The Culled Read online

  He sighed.

  “I tell you, man... I was scared. There’s me, pissing outta my ass, shivering, puking, all that shit, immune system fucked to hell, and the end-of-goddamn-times plague outside my door. Just about gave up.”

  I remembered too. London. Chaos. Panic. It was weeks before they could tell why some people survived. Why most didn’t. Revealed little by little on garbled TV shows and home-printed leaflets, in that spasmodic time before the media gave up the ghost.

  “But I survived,” Nate said. “Fuck, yeah. Came out clean.”

  And so did I.

  What I remember most is, the unfairness.

  I suppose I always felt I was lucky. Due a fall, surely, but there I was, winning a lottery I never even bought a ticket for. Outside there’s priests and nurses and charitable souls rotting on the pavement, and here’s me – he’s a fucking killer – breathing clear.

  It didn’t seem right.

  It’s a weird thing, feeling guilty for being alive.

  “Anyways,” said Nate, flicking a chunk of wood onto the fire from a stack beside the corrugated wall, “that put the cap on doctoring.”

  He said he’d wandered in London for a year or two. He hinted he’d done his best to help where he could – triage, treatment, tidying – but I guess there was always a price.

  Nate didn’t exactly radiate selflessness.

  After two years the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn was up and running. I remember that too. The Abbot broadcasting his miraculous sermon every Sunday, the crowds gathering, the scarlet tattoos and chanted prayers.

  The robe-wearing creeps strolled straight out onto the charred remains of the world stage, and declared that they alone – as an entity embracing values of community, integrity, intelligence and of course faith – could sweep aside the horrors of the Cull and work towards a new, restored civilisation.

  They said that they alone could overcome the ‘inertia gripping humanity’ and rebuild, recreate, restart!

  Those.

  Arrogant.

  Fucks.

  They came to London and spread the word. I ignored them.

  They said for most people it was too late. The world they’d known was long gone. They said the people could console themselves with living as best they could, embracing Jesus, making the most of their lives in the rubble. They said devoting oneself to the Neo-Clergy was the only expression of purity and hope for the average man.

  But for the children... for the children, there was so much more. Innocent, unsullied by the calamities of the past, not responsible for the sins that had visited the Cull upon the world. For them the future was clear. So said the Clergy.

  They must build a new dawn.

  So the priests came and got them.

  At gunpoint, sometimes. But mostly they didn’t even need to threaten, mostly it was parents waving goodbye, smiling, proud of their contribution to the world, and that was the worst thing of all.

  The church ferried the kids off in blue-painted planes, and ignored the tears and shrieks, and told everyone, everyone involved:

  Be grateful.

  They were going somewhere better, the Clergy said.

  Sitting there in the cold, listening to Nate’s story, my eyes plucked at the huge banner above me. I shivered.

  “They brought them here,” I grunted, shaking my head. “The kids. Didn’t they?”

  Nate nodded.

  “Why? What do they do with them? Where’s this... this fucking new tomorrow?”

  Nate shrugged, took a slurp of water from a screw cap cantina, and carried on with his story like he’d barely stopped to breathe.

  Nate said the Clergy found him on the streets of London. They’d heard he was a doctor. They said they might have a need for someone like that. They might even raise him up to a state of grace. Besides, they said, he was already American.

  They had two conditions:

  “Number one,” he said, “they told me I got to have faith. I told them if they gimme a job and food and somewhere warm to sleep, I’ll believe whatever the hell they want.

  “And number two, they said I gotta go back to New York.”

  He stopped, and looked for a second or two like he wasn’t going to continue. It was strange to see. Nate’s natural state was ‘droning,’ and every time he stopped to stare off into the darkness with those spotlight eyes it was... disconcerting. “So you came back,” I said. “And did what?”

  He looked at me for a second – proper eye contact, for the first time – then away again. Someone screamed playfully out by the wreck.

  “Same as before, more or less. Ironic, huh? Just like the Albanians. Checking over the produce when it arrives. Making sure it’s fit to travel. No sickness, no frailty. Clergy only wants the best.”

  “You inspected the kids?”

  “Right. Shit, I was in charge of them. Clumsy old guy with a friendly face and a dumb costume. Made jokes. Patched up cuts and scrapes. Told ’em all everything would be just fine. Drove the bus into the city, came right back for the next batch. London, Paris, Moscow. Planes comin’ in from all over.”

  “So you’re the ferryman to the New Dawn?” I said, trying out a little sarcasm; seeing how the old man would react.

  Know everything.

  Check the angles.

  He smiled, a little too slowly, then nodded. “I like that,” he said. “Yeah, I like that.”

  Something rustled nearby. A spreading whisper of cloth and feet. My hand tightened on the M16, eyes scanning the shadows, but Nate waved a laconic hand in my direction and grinned.

  “No need, man.”

  Not reassuring.

  Something oozed out of the dark. Something hesitant and filthy, matted and feathered down each flank of its raggedy form. Something that broke-up as the firelight caught it; separated down by degrees into an aggregate. A crowd of people.

  Staring, all as one, at the meat roasting over the flame.

  They came into the light like a single entity, scuttling on far too many legs. They looked – random thought here – like extras from the set of a war film: recognisably human but coated in the makeup department’s finest emulations of soot, dirt and dried blood, scampering with that expression of people who don’t know what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. Several had fresh wounds – nicks and cuts from knives and teeth – and eyed each other warily.

  The ones at the front carried themselves with a seniority based on whatever Byzantine pecking order was at work, clutching in their dirty hands stolen guns, scraps of clothing, bundles of chemical ephemera and all types of other salvage taken from the plane. One was holding a seatbelt buckle, smiling with the smug expression of someone who’d outperformed herself. Another one – a young man – had Bella’s jeans slung over his shoulder.

  The M16 felt good in my hand.

  Let it go, soldier.

  Sir, yes sir, etc, etc.

  “Well, then...” said Nate, reclining back against the compound wall with as much disinterested ease as he’d shown before the darkness disgorged them. “What can we do for you?”

  I think I half expected them to speak in grunts and moans, if at all. They looked so devolved, so fucking prehistoric, that at that point it wouldn’t have surprised me if they’d dropped down and worshipped the ‘Great Fire Makers.’

  It sounds arrogant, now I come to say it. I mean... why should they be any less coherent than me? Why should their five years of hardship and filth be any less dignified than mine?

  “We smelt the rat,” a tall woman said, near the front. She reminded me of someone, and a shiver worked its way along my spine.

  Shut that shit down, soldier. Job to do.

  Nate shrugged. “And?”

  “And we thought maybe you’d trade.”

  Nate shook his head. “No trades.”

  “But... see?” The woman plucked a plastic drinking beaker out of a raggedy pack, brandishing it like a jewel. “Good, see? Perfect for trading, that is. Se
e what I’ve g...”

  Nate’s voice hardened a little. His face stayed the same. “No. Trades.”

  The scavs flitted a few awkward glances back and forth, then the tall woman’s eyes went sneaky. Heavy-lidded and intense, like a child conspiring to do mischief.

  “We could take...” she said, quietly, acting nonchalant.

  Nate chuckled to himself.

  “You could,” he said. “Yep.”

  The scavs shuffled, shifted their weight from foot to foot. Here and there a blade twinkled in the firelight, and my heart twisted in my chest: speeding up, blurring time.

  Endorphins washed down me.

  Muscles tensed.

  An old man shuffled to the front, dark blue sweater decorated with stripes of white paint, and I watched him with the targeted eye of a predator.

  “What Klan?” he wheezed. “Mm?”

  “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” Nate ginned. The M16’s grip was warm now, heated by my own palm.

  All at once the scavs twitched; a great roiling ball of motion, and without a single conscious thought I was lifting the gun and reaching for the arming bolt and...

  Nate’s hand sat on the barrel, holding it down. He gave me a look, shook his head, and grunted towards the scavs. They hadn’t been attacking at all.

  They stood brandishing themselves, like a medical examination taking place en masse. In each case the proffered elbow, shoulder, arm, stomach, neck or ankle was decorated by a small mark. A burnt branding-scar in the shape of a smiling face, eyes like double-arches above a mountainous nose, with a pair of satellite ears protruding on each side.

  “Mickeys,” said Nate. He gave me a doting smile, like an old man discussing the merits of different chess pieces, and said: “Respectable Klan, that.”

  “Trade now?” the woman said. “Or we’ll help ourselves.”

  “What Klan?” the old man whispered, hopping from foot to foot. “What-Klan-what-Klan-what-Klan?”

  Nate tilted his head back, letting the fire chase away the shadows beneath the brim of his cap. The scarlet semicircle seemed to blaze on his cheek.

  “Clergy...” went the whisper. A fearful susurration rushing around the crowd. “Godshits... Choirboys... Fuckin’ Clergy...”

  And then they were gone.

  Nate and I sat in silence. Eventually I coughed under my breath and asked him, third time lucky, if he’d tell me about the Klans.

  He gave me a funny look, smirked quietly, and said:

  “Shit, man. What you think I bin doing?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE CONSOLIDATED EDISON Power Plant facility, directly off Astoria’s Twentieth Avenue, was a continental wedge of pipes, cables, depots, spinal chimneys, blocky storage tanks and stark structures like geometric skeletons made from girders. All of it pressed up against the same polluted, watery banks as the airport. There was something undeniably sepulchral about it. A knotted tangle of hip-like joists, vertebral chains linking moving assemblies, and skull-like containers that had long since lost their sheen.

  Nate had brought me here at first light, when I’d told him I needed transport.

  He hadn’t asked me why. He hadn’t asked me what I was here to achieve.

  Hadn’t told me why he was tagging along.

  Hmm.

  Standing outside the power plant, it was plain to see the whole place was inactive. Rusted to fuck; plundered for raw materials, stripped apart in a million acts of petty vandalism and selfish salvage.

  There was red bunting dangling above the concourse as we stepped off the street – giving the whole thing an air of ludicrousness – and the corrosion-melted gates slumped awkwardly, reminding me of reclining figures watching the world go by. The health and safety signs above their heads had been neatly crossed through with red spray paint, and someone had erected a billboard above the entrance, which read simply:

  WHEELS

  I felt someone staring, that same old prehistoric instinct, and glanced around, with hairs prickling, for the culprit. Only when I looked directly up did I find him: a dead head, sockets empty, skin tattered, lipless jaws set in a timeless grin. This grisly voyeur sat mounted on a telegraph pole; cables stripped away and its solid girth painted in stripes of tar and red paint.

  “The fuck does that mean?” I asked, nodding up at it.

  “Territory marker,” Nate mumbled, smoking a straw-like cigarette. One of mine. “Black and red means this is en-tee.”

  I gave him a blank look. The acronym thing was starting to piss me off.

  “Neutral Territory,” he grinned, pointing further into the plant’s network of alleys and avenues, all festooned with the same black and red flags and bunting. “No Klan business.”

  “So the dead guy...?”

  Nate shrugged, drooling smoke. “Maybe picked a fight. Got outbid, tried to pull pecking rank. Who knows? Maybe just an unlucky schmo inna wrong place when someone wanted to make a point. Folks that run the en-tees don’t take kindly to rule-breakers. They can afford to enforce, y’see?”

  Like so much that poured from his mouth, Nate’s casual explanations mixed the common sense with the bewildering. Pecking ranks, territory markers... it was all the stuff of just another drug-dream. A revisit to the malleable memories and landscapes of the Bliss trip. But still, I wasn’t entirely in the dark. I’d spent much of the morning at the airport dozing and thinking, listening to the old man snore, picking his brains about the Klan-system whenever he deigned to wake.

  If I understood one tenth of what he’d said, during the Culling year, New York – not to put too fine a point on it – had gone straight to hell. He’d painted a picture of streets clogged up with empty cars, skeletons tangled along sidewalks. Of the military running out of control with water cannons and teargas. Of riots like full scale wars and whole blocks burning to ash on the grounds of a single suspected infection. He hadn’t been there – he was still in London at that point – but, leaving aside the narrator’s propensity for hyperbole, it still wasn’t easy listening.

  What was certain was the Klan system. In a weird sort of way, despite everything, I was impressed by it. It was easy to see how it must have started, and at the back of my mind – beyond the doubts and disapprovals – it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Like some new species released onto the savannah, frightened herds running together; accreting like shit flowing into a bowl.

  Strength in numbers.

  Pack mentality.

  The oldest instincts in the book.

  The way Nate told it, the Klans all had their origins in different places. Maybe some grew up around whichever politicians survived the Cull and got lucky, outside of Washington when the nuke skyburst. You can imagine that happening, maybe. Little guys in suits, standing on stone steps, kicking up a fuss. Like you used to get in Hyde Park, like Speakers’ Corner every Sunday. Angry men and women on stools and ladders, spouting fire and brimstone. Since the Cull, they would have been kings.

  Still... it’s a big step from there to gang colours, to skin brandings, to closed territories and aggressive expansion and nightly raids and sallying-forth and midnight skirmishes and blood in the gutters...

  The night before, as Nate explained this stuff, as I told him I just didn’t see rational people acting so dumb, sinking so low, he stopped with a grin and said:

  “Desperate times, man.”

  The main driveway along the interior of the power plant took a sharp corner, every inch of the way draped in swatches of fabric and makeshift adverts. Most carried the names of food stalls and barter points (promising FARE TRADE, WIDE SELECSION, ALL SCAV CONSIDERD), branded in each case with iconic images of bygone snacks; hotdogs, burgers, bagels. I found my mouth watering at the memory of such extravagant-seeming meals, and asked Nate what the stalls really traded.

  “Rat,” he said, not looking around. “It’s all rat.”

  Some of the Klans, maybe, came up from less obvious sources. Lantern-jawed drill sergeants disco
vering they had no country left to fight for, nobody left to shriek at, no way of draining off the dynamo-level testosterone. Civic leaders, celebrities, lawyers. The local bloody postman. It didn’t take much, back at the start, to be the centre of a pack; to let something comfortable and secure grow around you. Maybe some of those putative mobs – coalescing and running together – could even claim they’d formed their miniature little states for all the right reasons. Nate told me one of the Klans, back at the start, was called the ‘Thin Blues.’ Bunch of NYPD grunts, he said, banding together, facing down the chaos. He said that to start with they even had a decent stab at maintaining the peace; driving about, making arrests, shooting looters. He used the word ‘altruistic,’ which sounded weird when he said it, and tricky to take seriously.

  He said it didn’t last long.

  He said ever since then, the Thin Blues had been one of the smaller Klans.

  Inside the industrial sprawl of the Con Ed facility we reached a checkpoint, where two enormous blokes in black clothes and red bandanas stood divesting everyone of weapons. A small queue of raggedy scavs had formed, and beyond the canvas-draped checkpoint I could see the peristaltic movement of large crowds, deeper inside the facility. It made me nervous. In London, the only time you saw that many people gathered together was for the Abbot’s sermons, and just thinking about those left a bad taste in my mouth.

  I watched the guards frisking and checking, allocating each person a number to be used in recollecting their guns and knives, and tilted my head towards Nate.

  “What Klan are they?” I asked, nodding towards the muscular goons.

  “Right now,” he said, “no Klan at all. Neutral Territory, remember? They’re being paid to keep it that way.”