Veteran

17

Crawling Town was not going to be difficult to find. Balor had given us access to a satellite he bought time on to track the huge convoy. Besides, we couldn’t miss the irradiated and polluted dust cloud kicked up by that number of vehicles.

We said goodbye to our psychotic benefactor on the banks of what was left of the state of New Jersey, near where the city of Newark had once been. Balor had provided us with vehicles, hazardous environment gear and some other bits and pieces that would come in useful. The vehicles, like most of our gear, were treated with a serious anti-corrosion finish or they wouldn’t last a day in the Dead Roads. I think he was helping us because we had the potential to piss people off and maybe even cause some chaos. In fact he’d been pretty good to us except for the bit where I’d had to spend five days in hospital.

I watched, straddling the low rider that Balor had provided for me, as Rannu drove the armoured muscle car off the flat-bottomed boat. Mudge was sitting in the passenger seat of the car, bottle of vodka in one hand, some inhaled burning narcotic in the other. I wasn’t best pleased at Rannu’s presence, but I knew first hand that he was capable, and sooner or later we were going to need all the guns we could get.

Balor and Pagan came to stand next to me. Neither of them said anything. Balor just favoured me with one of his disturbingly toothy smiles. I think he thought he’d taught me some valuable life lesson. He had: if I were ever to tangle with Rannu again I’d shoot him in the back, a lot, preferably while he was sleeping. I noticed Balor was watching Morag now as she walked off the flat-bottomed boat towards us.

‘Balor,’ I said, deciding I had to know something. He turned his monstrous head towards me. ‘There’s a story about you. I’ve got to know whether it’s true or not.’

‘Which one?’ he growled.

‘Did you ever see the Grey Lady? I mean-’

‘I know what you mean,’ he said. Pagan was watching us both, a look of slight concern on his face. Morag was just about with us now, her clothes and the armour she’d managed to scavenge covered by the poncho pan of her hostile environment gear. Balor seemed to be considering my question. We were all dressed in anti-radiation/pollution chic, we had on either ponchos or, as in my case, dusters to keep the worst of it out.

‘She scares me,’ he finally said. Not really what I wanted to hear, probably served me right for trying to be clever. ‘Besides, I only have eyes for Magantu.’ He was looking at Morag. Then he turned and walked back towards the water.

‘Who’s Magantu?’ Morag asked, only hearing the tail end of the conversation.

‘It’s the name of a great white shark from a Polynesian legend,’ Pagan said. We watched as Balor waded into the water. It was a clear but colourless grey day. Opposite us, across the water, we could see the broken spires and grey canyons of New York. Balor disappeared beneath the water. I fixed the filter over my face and then clipped the goggles to it. Rannu gunned the four-wheel-drive muscle car up the small dirt slope that led away from the water. Balor’s people began reversing the flat-bottomed boat away from the shore.

I plugged a connecting wire into one of the sockets in my neck and pushed the other end into the bike’s vehicle interface. Both the car and the bike were typically American, all style and muscle, no handling.

‘Come on,’ Pagan said to Morag. ‘We can work in the car.’ Morag didn’t say anything to him. Instead she fastened her mask and goggles and climbed on the low rider behind me. Pagan was obviously pissed off but didn’t say a word. He headed towards the car and Mudge got out to let him in the back seat. I felt good. Morag clipped her PDW to the bike on the opposite side to the Benelli assault shotgun I’d bought in one of New York’s many arms bazaars. Then she wrapped her arms around me.

‘I’m driving in the afternoon,’ she told me as I gunned the engine and we took off into Jersey, the others following in the muscle car. I heard a cheer from Mudge.

This was a scarred land. It had been hit pretty hard during the FHC as the corporations and the equatorial states had gone after what was left of America’s heavy industry. They’d used nukes as well as biological and chemical weapons. Those, along with the pollution from the deregulation of industry that had taken place before and after the FHC – a desperate attempt by America to hold on to its failing economic power – had left a wasteland nobody wanted. So the people nobody wanted had moved in.

Most of the land was covered in a white ash-like dust. The colours in the sky were vivid and unnatural, and everywhere we passed, from distant tower blocks and empty suburbs, to abandoned refineries and power stations, was eerie and deserted. It was like being alone in the world. I found myself liking it. I liked Morag’s skillsoft driving of the low rider less. Though not as much as Rannu and Pagan disliked Mudge’s driving, and when he and Morag decided to race each other I had to agree with them.

We headed west, further into America. Progress was slow, most of the routes were still partially blocked by debris. All the vehicles that had been abandoned on the Dead Roads had been pushed to the side, presumably by the passage of Crawling Town. There were, however, still craters, rubble too heavy to be moved, downed bridges and the general poor repair of the road to deal with. The satellite info told us that the slow-moving convoy was heading towards the ruins of a city called Trenton, near the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border. This was a border held and violently defended by the US proper.

I knew there were people who lived out here other than the inhabitants of Crawling Town. I knew there were tribes living in some of the towns. I knew there were packs of dogs and swarms of rats, but we saw nothing and no one. It was the evenings I liked best. The sun going down as we rode towards it. The strange half-light before it got too dangerous to travel and we had to stop. The only sound was the throbbing of the two engines as our vehicles became silhouettes. I wondered if Rolleston knew it was us. Was he tracking us? In many ways we were at our most exposed, yet this was the happiest I’d been since it had all begun. Actually it was the happiest I’d been in a long time.

On the first night we stopped and set up the tent. It had an airlock mechanism and we had to maintain decontamination discipline. Morag and Pagan worked on God, tranced into the net for hours at a time. Rannu, Mudge and I took turns on guard, setting up an OP away from the tent. Rannu was uncomplaining about taking the middle watch, which always meant a disturbed night’s sleep, and I doubted if Mudge, who was usually drunk or high, was a great deal of use. When they’d finished working on God for the night and my watch was done, Morag would curl up next to me. Mudge looked amused,

Rannu was as impassive as ever and Pagan looked disapproving but never said anything. I just held her while she slept.

It was my favourite time of the day when we first saw it. In that strange, unreal, twilit half-light we saw a huge dust cloud that obscured the western horizon. Unspoken, we brought our vehicles to a halt. I magnified my vision. Suddenly the huge dust cloud was much closer, filling my vision, impenetrable, though I saw a few outriders on bikes and trikes disappearing in and out of the haze.

‘The city rides for a week and then makes camp,’ Pagan said over the comms net.

‘You picking up anything?’ I asked.

‘Nothing much, though there is some heavily encrypted stuff going on.’

‘Military?’ I asked.

‘I would imagine so; the town’s getting very close to the border,’ Pagan answered. America’s Fortunate Sons would be out keeping a close eye on the convoy.

‘So when are they due to camp?’ Morag asked.

‘Well, they’re either going to have to stop soon or change direction, which can’t be easy for a convoy that size, or invade America,’ Pagan said.

‘Then what?’ Morag asked.

‘Then Rannu and I go in and have a look,’ I said.

‘It’d be better if I go,’ Mudge said. ‘I’m better at finding people.’

‘I need you to stay here and provide security for Morag and Pagan.’ They would need it if they were going to be working on God. Working on God, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what that would entail, but somewhere along the line I’d begun to accept it. Maybe I had more faith in Morag than in Pagan.

‘And I would be better providing security,’ Rannu said. What he didn’t say was that he would be better able to stay close to Morag.

‘Guys, please, help me out here, yeah?’ I said. There was no reply. I had my reasons for taking Rannu. Mudge was right – he was probably more capable of finding Gibby and Buck – but I wasn’t sure he wasn’t just going to shoot the pair of them when he found them. I couldn’t really blame him; I was only slightly surer I wasn’t going to do the same.

We’d called it right, and Crawling Town had come to a halt on the outskirts of the ruins of Trenton. They’d formed a huge circle of their articulated lorries and land trains, most of them huge five-axle rigs pulling multiple trailers. Many of them were covered in neon patterns that Pagan had told me were veves, Pop Voudun occult symbols. These trucks belonged to one of the biggest gangs in Crawling Town, one of the founder groups at the core of the huge convoy. They were Haitian and Jamaican Yardies who’d muscled their way into the haulage business a couple of hundred years ago. They called themselves the Big Neon Voodoo. They were popular subjects for lurid sense experiences and shock documentary makers, many of whom ended up dead. I also noticed that some of the trailers had huge viz screens running the length of them.

The dust cloud above the convoy had seemed static for a while but it was beginning to come down now. It coated everything and made the air little more than a thick grey fog as Rannu and I headed towards the parked vehicles. The powerful headlight on the bike barely cut through the murk. As we approached we could hear the sound of over-revved engines. Sporadic gunfire provided brief illumination through the dirt and the larger vehicles were just shadows that suddenly loomed out of the murk at us.

They were all here, all the bogey gangs I’d seen on vizzes, be they documentaries, sports programmes or horrors. All the stories that grow out of places like this, all heard second hand. Gangs like the all-female Nicely-Nicely Boys in their pinstripes and bowler hats, or the Electric Circus. There was the ghoulish, literally, Bad Faeries. The infamous First Baptist Church of Austin Texas, in their pastel-coloured dress suits, dead-skin masks and armoured station wagons, a militant prayer group with a serial killer in charge of them. I reckoned that if Buck and Gibby were going to be anywhere they’d probably stick with their own people. They’d be with some cyberbilly outfit like the Hard Luck Commancheros. For all the stories about the convoy, we’d survived New York, despite nearly being killed, and I couldn’t see it being much worse than the Rigs.

An hour later I was less than pleased to find myself naked, securely restrained and hanging from some kind of metal cross attached to the back of an armoured dune buggy. The dune buggy had a stylised swastika crudely painted on the top of it. They’d pegged me for an outsider as soon as we’d rode in.

Rannu and I had made it past the perimeter of encircled trucks and into the impromptu town itself. There was every conceivable kind of civilian vehicle capable of traversing rough ground there, many of them still on the move through the streets of tents and parked vehicles. We swerved to avoid a monster truck, though we could’ve probably ridden between its huge wheels, and only narrowly avoided colliding with a half-track that looked like it could’ve been pre-FHC. Its armoured hood was painted with the face of a cartoon swamp monster. Everything smelt of burning alcohol and the sound of powerful engines provided the ambient soundtrack.

Through the thick, settling dust we could see that all the tribes were out. Those that had hazardous environment gear had heavily modified it to display their colours and show their allegiance. There were many there who didn’t have any HE gear, either through choice or poverty. Sense programs and vizzes had made much out of the so-called wasteland mutants that made up Crawling Town. The sad fact was there were just a lot of deformed and otherwise very sick people. They were the real mutants.

We’d heard screams and gunfire and even seen a drive-by, which somehow struck me as redundant in a place like this. Crawling Town was not unified. It was made up of many disparate and antagonistic groups that somehow managed to travel together. We kept our heads down. The town was some eighty to a hundred thousand strong so it was going to take a while to find Buck and Gibby unless we were really lucky. Initially we would need to just get the lie of the land.

‘We should split up,’ Rannu suggested. ‘Cover more ground.’

‘That means one of us on foot.’ There was screaming as a man was dragged past us on a chain behind a quad bike, his skin being flayed off by the corrosive dirt. ‘This doesn’t strike me as a good place for pedestrians.’

‘You keep the bike, I’ll go on foot,’ said Rannu. We found a garishly decorated mobile home that looked like it had put down roots for the time being. We used it as a fixed point, or as much of one as we were going to get in this place. We memorised the position. It was still too dangerous for us to use GPS.

‘Four hours and then back here,’ I said.

‘Comms discipline?’

‘Tight burst once per hour. Use the crypts that Pagan gave us. Signal to me and back to Morag and Pagan, agreed?’

‘And we hit trouble?’

‘Quick burst to me, or me to you, but if possible exfiltrate first. Some of these gangs are well organised and they’ll have some serious hackers. We can’t compromise the others,’ I said.

‘Agreed.’ He seemed reassured by what I’d said.

‘What’re you carrying?’ I asked.

‘Just sidearms. They’ll be enough for a quick recon.’

I nodded. I had my pistols and the assault shotgun clipped to the side of the bike. I looked up and he was gone. Disappeared into the settling dust.

I had been sloppy; there was no other explanation. I’d noticed them pretty quickly. Their rad gear was old but well maintained. Their gear was a dust-covered black colour and they had a red cross on their left breasts over the heart. They were difficult to miss. They’d started following me in a monster truck, heavily armoured and decorated in their colours. Vicious spikes of scrap metal and the barrels of military surplus heavy weaponry protruded from the truck. I was going to be able to outrun that easily. I was a bit more worried about the motorcycle outriders and the fact that they presumably had a better knowledge of what the configuration of Crawling Town was tonight.

I was so concerned about the ones behind me that I hadn’t noticed them getting in front of me. I should’ve but the place was full of people so there wasn’t a great deal I could do. Even checking on thermographics would only have shown me what I already knew, lots of people and hot engines. Even so I don’t think this would’ve happened had I been on my game. The jeeps slid from either side of the crossroads ahead. They had enough discipline for their gunmen to competently cover me. I got out of the way of the first net. The second only clipped me and somebody died with a round from the Mastodon through their skull. The third net got me and they pumped enough current through it that even my systems weren’t able to cope. I hope I cost them a fortune in energy. I was too busy being electrocuted to send out a distress message to Rannu and too unconscious to do it when they’d finished electrocuting me.

They were called the Wait. They were a skinhead monastic order that’d been evicted from their commune in Oregon and subsequently joined Crawling Town. It’d taken me a while to figure out the whole skinhead swastika thing. They were Nazis, a political ideology from back when people had them, which promoted white supremacy – as ridiculous as that might sound. It was a pre-FHC idea that apparently had resulted in quite serious wars at one point. I was surprised to find that people like this still existed. I guess that in times like these people needed to find something to hang on to, to try and make sense of things. Even if that thing is old and foul and pointless. Also I doubted they’d been able to make out that I was a quarter Thai, so I did wonder why they’d picked on me.

To give them credit, they knew how to secure someone properly. They’d attached a spinal clamp, effectively paralysing me. They’d stripped me and taken all my gear but otherwise I was in pretty good shape. I just felt embarrassed and more than a little angry with myself. I’d tried to send a comms message out to Rannu but I could feel some kind of inhibitor jacked into one of my plugs.

The skinheads had set up a compound of sorts. They’d run electrified fencing topped with programmable razor wire between several huge armoured mobile homes. They’d also set up several other security measures and were patrolling the compound relatively professionally. Thing is, I got the feeling that few if any of them had ever seen service. These were hate-filled children playing soldiers. I always wondered why people like this never joined up. I mean if they really felt the need to wallow in hate-filled pseudo-military bullshit?

From out of the mobile home, which I guessed was supposed to be Command and Control, I saw three of them exit and head towards me. Two of them wore black rad ponchos with the red cross on them. They carried replica Schmeissers chambered for 10-millimetre case-less. The guy in the middle did not have a rad suit on. He wore a spotless, pressed black tunic with matching trousers and high black boots which actually looked like they’d once been part of an animal’s skin. They were very black and shiny. He wandered over to where I was crucified and looked up at me.

‘Hi,’ I said. His head was totally shorn of hair. In fact he seemed to have no hair anywhere on his head and I couldn’t work out why he seemed to be wearing purple lipstick. Across his scalp, just beneath the skin, I could see a complicated network of circuitry. It was high-end expensive stuff. This guy was obviously a hacker. I didn’t like his eyes; they were blue and multifaceted like an insect’s. It wasn’t right. He just watched me for a long time. I could see multiple images of myself reflected in the eyes.

‘What do you want?’ I finally asked, irritated at being unnerved by someone I guessed wasn’t much more than a kid.

‘We have everything we want.’ His voice was so cold and expressionless, I was sure it was modulated. This guy was so image conscious he had to be young.

‘Why am I up here?’ I asked.

‘Are you Anglo-Saxon?’ he asked, as if the term had any meaning whatsoever.

‘Yes.’

‘Your accent sounds Scottish; the Scots aren’t Anglo-Saxons.’

‘I’m still white,’ I said hopefully. I was planning on choking the life out of the little shit when I got down. The insect-eyed Nazi went quiet.

‘You still haven’t told me why I’m up here,’ I said eventually.

‘To suffer.’ That didn’t sound good.

‘Any reason?’ I asked.

‘To suffer for the crimes the lesser races have inflicted on the master race. To show God that some of his chosen people still care. So you can feel an iota of what our Lord Jesus felt when he was brought low by the likes of you.’ Something struggled through my memory. Some half-remembered conversation with a Christian signalwoman attached to my first squad when I’d joined the Paras.

‘I’m not Roman,’ I told him, pretty sure that was right. ‘I’ve never even been to Italy.’ He ignored me.

‘For untermensch you are strong, yes?’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘I think you will last a long time and your sacrifice will be great.’ I came to the conclusion that there probably wasn’t going to be a great deal of reasoning with this guy.

‘Oh bullshit, you whiney little cunt. This isn’t about ideology or religion, this is about your own fucking inadequacies. You’re weak and frightened so you have to fucking act out. Try and get people under your power. Get people to fear you because respect and love are beyond you. You know as well as I do that if you guys hadn’t got the drop on me you wouldn’t last ten seconds in a locked room with me. Don’t you, don’t you!’ I screamed at him. I think I saw a flicker of annoyance, but to give him his due he retained his composure quite well.

‘Cook him. Take him to the craters,’ insect-eyes finally said.

For a while it wasn’t too bad. They drove the dune buggy over rough ground, and because I’d been restrained with my arms outstretched every bump put a lot of stress on my back and arms, causing pain despite my reinforced physiology. Pretty soon that was the least of my worries. It was the dust. It was corrosive and stung. Filters or no filters, I felt the dust filling my nasal cavity and throat. I tried to keep my mouth closed, opening only to scream when I was jarred particularly painfully. As my head nodded down I saw that I was covered in blood. My skin and flesh were being slowly stripped down to the armour as the dust sandblasted me. I felt like I was disappearing, being peeled back layer by layer. When I tried to scream I just choked on more dust.

It felt so pointless. Insect-eyes could’ve stripped me down for parts, maybe even sold my flesh; instead there was just this suffering, the point of which was beyond me. Pretty soon it wasn’t me up on that frame atop the dune buggy. It was just a lump of suffering flesh that wasn’t capable of the higher forms of thinking. It was a mindless wounded animal, a broken machine. The form and the mind were mutually exclusive, neither able to identify with the other beyond the electric signals from screaming nerve endings. I would’ve passed out, but every time I tried I was jarred awake by the pain in my back and arms.

Really the last thing I remembered that made any real sense was the feeling of panic, a reassuringly human sensation at the time, as the dune buggy inched precariously over the side of a huge crater. It felt like it was going to turn over but the driver, in his radiation-proofed vestments, held it as we drove down into the crater at a shallow angle, leaving a dust cloud of hot dirt behind us. The crater seemed huge and a pool of reddish liquid had collected in its centre. I couldn’t work out the reason for this hole.