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.