The Culled Read online

  But there weren’t any kids. Obviously.

  That was the point.

  This was back in London. This was maybe two, maybe three years ago. This was one of the few times I let curiosity get the better of me, and went to see TheTomorrow Show.

  Standing in a knackered old warehouse somewhere in Docklands, with a crowd gathered round a snazzy plasma screen TV, I couldn’t help remembering midnight mass at Christmas, as a kid. Standing there with the family, heads bowed, singing carols...

  Even then, I was old enough to know what I believed and what I didn’t. Even then, that same sense of awkwardness, of hypocrisy, of toeing the line of something you don’t believe in. That same half-formed urge to leap up and slap the vicar, and start shouting at everyone to think, to open their fucking eyes, to stop being so stupid!

  I was young. What can I say?

  But yeah, the same sensation. Huddled with the TV crowd on a Sunday, zombie-like expressions fixated on that square of flickering light, drinking every word the announcer said. That same sense of not belonging, as everyone around me listened with an alien devotion to the words of John ‘look-at-the-size-of-my-bloody-hat’ Paul Rohare Baptiste, and his crew of evangelising loudmouths.

  That day the broadcast was stronger than usual – the signal more pronounced, the flickering of the screen less intrusive – and the gathering was determined to eke every last iota of information and holiness out of it that they could get.

  “The miracle,” they wittered around me. “He’s going to do it! He’s going to do it!”

  Oh yeah...

  The Miracle.

  He performed ‘The Miracle’ maybe once a month. We’d all seen it before. Even so a little thrill went through the crowd; the fortifying knowledge that their faith was not only being reaffirmed, but positively vindicated. They saw this shit as proof of the Abbot’s divinity, and despite all my carefully-polished cynicism I couldn’t help but be a little impressed. Oh, yeah, the routine was full of holes, any number of cheats and camera-tricks to muddle the results, but still... It was something about the faces of all the people on-screen, marvelling and gasping in astonishment. You could fool the camera, maybe, but it was a hell of a lot harder to fool the geeks in the studio.

  “Hallelujah!” shouted one of the guys in the crowd. Probably a Clergy plant.

  It began like it always began, with the announcer bringing two smiling young acolytes into frame. Both were under 18 – a girl and a boy – either so utterly indoctrinated into the church that their beaming smiles were natural symbols of their contentment, or so doped out of their skulls that they didn’t care at all. They wore the same dull grey cassocks as everyone around them, with one notable exception; they each lacked a left sleeve, exposing their bare arms to the shoulder.

  “Brother James, Brother Tilda.” The announcer introduced them with a smile and a swagger, leading them to a white desk inside the same old dusky studio. Three Petri dishes sat waiting, empty, next to a sophisticated microscope with a cable-drenched camera affixed to its viewing column.

  The announcer smiled at the camera, mumbled a prayer with his eyes closed, then pulled a trio of sealed hypodermic needles out of a recess in his cloak.

  The crowd shivered again.

  “Both these fine young acolytes of the Rediscovered Dawn – bless their souls, Lord-ah! – got ’emselves blood type ‘O-negative.’ Same as us all, brothers and sisters! Same as everyone alive on this good green earth, created and Culled by Him Above!”

  He jabbed a needle into the girl’s arm, drawing out a puddle of blood with practiced speed. He then thanked the girl, made the sign of the cross between her and himself, and waved her out of the camera’s frame. The syringe was emptied into the first Petri dish, and the whole process was repeated with “Brother James.”

  “Now,” said the preacher, placing a tiny swab of Tilda’s blood on a glass slide beneath the microscope and brandishing the syringe containing James’s like an old West sharpshooter. “Since both these wonderful sons and daughters of Jee-sus have the same blood types, it’s no trouble at all to mix ‘em together.” He smiled ironically. “All you doubters out there – that ain’t faith, people, that’s science!”

  The crowd laughed on cue.

  The image shifted to a microscope view. A uniform expanse of red blobs, so tightly-packed together on a field of bright light that they could almost be mistaken for a solid block. Red blood cells.

  The tip of the needle shunted into view like a clumsy freight-train, skimming layers of Tilda’s blood aside in its haste. I wondered abstractly if there was some deliberate rationale behind choosing acolytes of different genders; some discreetly sexual overtone in the public mixing of their blood.

  Maybe I just had sex on the brain. It’d been a while.

  James’s blood streamed down the needle and oozed into the patch of cells already cramping the screen. Without a pulse to meld them together there was little natural movement, but again the needle whisked back and forth, blending like an artist on a palette.

  “Same as before,” the preacher said. “No change, y’see? No reaction. No rejection. Both the same kinda blood.”

  Cut back to the smirking preacher, only now he had a guest. Seated and frail in a chair beside him, looking even less healthy – more zombified – than usual, was John-Paul Rohare Baptiste, filled with quiet serenity or incontinent senility, depending on your view.

  The crowd around me – predictably – went nuts.

  The preacher bent down, fussed, muttered prayers, kissed the old git’s robes, and eventually got the hell on with it and stuck a needle in the withered skin of the human prune’s arm. There were a few artfully displayed bruises clustered in the same area where the poor dear soul had undergone previous tests, making the audience cluck and sigh in sympathy at his selfless suffering. They all looked like makeup to me.

  Whatever the truth, the preacher was eventually successful in drawing-off a spoonful or two of the holy man’s divine fluids, and quickly returned to the microscope, syringe in hand.

  The needle slid into the silent mixture of the acolytes’ blood and immediately disgorged its own cargo, a slick of ruby covering over the rest.

  The effect was almost immediate.

  The cells intermixed. Knots formed. Colours darkened. Like some glue-smeared retraction, the whole bloody morass shrunk-down together, accreting and clinging, separating into dark nodules. It was like watching something perfectly transparent, held over a flame, warp and ruck into sharp new angles, forming nodes.

  “What y’all are seeing,” the preacher said, “is called clumpin’. It’s what happens when you put the wrong kinda blood into someone. Now, all us O-negs, back before the Holy Wrath of Him On High – Hallelujah! – delivered the Cull upon our miserable sinner’s world, you coulda’ given our blood to just about any Tom, Dick or Harry. You do it slow enough, you get no reaction at all. Universal donor, brothers and sisters! Amen!

  “But you try introducing something else into an O-neg system, it’s gonna react. It’s gonna get to clumpin’.”

  Cut back to the preacher. Face serious, now, all fire and brimstone, sweat prickling on his brow.

  “‘And I heard a great voice,’” he hissed, “‘out of the temple, saying to the Seven Angels, “go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth!”

  “‘And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast; and upon them which worshipped his image!’”

  The preacher wiped his brow, as if he’d been overcome and then released from some powerful trance. I stifled a yawn.

  “Revelations!” he yelled. “Revelations Sixteen, One and Two! The prophet foresees the wrath of God, claiming to death and damnation all them miserable sinners and heathens he’s marked! Marked on the inside, brothers and sisters! Marked in their very blood!”

  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 the 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 nearly six 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 First 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 sai
d. “Fight starters, thieves. Maybe tried to settle shit without 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.”