CHAPTER FIFTEEN

 

 

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 dee-see 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 a don’t-mess-with-us air 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 remnants 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.

Someone had painted ‘THICKER THAN WATER’ in black tar across a fifty-foot expanse of the parking lot. I wondered if it would be visible from space.

Next to Malice, in the cab, was where Spuggsy sat. Well, reclined anyway. Lazed.

Slobbed.

Spuggsy, from what little I’d seen, wasn’t much of an engineer. Granted, he had a gift for smoothing out the most angular of mechanical kinks, although I couldn’t help noticing his technique tended to involve hitting things hard with a spanner until they started making the right noises. He was short and plump, and as bald as a cueball, and sat there flicking lazily through porno mags with an expression of unconquerable boredom. His one concession to arousal was the copious sweat oozing off his chubby face, but given that it remained even when he wasn’t browsing Anal Carnage, Wet Domination or whatever the hell it was, that didn’t mean much. When he spoke it was with an enthusiastically sleazy good nature – like a mischievous schoolboy who discovered German hardcore before he discovered snot-eating contests – and I found myself liking him and wanting to disinfect him in equal measure.

The Cross Bronx Expressway petered out in a fug of chipped road segments – mottled like they’d been in a firefight – and then the Hudson was below us, wide and shimmering and almost passable for clean. The George Washington Bridge stood just as solid and untroubled as always, as if this ‘end of humanity’ business was a passing fad by which it was neither impressed nor concerned. A couple of scavs had hanged themselves from the rails on one side (I like to think it was a tragic death-pact between lovers despairing of this cold new world... but it could just as easily have been a drunken dare) and a crowd of others was tugging them down as we passed by. Tugging a little too violently, actually, with knives and roasting-sticks in hand and a fat man building a campfire, waving away the gulls like the unwanted competition they were.

Tora kept them covered from the pintle-cannons all the way past.

“Fucking cannies,” she spat.

Tora was sort of weird. She came from Japanese stock, she said – a heart-shaped face and dark hair (dyed deep blue at its tips), with a delicate sweep to the edges of her eyes and a nose like a button – and was one of the most mixed-up women I’ve ever known. Not beautiful exactly, but she knew how to move, had an attitude you wouldn’t believe and could easily have flirted for her country. But it was skewed – the whole thing – like you knew somehow she was damaged; fucked up deep inside, and everything she did was just a façade to create the impression of humanity. She used sexual friendliness like a battering ram. Like an act of aggression. Her arms were covered – wrist to shoulder – in thin little scars where she’d cut herself, and she sat in the dangling canopy above our heads – half poking out to man the guns – singing a pretty song and carving new tally-marks into her skin. I asked her about it, later on. She shrugged and said:

“Why do you scratch when you’ve got an itch?”

“To make it feel better.”

“Uh-huh.”

I never found out what had happened to her – shit, maybe she was just born that way – but you could see it every time she looked at you, or spoke to you, or smiled. Like... just behind the veil, behind the spunky playful bollocks and cleavage-jutting body language, she was eyeing that scalpel and wondering just how deep she’d have to cut to make all the itches go away.

We bounced into New Jersey in a blur; Malice finally able to throttle up all the way. Fort Lee, Leonia; names on crooked signs that drifted by without any sensation of reality. Just echoes of something that might once have had some significance, but now... nothing. Skeletons on the edge of the road – picked clean – and blasted wrecks that jutted and trailed, forcing us to slow. Highway 80, place names fogging-by.

Hackensack.

Saddlebrook.

Elmwood Park.

At one point, Malice muttered something darkly to Spuggsy – spotting something ahead – who huffed and dropped his magazines and scrambled back towards us, poking Nike and Moto awake from their nest of sleeping bags and telling Tora to stand by. The Inferno jinked hard to one side; overtaking.

It was strange to see another vehicle on the open road; but even stranger to see one so... normal. I’d expected dune-buggy gangs, flame-jobs, hotrods and... oh, I don’t know. Nuclear-fucking-powered bulldozers, maybe. Skull-hurling catapults. Something a little more... survivalist.

Passing an HGV hauling a trailer marked Cheesy Snax was pretty surreal.

A couple of heads poked warily from the roof – guns arrayed cautiously towards us, just in case – and I spotted square slits in the corrugated sides of the container, bulging with naked flesh and squinting eyes.

“Workers,” Tora told me, swinging in her harness. “’Burb Klans. Scavs work the fields, different shifts going back and forth all the time.”

“Dangerous?”

“To us? Pfft.”

But still, but still... It was tense, as we passed them by, and Moto stared back at them – through the square porthole above the rear gun mount – for long minutes afterwards.

Moto and Nike kept themselves to themselves, mostly. The former was a well-built young man with startling white hair and an almost perfect face. I figured before the Cull he was maybe a model in cologne commercials, or a male escort, and he looked simply wrong – out of place, somehow – in the midst of all us raggedy bastards in the back of the Inferno. Actually, scratch that: he looked almost out of place. His one concession to chaos and ugliness was worn proud on his cheek. A mess, shredded and rippled in all kinds of gravely keloid contours, so that his lip and eye were all but joined by the matted tangle of scarring.He’d been whipped with barbed-wire, Spuggsy told me later with an indecent grin. Held down by a bunch of thugs and whipped carefully – lovingly, almost – by Nike. He didn’t say why.

Towns went by. The quicksmog came down, hid the distant rooftops and tree-lined avenues, then went back up again.

Denville.

Roxybury.

Netlong.

Hills and gorge-blasted roads, the weak sun, the Inferno rumbling ever on.

That scar on Moto’s cheek, I figured it was like a brand. Like some jealous tribal elder, maybe, defacing his young spouse to dissuade all thoughts of adultery. Maybe it was punishment. Some quiet misdeed, some jealous retribution. Fucksakes, who knows? The types of people out there these days, for all I knew Nike might have done it to improve the poor kid’s face according to his own twisted tastes.

Either way, it was a mark – a signature – left by Nike, that said loud and clear:

Mine.

Moto said pretty much nothing to anyone except Nike for the whole journey, and when he did it was quiet and deferential, and he turned his face to one side so that all anyone ever saw of him was the scar. He seemed quite happy. They seemed quite happy.

Love, huh?

Nike, by comparison, was tall and skinny, quite old, I’d guess, and a perfect gentleman in every way. He nodded and smiled, and passed the time of day, and traded dirty songs with Nate. Towards the end of the first day, when Malice swapped with Spuggsy for a kip, Nike chatted to me about what sort of state London was in. He told me how he used to be a teacher – American history – and collected model aircraft for a hobby.

Everything about him oozed calm, rational, intelligent, polite decency.

And then you happened to glance at Moto, staring like a devoted dog at the older man, face all fucked up like that, and you wondered.

We stopped for a bite to eat on the freeway, just outside a place called Knowlton. Nate cooked, giggling and dancing annoyingly. The Inferno carried a heap of supplies as part of the cost of rental, and amongst the tins and rats there were three actual chickens and a genuine, freshly baked loaf of bread. If it’s possible for your tongue to have an orgasm, mine did.

Mostly we sat by the fire – silent – although 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, turned his 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 that 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.

Poor fuckers.

I chewed rat and didn’t think about it.

Somewhere nearby, Nate was singing a song to himself and laughing after every verse. Totally wasted, totally out of his tree. It would have been funny – would have been endearing – if he didn’t glance up every now and again, all casual, and stare at Malice’s kid. I was noticing it now. The little hint of... what? Intensity, that visited his face in those moments.

I shivered again.

The crew slept in shifts. Two on watch at all times. Malice volunteered to take the last shift alone and I offered to accompany her. She shrugged, like:

Do what you want, asshole. It’s your lack of sleep.

I dreamed of seagulls wearing robes, man-sized spliffs running up and down along the George Washington Bridge on little stubby feet, and of a great wound in the heart of New York, bleeding a fine mist of quicksmog up into the air, where it separated into colossal blood cells that floated and wobbled like lava-lamp clouds.

I dreamed of Bella saying:

“Doesn’t matter. Not your problem. But that’s why I’m going.”

Then she flopped over in my arms, gave me a look of bored disinterest, and poked me in the rigs.

“Hey,” she said. “Hey, Patchwork...”

Malice, waking me up for the watch. I tried to conceal my hard-on.

 

 

“SO.”

“So.”

“What’s this all about?”

I scratched my manky ear through its equally-as-manky dressing. “Which ‘this,’ specifically?”

She nodded out into the dark.

“Going west. Highway 80. Lake Erie. What’s there, patchwork man?”

I smiled.

“Probably nothing.”

She thought about that for a moment. “That’s a long way to go. Lot of trouble, for probably nothing.”

We sat in silence for a minute or two, listening to the deafening silence of the world. It wasn’t a cold night, exactly, but there was something... shivery, yeah, about such profound darkness. Like living in oil.

Yeah, we had a rifle each. And yeah, we could scramble inside and be manning Tora’s collection of hardcore artillery within a second or two. But still, we were tiny. We were nothing. There were stars and sky and road and hills, and nothing else, and we were just parasites. Fucking fleas on the back of an elephant.

I told you already, I get abstract when I’m bored.

“Okay,” I said to Malice, suddenly feeling talkative, catching her eye. “Long way to go. You’re right. You mind if I ask you something?”

She shrugged.

“It might piss you off.”

“Would that stop you?”

“Probably not.”

“Then shoot.”

I fiddled with the rifle, keeping my eyes fixed – uselessly – on the night. Somewhere far, far away I thought I could hear engines, a muted throb that died away almost instantly, and left me doubting my own senses.

“Let’s say there’s something you want,” I said. “Let’s say you... you had it once. Lost it. Want it back.”

Her eyes narrowed, just a fraction. I wondered if she knew Tora told me about her other kid, and if she’d blow my head off for raking up the past. She didn’t look the type to enjoy in-depth discussion about personal tragedies long bygone.

I know the feeling.

“Let’s say,” she said, coldly.

“Right. Now let’s say you find out there’s a chance. This thing, getting it back, it’s... it’s the world. It’ll make everything better. It’s important – and, shit... not just to you. To everyone.”

She didn’t move. I blundered on, forcing myself not to jump when a bird launched from some perch out in the dark, cawing noisily.

“Far as you know, it’s gone. For good. And okay, that’s a shitter, and you’d pay money for it to be otherwise, but what’s done is done. You’re a realist. You bottle it up, you put it away, you get on. You get by.”

I could see it in her eyes, and in that quiet little instant we were so the same I could have reached out and touched her and felt my own fingers against my own arm.

The silence got a little thicker.

I stared at her. “And now suddenly there’s a chance. One in a million. Defies all logic, as far as you know. No reason to believe it, no reason to give it headroom. But still...

“Just in case.”

She swallowed, lips tight.

“How far,” I finished, “would you go?”

Her jaw rocked back and forth once or twice.

“Long way,” she whispered.

I nodded.

We sat.

We waited.

I smiled.

“You should go inside,” I said.

She glared. “Pardon me?”

“You should go inside.” I drew the knife from my belt and passed her the rifle.

“And why the fuck would I do that?”

“Because there are two men approaching the truck from two different directions, and we’re sitting ducks up here.”

Even in the gloom, I could see her eyes go big. Disbelief, maybe. Surprise.

“They pulled up a mile out on motorbikes. Probably from that crew that passed by earlier on. Listen.”

“But I don’t he –”

“There. A twig. And another bird. Fucking amateurs.”

She just stared.

“Don’t worry,” I said, and I smiled again because I couldn’t help it, and I couldn’t be bothered to stop. “I won’t be long.”

And I slipped off the edge of the truck and onto the concrete, panther quiet, and went out into the shadows with a savage joy.

Don’t you fucking give up, soldier!

It snarled. It burned.

Sir, no sir! etc, etc.

 

 

WHEN I GOT back Hiawatha was sitting on the roof, waiting, fiddling with something small and silver.

“You get ’em?” he asked.

I wiped blood off the knife and stared.

Letting the humanity come back into me. Slowly.

Reluctantly.

First rule of stealth combat. Advanced training, third year:

Don’t fear the predator in the dark.

Be it.

“I can see you,” Hiawatha said, conversationally. “Properly, I mean. All that... conditioning. All those changes. You’re a wolf, mister Englishman. You know that? Inside your head. They made you a wolf.”

The adrenaline was still up. Heart still going. Beast still just below the surface.

I spat on the ground. Couldn’t be fucked with any more mystical bollocks.

Hiawatha smiled and said nothing.

“Who were they?” I said, not bothering to sound impressed or spooked out or anything but bored. My hands were shaking with the desire to hunt and hurt, and this snotty little idiot was getting on my tits.

“Collectors,” he said, after a pause.

“And they are?”

“They’re... I mean...” He stopped and scowled, and I could see again the person coming through, the scared kid chipping away at the know-it-all straitjacket. Then it was gone.

“They’re scouts,” he said, voice rising and falling in that same lilting chant. “Men of money and misery. Mercenary filth. Cells of aggression, unfaithful, unloyal, sent ahead of the crucified god and his robed horde to...”

“Cut the crap, yeah? Just tell me who they are.”

He blinked.

And slowly, boyishly, smiled.

“Fuckheads,” he said.

“Fuckheads. Right. And what do these fuckheads want with us?”

He shrugged.

“Clergy sends them, mostly. Or at least, that’s where they get their shit. Trading with the Clergy. They... roam around. Outside of cities. Finding things the Church’ll pay for.”

“Things like what?”

“Like guns. Food. And... mostly... mostly kids.” He looked away. Jaw tightening.

“Kids.”

“Yep. No Klans out here, see? No loyal fucking scavs to hand over their own kin. Only the Clergy and the scum they pay, helping themselves. That’s... that’s what this is all about. You being here.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I know. But you will.”

I huffed and shook my head, too tired to push it. “Whatever. Doesn’t explain what they want with us.”

“No... but they came from behind, on the road. From the city, probably.”

“And?”

And then the boy was gone, and fucking Hiawatha was back, smiling and staring and rolling his eyes.

“And perhaps this holy man, this John-Paul, this withered thing... perhaps he knows where you’re headed. Perhaps he sent word to slow you down.”

“How the fuck would he know?”

I remembered the personnel file. The name. The photo.

Cy, staring over my shoulder.

Hiawatha ignored the question and stared off into the night.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll find the rest tomorrow. They sent out these two to take us in the dark. Explosives, yes?”

I grunted, patting the pockets of my coat. There’d been four sticks of C4 on each corpse, with some surprisingly sophisticated remote detonators. Out in the dark, when the fat fucks had stopped shivering and bleeding and trying to shout with their windpipes torn-through, I’d helped myself.

“So if we’re lucky, the rest won’t know we survived.”

Hiawatha smiled and nodded.

We weren’t lucky.