The Culled

by Simon Spurrier

  Hiawatha had suddenly decided everything was significant and the whole world was resonating on a profound metaphysical level.

  Overall, Rick/Hiawatha was kind of messed up in the head.

  Out on the road the dream-visions were at least straightforward. Talking trees, rumbling skies, fluttering crows, yadda-yadda; the sort of stuff the tribal myths were packed full of. But here in the city things were different. None of the Haudenosaunee legends spoke of buildings that shuddered like horses dislodging flies; of smog-palls becoming faces and hands; of rats seething from clogged sewers to become corkscrewing whirls of smoke; of tenements making love by starlight – balconies locked together like slippery tongues – and skyscrapers cutting great intestinal scars across the belly of the clouds, where blood and shit oozed into the rain, and huge thunderbirds pecked at the wounds like vultures.

  It was kind of cool.

  The silver needle in his back pocket hummed to him.

  The coloured smoke had brought him here. Just like out on the road; revealing the pothole that wiped out Ram. All across the suburbs, through spaghetti-like turnpikes and graffiti-plastered tunnels, across the George Washington Bridge and down through the eerily silent West Side, it had hung above the city like an electric net; green and purple, narrowing itself down to a single column of hallucinogenic smoke. He discovered he could see it twice as well when he looked away, concentrating on the corners of his vision; like an optical illusion his brain tried to conceal whenever he stared directly at it.

  It took him down Broadway, through Harlem and Morningside, places he’d heard of but never visited. A small part of him felt like he’d missed a chance; like the bustling human ratraces he used to see on bygone TV shows were lost forever, and when finally he’d got his dream and escaped his small-town roots to do what every youngster always claimed they would – leave for the big city – he’d arrived five years too late.

  In the middle of a goddamn ghost town.

  And now here he was, cross-legged on the roof of a colossal parking lot, in an unfamiliar part of an unfamiliar town, with the dark sky rippling like an inverted ocean, the moonlit streets pulsing with curious colours and stranger sounds; and the twisting column of smoke focusing down to a sliver of light above his head, before winking out.

  Making him wait.

  As ever.

  As midnight approached, engines growled below him, and he looked down with a sort of foggy indifference. He’d been hearing the distant chatter of gunfire on and off, but given the ungentle look of the city he’d dismissed it as ‘not my problem,’ and even then hadn’t been entirely sure whether it was a true sound or just another backflip of his brain. But now, glancing over the street-side canyon, he could see a bulky armoured vehicle slipping to a hurried halt outside a low office block, and knew not only that it was real and solid, but that it made him shiver and his blood turn sluggish.

  The car had been painted half-heartedly – a smear of messy red along both flanks – but from Hiawatha’s vantage the redecoration couldn’t hope to disguise the undercoat. The glossy skyblue sheen marked on the thick roof with a wide scarlet ‘O.’

  Clergy.

  Here.

  Hiawatha rushed to his bike to snatch-up an appropriate weapon, acting on auto-pilot, scrabbling through pistols and automatics like a chef tossing salad. Finally his hand closed on a rifle – some crow-blasting farmer’s friend, no doubt, stolen from a deserted homestead somewhere by Ram and his cronies – and raced back to the edge: just in time to see the AV’s two occupants disappear into the office block.

  He swore out loud.

  And then he saw the man.

  The man with green and purple fire tangled above him. With a great bird hovering over his head and wolves slinking past his legs. With rivers and grasses flowing in unreal ripples from his booted feet.

  With one ear a tattered mess, with blood all down him, with rags on his back and an Uzi in each hand.

  “You’ll know him,” the Tadodaho had told Rick. “You’ll know him when you see him.”

  Everything stopped.

  The man stood on the roof of the office block, opposite and below Hiawatha’s own vantage point. He looked like he was breathing heavily, sweating buckets, bleeding from a dozen cuts; but even as Hiawatha watched, the man seemed to force-down the exhaustion, eyes closed, face calm. When he reopened his eyes he was almost a different person, moving with predatory grace, stepping to the shadows on one side of the door.

  A little part of the old Rick muttered: “Jedi, man...”

  In his swirling dream-vision, Hiawatha watched the man change. Become something different. A puma-king of lank fur and subreal shadows; a primitive shade; a Walking Instinct. Reality kept adjusting around him; slowing down, jarring, highlighting its dangers and hazards, blazing along the edge of anything that could be used as a weapon, streaming into dark corners that offered cover, snaking in silvery beads along potential escape-routes, ambush points, blindspots...

  Hiawatha realised with a start he was seeing the world as the stranger saw it, and shook his head in annoyance, wanting to watch the spectacle unclouded by the druggish haze.

  Out on the rooftop, the two goons from the AV bundled through the stairwell door together, hands full of blades and barrels, and everything went crazy.

  The stranger sort of... blurred. Maybe he kicked the door, or slunk around in front before it was fully open. Maybe he duck-sneaked across the open hatch, below the aim of their guns, and darted-in towards them before they could react. Maybe he took them on the full, twisting sideways between outstretched gun arms with fingers locked and lunging.

  Hiawatha couldn’t say for sure.

  An arm jerked, a leg flicked out. The scrawny goon shrieked and fell, the bigger man raised his gun –

  Hiawatha gasped and struggled with the rifle. He’d save the stranger. He’d keep him alive! He’d –

  Except the goon was already disarmed. Bleeding from his nose. A kitchen-knife up to its hilt in the soft meat of his leg.

  He looked more pissed than hurt.

  The stranger turned. Ducked. Flexed. Impacts raining on the swarthy thug, boots lashing out in balletic patterns. The smaller goon was back up now, pistol firing twice in the wrong direction, the stranger twist-turn-kick-duck-pouncing, then the little guy was back down again, all but launched off the roof; gun tumbling out into space.

  Hiawatha sighted the rifle back on the big guy, adrenaline roaring, desperate to do something, to take part... But the stranger was too fast.

  Didn’t need any help.

  He took the two shitheads apart like a surgeon, and when they both rocked back on the floor – disarmed, disoriented, slow like glaciers fighting fire – he scooped a single tiny Uzi out of his pocket, aimed it with the minimum concentration, and blew their surprised expressions right open.

  The whole fight, from start to finish, took about five seconds. Hiawatha discovered he was still aiming at the dead goons and let his shaking arms relax by degrees.

  “Fuuuck,” he hissed.

  Which is when an enormous naked freak, bleeding from a hole in his chest, tore through the remains of the door with a meat cleaver in one hand and a limp sex-doll in the other, screaming for revenge upon the murderer of his wife.

  The stranger had his back to the colossus. Taken by surprise. Unprepared.

  Even he couldn’t move that fast.

  Hiawatha blew two new holes through the fat man’s ribs, smiled a secret smile, and melted away into the shadows of the parking lot before the stranger even knew what had happened.

  He wondered if he should go over. Tell the poor guy who he was.

  What he was doing here.

  What he wanted with him.

  “Not time yet,” the sky told him. The needle sang in his back pocket. “Not time yet.”

  HIAWATHA FOLLOWED THE stranger at a discreet distance. He seemed to be in a hurry; vaulting into the thugs’ AV and tearing off into the east. Hiawatha stayed out of
his sight, letting the signs and portents – the roiling purple fire – guide the throb of the Harley’s progress; grumbling internally about relying on hippy bullshit to guide him.

  It felt a lot like cheating.

  Half an hour after the rooftop struggle, at the edge of a great blocked-in wilderness, encircled by dead trees and stagnant swamps – Central Park, he assumed – he deserted the Harley in a quiet alcove and ambled out across the browning lawns. He’d done his best to conceal it, but the whole area seemed to be crawling alive with knots of raggedy-looking people, and no amount of security was ever going to stop a truly determined thief. He searched his feelings for a moment or two – still not quite sure if he was seeking divine solutions, subconscious rationality or plain old trippy make-believe – and decided he wouldn’t be needing the trike any more anyway.

  (The defining moment in this decision was a fat bear, made entirely out of smoke, waddling past with a claw flicking dismissively towards the vehicle. “Hope you’re right,” Hiawatha said. If he’d been in a more rational state of mind, he might have felt slightly dumb addressing such an obvious figment of his imagination. As it was, it not only seemed utterly natural, but far more real than the mundane shit going on around it.)

  He shouldered the sack of guns he’d taken from the general store, and followed the flow of the crowd.

  Somewhere ahead, in a copse of spindly trees, a great cheer went up. It seemed to hang in the air. Hundreds of hands clapping, voices laughing and shouting, and a single booming tone raised above the others. The rodent-like people nearby seemed to be gravitating towards it, sticking to little groups of two or three for as long as possible, then awkwardly mingling as the numbers locked together. Hiawatha saw luminous tags hanging above each one’s head, wrapping ethereal chains and brambles around each neck. He understood without knowing how that these visions were brands declaring each persons’ ownership. Each to a different tribe; like the Beaver-Lodge tattoo on his own left shoulder, but far harsher – symbols not of familial ties but of property, like a name tag sewn into valuable clothes. The people’s cautious movements marked them out as rivals, awkwardly picking their way into someone else’s territory at the mercy of their curiosities, unaccustomed to mixing.

  Hiawatha began to understand this was unprecedented. A crowd like this; a gathering like this. Hopeful glances traded between bitter enemies, slaves electing a new master...

  In his mind, there was a blanket of gold hanging above the park.

  It was all deeply peculiar.

  Every now and again a better-dressed man or woman – most in red, with feathers pinned in their hair – would point and shout accusations, snarling “you fucking Globies get outta the park!” or “Gulls only! Gull scavs only! No fucking Mickies! No fucking Strips!” Their shouts meant little to Hiawatha, and went mostly ignored anyway. Eventually the crowd just surged around them, and they wandered off, forlorn, towards the edge of the park, casting hateful glances back towards the source of all the cheering.

  He began to catch snatches of conversation as he picked his way through the trees, letting the cheers grow up around him; feeling the excitement of the hordes. But what little he overheard seemed nonsensical at best, and he scowled and forged on through the storm of random commentary.

  “...figures he told ’em if they wasn’t with him, they was out on they fuckin’ ear, man...”

  “...got fresh rat here, fresh rat, barter for clothing, barter for burns... fresh rat...”

  “...says any ’n’ all welcome. Never seen nothing like, man, and I bin here years...”

  “...wassa-wassa-wassa fucking Liiimey? Never hearda no Liiimey...”

  “...sent the rest to tear down the territory poles... got plans, he says...”

  “...rabbit meat and rats, rats and rabbits, get ’em while they’re hot...”

  And so on.

  On the shores of a truly revolting pond (which formed a great miserable face in Hiawatha’s mind, moaning plaintively for aid) he found the stranger; stood on a ramshackle podium built of logs and sheets, set-up in front of a great ghastly building that sprawled across the lawns like a living ooze.

  He also found the largest crowd he’d ever seen.

  In the ravages of his memory – from a time before his mind was prised open by the expedient application of mystical mumbo-jumbo and hardcore perception-altering pot, from a time even before the great Cull – he remembered concerts he’d visited, student rallies, great gatherings where all personal differences were thoughtlessly disregarded in the shared reverence of a single band; a single demagogue, a single voice.

  This was like that.

  But more so.

  The stranger spoke surprisingly softly. He had the look of a character unused to such attention; far better suited to the quiet application of force in secret, covert places. Hiawatha guessed that under other circumstances the man would have passed for utterly unremarkable. A forgettable face, cropped hair, a physique neither tall nor short, vastly over-inflated nor ultra-weedy. Just a guy with a crazy accent and a hopelessly British manner, whose words managed nonetheless to silence a crowd thousands strong.

  If it hadn’t been for the blood drying in thick streaks down his cheek, the matted tangle of gore-splattered rags on his back – once patched in every conceivable colour, now stained to a uniform brown-grey – and the glossy rifle hung nonchalantly over his shoulder, nobody would have looked at him twice.

  “Where,” the man said, into a silence as deep and dark as the sky above his head, where the quicksmog oozed out of the stratosphere, “are the Children?”

  Hiawatha shivered.

  No, no... scratch that.

  The whole fucking crowd shivered.

  As he stood there, playing the reaction like a pro, the stranger was patched-up and fussed-over by an elderly black man wearing the most ridiculous clothes Hiawatha had ever seen. It was all part of the spectacle, he supposed; holding an ever-growing host spellbound.

  “I don’t see them. Do you?” The stranger glanced about theatrically. “Look. Look at you. Not a single kid in the whole place.”

  Here and there people muttered, but whether in anger or fear Hiawatha couldn’t tell. The bright stars above the crowd – figments of his imagination, he was pretty sure – had turned to an angry scarlet, pulsing along with Hiawatha’s own heartbeat.

  “I’ll tell you where the kids are, shall I?”

  He smiled, almost paternal, just a little too sweet to be genuine.

  “They’re sleeping. Just over there.” He nodded off to the horizon, to the south east. The crowd muttered just a little louder. “Like little angels, they are. Come from all over the world, the dears. Sleeping off a hard day of... of dutifully learning their scriptures. Preparing for big things. Getting ready to... lead the world into a new age of glorious civilisation. Right? That’s right. That’s where they are.”

  He sounded sincere. It was hard to believe he was being sarcastic, hard to believe he was forming dangerous words, but the crowd were off-balance. What was this? Rebellion or respect-paying?

  And then the stranger leaned down low to the front rows, dipped his head so he was staring from beneath grimy eyebrows, and shouted so loud that everyone jumped.

  “Bollocks! Fucking bollocks!”

  Hiawatha didn’t know what bollocks were, but he got the gist. Everyone got the gist.

  “If they’re locked away,” the stranger growled, “in that... that fucking prison, why don’t we see them? Why do they never come out? Didn’t you people ever stop and think? Didn’t you ever smell a bloody rat?”

  Somewhere near Hiawatha, a couple of rows to his left, a woman started crying. It was a mystifying reaction. In any other place, at any other time, he would have expected the crowd to rise-up against the sanctimonious prick giving them a dressing-down; to react with fury at the open accusations.

  But no. No, this crowd was a chastised kid. A naughty child who knew it deserved to be punished.

  The
stranger rung his hands together. “Didn’t you ever... Didn’t you...” his voice tailed off, lost to the frustration. He stood silently for a moment, and Hiawatha wondered if he’d run out of energy, if the anger gobbling him up had overtaken him.

  But:

  “Fuck!” he shouted. “Fuck – come on! Even if those shits-in-dresses are telling the truth, even if your sons and daughters are hidden away in there, don’t you tell me you’re happy. Don’t you tell me you handed them over with a... smile and a fucking song in your heart. Don’t you tell me that!

  “No, no. You gave them up because you were told to. I get it. Because... because maybe if you said ‘no,’ they would’ve just been taken anyway. Because you’re nobodies. Because the shits in the Klans with the... the guns and the drugs, they said that’s what you scavs do. That’s what you’re for. Right? And maybe you told yourself over and over it was for the best, that the kids would be going somewhere better, somewhere more hopeful... but people, I don’t believe that. And I don’t believe you believe it either.

  “Here’s the truth, ladies and gents. These people... these fucking scum” – and here the stranger raised a crooked finger towards a line of men standing at the back of the podium, held in place by scrawny scavs with knives and guns – “They’ve. Stolen. Your. Children.”

  Silence.

  Thick, heavy, accusatory silence. On the stage the hostages shuffled their feet and traded glances. Scarlet eye-rings hiding furtive fear and the first glimmerings of tears. One of them – the scrawniest, whose face was contorted not with fear but with hatred – wore ruby-red sunglasses, as if to protect his eyes from the moonlight’s glare.

  Their robes had been stripped away, their weapons taken.

  Neo-Clergy, fallen from grace.

  Hiawatha almost snarled with joy to see them so humiliated.

  And then, as had happened in every crowd since creation began, the prerequisite asshole at the front opened his mouth.

  “For the glory of the New Dawn!” came a shrill voice; a scrawny man in stained rags leaping up and down, stabbing a finger towards the podium. He had a scarlet tattoo around his left eye, and a pistol raised in his right hand. “Your selfishness betrays you!” he shrieked, drawing a bead on the stranger. “Your wickedness shall...”