The Culled ac-1 Read online

  Somewhere deep inside me – somewhere petty-minded and sadistic, which didn't really understand its own motivations – I liked that he was worried.

  Something about him.

  Oh yeah, one other thing:

  As the last vehicle in the convoy growled its way through the razor wire fences, just before the guards slid the tracked walls back into place, a group of the women in the crowd broke free from the shadows and rushed the guards, sobbing as they ran.

  The guards shot a few – almost perfunctorily, just to prove they could – but did their best to keep the others alive; clubbing at them with rifle-stocks and batons. I almost mistook it for mercy.

  But at first light, as the sun broke over the sooty limits of the river, there were six new bodies dangling and shrieking at the tops of the flagpoles, and three more turning black on a pyre inside the gates.

  They were called the Red Gulls, though in defiance of all naming-logic their headquarters were black. Very black. Black in the same way the ocean is damp.

  The whole thing was built of wood, laid down over shattered concrete. Cut and fixed lumber, crudely planed and inexpertly joined, sealed with sinuous rivulets of tar and vomit-patterns of wax, draped in layers of black bin-liners. Ultimately the whole thing looked not so much constructed as congealed; spreading out in a great glossy puddle like a drying cowpat.

  Just as Nate had warned, the far perimeters were a tangled morass of razor wire, crude trip-alarms and grotesque territory-markers with picked-clean skeletons skewered at their peaks. It was almost embarrassingly easy to slink past.

  The whole wretched thing stood near the heart of Central Park, set to one side of what had once been the great lawn, and where the twisted trees loomed out of the dappled sunlight they seemed to tangle and grow into the weird construction, as if its boundaries had little meaning. As if it intended to spread as far as it could, without human aid.

  I worked my way towards a knotted entrance on the quietest face, using the shadows of the tree trunks and my own raggedy camouflage to avoid the traffic heading in and out in all other directions. To the south of the park the Clergy ruled absolute, so it didn't surprise me in the slightest that of all the scavs and muscular Klansmen striding out on their business – red feathers rising like spines from their scalps – hardly any did so in this direction. The guard at the door looked positively catatonic.

  I opened his neck from the side – punching in and cutting forwards – oozing from the shadows before he could even call a challenge. I dumped the body on a natural shelf above the doorway, formed by a crook in a mouldy tree, and oozed inside like a ghost.

  I love this shit.

  Prowling. Slinking like an ethereal fucking tiger. Corridor by corridor, beaver-like nest chambers crossed in a doubtful blur, shadows adhered-to, every passing footstep used to mask my own.

  It was beautiful.

  The Red Gulls were the biggest Klan in the city, besides the Clergy itself.

  This was important to my plan.

  Years ago they'd put down a concerted coup by some long-gone uptown gang calling itself the NeverNevers, who thought they could take a crack at the Choirboys' power-base. Ever since the Gulls had been John-Paul's most favoured underlings. Permitted to spread through territories on the Clergy's own doorstep they were gifted with all the best weapons, all the choicest scav and all the craziest narcotics.

  Maybe the boost made them sloppy. Like a spider invading a rabbit-warren, I was deep inside the labyrinth of sleeping chambers, food-stores, scav-holds and moonshine stills before the so-called 'guards' even became a problem. At a thickset corridor intersection Gulls stood posted at regular intervals (they might as well have pinned-up a sign saying 'you're near something important'), and for all the adrenal shivers and subconscious hunger for violence I was forced to consider something a little more subtle.

  So I put my head down and walked past them, confident as you like.

  Just another scav.

  For the record, this sort of scam works more often than you'd think. Trust me on this. Afghanistan, Peru, even once in North Korea… You put you head down and walk like you're supposed to be there. Doesn't matter what you look like, where you're going.

  Note that it doesn't work all the time.

  Like for example when you're just passing the last red-feather-wearing wanker in the row, stepping out into the sweaty cavern at the heart of the rickety palace, and some despicable little piece of shit somewhere starts shouting about the south entrance being unguarded.

  And then, a beat later, about poor old Crocksy lying with his windpipe torn all to shit.

  Situation like that, suddenly everyone's hefting a gun. Suddenly everyone's wondering who the guy that just walked past actually was. Suddenly everyone's on edge, and shouting, and running up and down, and the whole fucking place is shaking from the noise.

  The shutters came down in my head.

  The old brain took over.

  I stepped into the cavern and cut a hole in the face of the guy shouting at me.

  Didn't stop. Heard him screaming on the floor. Moved on.

  Another guy running my way, pistol gripped tight, calling for help. Stabbed him in the stomach, lifted upwards under the ribs.

  The way to a man's heart…

  His pistol-arm stuck out under my shoulder, already going limp, so I hooked a finger under the trigger-guard, beside his own, and took out the next suicidal motherfucker in line. Forehead splatter. Red froth on the air. Singed gull-feathers.

  Something inside me, howling in joy.

  I helped myself to the gun, letting its owner empty out his guts on my shoes. Echoes still flapping in the air. Shocked faces and sprinting legs. Stop for a situation recon.

  Know everything

  Cover the angles.

  It was an audience chamber, like a medieval throne-room. Hordes of scavs and favoured women rushing out by other exits, hooting and spronking. Up the steps of a raised dais stood a succession of lieutenants and ranking Klansmen, each one in colours more gaudy than the next. Feathers, beads, bare skin with crimson tattoos, gull-feet headdresses and hands heavy with Uzis, AKs, machetes.

  At the top sat a big fucking guy in a chair. He looked sort of startled.

  I smiled at him.

  First step. Ducked under a messy punch designed to slow me down whilst the other goons got themselves loaded-up. Used the numbers against them; kept the greasy little shit with the knuckleduster between us.

  Told him: "Scuse me." Put a knife through his ribs (felt the blade notch – shit) and spat pistol fire over his collarbone, taking out the obese sod with a Kalash' two steps up. Then turned and kicked – boot to the throat of the punk behind. Scamper three steps higher in the muddle of limbs and shouts. No one wants to risk a shot. Too many bodies packed together.

  No one but me.

  Shot a lanky youngster holding a. 44. Probably would have broken his wrist anyway.

  The ranking Klanners moved in, boxing me off from the honcho on the throne, shoving and snarling, letting space open-up for weapons to bear.

  I let the knife play random patterns, spun behind the guard of a dog-faced woman with a fucking sword in her hand (amateur!) and hit step number four.

  Shot out the knees of the biggest feather-wearing arsehole of the lot. Wasted another two rounds on his ham-hands when he smirked at the pain in his legs and tried to open up with his cute machine pistols anyway.

  Time ticking by.

  Ammo all gone. Bitch with a sword hacking at air.

  Space blurring.

  I shifted tack, rushing the downed giant and using my momentum; stamping on his shoulder to vault up (bloody Hollywood antics – amateurish! Pathetic!), and pushed him down the slope on the rebound, toppling like a bowling ball towards the indignant youngsters at my back.

  Satisfying shouts of alarm and pain as the steps cleared behind me.

  I came down on top of the last goon, the last guard, the right hand man. Small but fast, wiry
as shit. My landing was messy; knocking us both down, tangling and tussling on the floor with knives pressed together. I felt a blade-tip kiss my cheek and angle up towards my eye. Ignored it. Pressed in towards his sides; a slow squeeze against the resistance of his arm, forcing him back, knife entering like a slow-mo javelin.

  I stamped on him as I stood, and blinked the blood out of my eye.

  And there was the boss. Seated. Eyeing me.

  Impassive, the cool motherfucker.

  "Who," he said, and everyone else had gone still, and nobody wanted to shoot me because they'd hit him, and everything stopped, and the silence was thicker than the noise had ever been. "The fuck. Do you think. You are?"

  So I slapped him playfully on his big forehead, and shouted: "Tag!"

  Fun for the whole family and all part of the plan.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Tag went back a year or four.

  The Tag was one of those little things the Clergy put in place as soon as it was obvious no other motherfucker was ever going to big enough to kick them off the top spot. The Tag was… a tradition. A ritual, if you want. A way for the robe-wearing arseholes to take charge of every dispute, every promotion, every powerplay.

  Above and beyond all other things, The Tag was entertainment.

  The way Nate had explained it to me, sitting in the dark outside the United Nations was:

  "You're a chicken. You spent your whole goddamn life afraid of the wolves. What you want right now is freedom. Get away from the meat eating shitheads. Spend some quality time without carnivore assholes watching your back.

  "But you know what? What you want so much more than that, is to have a go at being a wolf too.

  "Tag's how you do it."

  The Tag was a pretty simple concept, all things considered. A tough sort of justice: survival of the fittest with a lopsided twist to favour the overdog. I guess when you're living in a pit, the rules need to be as nasty as everything else, which is scant comfort for the underdog.

  That'd be me.

  In a nutshell:

  One man, or woman, challenged another. Rules varied from here to there on the nature of the challenge, but generally you're looking at punching, slapping, kicking, hair-pulling, whatever. Something publicly humiliating; an affront to the challengee's dignity. He or she was permitted to defend themselves by any means – as if in self-defence – up to and including muscle-bound lieutenants with machetes, machineguns and magnums.

  Heh. For all the good it did.

  But as soon as the challenge was made, everything stopped. No more violence allowed. Break the rules and the Clergy Adjudicators would be down like a ton of bricks.

  The challenger was escorted away, told a place and time, and left to prepare whilst the disgruntled VIP who'd been tagged set about assembling a hunting party.

  Five people. Any weapons, vehicles or gadgets they wanted, which amounted to whatever stuff they could get their hands on.

  Five people, drugged to the gills, with territorial knowledge on their side and not a scruple in sight.

  At the allotted time the challenger and the hunting party were placed in position, normally beneath the gaze of a thunderous crowd. In a world without TV, this was the Superbowl.

  The challenger was stripped of all guns, tools and blades. An electrical tag was pinned beneath his skin (joyously provided by the friendly neighbourhood Clergy), and with all due ceremony, gravity and cheer, he was told to fuck off and get running.

  The hunters were released five minutes later.

  When you initiated a Tag, there was only one rule worth knowing:

  Stay alive for two hours; you've won. Everything that belonged to the loser now belongs to you. Power. Privileges. Property. Rank.

  I got the impression it didn't happen often.

  And just for the record, just to make the whole shitty thing even more wonderful, it was overseen from start to finish by representatives of – take a wild guess – the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn.

  The cleverest thing I'd done – and if I'm honest it wasn't until afterwards that Nate explained why it was such a smart move – was to wade-in heavy and cause some serious collateral along the way. At the time I'd done it as a path-of-least-resistance thing: I wanted to get to the boss, his goons were in the way – QED.

  But no. I'd got lucky. It turned out that killing a Klansman in the normal course of life carried an immediate penalty of 'Oh-God-Make-The-Pain-Stop-Please-Please-Please' death. It was supposed to prevent gloryhunters from killing their way up to the top without effort, to stop disgruntled scavs getting mutinous around their overlords, and to deter internal arguments from spilling-over. It worked too – most of the time – and the only ones exempt were the Klanbosses themselves.

  Which meant I'd accidentally carried-off a neat spot of playing the odds. If I won the Tag I'd be the new Boss, and they couldn't hold me accountable for all the chop-socky I'd caused en route. And if, Nate said, I lost, then it didn't matter then either.

  I scowled. "How come?"

  "'Cos you'll be dead anyway."

  I'd crippled, killed or incapacitated more of my potential hunters than seemed fair or decent. I'd wiped out the Klanboss's top dogs in one fell swoop. I'd left him with an untested rabble to try and catch me, and put the fear of god up them at the same time. They'd seen what I could do. They'd hesitate, I hoped, to corner me alone.

  And, frankly, I needed every advantage I could get.

  All this just to get into the UN building. It had better be fucking worth it.

  They kept us waiting until ten o'clock. It meant that when things kicked off, the two hour limit would expire at midnight. I guess they thought it was more dramatic.

  I wasn't about to complain. It gave me the rest of the day to sleep and prepare, whilst they – the Gulls – scuttled about like headless chickens, conspiring and scheming, treating the wounded and carting-off the dead.

  All through the day, Nate kept a nonchalant sort of 'watch' while I kipped, nestled up in a bed of dry leaves beneath a footbridge, on an out-of-the-way path in the park. He shuffled off once or twice to chat to the little knots of Red Gull scavs living in bivouacs in other parts of the greenery, keeping himself out of sight of any Clergy passing through, and seemed to be warming to the role of information gatherer. I like to think he saw himself as a duellist's 'Number Two', preparing for his benefactor's moment of pistol-waving tribulation… but frankly behind his open face and warming smile it was fucking impossible to work out what he was thinking, let alone what historical-romantic notions he was dreaming-up.

  He mumbled a lot, just under his breath, and had started to sweat too much.

  All very weird.

  As I slept, I dreamed of the signal on the computer in the Vauxhall Cross building – the glowing word PANDORA, beaming bright. I dreamed of Bella impaled on her spike, shouting at me to stop being so selfish and think, dammit, about what she'd told me. I dreamed of Nate, laughing, and John-Paul Rohare Baptise, dancing through it all like a daddy-long-legs, battering himself against polished glass to reach the shining light outside.

  The light was red, and sticky.

  I dreamed of somebody else too, but the face I should have memorised years before had become a fuzzy collection of features in my mind, and the figure dissolved the instant I reached out to grab it.

  Nate woke me at eight. He'd caught a couple of rats off the banks of the stagnant Turtle Pond and sat cooking them, not once complaining at doing all the hard work, rambling away blithely on the events of the day, apparently not troubled by whether I was listening or not.

  I was.

  He said the whole territory was in uproar. He said the scavs were all but hysterical at the news of what I'd got up to that morning, and it was a toss-up as to whether said hysteria was based on delight or disgust.

  He said no one had ever heard of a Klanboss getting himself Tagged before. He said already the other tribes in the area – the StripLims to the east and the Gl
obies up on the edges of Harlem – were choked with gossip and book-running. Already barter-wagers were hot business all across the Island, he said, and scavs from Klans he'd never even heard of had been showing up in the En-Tees all round the edges of the Red Gull patch, to stand about and murmur in low voices about the 'Big Tag', hoping to catch a glimpse of the action.

  He said it was big news.

  "You, ah…" He coughed awkwardly, and twitched. He looked unwell. "You sure you wanna do this?"

  I told him, of course I did. How the hell else was I going to get into the UN building?

  "Yeah, yeah… Yeah." He coughed again. "Only, ah… That Cardinal asshole, Cy. He was up here 'round noon." His voice shook.

  "Did he see you?"

  "You think I'd be talking to you if he did? Shit, no! Stayed well outta his way. You live in En-Why any lengtha time, you get good at making sure folks ignore your ass. Like… There was this one time I got stuck with…"

  "Nate." I interrupted the tangent before it got started, troubled by his uncomfortable manner. Even in the midst of his most enthused ramblings, he'd never seemed quite so twitchy. "You were saying. About Cy."

  "Yeah. Sure. H-had himself a little chat to Scrim, that's all. In-depth, man. Intense."

  "Who's 'Scrim'?"

  Nate looked at me like I was stupid. "Motherfucker you tagged. Top dog."

  "Fair enough." I poked the rat in the fire. "Stupid name, but fair enough. So what did our friend Cy have to say for himself?"

  Nate shook his head, eyes rolling weirdly. "Pass. No way was I getting close enough to hear. But you want me take a wild stab, I'd say he's keeping an eye. Knows it's you. I mean, shit, it don't take a genius! Raggedy-assed stranger shows up at LaGuardia, goes through a pack of Choirboys like a razor. Next day you got witnesses see the same guy heading through Queens on a quad. And next day, Mister 'Nobody-Knows-Who-The-Hell-He-Is' not only gets himself balls-deep in the Red goddamn Gulls, but slaps a challenge on Big Scrim.

  "You think Cy ain't gonna make the connection? C'mon! He knows. He knows it's gonna be you out there tonight."

  "But you said this shit is sacred, right? You said nobody else gets to interfere."