The Culled Read online

  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 them? 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-mount 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 Cardin
al 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.

  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 intended 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 five.

  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 get 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.