The Culled Page 3

  “– down will come ba –”

  Kroom.

  Sparks. Alarms screaming like abandoned babies.

  Everything shuddered. A backblast of air funnelled down the cabin from ahead, peppered with glass and stone, and my neck twisted so hard I yelped in shock. Grass and distant buildings snickered past outside the window, but not in a straight line. We were curling on the runway, half-deployed landing gear screaming and twisting in protest beneath us, rolling us sideways, careening in a cloud of molten metal and whirligig embers. Spinning off the tarmac.

  A sudden moment of weightlessness, and pain all across my midriff as the seatbelt bit. From the corner of my eye I saw Bella rise into the air, pancake-spreadeagle on the ceiling with a cockroach crunch,and then back down, nutting a headrest and flipping, upside down, onto her side.

  No seatbelt.

  Shit.

  A bone jarring shudder, and crippled metal twisting with an operatic screech. Through the window beside me, lost behind a grid of contradictory smoke-trails and fluttering debris, I could make out the arrowhead of the wing tilting backwards and up, shearing itself off as the plane barrel-rolled into its slow skid. It ripped clear with a terrifying lurch, sprayed fuel which ignited immediately, and shattered itself magnificently across the tarmac like a neon waterfall. The metal of the fuselage – four seats in front of me – buckled with a shriek, shattering all the glass down the left side and vomiting smoke into the cabin. Everything went black and toxic, and even through the acrid fog and my own desperate coughing I could hear the battered impacts of the plane’s death throes. It snarled and groaned its way across the last of the runway, ripping gouges of rock with an angle-grinder roar, then dipped with another lurch onto the grassy rough. Bella groaned somewhere in the murk.

  Time started to return, piece by piece. Sparks drooled.

  And – slowly at first, but gathering speed as inertia surrendered to the shifting weight – we rolled. Landing gear comprehensively AWOL, single remaining wing arcing up and over the fuselage like a shark’s dorsal, ceiling bowing and sagging then snapping straight as it took the strain. My seat swapped verticality for an abrupt horizontal, lifting the whole cabin like a theme-park ride, sharp-edged seatbelt constricting me again.

  The second wing slapped at the ground with a bowlike shudder and snapped off. Like some cylindrical juggernaut the fuselage rolled across it, breaking apart at the seams as it went.

  Inside: tumbling chaos.

  Debris dropping then lifting, blood rushing to and from eyeballs, hands swapping between lap and forehead.

  Bella flapped like a dying fish, thud, thud, thud, off ceiling and floor with each new rotation. If she was still alive, she didn’t look it. Nothing much I could do to help.

  We seemed to be slowing down.

  Then something detonated behind us. The all pervading jet-whine of a long-lost engine maxed out with a painful hiss and – oh fuck oh fuck – striated everything, inside and out, with shrapnel. Metal was punctured. The craft rocked and shunted forwards, heat-blast roiling back from the mangled tail, and hacked at the rags of my bloody clothes. Something stung my knee. My face bled. What few windows remained exploded like froth on a wave, and I had the fleeting impression of singed grass surfing past the shattered porthole as we rolled again. Something sharp and long punched itself through the metal beside me, coming to rest a scant foot from my side: a shattered stanchion from the rough beside the runway, picked up like a thorn.

  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 five-point-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?

  Five. Point. 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 assess. 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 cliché, 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?

  Probably too much to hope New York had changed that little.

  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, New York 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 (née 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 mor
e 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 race.

  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’kéhaka 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 around here were dead. Not his problem.