The Culled Read online

  In fact, an unpleasantly guilty sensation was stealing over Rick like a fart in reverse: he’d broken into someone’s home, wrecked their window, stolen their gun...

  ...and then shot them when they caught him red handed. Not exactly the type of criminal ignobility you’d expect from someone carrying the name of the Mighty Hiawatha.

  “A-are... are you okay?” He mumbled, feeling ridiculous, to the sobbing colossus.

  The creature focused on him on the third attempt – spasmodic eyeball rotations calming for an instant or two – and scowled, sweat and grease dappling his scarlet forehead.

  “You’re not Ram,” he said, surprisingly softly.

  “Uh. No. No, I’m not. Look, I’m really s...”

  “Where’s Raaam?”

  “I don’t know. Who’s Ram?”

  “Raaaymond.”

  “Oh. I see. I...” A vision bobbed into Rick’s mind: the glittering plastic sign dangling just outside the window. “S-so, uh... So you’d be Jake?”

  The fat man’s eyes became suddenly still, brows bunching together. “Jake?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Jake’s dead. I’m Slip.”

  Rick coughed, wondering if he should perhaps offer some sort of medical care but wishing he could be a million miles away. Instead, scrabbling about for something to say – anything! – he blurted:

  “What, um. What happened to him?”

  “Dead.”

  “Yeah, you sa...”

  “Screwed-uppa mission. Let the kiddies getta wayaway. Bosses inna Ay-pos-tol-ic-Church got pissy. Blamed him, see? So I fucked him inna eyes.”

  “Um.” Rick cleared his throat. “What?”

  “Pulled ‘em out. Best bits. Juicy. Likealikealikea lychee, Ram says.”

  Oh yeah. That was the other thing.

  Collectors.

  Weren’t too fussy where the next meal came from...

  “You... uh...”

  “Sucked ’em out. Et ’em. Fucked the holes. Fucking catamite Jake asshole. Fucked him good, heh-heh-heh.”

  The weird thing, Rick discovered, was that it was a relief. Accidentally blowing off someone’s hand who’d just been trying to protect their property would’ve tested even his powers of conscious amorality. Discovering said mutilatee was a cannibalistic psychopath took the edge off the guilt, and the confirmation that his unintentional victim had been dealing with the Neo-Clergy was enough to leave Rick positively elated. It was all he could do not to spit on the guy’s bristly jowls as the blood pumped out of him and his life rustled away.

  He went downstairs, feeling a little dazed, and helped himself to as many guns and as much ammo as he could carry.

  He went outside.

  He went back inside and dumped the shoulder-launched rocket, cursing under his breath. It turned out ‘as much as he could carry’ wasn’t as much as he thought.

  He went outside again, and stared at his bike. The clan mothers had been quite specific.

  Don’t you lose it, they’d said. Don’t you leave it behind. It’ll only bring you grief.

  The cat was still glaring at him from across the street, reminding him of his dream and the withered-faced old Tadodaho whispering about the Ancestors.

  “Fuck that.” Rick said, out loud.

  Then he threw a stone at the cat, slung a leg over the monstrous Harley Davidson trike his would-be murderer had kindly left parked beside the Honda, and gunned his way back towards the I-80 with the purr of a zombie tiger.

  He had an appointment in New York, and he intended to meet it in style.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BACK IN LONDON, every Sunday, if you had the time and the inclination and something to barter your way inside, you could watch a little entertainment. Of sorts.

  John-Paul Rohare Baptiste, basking in directed light: a beacon of divine purity in white robes and towering mitre, marked with the simple scarlet ‘O’ of his order.

  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&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 VO
ICE 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 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 conditioning 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 gopher 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.