The Culled Page 16

  “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 alotted 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 second, 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’d 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 Globies 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 NTs all around 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.”

  “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 Seventy-Ninth 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 mêlée. 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. 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.
r />   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 Seventy-Seventh 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, and 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.