The Culled ac-1 Read online

  "And that's the truth. But that don't stop our pal the Cardinal from helping the odds. Clergy got themselves every killing toy in the world holed-up over there." He nodded east, towards the unseen slab of the Secretariat. His hands were shaking. "They got every brand of… of chem with a name, and twice as many without.

  "I hate to say it, most guys, running a Tag, they got less hope than a snowball in hell. But you…? Up against the Gulls? And them tooled-up by the Choir?

  "Shee-it!"

  I let this sink in.

  "I see," I said.

  Ten o'clock. I stood and waited, tensed, beneath a canopy of spindle-fingered trees. Beside me the stagnant water sucked at the south bank of the Turtle Pond, on the fringe of what had once been 79^th street and was now a crippled lane of rubble; its tarmac long since plundered for the construction of the Gulls' shanty nest.

  I'd filtered out the noise of the crowd by now, but the force of it was still there at the back of my head, nudging against my concentration. I'd spent an hour flicking through my tattered map, and a series of notes Nate had gathered from the scavs nearby; all of them covered in spidery descriptions that didn't help at all ('gud rats!' and 'watr mostly clean'). I had a vague idea where I'd go. I wasn't stupid enough to let myself believe I had a plan; that I was ready. In situations like this, there's no such thing as 'ready'. There's just people who can wing it, and people who can't.

  I let the instincts take over, like shrugging on an old coat; patched and frayed and stinking, but so comfortable you can't imagine ever taking it off.

  Vehicles rumbling nearby. The five Gulls glared at me, weapons bristling in every direction. Four blokes, one woman. That same crazy chick who had the sword before, but the others were just faces. Muscular, armoured-up, ready to play. All except Big Scrim. He stood out; encased in flashy sports gear and rubber body-armour, holding the Clergy's tracker-device like a novelty TV aerial in the back of an open-top jeep.

  Everywhere I looked, Clergy.

  Clergy guns. Clergy AVs. Cardinal Cy whispering to Scrim, his four goons cross-armed behind him, pointing and directing, throwing glances my way beneath hooded eyelids. Silent communication between us, crackling like static.

  Twat.

  The crowd gets noisier. Arms slap against my shoulders, people shout and laugh, something painful digs beneath the skin of my neck.

  The tracer.

  Stay calm.

  Breathe.

  Are you ready, soldier?

  Sir, no sir!

  Well done, son. Right answer. Now get goi A flare went up.

  I ran.

  Trees whipping past. Branches scraping cheeks already sliced and puffy from last night's melee. Legs pounding like pneumatics.

  It's almost a joy to open-up. All cylinders. Let go. Feel the burn.

  Know everything.

  Cover the angles.

  Their advantages: Speed, local knowledge, the tracker in my neck, more guns than a survivalist all-comers WorldCon and enough drugs to make a pharmaceutical multinational look like a primary school chemistry kit.

  So. One thing at a time.

  Get off the track. Confound the vehicles.

  I took the verge beside the street at a vault, darted through more trees; heading for the dark blot of stone ahead. Heading west, I think, over slimy husks of rotting trunks. Something man-made looming between the boles. An escape from the preternatural chaos of the park with its forested wilderness. Too many shadows here. Too many unknowns.

  I paused for a second, shaking my muscles down, taking the time to stretch whilst I caught my breath, then onwards. Up steps greasy with lichen and mould, past knots of scavs hoping for a good view, clamouring in the shadow of a colossal building. The poor buggers recoiled and ran when they saw they'd got their wish, terrified I'd bring-down the Gulls on their viewing spot.

  A second flare went up behind me – blood red and baleful – and I stumbled without pausing through a shattered doorframe into a great emptiness.

  It took my eyes a while to adjust, and as I groped the echoes of my clumsy movements suggested a vast void all around me; the tinkling of broken glass and crunch of rubble underfoot. Shapes swam into focus. Button-like eyeballs regarded me. Brass signs and red ropes.

  A fucking great elephant, staring down. Someone had snapped off its trunk.

  AKELEY HALL OF AFRICAN MAMMALS

  …a banner read; plucked out of the shadows in my peripheral vision by the overstretched blur of the instinctive training.

  Trust your perceptions.

  Don't think. Just react.

  Trust yourself.

  Go!

  Reality swam and reformed, and I'd barely noticed myself rushing up stairs that folded back and forth in concertina ribbons, up the sides of a great hallway, passing glass cabinets crammed with taxidermy's greatest trophies and fossilised impressions screwed to walls beside plastic plaques.

  Engines growled in the distance, rushing nearer, audible through crack-holed windows, arched and medieval. Raised voices.

  Fuckers.

  On the fourth floor a frieze of limp connections and cable-like structures swam together in my mind to form great prehistoric beasts: fleshless and comical in their gawky poses, tangled amidst steel supports and gaudily-coloured waxwork models.

  In my state of mind, adrenalised to hell and incapable of rationalising through the tsunami of reactions, finding dinosaurs on the fourth floor of a vast building did not seem worthy of remark. Just another bunch of dumb bastards, wiped out before their time.

  Up here, scav kit was everywhere. Blankets and cushions concealed lazily between titanic ribs, small piles of combustible rubbish pulled off the displays, heaped in odd corners for tinder and late-night fires. Beside me a glass cabinet containing rows of fossilised teeth had been partially shattered; torn away from the wall, left jagged with razor panels incised. On the other side of the room someone had used the Apatosaurus as a toilet, and the whole chamber was thick with flies and dust.

  Voices spiralled up from the great hall far below, shouts and curses followed by the conspicuous silence of people being quiet. I peered cautiously over the rim of the balcony, hoping the radio marker didn't provide a vertical reading. Sure enough, ghostly shapes moved in the light-dappled lobby; oozing from cover to cover with the exaggerated care of those who think their enemies are close.

  Cat and Mouse. Rule number one:

  Don't be the mouse.

  Sir, yes sir etc etc.

  So I picked up the remains of the cabinet with all the care I could muster, winced at every tinkle of fragmented glass, and pitched it with a roar over the balcony's edge.

  The snarl took on a violent life of its own in the acoustic void of the stairwell, modulating musically with the xylophonic traumas of the cabinet.

  Someone below reacted fast. The poor sod.

  Automatic gunfire stitched the open stairwell with muzzlefire and noise, and then nothing but glass. Like champagne. Like watery froth, dazzling.

  Shattering.

  Tumbling.

  Slicing.

  The sound was shocking. A calamitous crash that resounded in every dimension and shook the air.

  Then nothing but silence.

  Then screams that bubbled away into gasps, as whoever was underneath the cabinet rustled off their jagged little coil. Then more silence.

  Then just the moans of shocked survivors, cut to shreds.

  And the soft sound of me, running like hell.

  I'd stopped twice on the way down from the dinosaur exhibits. The few fractured shards of rationality still spinning inside my head had decided I was inside a museum, and the one thing museums always have is an enormous floor plan in every corner.

  That was stop 'Number One.'

  In a display of the Woodlands Indians, in the far western wing of the third floor (within easy sprinting distance of a stairwell which – I was reliably assured – led down to the side exit on West 77^th street), I crouched and bled.
/>   This was the result of stop Number Two.

  Thick rivulets down my spine, oozing under the hem of my trousers and down the backs of my legs. Didn't matter. I was in control.

  Taking my time. Calm. Breathing well.

  The sensible savage.

  I think somehow, somewhere inside, I felt indignant, too. Like: how dare these fuckers chase me? How dare they? How dare they outnumber me?

  Me!

  It was a useful emotion.

  This was home, in a way. Worming through the darkened corridors of an embassy in some exotic place, waiting for the moment to strike. Lurking, stalking, closing in.

  Or letting them come to me.

  This time the arseholes came mob-handed. They'd closed on the tracker beacon with admirable speed, slinking along open corridor corners to avoid ambushes, sidestep-by-sidestep. I could hear their progress with practiced acuity: three together on point then another (a softer tread, probably the woman) taking rearguard.

  Only four. The other one was staked-out in the lobby, crushed and sliced-up by the glass cabinet. Twenty minutes into this nasty little game, and one fucker down already.

  It would be dishonest to pretend I wasn't enjoying myself.

  I could hear them beyond the last corner of the twisting hall.

  "Strong signal," one grunted, voice terse. "Directly ahead. Other end of the room."

  An arm blurred in the shadows.

  Something small flying, bouncing, rolling, then Light and smoke and noise, and three heavy figures springing-out to let rip into the phosphor distraction. I couldn't even see the weapons; only feel the drumming of the air, the epileptic nightmare of endless automatic muzzleflare, and the quiet smugness on the bright faces of the attackers.

  They were standing so close I could almost have touched them and, for the record, they were shooting in completely the wrong direction.

  I waited until they'd walked further into the room. The one with the tracker grunted in satisfaction, claiming the marker was stationary and they must have hit me. They took up swaggering stances before the darkened 'Iroquois' display – now reduced to shattered plastic and crumbled wax – and took a few more potshots into the rubble, just to be sure.

  Behind them, I ducked out from beneath the cosy chickenwire-supported wigwam of the Ojibwa tribe (never heard of them) and ghosted back along the empty corridor.

  Divide and conquer.

  The woman stood with her back to me, pressed into a pool of darkness, nervous at the cacophony her comrades were throwing-up from round the corner. She had a mini-Uzi in each hand – compact little toys with folded stocks and extra-long mags – and the pale curve of her neck was perfectly caught by the dim moonlight of the arched windows, like a ski slope. Waiting for an avalanche.

  Carefully, using swaddled fabrics I'd stolen from my pals in the Ojibwa, I palmed the long shard of glass I'd used to slice the electric tag out from the skin of my shoulder (stop number two, remember?), I'd hidden it carefully amongst the dummy-display of the Iroquois, letting the morons walk right past me.

  Some people might call that 'cheating'.

  Don't you fucking give up, soldier!

  Sir, no sir etc etc.

  Cat and Mouse. Rule number two:

  Even the biggest cat picks-off mice one by one.

  The woman had the good grace to die quietly, and she'd even warmed-up the grips of my two brand new Uzis. That's consideration for you.

  Half an hour later, the others were getting frustrated.

  I'd left the museum and headed south, careful not to double-back on the park. This whole lightless neighbourhood was their turf, and the more advantages I could give myself, the better. Right now that meant staying out from the moon-dappled weirdness of the trees, hugging the right-angles and solidity of the West Side.

  I turned off down 74^th and found a tenement block; took the fire escape up to the top floor and bust my way inside as quietly as I could. Still no sounds of pursuit – and after all why should there be? The marker pressed under my skin was their only ace; and now that was nothing but a bloody shard of circuitry in the pocket of a mannequin. It was almost tempting to sit out the two hours here, reclining on the unscavved sofa in some long-dead New Yorker's grotty little apartment.

  But.

  Think. Cover the angles.

  But other people had surely cut out the trackers before.

  The fuckos must have a Plan B.

  But.

  But if they have the marker, couldn't they just claim victory anyway?

  'Proof of kill'?

  But, but, but.

  And the biggest shitter of them all:

  The End.

  By midnight I had to present myself to a member of the Clergy. That's how it finished. That's how they knew who'd won or lost.

  They'd given me a perfunctory description of places I could look: slums on the En-Tee border zones, territory markers down to the south, Clergy-run checkpoints. With each item on the list, spoken through softly clenched teeth by the pale-faced Cardinal Cy, I'd cast a quick glance at Nate – hiding in the crowd, face shadowed inside a hood. He'd simply shaken his head, over and over.

  The Clergy weren't going to make this easy for me. They wouldn't be waiting to shake my hand, tell me well done. If they were waiting at all, it was with a bullet.

  Think it through.

  Cover the angles.

  Which just left the park. Right back to the start. Presenting myself to the crowd and the bastard Cardinal himself, standing up there on the podium beside the turtle-pond with his four hulking Choirboy guards and his stupid ruby-red glasses, to show I'd done it.

  Easy as that.

  Big Scrim and his two remaining goons, they knew it as well as I did. They knew I'd be scurrying out from the undergrowth, back in the park, at five minutes before midnight. And that meant all they had to do was wait.

  Shit.

  Cat and mouse. Rule number one.

  So I plundered anything useful from the apartment – an out-of-date band-aid for my shoulder, a vac-sealed packet of salami on a shelf, a couple of rusty kitchen-knives in plastic sheaths, and went out to find them. Followed the sounds of engines rumbling. I took the rooftops where I could; a raggedy tabby going arm-over-arm, pouncing across alleyways and ghosting up empty fire escapes, leaving a trail of terrified scavs, their sleep disturbed by a prowling monster.

  I found the Gulls hunched in the back of the biggest AV, far below the roof ledge of a fire station. Voices rose from below the closed hood, and I worked my way down with the utmost care; letting go of everything, letting something unevolved and primitive – but so much better at this shit – swim to the forefront of my mind.

  I climbed down to meet them. An ape with Uzis.

  At the foot of the building an alleyway cut out onto the main street, and there I nestled myself into the bricks, unfolding the stock of one of the tiny guns to give myself at least a fighting chance of hitting something.

  I could see them clearly, shadowed by the moonlight like patches of cut-out card.

  I could hear them.

  Both of them. Two guys.

  So where's number 3?

  Scrim was busy, bent down over the scrawnier of his two warriors. Jacking a hypodermic needle into the other man's neck, holding him tight in a vicious headlock as he grunted and pleaded. I found myself entranced, all but forgetting to poise myself for that critical moment, that perfect shot.

  "You fuck! You stay still. You fuck!" Scrim kept up a volley of abuse, squeezing the plunger with a sly grin. "You gonna help us, boy. You gonna find that limey shit. You gonna track his ass."

  The little man jerked his head and finally pulled away with a howl. Scrim watched him, smiling quietly, clambering down to the driver's seat.

  The man shivered for a moment, sweat prickling along his forehead. I held my breath, wondering what weird shit Doctor Scrim had prescribed, what narcotic treats the all-conquering Clergy had handed-over to help their pet Gulls finish me o
ff.

  The little man grunted. Frowned.

  Then…

  Changed.

  He sat up. His head moved a little too quickly. Darting, like a bird's: from position to position with no intermediary movement. He drooled. He closed his eyes.

  The thing inside me, the primitive 'self' in control, gave a little grunt of recognition.

  The little man sniffed.

  And licked his lips.

  Scrim plucked something silvery-red from his pocket and dangled it above the man's nose. He tilted his head to taste it like a wolf on a scent, lapping at it, smearing it across his cheeks, then closed his eyes.

  Scrim re-pocketed the tiny shape. Didn't take a genius to figure what it was.

  The tracker. The tracker covered in my blood.

  I shivered, despite myself.

  The little man smiled. Sniffed again. Pointed his finger.

  Opened his eyes.

  Moaned.

  Stared right at me.

  Fuck.

  I was already running, I think, though I didn't realise it. Engines growling to life behind me, a voice shouting "There! There!", radios crackling in some distant world.

  I heard someone say, through thick static:

  "Yeah. Roj that. Got him."

  And then the sniper shitbag on the roof above, the third Gull, who'd been waiting like an angler poised over bait, waiting for the dumb psycho to try and turn the tables, opened fire and blew my fucking ear off.

  Things rushed past without shape. Everything seemed to throb; the whole world bulging in time to the pain inside my head.

  It hurt like a bitch, and I hadn't even had the time to poke and prod at it yet; to see how bad it was. In the mean time I was letting myself get good and freaked, imagining the worst.

  I think I could still hear okay, though frankly nothing much came through except the throbbing and the engines. Always the engines. It felt like they'd been chasing me forever, though I guess it was more like an hour. Maybe more. I'd stop and look at my watch, if stopping wasn't tantamount to getting dead quickly.

  The me doing the thinking – the instinctive snarling primate bastard I was taught to let out in situations like this – howled and yelped at the pain, fighting to scratch at the torrent pouring down my neck.