‘Dude, should you be out of bed?’ Mudge asked. I looked at him and grinned.
‘I’m gonna need a lot of drugs.’
Mrs Tillwater would not shut up but I was a little too disconcerted to ask her to be quiet. She was interspersing the most banal day-today conversation with descriptions of sadistic violence. Some people would do that just to try and freak you out, but I wasn’t getting that from her. She genuinely seemed ill.
I was riding shotgun with her. Papa Neon had asked her to act as our native guide to the white-trash element of Crawling Town. She had gently scolded him and agreed to do it. I’d chosen to ride with her because I’d been getting tired of seeing the look of sympathy on Morag’s, Pagan’s and even Rannu’s faces.
I’d been right: Gibby and Buck were riding with one of the cyberbilly gangs, the biggest and most powerful one, the Hard Luck Commancheros. Mrs Tillwater was taking us out to see them. Apparently they’d left the town and driven into the ruins of Trenton. We were all suited up. Mrs Tillwater’s hazardous environment gear was lilac, which appeared to be her favourite colour. It had scalps hanging off it. We were in her armoured, four-wheel drive station wagon. Morag was following on the low rider with Rannu, Pagan and Mudge in the muscle car behind her.
‘Of course, there are tribes in the ruins of the cities on the Dead Roads,’ Mrs Tillwater was saying. ‘Little more than savages really. File their teeth, wear human skins, barely human themselves.’ I looked at this woman. Other than her augmentations, the plugs in her neck, replacement eyes, she looked every bit the suburban matriarch. She wore slightly too much make-up, was ordinarily attractive for a woman of a certain age and seemed to take a lot of care with her disconcertingly banal appearance.
‘I hear some of them eat human flesh,’ I said, pretty sure I could defend myself if this got out of hand. She didn’t miss a beat.
‘Yes, but they don’t prepare it properly…’ She went into quite some detail about how to properly prepare human flesh. I began to worry when I found my mouth watering. I was relieved when I started to hear engines ahead of us.
The outskirts of Trenton, the industrial part of the city, had been hit by a low-yield nuke during the FHC. It was probably that crater that the dune buggy I’d been attached to had driven through. The nuke had killed the majority of the city’s population. Those that didn’t die probably succumbed to the radiation and burns not too long after the blast. The city itself had been pretty badly banged up. Mrs Tillwater was steering round piles of rubble and the four-wheel drive was definitely coming in useful. I was a bit worried about Morag but she seemed to be getting better with the bike. On either side of the road. damaged high-rise buildings reached up towards the unnaturally red sky like broken fingers. Many of the buildings were covered in freshly painted graffiti depicting complex but abstract patterns. Others had murals depicting stylised tribal heroics and what I guessed were hunts. Much of the graffiti was quite beautiful.
‘Those done by the tribes?’ I asked, pointing at one of the abstract designs. The serial killer sitting next to me nodded.
‘Territorial boundaries. The murals are histories,’ she said. ‘I mean, why can’t they do something useful like clean the place up a bit?’
‘Yeah, tidying would be the way forward,’ I said. Mrs Tillwater turned to look at me.
‘I do understand sarcasm, Mr Douglas, I just choose not to lower myself to use it.’ Suddenly the constant patronising sympathy of the others didn’t seem so bad.
‘The tribes wouldn’t mess with us, would they?’ I said, trying to change the subject.
‘Why on Earth wouldn’t they?’ she asked, sounding surprised. ‘They attack convoys much larger and better armed than ours.’ I looked out the back window to see Morag riding behind us, her poncho flapping in the wind. Suddenly she seemed very exposed.
We turned into the ruins of what we would’ve called a scheme back in Dundee but I think they were called projects over here. Basically it had been a large and ugly estate of state-provided housing. Now it was an empty crumbling mess. There was a large, rubble-strewn open area; beyond that were rows of terraced flats and beyond them a series of ugly high-rise buildings.
Parked in the open area were a lot of different vehicles, most of them muscle cars, heavily customised, all four-wheel drive. There were a few pickups and vans, also heavily customised, and lots of bikes and trikes, most of them low riders or chopped, with a few performance bikes here and there. There was even the ancient halftrack with the cartoon swamp creature painted on the bonnet that we’d seen on the first night. Everything was customised. I couldn’t help but stare at the machines. The noise of the various engines hit us like a solid wall of sound. I overrode my audio dampeners. I wanted to hear this.
‘Boys will be boys,’ Mrs Tillwater said cheerfully. People glanced up as we pulled in. Everyone there seemed to be wearing a duster and wide-brimmed hat, though many of them didn’t have their masks on. Most were bearded, even some of the women, and like Gibby and Buck, dreadlocks seemed to be the order of the day. They had the degenerate cowboy look of the cyberbilly scene. I could just about make out the sounds of heavy western guitar riffs playing through a powerful sound system somewhere. The singer was grunting about his one true love stealing his car.
As we pulled into the area, our beat-up vehicles getting looks of scom from the assembled cyberbillys, I wondered how they managed to get their cars and bikes to look this good in such a corrosive environment. I saw the start of a drag race, two of the muscle cars accelerating so quickly that their front wheels came off the ground, flames shooting from their exhausts as they raced up part of the remaining and very unsafe-looking raised road system. A cheer went up from the onlookers. I almost felt like I could live this way.
Mrs Tillwater found a space and fussily parked in it, I wasn’t sure why. I fixed my mask and goggles in place and climbed out. Morag came to a halt nearby and Rannu pulled up next to us. Mrs Tillwater headed over to a group of the cyberbillys. All of them had the aces and eights of the Dead Man’s Hand painted on their clothes somewhere, the colours of the Hard Luck Commancheros. There were some glances our way but finally she signalled to us and started across the concrete square. We followed, doing our best not to get run over by speeding bikes or cars. It was kind of gratifying to see Pagan, Rannu and Mudge form a loose formation, watching all around. I’d found myself doing pretty much the same thing.
We were heading towards the street of terraced flats, where a crowd of the Commancheros was gathered. There were a couple of cars and a pickup, but this mostly seemed to be where the bikers where hanging out. Suited me. Mrs Tillwater signalled to me and then pointed up to the road embankment that ran along one side of the square. Stood on top of the embankment watching us was a figure. I zoomed in on her. She wore an outfit of skin, possibly human, and looked lean, tough and athletic. Her hair was tied back tightly and what I could see of her skin was covered in ritual scars. Her mouth was open in a grimace and I could see her filed-down, steel-capped teeth. She carried a compound bow that looked like it had been made from salvaged metal and had a wicked-looking curved blade stuck through her belt.
‘If we can see her then that means there will be others around that we can’t,’ Mrs Tillwater said over our tactical net. It was like the tribeswoman was challenging us. It was strange. I got a thrill from seeing her. I knew she was another human being but it was like the thrill I got as a kid when I was out with my father in the park and we saw a stag or bear tracks, or even heard wolves howling when we had to camp. The tribeswoman looked feral and degenerate but she also looked noble, unafraid and somehow unpolluted. She hadn’t surrendered her humanity to machinery and war. There was little difference between her tribe and one that had cars and guns except maybe honesty. I think I envied her.