by Jacob Rayne
Too Many Humans
By Jacob Rayne
A Rayne of Terror publication
Copyright © Saul Bainbridge (writing as Jacob Rayne) 2018
All rights reserved
Cover design by 17 Studio Book Design.
Also available from Rayne of Terror
Becoming…
Hardcore Prawn
The Lazarus Contagion
Cold-Blooded Kin
Sunshine
Flesh Harvest
Walk in the Park
Digital Children
Perpetual Darkness
Season’s Bleedings
A Feast of Flesh: Flesh Harvest II
1:15
Two Stars
Third Strike
Dedicated to the memory of my best friend, Beverley Renwick.
I love you. I miss you. I won’t ever forget you.
Till we meet again.
XX
Part 1: Of Cullsmen and Kings
1.1
Night had fallen and silence swallowed the city, broken only by the faint rustling of rats among the garbage bags.
The streetlights provided small oases of light, but the majority of the city was dark as midnight came and went.
The clock in the hallway of apartment twenty-six on the thirteenth floor of one of the many vast tower blocks chimed twice, signalling the passing of the second hour of a new day.
Silence again claimed the apartment, as if the clock hadn’t sounded at all.
The inhabitants were all sleeping peacefully in their beds.
Mother, father, sister, brother.
Baby.
This last was so small, so fragile, so seemingly insignificant, but the catalyst for future atrocities…
The clock doesn’t get to chime for three o’clock as a jackbooted foot crashes the apartment’s door open, smashing the antique frame into shards of glass and wood. The clock’s cuckoo pops out, its bent spring looking sad and pathetic, likewise the sound it makes.
A man in a black motorcycle helmet enters. Six feet tall, two-hundred-and-twenty pounds of solid muscle. The dim light in the corridor glints on the two-inch white letters on the front of his helmet, just above the visor.
C.C.
Culling Crew.
In this place and time humanity is rapidly running out of food and other valuable resources.
The solution to this problem is stunning in its cold, clinical logic, but more on that later.
The cullsman glances around, his hand tight around the butt of his matt black shotgun. He snacks the pump, the sound almost deafening in the stillness of the apartment.
Noises from down the corridor make his head snap to the side, the light reflecting off his visor.
He sniffs, smiles grimly behind his bulletproof visor.
He takes no pleasure in this; it is simply something that must be done.
Rules must be followed, or punishment – brutal and cruel though it undoubtedly is – must be meted out.
Emotion must not be allowed to cross his mind, or a steep descent into insanity and despair would surely follow.
His foot makes the floorboards creak. His shotgun is aimed down the corridor, his black-gloved finger tight around the trigger.
A light comes on in one of the rooms, accompanied by muttering that is laced with panic and confusion.
A figure appears at the end of the corridor. At this stage it is unclear whether it is male or female, young or old.
In the end it doesn’t matter.
The gun goes off, the sound like thunder in the enclosed hallway.
The light from the muzzle flash reveals enough to confirm that the target is young.
There is a wet thud, the sound of pulverised matter spraying the wall behind the child, then a high-pitched scream.
The child drops, letting out pained whimpers.
The cullsman has heard these sounds enough to know that her time left on earth will be short and miserable.
The thought to put another shell through her pain-contorted face, thus putting the poor wretch out of her misery, does not occur to him. Again, emotion has no place here. The target has been put down. She is not armed, and fighting back is the furthest thing from her mind.
A mercy killing would be a waste of time and ammunition.
His boots leave prints in the pool of blood spreading from beneath the girl’s riven abdomen.
The child’s eyes, wide with horror, look up into his. Flecks of blood cling to her pale skin.
His eyes flick away to the dense corona of blood and pulverised flesh leaving trails down the wall, then down to the growing crimson pool on the carpet.
He looks away, knowing there are more targets in the apartment.
A flicker of movement from his right.
He spins, blowing a cheap bedroom door to kindling.
There are no pained screams, no flying plumes of blood and flesh, so he knows he has missed.
A shame. His superiors will have something to say about the wasted shell.
No doubt a dent will appear in next month’s wages.
He scowls, strangely more upset by this than by the dying child screaming at his feet.
The door in front of him flies open and he sees a woman, her face red and contorted with panic and despair, her white-knuckled hands clutching a butcher’s knife.
His shot hits her full in the face, taking off her head from the bottom jaw up over and scattering it across the surrounding area. A thick splat lands on his visor and begins to slide down.
He backhands this from his visor before the woman has hit the deck. She lands, a full five feet from where she stood, as though flung by an invisible hand.
He turns his attention back to the door in which he wasted his shell.
His boot makes light work of the rest of the door.
Likewise the cheap, balsa wood chest of drawers that has been shoved in front of it as a makeshift barricade.
A muzzle flash lights up the peripheral vision on his right side and his head jolts to the left with the force of a kick from a mule.
The bulletproof helmet and visor prevent any serious damage, but the impact is enough to disorient him for a few seconds.
He turns and sees the father in the corner of the room, desperately fumbling bullets into the revolver in his trembling hands. The majority of them fall to the floor like metallic rain.
The slightest flicker of emotion crosses his mind; anger at being fired upon, but still, his annoyance at having to sacrifice his wages for the wasted shell dwarf this.
Before Father can raise the gun again, the cullsman crosses the room in half a dozen stiff strides. His shotgun butt hits Father’s jaw in a blow as well-practised as it is brutally efficient.
There is an audible crack as his jaw shatters, then a small rattle as a tooth lands on the bare floorboards.
Father slumps, terrified, to his knees.
‘Please,’ he begs, blood oozing from his mouth. ‘Don’t do this.’
The cullsman shakes his head. ‘You know why we are here, yes?’
Father nods, eyes wide and white, like marbles have been shoved in the sockets.
‘You know as well as I do that breeding is no longer permitted.’
Father nods, his gaze sinking to the floor. ‘We didn’t plan it,’ he pleads.
‘That is no excuse. Contraception and terminations are readily available.’
‘We couldn’t afford it, I swear. I can show you my bank records, as proof, if you require it?’
‘That wouldn’t change anything.’ The voice is cold, clinical, detached. Like he’s watching this on TV instead of acting it out in real life.
Father says nothing, continues to stare at the ground, one of his hands clamped to
his face as though it is going to magically fix his shattered jaw.
‘So… where is she?’ the cullsman says.
‘Who?’
The cullsman doesn’t reply. Wasted words and all that.
‘Please. She’s only two weeks old.’
‘Where is she?’
Father’s delay in replying is rewarded with a much harder blow. He lands on his back, swimming in darkness.
The cullsman listens. There’s a faint cry coming from the next room, where the mother was.
Instinct tells him the baby is in there. The brother is also still unaccounted for.
He boots the door open, taking the flimsy lock with it. It clangs to the floor, making the baby’s cry intensify.
His eyes land on the cupboard door at the back of the room. It is lined with badly drawn pictures of castles and princesses and dragons.
In the middle of the collage is a crude but unmistakable picture of a cullsman, looking huge and ominous in thick black crayon lines. He holds a gun that is almost as big as he is. The barrels are pointed at a tiny pink squiggle that vaguely resembles a baby.
Between the two figures stands a boy, roughly half the size of the cullsman. Though the drawing is poor, it is obvious the boy is there to defend the baby, even without reading the scrawled legend; ‘I wyl prutekt yu.’
The next picture along shows the boy standing victorious, his foot propped up on the back of the fallen cullsman. A large puddle of red crayon surrounds them. The boy has his hands in the air in celebration. He and the baby have smiles bigger than their faces.
The cullsman shakes his head, mutters, ‘Yeah right.’
He snatches them from the door and crumples them up.
Pulls the door open, the movement impeded slightly by pressure from the other side.
Little hands trying to hold the door shut.
He pulls harder, tearing the door from the kid’s hands.
There’s a frustrated cry as the door comes open.
A boy of maybe ten stands in front of him, his stance confrontational.
Some serious balls on this kid, the cullsman thinks.
‘You’ll have to kill me to get to her,’ the brother says, his face set in a determined grimace. His grubby hand indicates the baby on the cushion behind him, now red and shrieking and writhing in response to the sudden appearance of the black-clad man with the big gun.
The cullsman shrugs, pulls the trigger again. Brother’s gut erupts with blood, staining his nightshirt red. He falls, screaming, but still moving to block the cullsman’s path. His legs kick out at his assailant, trying to force him back.
‘No,’ he screams. ‘I won’t let you take her.’
The cullsman boots him in the top of the head, drawing a pained howl, but not diminishing his fight. Indeed, as the cullsman goes to step over him he sinks his teeth into his hand and starts thrashing his head from side to side like a dog with a chew toy.
The cullsman feels the pressure on his fingers, but the teeth don’t pierce his skin. He leans down and punches the kid full in the face.
Brother falls back, the cullsman’s glove in his mouth.
He snarls, lets the glove drop and, jaws gnashing, comes back for seconds.
The cullsman curses and lashes out again.
After the fourth blow, Brother finally stops struggling and slumps back, a ribbon of blood snaking down from his burst lip.
The cullsman shoves his glove back on, hiding the ornate skull tattoo on the back of his hand. He steps over the fallen boy, keen to get to the screaming infant and quiet its cacophony forever.
He picks it up by the leg, carelessly dangling it upside down as he moves back towards the father.
Baby’s screams intensify.
Father is just stirring.
‘You brought this on yourselves,’ the cullsman tells him. ‘The rules are simple; no breeding. We have enough mouths to feed as it is.’
Father’s eyes close as the infant is thrust to the floor. But from the sickening crunch and sudden silence, it is obvious what has happened.
The distraught father doesn’t even get to finish his scream before the cullsman’s blade tears through his jugular, liberating a hot spray of gore that further spatters his visor and jacket.
Father slumps back, his blood pouring out onto the bare wood beneath him. The cullsman watches his death throes, then turns and goes back for the baby’s brother.
The only problem is that Brother is gone.
1.2
Brother had been aware of the risk of the Cull Crews visiting his home. He knew there was a high chance they’d be coming soon, as it had been a while since his district had had a visit.
Also, although his family had done their best to keep his sister’s birth a secret, he knew it was likely his neighbours would have heard her cries. After all, a screaming baby was hardly the most concealable of things, was it?
So he’d prepared.
He’d read every piece of information – not many admittedly, as the Cull Crews (Government-sanctioned hit squads with a fancy name) were extremely secretive. Most of what he’d read was urban legend, as the vast majority of the time there were no survivors from their rampaging visits. Entire families became extinct within minutes.
But still, it seemed they wore thick body armour. Bulletproof helmets. Shooting and stabbing them was unlikely to work. So he wasn’t going to waste his time. He was a fast runner, had spent the majority of his free time practicing, knowing that one day it could potentially save his life.
He got the impression that the cullsmen – or Cullers or Cully men, or any of the other dozens of names given to this generation’s Bogey men – were highly-trained, fast, powerful but he reckoned he had the jump on them in terms of intellect. Also, he’d reasoned that they would be heavily muscled, a belief confirmed by the brick shithouse of a man he’d seen.
So when he had heard that the apartment next door to them had become vacant, he had climbed up through the engineer’s access hatch and into the crawlspace which housed the pipes and wires for the dwellings on the floor above. He’d crawled through the small tunnel to next door’s access hatch. Part of this was just boyish exploration; he loved climbing and imagining and adventure.
As a trial run, he’d timed how long it took him to get up into the crawlspace, pull the ladder back into place and crawl through the small – certainly not large enough to admit the bulky cullsman anyway – tunnel into next door.
From there, he’d climbed down, positioning a chest of drawers to facilitate his exit and re-entry to the crawlspace, and explored the apartment.
Their windows were on the same side as his, facing the main thoroughfare, so he knew that going out of the window was no use, even though he had no fear of falling from the thirteenth floor.
He knew he’d be spotted by either the CCTV or the other cullsmen waiting for escapees.
It would be suicide going out there.
His mind had gone over and over it; an obsession he couldn’t leave alone.
He studied the few reports of the survivors, saw what they’d done to get away (however temporarily) and tried to emulate them, but without aping them entirely as the Cull Crews would no doubt have learnt from their mistakes by now.
Indeed, rumour had it that they often cleared an apartment block to practice finding every little nook and cranny.
Still, he’d spent hour after hour playing hide and seek in here with his friends. Every few days he ran each of his escape routes at least once, his job as a paper boy helping him to do this without arousing suspicion.
He’d even told his friends false escape routes, in case the unthinkable happened and the Cull Crews came here. In case they got interrogated and revealed where he’d gone.
And, it almost goes without saying that every night he had slept with a sheet of body armour under his nightshirt. The bag of blood he’d stolen from his dad’s emergency medical supplies had been icing on the cake.
Yes, it’s safe to sa
y he’d thought of every conceivable angle.
So when the time came, he calmly crawled into the crawlspace, pulling the ladder up – it didn’t squeal as it was oiled at least twice a week; this shit was a matter of life and death so of course he was on top of it.
He shifted across the crawlspace, moving with the surefooted grace of a mountain goat. He could’ve crossed this route blindfolded without putting a foot wrong or even making a sound, so often had he done it, but still his eyes were glued to the floor. A mistake could mean his end.
He was just getting through the gap in the wall into next door’s section of the tunnel when he heard muffled curses from below. He kept the smug grin off his face; now was definitely not the time for complacency. The skin from his left elbow was scraped away on a ragged piece of brick. It was a stark reminder of what awaited him – thousandfold – if he messed up his escape.
He took heart in the fact that it would take the cullsman a while to figure out where he had gone. He was confident his movements were quiet, but still the breath was torn from his lungs as his blood raced through his chest.
Next door’s access hatch greeted him, the sight as welcoming as the one time he’d ever been on a beach holiday – in the days before all of this government-sanctioned bullshit kicked in.
He lifted the hatch as fast and carefully as he had his own and was soon climbing down into next door’s apartment.
He uttered a silent prayer that the cullsman wasn’t waiting in the darkness below, the twin barrels of his shotgun gaping like the cavernous eyes of the reaper himself.
The apartment seemed to be empty, but Brother refused to let himself relax until he was safely out of here.
Without making too much noise, he moved through the apartment, picking up the backpack he’d left behind the tattered sofa on a previous visit.
He pulled a can of spray-paint from the backpack and inched the door open, leaving the chain on in case the cullsman was in the corridor. The coast seemed clear so he pulled the door open, left and carefully closed it behind him.
From here, he turned sharp right and sprayed the black spray paint all over the camera on the wall. He’d taken time to memorise the location of each of the CCTV cameras in the building to minimise his risk of detection.