable currencies), and in return they demanded The Tithe.

Oh yeah...

The Tithe.

“Every child above age five,” Nate had said the night before, like reading from a scripture written inside his eyelids, “and below age eighteen, to be inducted into the ay-see-arr-dee.”

That’s Apostolic Church of the etc, etc.

They’d spread the good news across the oceans. They’d conquered the airwaves when all other frequencies had fallen silent. They’d taken responsibility for the future when all the starving, dribbling politicians and leaders and generals left behind could not, and then they’d made it their business to take charge of the children.

They’d made the people want to give up their own kids. And they were just another New York gang.

I found myself wishing I’d taken a little longer with the fuckers inside the plane.

Eventually, loving every minute of the guards’ continuing bewilderment, Nate dug from his pocket a tattered eye patch and covered over his half-tattoo. He looked like he’d done this sort of thing before. The goons all but fainted in relief; apologising with twenty shades of uncharacteristic pomposity and explaining that members of ‘The Great Klan’ so rarely visited the Mart, they were unprepared. It’s one of those sights that sticks in the mind: two seven-foot yetis fawning and scraping over a scrawny old git dressed like a tramp with a uniform fetish. Nate clucked and swaggered along the concourse.

The guards turned to me and let the panicky hysteria fade from their grizzled faces. They took my gun, glancing at it with suspicious eyes that said how inna hell did you come by this, little man? and told me to show them my Klan marking.

“Ah,” I said.

The way it worked, Nate had told me, was that you had your Klansmen, and then you had your scavs. The scavs were like livestock. Their loyalties determined by whichever mob happened to rule the territory in which they’d chosen to eke out their lives. Some went wherever their Klans went, or chose the most profitable or benevolent of regimes to nuzzle up to. Others were just spoils, like land taken in territorial scuffles; unceremoniously re-branded as the occasion required.

It sounded feudal. It sounded fucking stupid.

“Why don’t they just leave?” I’d said, in the airport, as Nate explained. “Why don’t they just rebel? There must be thousands of them.”

“They do.” Nate shrugged. “All the time. Not a day goes by there ain’t a little... revolution, uprising, whatever. Chaos on the streets, every fucking night. But here’s the thing: you want a way to share out scavenged shit, or food, or whatever you got? Klans’re the only way.”

“Bullshit.”

“Not bullshit. Good sense. And if not good sense then natural-fucking-order.” He’d licked his lips, waving a hand as he hunted down an example. “Let’s say you’re a... a young girl, right? Only just escaped the tithe. No parents. No weapons. No friends or food. Who’s gonna stick up for you? Who’s gonna make sure that shitty squat you found to sleep in don’t get raided, or burnt down, or torn-up by some crackhead rapist? Huh?”

I’d shaken my head, unable to bring myself to agree, but I could see what he was getting at. Just.

“And what if you’re not helpless?” I’d said. “You’ve still got to... toe the fucking line. Join up, act like a piece of property, get branded like a sodding cow.”

“Yes, you do. Yes, you do. But the only way is up. And what happens when you impress one of the hotshots, huh? Or maybe cosy-up to the Klanboss? Or kill someone in the communal bad-books?”

I’d shaken my head again.

“Promotion.” He grinned. “Become a Klansman. Free to carry weapons. Free to roam. Work your way up. Maybe one day challenge for the top spot.”

“And if you fuck up?”

His voice had gone quiet, all but lost behind the crackling fire.

“Then you out on your ear. And you better hope you can take care of yourself, or else find someone who can.”

Talking about himself, again. Just like always.

Nate said the Klansmen wore gang colours, and let their brands heal over. They got to carry weapons and administer internal justice and expand territories and all the other bullshit war games you can imagine. They played at being generals, gladiators, law enforcers and conquistadors. They got all the best gear. They had first choice of any scav, ate the best pickings, collected on debts, upheld the Klan’s integrity and generally acted big.

I told Nate I was shaking in my boots. I’m not sure if he knew I was joking.

Back to the power plant.

“I don’t have a brand,” I told the guards.

“You ain’t a scav?” One of them ran his eyes up and down my pitiful clothing. “Look like a scav.”

“Fully paid-up Klansman,” I said, smiling, knocking-out my best US accent and still managing to sound (in my head, at least) like I was taking the piss.

I was.

“Yeah?” The guard said, looking like he’d already had a bad day and couldn’t be arsed with it getting any worse. “What Klan?”

I thought for a moment, smiled sweetly and said:

“The Culled.”

They let me through, eventually, and as I passed him by the biggest goon grumbled, half-hearted.

“No Klan business inside.”

I grinned and told him to perish the thought.

 

 

AS WE PASSED the checkpoint and wound our way further into the facility, I caught Nate staring at me, like some freakish version of a pirate, uncovered eye twinkling.

He’d been carrying my pack since the airport – to spare my shoulder, he said – and now he unslung it carefully onto the floor, staring at me with a curious smile.

I wondered for the fiftieth time what he was hoping to get out of all this. Out of helping me. Out of saving my life and bringing me here.

Call me cynical, but Nate didn’t strike me as the sort of guy to do something for nothing.

“Take another cigarette?” he asked.

He’d earned it. Of course he had.

Currency’s currency.

“Go ahead.”

But as he dipped his hands inside the pack they moved with a speed and confidence that betrayed all kinds of stuff, if you’re a paranoid bastard like me. If you know what you’re looking for.

Familiarity.

Confidence.

Avarice.

When he saved my life, when he made the choice to attach himself to me rather than kill me, as I lay with a dying man’s blood pulsing into my veins, he’d had hours and hours to go through the bag. Was that it? Was that all there was to him staying with me?

He’d seen the goods and wanted to earn his share?

No. No that made no sense. He could have just let me bleed out, let me die there on the runway, then taken it all for himself.

What then?

That same scratching. That same itching something at the back of my mind.

Something not quite right.

Something not adding up.

“Nate.”

“Mm?” he said, sparking the cigarette.

Just ask, dammit...

“Why are you helping me?”

The air smelt of salt and car fumes. For a long time, there was silence.

He watched me. Eyes unmoving.

“Thought we’d established that,” he said, slowly, as if I was being ungrateful. As if I’d told him I didn’t need him.

“Try again,” I said, gently.

He sighed. Pursed his lips.

“I walked out on the Clergy, pal. Saved my own skin when I shoulda... shoulda died like a martyr. That’s what they expect. Thoughtless obedience, you understand?”

“So?”

“So if they catch up with me, it’s... It’ll be...” He looked away, face fearful, and coughed awkwardly. Another long suck on the cigarette, calming his nerves.

“Anyway,” he said. “I seen you in action.”

“And?”

“I kept you alive, raggedy-man. Now all you got to do is return the favour.”

And it was an explanation, I suppose. It made sense. It all added up.

And underneath it all the dark voice in my mind, shouting:

Don’t you fucking give up, soldier.

Don’t you get distracted, boy.

Don’t you let things slip.

Sir, no sir, etc, etc.

Nate was helping me. Because of him I was healthy enough to carry on; to get the job done; to go after it like a flaming fucking sword. Everything else was just dross. Everything else was just peripheral shit that didn’t matter. Who cared why Nate was helping me? He’d given his explanation. Now move on.

Except, except, except.

Except that as Nate dropped the cigarettes back into the bag his hand paused – a split second, no more – next to the battered city map with its New York scrawl and red ink notes, and his lips twitched. A fraction. Just a fraction.

Then he caught me staring, and closed up the pack with a friendly smile, and led me further inside the power plant.

I took the pack and shouldered it myself.

“How you feeling?” he said, as we walked. “Got your strength back? Lot of blood you lost, back there.”

Reminding me. Keeping me indebted.

Not subtle, Nate.

“I’m peachy,” I told him, a little colder than I’d meant.

Basic training, year two:

Call in favours. Get people good and beholden. Make friends. Make the fuckers owe you one.

But don’t you let yourself owe anyone anything. You hear me, soldier? Don’t you get yourself in arrears. Don’t you feel obliged to take care of anyone.

People are parasites, boy. They see something strong, they clamp on.

They slow you down.

They complicate shit.

“Just peachy,” I mumble-repeated, morose.