The Culled ac-1 Page 5

  Offering prayers. (Ranting, if you ask me, but then I'm not the target audience.)

  Performing miracles. (Staged, if you ask me.)

  Evangelising, enthusing, speaking in tongues, convulsing in communion with angels, dribbling and shrieking. Reading snippets from the bible, sometimes. Sometimes from other books, as the whim took him. Standing stock-still, like a rabbit in the headlights, as his underlings snuck into frame and proclaimed, accents Noo-Yoik thick, that the "Holy Spirit has come upon him…"

  Nobody else seemed to find that as funny as I did.

  The man was as mad as a stoat, in my professional opinion, not that anyone ever asked. This, after all, was entertainment. This was, in some dimly understood part of the survivors' 'society', one last link with the past. Media. Broadcast signals. Something civilised…

  This was back in London. All over the UK as far as I could work out. Christ, all over the whole world, for all I knew.

  They called it The Tomorrow Show.

  The luckiest people – scratching out a survival in the suburbs, or holed-up in automated offices like me – had the remnants of electricity. Enough to plug-in for the requisite one-hour session every week, entranced like a spectator at the advent of the moving image. It felt like that, sometimes. Like something that had become mundane – the broadcast of sounds and shapes – had rediscovered the awe of its inception.

  No one expected there to be TV in the aftermath of The Cull. It was almost magnetic.

  Other people pilfered rusting generators from abandoned worksites and derelict studios, summoning the juice required to bring their equipment to life, be it knackered B amp;W antique or plasma screen treasure. They'd set up in debris-covered squares and graffiti-pocked warehouses, charging the great crowds who gathered to gawp in food or fags or favours, to squint up at the fuzzy image and await the broadcast.

  Every Sunday, at four o'clock in the afternoon (that's eleven EST), it came on. Since The Cull London had become a silent city anyway, but never more so than in that crystalline moment before the show began. Breaths held, fists clenched. I guess not many of them had been overly spiritual before it all happened, but having the word of God disseminated directly into your eyeballs still beat hunting pigeons and scavenging in the underground. No contest.

  "Abbot!" they'd shout, as the crowds gathered. "Abbot's on! Trade tickets! Tins, meat, fresh water, fags! Abbot Baptiste on soon!"

  I'd been to a few, down through the years. Just out of interest. Just to see what all the fuss was about, maybe even (whisper it) just to be around other people.

  It was always the same routine. They'd flick the switches one minute before four. Hush fell, and eyes focused on that bright oblong of swarming white noise, like a blizzard in zero-gee. Time dragged, and before you knew it people were muttering, trading worried glances, adrenaline overflowing. Is he coming? Have we missed it? Has something gone wrong? Oh, Jesus, pray for him! Pray for him to come! Don't let him desert us!

  Idiots.

  Bang on four: the signal. A test card marked with a spectrum colour-check, enclosed in the same scarlet circle that decorated everything the Neo-Clergy ever touched, and that included the clothes of their audience. A ragged cheer from the crowd, a tinny burst of recorded organ music, and there he was.

  Smiling. Serene. Wrinkled like a geriatric prune. Wobbling mitre slipping down over a frail brow, nose classically aquiline, chin jutting proudly from the abyssal folds of a robed collar. I always thought he looked like an albino vulture. Like a friendly old granddad with a secret perversion. Like a war criminal, trying to fit in.

  Saying so out loud probably wouldn't have gone down well.

  The sermons always began the same way. Push hard into a close-up – friendly eyes and soft smile filling the screen – slip into a vague soft focus that could have been intentional or technical inefficiency, and let the old goat speak, deep-south drawl sincere and stupid, all at once.

  "Blessed," he said, "are the children."

  "Where," the voice roared, loudspeaker whining with painful distortion, "are the children?"

  "Please!" I shouted, bracing myself against the ragged tear where the plane's tail had parted company with the fuselage. "I… I'm hurt! I'm bleeding! I need help!"

  "The fucking children!"

  Too much to hope the despairing nobody routine would work twice in a row. This was going to get messy.

  In snatched glances, staying low against the tortured edges of the fuselage, I figured there were ten men out there, give or take. Wafting through haze-coated patches of burning fuel and smoking debris, creeping forwards like sodding commandos assaulting a hostage siege. The tail was the obvious way in, but there were others. Smaller rents in the metal walls, the shattered panes of the cockpit, up through the sagging crater halfway down the cabin, leading into the gloomy luggage hold; now resting on the horizontal.

  I was, to put it bluntly, screwed.

  "You come out!" the loudhailer squealed, changing tack; the speaker's voice gratingly high and delivered in uncomfortable bursts. "You get your ass out! Mister! Arms high!"

  Diversionary tactics. Keep me standing here at the rear, trying to buy time, whilst the kamikaze crew popped in somewhere else. Subtle.

  I hefted the dead man's rifle and checked the setting. The wasteful idiot had it on a three round burst. Quickest way to prematurely empty your clip.

  He'd been sent in on point, I guessed. He and his mates stationed at the airport, waiting for flights from who-knew-where-else to disgorge their cargo and head back home for more. London, Paris, Madrid… Where else had the Neo-Clergy set up base?

  "You got ten seconds! Ten, asshole! You hear?"

  Oh yeah, the cargo…

  No wonder they were pissed off with me. Not only had I fucked their plane, I didn't stop to load-up with the usual freight.

  Blessed are the Children…

  I caught an ugly mental image of the same spinning, whirligig plane crash – sparks and metal storms spiralling in every direction, smoke venting like haemorrhaging blood – albeit packed to the gills with terrified youngsters. Crying out for parents they'd left in London, screaming and sobbing as windows shattered and shrapnel spun. Never quite making it to the 'rediscovered dawn' they'd been promised.

  "That's seven fucko!"

  Yeah, yeah.

  The man I'd killed lay at my feet, a deflated skinbag oozing congealing fluids. I'd dragged him all the way down from near the cockpit, and with a raging narcotic hangover and some major blood loss issues, it hadn't been much fun. From what little I could see of his gung-ho colleagues, through the murk and smoke of the crash site, they were dressed the same: grey robes, black army-boots, heads shaved with military precision and M16A2 semi-automatic rifles clutched lovingly to their chests. I guessed the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn got its fingers into the military on this side of the Atlantic as easily as the other.

  The dead man had a scarlet ring tattooed around his left eye. It made him look lopsided. Sinister and ridiculous, all in one.

  The loudmouth on the speaker got down to 'five'. It was a fair bet they'd punch in through the front and sides of the wreck shortly before the countdown finished. Take the sucker by surprise.

  That's what I'd do.

  Time to go to work.

  I picked up the dead man, arms looped under his shoulders, and pressed my head into the small of his back. His lungs wheezed somewhere deep inside, more bloodpaste gathering on his lips. I folded myself carefully onto the floor (formerly the plane's left flank) and arranged the stiff so his cloak covered the more obvious extremities of my body. Something warm and damp dripped onto my chin.

  Lurking in the lee of a battered service area, where hostesses had at one time heated their plastic meals and bitched about unruly passengers, I was nothing but a shadow beneath a corpse. I rested the gun against the guy's hip, flopped his sleeve across its stock, and curled a finger beneath the trigger guard, waiting.

  The combat condi
tioning folded in again, running it all in slowtime, making an abstraction of everything, highlighting details. I was getting sick and tired of the insides of this fucking plane.

  A whisper of cobwebbed aggression moved deep down in the calluses of my old brain. I was a caveman with an Armalite semi-automatic rifle, and a shield made of meat.

  The grin came up unbidden.

  "Two!" the loudspeaker snarled, voice dripping impatience and (the conditioning told me, senses tuned to a level far subtler than any I could detect alone) genuine fear.

  They're not used to this.

  Too fucking bad. I am.

  Somewhere in the shell of the plane, noises dampened by the corpse's weight, glass shattered and booted feet struck the felt floor. In fuzzy half-vision, glimpsed in the acute angles of the robe, I could make out figures crawling sideways from the breached hold, slipping down from fissures in the fuselage further up the aisle, creeping forwards from the cockpit.

  They had their weapons held ready, but too low, too macho, too seen-it-all-in-movies. They kept stopping and starting, listening for threats, fighting to keep the shakes out of gloved hands. They poked into every corner. They paused when they got to Bella and talked in a low whisper-murmur that no self-respecting covert op would touch with a bargepole.

  A pair of booted feet stopped near me.

  "Fucker got Garson…" he said.

  Moron.

  I relieved him of his face with shot number one. Not easy to aim from underneath a dead guy, but it did okay. Caught him broadside of the ear, flipped him back, shouting. Skull-flecks and a popped eyeball. I put another one in his chest somewhere, just for good measure.

  Let the grin widen a notch.

  Pushed poor old Garson out the way.

  Sighted down the aisle. With care. No rush.

  The others were panicking. Reacting to the gunshots, looking for targets. Shouting, arguing, crouching in that idiot combat-posture that looks like constipation. Narrow space, men standing one behind the other. No room for covering fire.

  Begging to be killed.

  One shot at a time. Nothing flashy. Aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire.

  Muzzle flash, serpentine smoke. Quiet clods of blood and flesh, knocked astray from pale robes, like melons beneath sledge hammers. One guy got off a shot in return, but desperate, off target. A convulsive squeeze, like pre-emptive rigor mortis.

  There were eight in all. Four down already; dead or disarmed. Three more diving for cover (I caught a fourth as he fell, once in the ribs, again in the leg) and shuffled myself upright. Let Garson tumble to the floor, slippery.

  Kept firing. Kept the other arseholes ducked down. Got lucky and caught one on the foot. He hadn't hidden from sight. Watched the boot fragment like a leather mine, his gun tumble away.

  I was shouting, I realised. An unintelligible rush of animal sounds and half-formed words. Speaking in tongues. Heh.

  Behold the Holy Spirit, coming upon him…

  I kicked Garson through the mangled tail, letting him spoon outwards onto the tarmac like a man tripping on the edge of a cliff. Kept firing. Started shuffling back into the fuselage.

  Outside the plane, whatever was left of Garson was ripped to shreds, silenced munitions plucking frayed tatters off his robes like feathers from a pillow. A trigger-happy sniper, then, somewhere out on the airport side of the strip; getting overzealous. Probably the same guy with the loudspeaker.

  Moron.

  Two guys left inside. I kept firing. Deliberately off-target. Let them think I didn't know where they were. Let them sweat. Let them pluck up the courage to "Asshole!"

  The first one came up like a gofer from a hole. Pistol in each hand – fucking cowboy – shouting and cursing like a trooper.

  Which, let's be quite clear, he obviously was not.

  He got off a couple – misses, obviously – and went back down with an expression of ultimate bewilderment. The top half of his head was missing.

  Good shooting, soldier.

  I stopped firing. Stayed ready. Knew exactly where number eight was.

  I could hear him crying.

  "Oh god…" he kept saying. "Oh god oh god oh god…"

  I wondered, distantly, if he was playing the same trick I'd played. Get me off guard, then turn with a savage smile and a slicing edge.

  No.

  The subconscious analysis came online. Bone-deep, beyond thought or effort. Animal instincts peeling back layers of information with scary accuracy.

  No, he's terrified. It's in his voice. He knows he's going to die.

  I considered letting him live. Just a kid, probably. Some speccy troll inducted into the Clergy sometime since The Cull. Looking for strength in numbers. Never imagining he'd wind up huddled against an economy-class aeroplane seat, on its side, with a psychopath who'd just gone through his hardass pals like a flaming sword.

  Poor little bastard. I almost felt sorry for him.

  Then I remembered why I was here, remembered the signal and the five long years, and the pain and the mourning, and the deep dark voice Don't you fucking give up, soldier!

  – and I stepped forwards and shot the little rat through the top of his skull, so his brains slapped out of his jawline like snot into a hanky.

  Sir, no sir, etc etc.

  Outside the plane, beyond the sputtering of tiny fires up and down the runway, everything was still. Somewhere distant a couple of seabirds cawed, reminding me – with an ignorable spurt of melancholy – of London. But otherwise, nothing.

  I lurked, vaguely combat poised, and stared out across the landing strip; torn and pocked by the plane's passage. It shivered here and there with a faint luminosity where fuel had spilled and ignited, like a fiery reflection of the calm waters stretching away beyond. The idea of sprinting across the tarmac – strafing to confuse the bastard sniper who may or may not still be out there somewhere – and diving into the swampy morass held a sudden and unshakeable appeal. I imagined the water washing away the filth and blood that had soaked my coat; all the congealing gore that had spattered me moments before, as I moved up and down the plane with one of the cowboy's pistols, putting an end to the moans and pleas from the monk-soldiers I'd wounded.

  No time for last words, no gloating, no fucking power trips. Just step-up, barrel-between-eyes, look away, squeeze trigger.

  The lecturers used to call this ruthless mercy.

  Second year of training. Major Farnham Dow presiding.

  "It's easy – piss-easy," he'd said, "to feel sorry for someone you've clipped. He's lost everything. He knows he's for it. He's going to… to blub and piss himself. He's going to ask for mercy, if he can. Talk about his family, maybe. Whatever.

  "The point is, the only reason he's not dead is because you missed with the first shot. It's your mistake, soldier, not his. And it doesn't change anything. Does it?

  "You think he wasn't trying to kill you too? You think he'll renounce a lifetime of violence if you spare his life? Dedicate himself to charitable-bastard-causes? You think he won't shoot you in the back, if he still can, when you walk away?

  "No. Don't be so fucking stupid! A wounded enemy is just a dead enemy who doesn't know it yet…"

  Rationalising it and doing it were worlds apart.

  I'd exited through the luggage hold, scampering across perpendicular support-struts and cargo-webbing, heading for the chasm of shattered steel and twisted, solidified slag where the forward landing-gear had been rammed upwards into the guts of the plane, tearing a long scar in the fuselage. The exit opened onto the sea side of the strip, away from the airport buildings and – I hoped – the sniper. I spent a good five minutes at the opening, darting glances left and right, sneaking out to check the roof of the wreck and retreating once again. Nothing. Either he didn't have a bead on me at all, or he was waiting for me to come out to play.

  I fucking hate snipers.

  I stepped out and stayed out. The air smelt of salt and ash; an acrid cocktail that seemed to ride on the ligh
t breeze rippling over the waters. The feel of sunlight caught me unprepared, a warmth I'd forgotten in the perpetual greyness of London. Ever since The Cull – ever since the bombs fell, half a world away – England's Pastures Green had become 'Mires Grey'. I once spent half an hour with another survivor – I forget his name, but he was a talented rat catcher – rambling informatively about skyburst radiation and the fucking Gulf Stream. Used to work for the Met, he said.

  I tuned out thirty seconds in.

  Quite how all this enabled LaGuardia airport, squatting on the watery edge of New York like a growing patch of mildew, to enjoy unbroken sunlight and cloudless skies was quite beyond me. I felt like I'd just arrived at Disneyland.

  I let the desire for a dip in the water ebb away; put off by the kaleidoscopic blobs of oil smearing the surface, and the brown tint to the shoreline. With more scratches and open wounds than I cared to think about, it would be less a bath and more a proactive infection.

  Enough time wasting.

  I edged my way along the length of the fuselage, pressed against the sagging underside in the shadow of the plane's girth. At the cockpit I paused and shouldered the fully-loaded rifle I'd liberated from another of the Clergy goons, and clambered up onto the pitted slope, wincing as I put a little too much weight on the wounded arm. It had started bleeding softly again; one or two of the messy stitches popping open. I swore under my breath and tried to ignore it.

  Dangling there like meat on a hook, staying low, I could peer through the shattered panes of the cockpit and take careful stock of the flat killing-ground beyond, spread out on the left side of the wreck.

  Wide, regular, empty. No cover.

  Shit.

  Halfway between the edge of the still-flaming debris field and the distant airport buildings – clustered like toys around the distinctive inverted-lampshade of the control tower – a series of ramshackle sheds and lean-tos had been erected, improbably sturdy, in a rough semicircle. Cables and joists held them in place, stretched out like a high-tension big top built of plastic and wood. A railed gantry ran along their tops, marked at each end with a conning tower plated with corrugated iron. I squinted through the haze coming off the fuel-fires and made out a big sign, graffiti-texted inexpertly and tacked to each end of the rail, hanging down across the front of it all.