The Culled Read online

  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 around 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 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 Seventy-Fourth 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 NT 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 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 Three?

  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 off.

  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, although I didn’t realise it. Engines growling to life behind me, a voi
ce 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, although 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.

  The me inside – rational, detached, cold, keeping the monkey-man in control... he loved it.

  Such focus!

  Such sensation!

  Don’t you fucking give up, soldier!

  I ran like a steam train. Like a bloody Duracell bunny, with an amphetamine volcano up its furry arse. Like an animator’s run-cycle stuck on a fast-forward loop. The same movements over and over, with a background cyclorama tumbling by and nothing but the throb, throb, throb to accompany the slapping of my feet. Puddles. Cracked tarmac. Weed-strewn sidewalks.

  What I’m getting at is, I ran like a robot. Never tiring, never feeling. I ran until I was sure my heart would pop, and smiled through frothing teeth and kept going.

  Fuck it, I kept thinking. Fuck it all.

  Down tight alleyways. Over dumpsters, through drifts of shitty litter. Sharp corners. Over wire fences and down labyrinthine passages. The vehicle-roar came and went, bashing and smashing at intersections, voices raised in curses.

  Hot breath, burning my lungs.

  The AV couldn’t keep up. It kept trying to double round, to sneak ahead; headlights blazing then jerking off on some random course. They might have had some luck, if I hadn’t been a contrary bastard. If I hadn’t been changing my mind about what direction to run every five minutes.

  The third man had a bike. Some suped-up Japanese travesty, whining like a prepubescent dragonfly, and he had no trouble sticking to me; negotiating alleys too tight for the four-wheeler. I took him down circuitous switchbacks and wide avenues, letting the skittish scavs confuse him, hiding behind dark corners and doubling back every time he scorched past. Earning ten minute respites here and there, curled-up in dark rooms with terrified squatters moaning beneath soiled sleeping-bags. But he was good. Give him his due; he turned on a penny and came straight back the instant the sniffer-freak on the AV caught the scent, headlight tracking like a laser-sight, rubber squealing.

  It would be fair to say – in fact it would be a royal bloody understatement – that I got fed up with him. The bike was enclosed like a sleek little turtle with riot-shields and bullet-proof plex; caroming off angled walls that should have unseated him, slipping through the oil drum fires I pulled down in my wake like a galleon through fog. And yeah, maybe he couldn’t shoot me through the balustrades of shielding; but it worked both ways, and every time I found some perilous vantage point – dangling from a low-hanging escape ladder, peering like Oscar the Grouch out of a scav-nest dumpster – to open up with the Uzis and riddle him with lead, all it achieved was to let him know where I was.

  He was trying to make road kill. Exhaust me, flush me out in the open. Curved scythe-blades on the bike’s front mudguard, ankle-breakers poking like twisted spokes from both wheels.

  He was running me down, and he was fucking good at it.

  So eventually what I did was: I stopped running.

  Stood in full view.

  Waited.

  (Took a moment to glance at my watch. 23:13hrs, yank-time. Not out of the woods yet, boyo.)

  He came round the corner like a flaming bullet, and pulled-up with unnecessary flashiness, propping himself on the far leg so I couldn’t even blast open his knees.

  Cautious little cocksucker.

  I willed him to get on with it before the AV caught us up.

  He laughed behind his dusty shield and shouted:

  “Getting tired, little limey?”

  I opened fire. For all the good it did.

  He gunned the whiny engine like every mosquito in the universe shouting in unison, blurring tyres snagging at the floor with a smoky blast of inertia, and came for me.

  Bullets punching worthless craters in the glass.

  Laughing.

  Closing the gap.

  Scythe-blades looming.

  It was all deeply melodramatic. I rolled my eyes, took three steps backwards – down the flight of stairs lurking in the moonless shadows directly behind me – and lay down.

  He didn’t see that one coming.

  “The fu – ?”

  The stupid little prick went hurtling over my head, angled in mid-air, hit the wall of the subway stairwell, and just sort of...

  Came apart.

  No flashy fireballs or smoke-drenched detonations. Just a noise like a big cockroach cracking, and a lot of debris.

  He was gurgling nastily when I walked away – like he’d broken his back or something – and I should probably have put him out of his misery.

  Paint me bothered.

  THE AV FOUND me fifteen minutes later. The scrawny little freak – doped up on whatever military-grade tracking drugs Scrim had dished out – clung to the roof like a surfer, rapping on the glass and snarling inarticulately, directing the Klan boss’s crazed steering. Again with the sodding circling-round, slipping along too-tight alleyways. It felt good to begin with. Rushing past their clumsy attempts to get ahead, disappearing into the shadows to clamber up on this or that fire-escape, pausing to catch my bearings, trying to head back towards the park. It was time to begin the home-run.

  It took me a fair old while to realise they were herding me. They were smarter than I thought.

  I came upon an office block – nothing special; redbrick and shattered windows – with a door hanging open on a narrow stairwell. Sick and tired of the growl of engines, I rabbitted up the first few flights without any trouble, pausing to vomit discreetly before pushing myself onwards. Somewhere near floor five – or maybe six – a particularly large scav wearing Gull colours tried to axe me in the head, yelling for me to get the hell away from his wife.

  There was an inflatable sex-doll on the floor next to him, but it didn’t seem like the right time to point this out. I shoved the Uzi up his nostril until he got the message and backed off, then carried on upwards towards the roof whilst he noisily comforted his ‘wife’ below.

  On the roof, I puked again. The throbbing in my ear was jacking about with my sense of direction, and it didn’t help when the moonlit city put itself together bit-by-bit inside my topsy-turvy bearings.

  I was so far west of the park I could see the tiny fishing punts on the Hudson, beyond the tangle of docks and quays spread out below me. Taller buildings rose to my left and right – faint lights glimmering inside where innocent scavs struggled to get by with some semblance of a life.

  It was actually sort of beautiful. If it hadn’t been about a mile in the wrong direction I might have paused to appreciate it.

  There were no roofs to leap across to here. No secondary stairways to scamper back down.

  And, if I’m honest, no energy to go on. The thing inside me curled up and went to sleep, exhausted, and left me alone. Only human. Outnumbered and outgunned.

  Trapped.

  “Fuck,” I said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

&nbs
p; From the open door I heard the huge scav shouting again – “My wife! Tha’s my fucking wife!” – then a sharp little gunshot to shut him up.

  Footsteps up the stairwell.

  Time for the endgame.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  INTERLUDE

  IF HE WAS honest, Hiawatha wasn’t nearly as bemused as he felt he should be.

  Or rather, as he felt Rick should be.

  The name change had only been cosmetic at the beginning. Just a... a symbol of his willingness to embrace all the weirdness, to get stuck-in, to do as the Sachems asked. To drop all the moping angry-native-kid-trying-to-be-white crapola and cuddle up to the Old Ways, like a brand on his soul that said ‘On A Mission.’

  But it was purely temporary – always had been – and that was the point. When he got home he’d still be ‘Rick.’

  If. If he got home.

  But then again, Rick wouldn’t have sailed through the peculiarities of the last couple of days without feeling at least uncomfortable, whereas he – Hiawatha, whoever-the-fuck-he’d become – was taking it all in his stride. The sights and sounds, the little excursions into foggy dreamworlds, the blending of reality and legend.

  At the back of his mind Rick ranted and raved about cod-mystical tribal bullshit, whilst at the forefront – in the driving seat – Hiawatha shrugged, listened carefully to the messages on the wind, passed a critical eye over the runic algebra decorating the stars, trailed a finger in bubbling brooks and paid close attention to the splinters of light – and the codes they inferred – on the surface of the water. He didn’t even need to keep stopping to smoke dope any more. It was like he’d prised his brain through a sideways gap and – now that it was there – it could stay as long as it wanted.

  The cynical part of Rick’s mind told him he’d turned into a big dumb stoner expressing the classic idiocy of a drugged-up moron who suddenly decides everything is significant and the whole world resonates on some profound metaphysical level. If he’d been fully in charge, rather than just a morose little echo of a former voice, he would have rolled his eyes.

  Hiawatha didn’t give a rat’s ass.