The Culled ac-1 Read online

He took a deep breath, and in the pause I glanced across the crowd beside me. None of them could stand still; quivering, hopping from foot to foot, shivering in elation.

  "Brothers and sisters," the preacher said, "the righteous Cull swept across creation and took from us the means to pursue our iniquities, our selfish agendas, our unholy wars. It took away our great numbers, our great technologies, our great civilisations – ha! Amen! – and left us only with our spirit and our faith. He spared only those without the mark – the O-negs – and all others have perished! Science tells it! The Lord-ah explains it!"

  Extreme close-up.

  "All were Culled – except one! One great man, whose purity was so great, whose vision so intense, whose strength was so indomitable, that he withstood the mark placed upon his vile family of sinners, that he bore the pain of his ancestry with cheek turned, and was spared, alone in all the world, by the Lord on high!"

  A crash-zoom, crude and old fashioned, but just right for the intensity of the moment; slinking away from the preacher and straight onto John-Paul's face.

  Smiling. Beaming.

  Crowd goes wild!

  I let myself out at the back of the warehouse whilst the cheers were still echoing about.

  He should be dead, the old shit. He should have choked and died.

  Oh, fuck, I know, it could easily be a fake. Who's to say they're cutting to that same microscope as the one in the studio? Who's to say it's not someone else's blood in the syringe? But I've seen the cockups, when the blood of the acolytes react weirdly because of this or that blood disease, or some other unusual condition. I've seen the episodes where they have to fetch replacements, or the preacher's used his own blood, or the microscope-camera fucks-up and they have to mix such massive quantities – live in Petri dishes – that the Abbot ends-up looking whiter than a sheet.

  Always the same. Always the clotting and the clumping.

  I've seen episodes where they've held up his birth certificate for the camera, focused hard on the 'A(Rh+)' box. His name was John P. Miller, for the record, before The Cull.

  I've seen episodes where they've filmed his blood – exposed to the air – shrivelling and dying as the Culling virus withers it away.

  It could all be a stunt. It could, but it wasn't. My instincts told me.

  So how the fuck had the old shithead managed it?

  Either way, it was great TV.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  We started seeing people – real ones, out in the open, slinking out of our way – as we approached our destination.

  Evening came down like a curtain – sudden and soft – and the egg yolk sun sat on the encrusted skyline and punctured the milky haze just enough to blaze along every angle of that great slab of rock, that great blue-black monolith, that towered over the East River like a gravestone.

  Once, it had been the Secretariat building; the administrative heart of the United Nations HQ, with the library and the General Assembly (a shallow curl of white concrete with a colossal bowling ball embedded in its roof) cowering in its sunless shadow; the whole complex pressed-up against the river like it was trying to swim to freedom.

  As we swept nearer, I couldn't help noticing how many of the windows were broken; how vividly the great satellite-dish squatting beside the river had been painted.

  Scarlet. A great scarlet 'O'.

  Clergy territory.

  I've always been a tad conflicted, as far as the UN went.

  On the one hand, it's a pretty bloody obvious idea, isn't it? An organisation to get all the contrary fucks in the world talking, cooperating. It's what an American would call a 'No-Brainer.' And yeah, you could whinge at length about how, at the end, it had no power to speak of, how its hands were tied-up in red tape and corruption, how its goals were too vague or too elitist, how its unity didn't extend quite as far as everyone made out… but at least it was there. At least people could look at it and say:

  "Check it out. There's hope."

  On the other hand, I spent my entire professional life doing nasty secret things the UN had made illegal decades before, so chalk another one up to national disharmony.

  Besides, there was a steaming crater where the White House once stood – along with everything else inside a ten mile radius – serving as cancerous testament to the UN's ability to mediate in a crisis.

  I'm being uncharitable again. These poor fuckers must've been hit just as hard as everyone else when The Blight struck. It's not like you can calm someone down when their finger's on 'The Button', when the whole world's dying around you, when a mystery virus is in the middle of slaughtering 59 billion people, just by appealing to their bloody humanity. These are politicians we're talking about!

  But still. It was hard to reconcile the dismal uselessness of the whole bloody organisation with the magnificence of its home.

  On the approach, the people on the road were moving slowly; barely looking-up as we passed. One or two vehicles shunted along cracked streets, full of people with dead eyes and no words. I got that quiet chill in the base of my spine, like with the combat conditioning except colder, more logical, and let my senses fill-in the blanks.

  Tear-streaked faces, eyeing-up the brooding edifice with fear and disgust curling their lips. Knuckles white.

  Anger, resentment, terror.

  Heads lowered, bodies resigned. Dejection and despair.

  They had the look of people who'd come to see something; who'd travelled expressly for a sight, a vision, and were now wending their way home having seen it, heartbroken.

  They had the look of pilgrims whose journey had been wasted. Misery tourists.

  None of them were Clergy. None even sported the same brand as Nate. They wore Klan colours of a dozen different kinds, avoiding one another but united in the uniformity of their expressions.

  And the vast majority were women.

  "What's got them so pissed?" I asked Nate, as we took the last corner onto 1^st Avenue. "I thought people loved the Cler…"

  My voice just… stopped.

  In the guidebooks, it was flags. A great arc of them, fluttering and proud, lining the approach along United Nations Plaza, one for each member-state. I used to wonder what happened every time someone new signed-up. Did they have to stick up a new flag? Re-space the others? Who determined the order?

  It wasn't flags anymore.

  Nate had warned me about this. The Spartacus moment. The forest of crucifixes.

  The warning hadn't worked.

  At one edge of the road there stood a tall truck with a cherry-picker, painted blue and scarlet in the Clergy's colours, and at the peaks of each immense flagpole, T-squared with crudely welded crossbeams, its grisly works hung down and moaned.

  And bled.

  And pissed.

  And crapped on the heads of the crowd below.

  Distraught lovers, I started to understand. Friends. Family. Unable to reach up to cut them down, eyed warily by the robed fucks with guns and vehicles and all the toys in the world, from the other side of the great razor-wire fence. Spike-tipped stanchions, scaffolds with heavy machine-gun positions, looping ribbons of barbed wire and more guns than I could count.

  The United Nations had become a fortress, and it displayed its captured enemies with all the medieval subtlety of heads on gateposts.

  "What did they do?" I whispered, as the quad chugged away to silence. One of the dangling men was screaming down at a face in the crowd, telling her to get away, to not see him like this, to go back home, forget him. Eventually the Choirboys took turns pelting him with stones until he shut up, then glared and sneered at the woman in the crowd, daring her to stop them.

  They had a basket of rounded pebbles standing-by. I guess this sort of thing happened a lot.

  Nate clambered off the quad and sighed. He looked jumpier than I'd ever seen him, hopping from foot to foot, nervous energy renewed, chewing his nails.

  "Mostly rule breakers." He said. "Fight starters, thieves. Maybe tried to settle shit withou
t appealing to the adjudicators. Skipped-out on a Tag. Who the fuck knows?"

  Staring up at those men and women – stripped naked, black and blue, lashed to their poles with barbed cables, necks sagging, shoulders aching – I found myself too exhausted, too disgusted, to even bother asking Nate what the fuck he was talking about.

  The crux of it had come through loud and clear.

  "Anyone who pisses them off." I said.

  Nate nodded, expression wary, and pulled his cap lower over his face.

  An even larger crowd was gathered directly outside the gates. They had the look of a picket or protest, but stood in silent rows with arms lowered, a bulging semicircle of quiet indignation, staring in with eyes smouldering. Their gazes were lifted past the bored guards, past the barricades and silent vehicles, past the shanty-buildings clustered like barnacles around the base of the Secretariat. Here an even greater proportion were women, and when I let my senses slip into that subconscious state of information ravening – drinking in every tiny indicator around me, letting my old brain piece it together – I could almost taste their hunger, their sorrow, their desperation. They'd come here to reclaim something they'd lost.

  "Moms." Nate said, fussing with the quadbike. "Come to see their kids."

  "They get to visit them?"

  Nate gave a grim little laugh and shook his head. "Hell, no. Mostly they just… stand here. A week, maybe two. Hoping for a glimpse, some sort of sign, I dunno. Something to show 'em their kids really are building that… 'New Tomorrow.' Make them feel better, maybe. Not so guilty."

  "They ever get their wish?"

  "Uh-uh. Whatever happens in there, it stays in there."

  "But you used to bring them here. You must have seen the inside."

  Nate shrugged. "Parts. Reception garage, fuelling pump. But I tell you this… the New Tomorrow looks kinda the same as the Old Today, and there ain't no hordes of happy kids rushin' about in there, either."

  I stared across the scene for a long time, letting the misery infuse. Nate lit a cigarette and sat smoking, turning away with overblown discretion every time one of the guards happened to glance our way.

  If I'd stopped, if I'd thought about it right then and there, I might have been surprised. For all his posturing, for all his fear and anguish at the Clergy getting their hands on him, here he was. Hadn't raised a word of protest, coming to this place. He'd walked right up to the outskirts of the dragon's den, and sat down outside with his new-found protector and his knightly armour lowered to his ankles.

  But I wasn't thinking of that, right then. Call me dumb. I was thinking of the groans from the crucifixes, and the sobs from the mothers, and the silence from inside the compound.

  And Bella, briefly. Thinking about Bella, when I should have been focusing on the mission. When I should have been concentrating on Don't you fucking give up, soldier.

  Sir, no sir, etc etc.

  "In London," I said, eventually, "they used to send out Catcher squads. Clergy goons. All armed. Lot of them were women… Maybe the bigwigs thought it'd make things easier. Woman's touch, that sort of thing.

  "A lot of the people who survived The Cull ended-up well into the Church anyway. All those broadcasts, every Sunday. Never ceased to amaze me, but I saw it happen all the time. People giving-up their own kids, shit. Treated it like a fucking ceremony."

  Nate blew a smoke ring. "I was there too. Remember? I seen it."

  "Yeah. But did you ever see them with the people who didn't give-in so easy? The ones who… wouldn't let go. Hid their kids. Kept them safe. You ever see that? The Clergy used to call them 'selfish.' You believe that?"

  He sighed.

  "You ever see the Catcher squads?" I said, feeling strangely angry with him, wanting to press until he snapped. I couldn't work out why.

  He shook his head.

  "You ever see them kicking down a door, or shooting a screaming woman in the street, or dragging-off kids to the fucking airport and telling the parents they were dead if they tried to follow? You ever see that Nate? You ever see that shit, before they brought you over here to ferry the sprogs back and forth?"

  He looked away.

  The sun dipped below the horizon. A few fires were being built by the more enterprising segments of the crowd. The silence stretched on.

  "It's different here," Nate said, after long minutes had eked away. There was… something in his voice. Bitterness? Guilt? "All the Klan shit, you know? It's what's expected."

  "I don't follow."

  "Choirboys keep the Klans in order. Oversee disputes. S'what the Adjudies are for. And they… they parcel out guns, sometimes food, sometimes water. And the drugs. They got so much of that shit in there…" he nodded to the Secretariat, and again that something in his voice "…it's coming out their fucking asses."

  "So they dish it out to all the Klans? Why? Just for… for loyalty?"

  "Cos in return they get the tithe."

  I glanced around the crowd, the tattered clothes, the dirt-smeared tags.

  "But these are just scavs. These aren't Klansmen."

  "Right again. But they gotta do what the bosses say. They want to eat? They want to stay alive? They don't wanna get skewered on no territory-pole like a fucking shish kebab? Then it's easier to go with the flow. Hand over the youngsters. Believe they going someplace better." He sighed again, staring at the crowd. "You act like a good little scav, you give up your own flesh and blood; you maybe get an extra ration, maybe a better sleepin' pitch. Maybe you get promoted to Klansman earlier than otherwise. And if you're smart, if you figure out that's the way to the top, then the only way to do it is to… to make yourself believe. You understand? Make yourself believe it's right.

  "Self-sacrifice, man. That's what the Klans do."

  "Can you get inside there?" I said, suddenly tired of it all, hungry to press-on.

  He chewed on the smouldering dogend of his cigarette for a long time, closed his eyes, reopened them, and said:

  "Snowman's chance in hell. Sorry."

  We camped out on the plaza in front of the crucifixes overnight, warming ourselves at an oil drum fire some of the desolate women had built, and ate dog food. We discussed getting inside.

  Nate kept asking me why. Why the hell was I doing this? Why the hell would I go up against the Clergy?

  I didn't answer. It wasn't his business. Nobody's but my own.

  Nothing to do with anyone but me. Not Nate, not the Clergy, not these scavs with their dead eyes.

  Just me.

  Good soldier. Good soldier.

  Except that every time I looked at the building, or at Nate, or at the sobbing mothers, I ended up thinking of Bella; sat in that burnt-out pub in Heathrow, with her bitter glances and don't-fuck-with-me face. Then hunched over the controls of the plane, shivering and sweating. Then dead.

  Impaled in the middle of a mashed up plane.

  By midnight, when Nate's voice was getting croaky from explaining the ins-and-outs to me, when my eyes were starting to droop and the stink of his endless cigarettes was all over me, I had a plan.

  At two in the morning – give or take – a convoy of AVs entered the compound. Seven in total. Old military models, repainted in sky-blue with scarlet circles, covered from tracked wheels to pintle-weapon roofs in ablative shields and home-made deflectors.

  In the lead vehicle, a tall man with a long face, a pale robe, and a strange cap stood with his arms folded, gesturing angrily in heated conversation with someone out of sight beside him. He wore scarlet sunglasses.

  Nate almost popped.

  "That's Cy," he hissed, shivering. "That's fucking Cy…"

  The old man covered his face, lurking in my shadow like a terrified child, peering between his fingers.

  As the lumbering machines took the final corner I caught a glimpse of Cy's companion, the unlucky receiver of his displeasure. I felt the skin prickle on my forehead, recognising the muscular man with perfectly white hair – bare chested – whose shoulders were
criss-crossed with rank scars like a sergeant's stripes.

  "The Mickey." I muttered. "That's the guy who saw us take the tunnel."

  Nate moaned quietly, hopping from foot to foot.

  The Klansman had a black eye, a foul expression, and a hateful glare reserved just for Cy. They appeared to be arguing, though if I know body language at all – and I do – the Mickey wasn't getting anywhere fast.

  The Clergy've been tracking me.

  Asking questions.

  Plotting my movements.

  It felt vaguely exhilarating. Almost a pleasure, to be hunted, to be second-guessed, to be looked-for but never found. Just like the old days; sneaking and scuttling in the shadows. Staying covert, staying secret. Doing what I'd been sent to do, then melting away.

  Don't you fucking give up, soldier!

  Sir, no sir! etc etc.

  It was an effort to push down the shivery desire for action. I flipped the remaining blanket over the quadbike's body; trusting to the darkness to hide the confused shape. I needn't have bothered. Cy was barely conscious of his surroundings; so busy grilling his unhappy witness that he didn't so much as glance at the crowd.

  When he'd calmed down, Nate hazarded that the convoy had returned from the airport. He said that coming home empty-handed wasn't going to help Cy's standing in the Clergy at all, and it stood to reason he'd bring a witness back with him. Evidence that he'd been doing his job.

  Nate said the Church wasn't exactly renowned for being forgiving. Not towards guys who'd slaughtered entire companies of Choirboys, trashed functioning aeroplanes and rendered one of the three Clergy airports useless.

  I told Nate: thanks for the good news.

  He didn't mention how the angry-looking Cardinal would certainly also have noticed that he hadn't been amongst the dead. He didn't mention that the white-haired Mickey would certainly have reported an elderly black man clinging to a stranger, on the back of a clapped-out quadbike, entering the Queens Midtown tunnel.

  He didn't mention that he'd just become an official enemy of the Church, right up there beside me, with the added epithet of 'traitor.'

  But it was all over his face and heavy in his voice.