The Culled ac-1 Page 3

  And finally, like a great engine throbbing itself into dormancy, the airplane came to an appalled halt; listing on its back like a clapped-out whore, waiting for another bout. Smoke plumed on every side, and the quiet crackle of flames tugged at my punch-drunk consciousness.

  "Shit." I said.

  And Bella's inert body – half resting on the back of a chair directly above my head – surrendered to gravity, flopped in mid-air with a boneless kick, and impaled itself on the jagged spike in the wall.

  I don't think I'll ever forget the sound it made.

  The first instinct was to get out.

  All that Hollywood bullshit about fuel tanks spontaneously going up like Krakatoa – long after the crash – could be safely ignored. The second engine had fallen silent shortly after the mad tumbling stopped, killing with it any obvious danger of explosion. But the irrational panic remained like an ember in my guts, and the fires already lit were plentiful enough to be scary. With the smoke gradually thickening and the slippery cut across my forehead leaking into my eyes, I thrashed about to get to the seatbelt buckle, finding a sudden unshakeable need to be away from this bastarding plane.

  Away from Bella's limp little body. Staring straight at me.

  Don't you fucking give up, soldier.

  Sir, no sir, etc etc.

  It was stealing over me by degrees that I'd done it. I'd got to the States. I'd fucking done it.

  And yeah, there had been sacrifices and hardships. Yeah, there had been pain and chaos and untidy scrambling. Yeah, there had been death.

  But you don't do what I used to do, for fifteen years, without seeing some or all of that at some point. You don't get to slink like a shadow between the raindrops, killing and cutting behind the scenes of a hundred and one foreign powers, without learning how to bottle it all away. Screw it up into a venomous little ball and dump it, derelict and forgotten, somewhere in the poisonous wastes of the unvisited mind. Anything it took to get-on-with-it. Mental conditioning. Emotional disconnection. Whatever.

  I'd got to America. Nothing else mattered.

  Though, to be fair, the victory was soured somewhat by the attendant uncertainty of what I'd find out there. Five years ago, before the news-shows stopped broadcasting and the emergency radio fell silent, before the Internet became an unchanging frieze – dying piece by piece as humming servers across the world sputtered out – it had looked like the US had not fared well.

  Certainly they'd caught a nuke or two.

  Listen: it turns out nothing brings out the aggression in a population like a shared disaster. If you believed the projections they made back at the start – and I did – the AB-virus took out 93% of the world's population. That's fifty-nine billion people, for the record, bent-double with the pain, spitting mangled clusters of alveoli out of their lungs and into their mouths, bleeding from eyes and ears and arse, dying by fractions.

  You hear that?

  Fifty. Nine. Billion.

  It's a bigger number than I can imagine – and that wasn't even the end of it.

  There was a time – perhaps a month or two – when the governments and networks and lines of communication were still nominally functional. Stripped down, understaffed, kept afloat by the efforts of men and women who'd watched nine out of ten of their colleagues drop dead, who'd been left blinking in the glare of responsibility with no clue, no hope and no idea.

  I guess it was inevitable some stupid fuckwit would start throwing accusations.

  The AB-virus was manufactured, they said.

  Biological weaponry, they said.

  State-sponsored terrorism hiding behind pandemic disaster, they said, and they pointed fingers and found 'proof', and let the tension escalate. The news was all but dead by the time the missiles dusted off, but we heard about it. Even in London.

  I like to think nobody targeted Britain because our diplomatic status was untarnished, our potential involvement in any biological assault was laughable, and our impartiality prevented any accusations being aimed at us.

  Yeah. And pork-chops come with wings.

  No, we were spared because there were no wankers left in Whitehall to stick their heads over the parapet and join the row. No one left to contribute to the growing worldwide squabble. No one left to press Big Red Buttons.

  After the Cull, any poor fucker left in charge was either lynched by the mob or ran and hid. It was a very British way of dealing with disaster.

  It was also, now, half a world away.

  I drew myself painfully through the interior of the destroyed plane and tried to anticipate. From the heat and glare ebbing through the largest of the ragged rents in the fuselage it looked like a pleasant day, which was something of a novelty after five years of acid rain and London skies.

  I threw a last look back at Bella – hating myself for not having the energy to lift her off that spike; for not pausing a moment longer to at least close her eyes. But no… that same feeling of being bottled-up; trapped in a cage. Waiting for something to come and get me.

  It's a cliche, but you don't get any good at what I used to do without letting your instincts guide you. That and the fact that, in my line of work, there was always something coming to get me.

  Logic suggested the Neo-Clergy would be nearby. This was, after all, their plane. It was also their route, plotted ahead of time into their autopilot, landing us (for want of a better word) at their chosen destination. They could be relied upon to take exception to the way I'd treated their property.

  I probed a hand into the pocket of my coat, seeking reassurance.

  Still there.

  Good.

  But what else to expect? A nuclear desert? A radioactive wasteland haunted by the insane and the dying? Cancerous wildlife staggering on tumourous legs, lurching up to feast on the new arrival?

  I'd been to New York once before. It didn't sound all that different.

  I'd stowed the supplies pack in a luggage locker near the cockpit. Working my way forwards, past twisted seats and dangling airmasks, it was easy enough to retrieve. But as I tried to heft it onto my shoulders, grunting under my breath, it occurred to me exactly how weak I was. My head rushed for a split second – the legacy of the Bliss – and I staggered, overbalancing awkwardly.

  "Bollocks!" I hissed, falling onto my arse.

  It saved my life.

  A stuttering burst of semi-auto rang out from somewhere behind me, clawing a neat geyser of shattered plastic and fibrous insulation from the ceiling/wall above my head.

  Exactly where I would have been.

  I dropped and rolled, textbook fast, before my brain even caught up. A chatter of gunfire followed – I guessed from the same source – shaking the air like a giant fan and tugging on my raggedy coat as it ripped a hole in the trailing edge. I swatted out the singed fabric before it caught light, finding myself hidden by the padded shield of a sideways seat, and let the adrenaline take over.

  Identify the enemy.

  "Where the fuck," a voice shouted, NY accent thicker than a sergeant's skull, "are the kids?"

  Ah.

  The kids.

  "I can explain!" I shouted, keeping the terror thick in my voice. "Just… just don't shoot me! Oh god oh god. It wasn't me! They sent me to tell you!"

  "Who sent you?"

  "T-the…" Think fast. "The Bishop! There was a problem! W-with the kids, I mean. They wanted me to explain, s-so they…"

  "What problem? Where the fuck are they?"

  Get a direction. Zero-in.

  "Answer me! Where are they?"

  Further along the cabin. Standing in the aisle. Must have climbed in through the missing tail.

  Alone?

  "Please, I… I just… oh god…" I knocked out my best sob. I hammed it up like a true thesp. I poured every false fear into that gurgling pitiful little voice, and when the figure appeared slowly on the edge of my vision, creeping forwards with his lips pursed, it was set in a posture of laughable unwariness. His gun was lowered.

/>   He rolled his eyes when he saw me, cowering and shivering in bloody rags with snot pouring off my nose.

  And the Oscar goes to…

  "Pull yourself together," he said, a fraction softer. "Now tell me who the fuck you are or it's…"

  I moved faster than my own senses could register. Mental conditioning. Third year training. Biological reactions: without thought or judgement. Zen disciplines with chemical catalysts: reaching down into the subconscious, switching off your abstractions and distractions, becoming something less and more than rational.

  Letting the body take over.

  "Hng." he said.

  I took out his jugular and carotid with a single sweep of the hunting knife I'd been carrying since Heathrow. More blood, soaking through my coat.

  Doesn't matter.

  I pirouetted downwards whilst the poor bastard was still wondering where I'd gone, wondering why his voice had stopped working, wondering why only gurgles arrived in his mouth where there should be angry, demanding words.

  Three stabs to the ribs. Two directly between intercostals, the third glancing sideways off the breastbone, snapping something with a greasy pop, then sliding in as soft as you like.

  Stepped back.

  Considered a fourth stab upwards from solar plexus, decided it wasn't needed.

  Retreated to my cover behind the chair and waited with animal patience for the human parts of my brain to come back on line.

  Start to finish, it took about six seconds.

  The man stayed upright for another five as his body worked out it was already dead.

  He hit the puddle of his own blood like a belly-flopping pig, jerked once or twice, and went still.

  I wiped the knife clean on a sleeve and cleared my throat.

  There didn't seem to be anyone else around.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Interlude

  The man had opted to change his name for the duration of his mission – not that he'd had a lot of choice. It was that or put up with the Sachems nagging him for the rest of eternity.

  A week ago he was Rick. Today he was Hiawatha. Go figure.

  He gunned the Honda along the main street of a picturesque everytown, enjoying the growl of the old engine – still a perfect melody, despite its hiccups and occasional coughs – and selected a sidestreet at random. Nobody on the sidewalks. No curtains twitching or faces peering over tumbledown walls. Nobody here to see the Mighty Hiawatha passing through.

  He supposed he ought to be honoured. It was, after all, a name dredged from the deepest troughs of tribal heroism – belonging first to the great warrior/prophet who reconciled the squabbling nations. Hiawatha – the original – had been friend and brother to the deific Great Peacemaker; a glorious ancestor-totem in his own right and the illustrious architect of the first Great Confederacy. Four hundred years later and the white men still insisted on calling the Union of Five Nations by its insulting handle – the Iroquois – and never gave it another thought.

  Ignorance and arrogance. So said the sachems, anyway.

  (Cue dull lectures about the Confederacy's 'invention' of democracy, its influence on the US's own constitution, and a hundred-and-one other details, hopelessly out of date, that the clan mothers and their chieftain pets meme-repeated every time anyone was dumb enough to ask a vaguely cultural question.)

  Iroquois meant 'Rattlesnakes'. The clan mothers hated it.

  Rick (nee Hiawatha) rather enjoyed the description. It appealed to the youngster inside him, a sinister sort of moniker to match the leathers and war paints the Tadodaho had given him. Certainly it had more character than the title the Confederacy gave itself – 'Haudenosaunee': the people of the long houses. Not exactly a name to strike terror into the hearts of one's enemies, particularly when most of the 'long houses' these days were Winnebagos.

  Rick let the bike drift to a halt before an imposing building at a crossroads. It looked like maybe it'd been a courthouse or something grand and prestigious – long ago – but a glistening plastic sign announced its more recent owners to be RAY N' JAKE, this being their

  GENERAL STORE. Bless.

  Rick listened to the engine rumble itself away into silence, wondering if anything was left inside the boarded-up building. His stomach gurgled. He'd have to start worrying about fuel soon too. Either that or stay stranded out here in ghost-town suburbia forever – and a more hellish prospect he could not imagine. He pocketed the keys, and swung himself down onto the sidewalk, flicking his long double-braid out of his eyes. Everything seemed quiet. An overgrown sign – hanging off its rusted pole on the far side of the street – let him know he'd strayed into the curiously-named town of Snow Hand (this on a day of glorious sun and only minor QuickSmog), and asked him to drive carefully.

  He smirked.

  On the subject of misinformative names, he also found it tricky these days to refer to the ubiquitous enemy (i.e.: assholes who persisted in calling the Haudenosaunee the 'Iroquois') by such a simple term as 'The White Man.' It seemed ridiculous. Some of his best friends inside the tribe were white, genetically speaking, and the council had supposedly granted them just as many rights, freedoms and opportunities as its trueblood members. It never ceased to amaze Rick that the 'new' tribesmen – who had eagerly joined the Confederacy since the Cull and were mostly paler than an anaemic goth – seemed utterly untroubled by the constant bitching about the goddamn 'white man'.

  It was like they'd resigned from their own species.

  Lucky bastards.

  His silent perplexity brought a little smile, unbidden, to his face. He was remembering the last night before he left his home-village to embark on this ridiculous trip, and his good pal Leicester (formerly a whitebread bank clerk, now a hunter-scavenger with the Kanien'kehaka lodge), smoking an enormous hash pipe. The dumbass had actually started griping, perfectly serious as only a raging pothead could be, about the 'Pale-Skinned Devils.'

  Rick still found himself sniggering at that one, a week later.

  Snow Hand's unremarkable environs looked unlikely to yield much by the way of food or fuel. Small white and green houses, clad in sycamore and aluminium, nestled into the wooded hills on every side. Pretty much all the trees were dead, Rick noticed, which didn't help the sense of cloying not-quite-rightness. He'd stopped in enough places up and down the I-80 in the last few days to know this was hardly a rarity. Maybe some weird effect of the fallout had taken its toll along the eastern face of the Appalachians. Maybe a lack of rain, or just too much fucking sun, or something in the QuickSmog or… or whatever. The forests round here were dead. Not his problem.

  Rick squared up to the door of the general store, not letting the little gang of crows squatting on its roof startle him. They – or others like them – had been keeping pace with him for a good fifty miles now, perhaps hoping he'd spontaneously drop dead. It didn't bode well for his hopes of finding food.

  The wide window outside the shop had been comprehensively boarded up: first with planks (long since desiccated and crumpled), thereafter with an increasingly desperate array of corrugated iron, chicken wire and a long lost car door.

  Impregnable. Ish.

  "Hello?" Rick called out, casually drawing a feather-pocked crowbar from his saddlebag, not entirely sure if he wanted to be heard. A fat cat, long since gone feral, glared impudently at him from a weed-choked driveway across the street. He shrugged. At least if there was nothing in the store he might find some lucky tins of pet food somewhere. Or…

  He wondered how easy it was to skin a cat…

  He had a half-hearted attempt at prising open the door – fat chance – then quickly and efficiently scrambled up the boarded window like a squirrel up a tree, coming to rest on the ledge of an upstairs window, scaring the choir of nosey crows from their holier-than-thou vantage. Iron bars, of all the luck, bisected the window, but the wood was so ancient and the plaster sealing the cavity so rotten that a few hefty swats with the crowbar and some hot-faced brute force was all it took to ga
in entry.

  The way Rick saw it, the harder it was to get into one of these dismal places, the more likely it was there'd be something worthwhile inside. He slipped in, silent as death, gripping the crowbar like a samurai sword.

  Whoever had occupied Snow Hand five years ago – Pale Skinned Devils no doubt, ha! – had either died or moved on. Same as most places. Uprooted families, the dead going unburied. Back at the start, when people began to die and the Government said conspicuously less and less about it every day, people had clued-up quicker than the suits had expected. Something big, going down, being kept quiet.

  Maybe the townsfolk had even seen the flare-flashes in the night, out across the southeast horizon, as the Sovs or the Saudis or whoever-it-was took out Washington like bleach on a stain. That's the sort of thing that'll kill your community spirit, deader than disco.

  Snow Hand. Some of them went east to NY, probably, and no doubt died there. Some went west, over the hills. Probably died too.

  Some of the lucky ones maybe fell in with the Haudenosaunee, to stay alive and count their blessings and get on by.

  (Yeah, the uncharitable voice of rebellion grumbled inside, just so long as they respected the goddamn old ways and didn't rock the fucking boat.)

  Rick checked the rooms of the first floor on automatic, adrenaline burning away like a barely-noticed light. Nothing. Not unless you could eat a child's rat-nibbled dollies, or run a Honda on the contents of a cologne drawer. Taking it as read that the place had been looted before it was still no surprise to find jewels and gold stashed away, untouched in makeup cases and bedside drawers. Who was going to steal something so useless, after all?

  He shouldered the crowbar and made his way downstairs, into the store, sighing as his thoughts turned back to the tribe, wondering what would happen if he just turned around right now and headed home. Fuck the mission. Fuck the Sacred Duty.

  Back in the Haudenosaunee, the sachems – forever peering cautiously over their shoulders to check the matriarchs approved – had told him all the 'Nationalistic Crapola' (his phrase, not theirs), all the white man/red man dogma, all the 'Them-and-Us' bullshit: it was a state of mind. The Confederacy had found its place and its path in this topsy-turvy post-Cull world, and anyone who made the effort to stand in their way or interfere was designated 'The White Man' – whatever their skin tone. Simple as that.