The Culled

by Simon Spurrier

  He never got the chance to fire. A blade snicker-snackered in the crowd somewhere behind him, hands reached out to snake around his neck and his arms, and within an instant the mob had swallowed him up and closed over him. His cries grew muffled, then tailed away into silence. The crowd’s head twisted, as one, back towards the stranger.

  He sighed.

  “Any other morons?” he said, letting his eyes rove, like a teacher peering across a rowdy classroom. “Any other stupid bastards? Anyone else thinks their kids are better off cuddling a bible instead of their own flesh and blood? Anyone else want to tell me they did the right thing? They like it how it is? The Klans and the killings and the fucking Tags? Anyone else want to tell me they believe the Clergy?”

  He was almost shouting. Voice hoarse. Anger dribbling over his eyeballs and into his words.

  “Because, people, they’re building us all a better tomorrow. Remember? That’s what they say. And wouldn’t it just be the best thing in the world to believe them? Wouldn’t it just be so easy to shout ‘hallelujah!’? To pray every night and... go with the flow? To feel like you did the right thing, letting them take your kids? Wouldn’t that be the dog’s-sodding-bollocks?

  “Too right it would.”

  He spat on the floor. He took a deep breath.

  And he drew a long knife out of his pocket.

  The crowd stopped breathing.

  “But believing it – really and truly, I mean – in your guts, people. That’s a tough call. That’s a tricky business. And I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say I really don’t think there are many of us who do. Not really. Not deep down.

  “So let’s find out. Let’s cut the crap.”

  He smiled.

  “Let’s see how many of you really love the Clergy. Let’s see who’s willing to stop me.”

  And he turned to the line of men, those captive Choirboys stood behind him, and he smiled.

  “I came here from across the ocean,” he said to the hostages, but loud enough for everyone to hear. “It was hard fucking work, let me tell you. But I came. I didn’t let them stop me, your pals in London, although they tried. I had to kill all sorts of people on the way. And all because I wanted to ask you a question, matey, face-to-face. Nice and simple.”

  He leaned down towards the first goon.

  “What I wanted to ask you, is:

  “Where are my children, you kidnapping, indoctrinating, psychotic pieces of cancerous shit?”

  The goon stared at him. The goon spat in his face with a sort of doing-it-by-the-script doggedness.

  So the stranger cut out his throat.

  The crowd made a noise. Not quite a cheer. But definitely not a scream of horror.

  The man went down, his legs shivered and thrashed, his blood oozed, and in Hiawatha’s eyes something dry and unpleasant fluttered up from the corpse to lose itself in the spreading quicksmog.

  The stranger turned back to the crowd. No one made a move. No one breathed.

  Hiawatha could see the lie. He could see the red taint of dishonesty hanging above the stranger, glittering and mewing like a mutant cat. This man, this unstoppable Brit with his boring face and his quiet voice, he had no interest in the scavs gathered in Central Park. He didn’t care one bit about punishing the wicked. He couldn’t give a damn for doing the right thing.

  All he had was an agenda – whatever the hell it was – and Hiawatha could see, burning bright in his third eye, that this man would do anything to get what he wanted. He would lie about an abducted family, just to make a crowd of allies empathise with his rage. He would slaughter his way through as many hostages as it took, to show them they didn’t need to fear the Choirboys.

  He wouldn’t stop until he got his way, and whilst Hiawatha couldn’t bring himself to admire such apathetic selfishness, such casual manipulation, it just so happened that the Limey bastard’s goals and his own were – briefly – aligned.

  So he smiled, and started to clap.

  And the whole crowd picked up the applause.

  Later, the second goon went the same way, although his resolve left him as the stranger’s question went unanswered and the knife blurred upwards towards his throat. He cried out wordlessly, gurgled, then dropped.

  The fifth man in the line – the wiry one with the thick glasses, whose aura seemed to crackle with an orange edge – shouted something to the two remaining thugs. Hiawatha caught the words ‘reward’ and ‘Heaven,’ and could imagine the rest.

  The goons sprang forwards, rushing the scavs who held them at gunpoint, shouting and snarling as their naked flesh rippled in time to their meaty swipes. The black man with the bandages dived to the floor, hands over his head; the stranger shouted – more angry than surprised – and the scavs opened fire.

  The crowd shuddered. Muzzlefire lent the whole drama a lightning-storm animation, and between freeze-flashes, specks of blood appeared across the faces of the crowd.

  When it was over, when the gunsmoke cleared and the scavs were cooling off and the crowd was in uproar, four naked goons lay bleeding on the stage, and the rat-like bastard with the sunglasses was gone, pushing his way through the recoiling crowd, through trees and undergrowth, shouting and laughing all the way.

  The stranger swore. Loudly.

  The crowd swore with him.

  By four in the morning it was no longer a crowd. It was an army.

  IT WAS A tired cliché, but that didn’t make it inaccurate. As Hiawatha watched, buffeted by awe and abstraction, he could think of no better description:

  It was like a tidal wave.

  The captured AV went first, followed by the smattering of vehicles the stranger had liberated from the Red Gulls. As their new de facto leader, he was more than entitled to requisition them for his own ends, but a gutsy minority of the Klansmen had reacted badly to the idea of throwing off the feudal yoke and rising up against the tyrants, and had holed up inside the Gulls’ base to stop anyone getting in.

  In the end, the stranger had had to kill pretty much all of them.

  Hiawatha had stayed out of the way. It wasn’t time yet. He’d sat to one side, beneath the great boughs of old, dead trees, and listened to the spirit-voices whispering mournfully inside them. As the first fires started burning deep inside the Gulls’ lair, he had taken the stick of blacking-paint from the bottom of his pack, and began to slowly mark his face, chanting quietly to himself, feeling the silver needle in his pocket chiming along with his words.

  Afterwards, when the armouries were opened and their bounties distributed, the crowd didn’t wait for the dawn. It was like a crusade; a great wedge of people, shifting together along empty streets, swelling as they went. A magnetic pull.

  And on the edge of the city, in Hell’s Kitchen, squished up against the black waters of the East River, they faced the United Nations building, and advanced.

  He – the stranger, the man whose name no one had bothered to ask – went first. It was all deeply medieval. All deeply mythic. But as the crowd roared as one and the vehicles gunned their engines and the guards inside the compound shouted and shit themselves, it felt right.

  The AV ploughed through the main gates of the UN headquarters like a harpoon through whale meat, bullets rattling off its sides; slivers of shredded steel and tangled barbed wire thrashing in its wake. Even as it sat steaming in the forecourt, dents opening up across it, the Clergymen in the guard-nest were realising their mistake. Betraying their positions in the darkness with tapered candles of muzzle-fire.

  The second wave of vehicles thundered through, guns firing. Sandbag-packed nests ruptured, grenades tumbled from heavy launchers and choked out red-black plumes of soot and smoke and people dying. Somewhere up on the roof of the Secretariat a heavy auto opened fire – thundering its payload down into the crowd – but at such a range and in such darkness its accuracy was far from perfect, and the spooky trails of tracer-fire stitched themselves neatly through panicky Clergymen as evenly as rioting scavs. Eventually some
one had the presence of mind to order the ceasefire, and the artillery fell silent.

  In odd corners, fires took hold. Sparks billowed and roiled, and beckoned with tongues of white light at the crowds waiting in the shadows, eyes gleaming. It was like an invitation.

  The horde swarmed from the streets, in every hand a weapon, in every mouth a scream, and everything went straight to hell. Gunfire, above grenade-blasts, above human roars, above dying screams, above engine purrs and the horrified gasps of unprepared Clergymen.

  Cy had forewarned them, maybe. But still. But still.

  Yeah, Hiawatha thought. Just like a tidal wave.

  It surged and boiled, fuelled by years of bottled anger. It lapped against the walls of the compound and spun in eddies of violence. Whirlpools with isolated Choirboys at their centres, screaming out as the mob circled and slashed and shot. It frothed at its edges; the glowing foam of muzzleflash and the warm spume of impact-craters, spitting dust and mortar and blood.

  The AV gave up the ghost in a spectacular fireball, fuel-tanks finally punctured, hefting itself in warped fragments off the crowd to spin lazily in the air; but by then the crew were well clear, and its messy end served only as a distraction from the true violence, close and personal and vicious. In dark corners, men and women pushed blunt blades into robed sides, struggled muzzle-to-muzzle to bring poorly-tended pistols to bear on the thugs who had terrorised their worlds, beat and battered with crowbars and tyre-irons at the tattooed faces of the pious pricks.

  “Where are they?” they screamed. “Where are the fucking children?”

  Not much of a battle cry, but it worked.

  Hiawatha stayed at the rear. Oh, not through cowardice – the spiralling dreamhaze had done away with that – and he lent his aid where he could; firing calmly and accurately into Clergy lines where the other scavs hooted and panicked, picking off stragglers in their grey robes with a savage sort of joy. He felt like all the Sachems stared through his eyes, and laughed and giggled and passed around the beers with each new kill. The Haudenosaunee, it would be fair to say, did not much like the Clergy.

  But no, no, that wasn’t his major role, here. He worked his way carefully along the edges of the mêlée, eyes darting, dreamsenses spinning; seeking out the stranger.

  “Almost time, now...” the wind said, hot with the breath of fuel-fires and roasting skin. “Almost time.”

  The purple cloud ran like a thread through the crowd, and Hiawatha realised with a start that the stranger had snuck away. He’d got what he wanted, access to this barbed-wire compound, and had left behind the agents of his aid the instant they’d ceased to be of any use. It was cold and brutal and logical, but it had worked.

  The trail led into the Secretariat.

  Hiawatha skidded on blood, marvelling deep down at the raw apathy of a man who could bring about such wanton violence in the sole pursuit of... of what?

  He stepped into the gloomy building, and went to meet his destiny.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I COULDN’T HELP smiling. The heat coming up from the fires, the smell of unpleasant things cooking, the acid stink of gun smoke.

  Yeah. Let it out. Let the grin break through. You’re so close. Enjoy. You deserve it.

  Then with the guilt. Screams and blood and desperate people cutting chunks out of each other, just because I told them to. Just because I needed to get past those big fucking gates. I lied to them. Worked them up like a sculptor hammering clay.

  Monster. Manipulator. Don’t you care about anything? Don’t you –

  Then with the irritation at the guilt.

  You trained for this. This is what you DO. This is who youARE.

  Round and round and round.

  Fuck it. Fuck them all.

  Don’t feel guilty.

  Look at what you did. Enjoy it.

  From the third floor, looking down through the Secretariat’s shattered mirror glass, it was quite a sight. Barely visible in the darkness, the undulations of the throng could easily have been mistaken for a gloomy sort of fog; wafted about by contrary breezes, lit internally by wyrd-lights and wil-o’-the-wisps; all of it sped up by a factor of ten and replayed to a BBC Sounds of War effects tape. Now and then, something solid differentiated itself from the mêlée – a moonflash along the edge of a blade, a torn strip of pale robe, an effervescent burst of cranial fluids. Little details, like individual brushstrokes discernible within a completed painting.

  They didn’t last. Big, crazy spectacles have a way of homogenising like that. Little by little everything was sucked inside; reabsorbed by the heaving, living, collective amoebic monstrosity that was the crowd.

  “Jesus,” I muttered, not really thinking.

  Being stuck in a fight on ground-level, that’s a messy, brutal, untidy sort of shit. No time to think. No time to gauge the way it’s going. Just act, react, dodge, stab, duck, shoot. Gunfire ripping from left to right, contrary angles of devastation, panicky shouts and thoughtless responses, friendly fire.

  But from above...

  Oh yes. From above you get a pretty good idea of why generals get to be such arrogant arseholes. Why politicians don’t talk about individuals, just ‘the people.’ Why the guys who make decisions – the top dogs, the head honchos – get to be sadistic fucks with no concept of human expenditure whatsoever. From above, it’s all... neat. Tidy. Like playing war games with over-expensive models, rolling dice to determine movements, accuracies, wounds.

  Nobody ever rolled a dice to determine how many sobbing loved ones each dead model leaves behind. How much the poor bastard suffered before he was removed from the playing table.

  It takes a funny sort of brain to see a crowd of people, and mentally note them down as a ‘diversion.’ ‘Cannon fodder.’ ‘Acceptable losses.’

  Guilty as charged.

  Again with the guilt.

  Something exploded down below, and lit them all up. Just for a fraction of a second, they were people. Different faces, contorted in anger and pain and fear. Individuals, locked together. All unique.

  For just a fraction of a second, fat with guilt and empathy and all that other bollocks, I wasn’t the cold-hearted manipulative scheming fuck I thought I was.

  Then the light faded and the mob coalesced in the shadows, and I was back to enjoying the spectacle, congratulating myself on getting inside the Secretariat without a scratch, being me.

  “You... ah... you don’t want to go help ’em?” Nate rumbled from somewhere behind me. He’d followed me up here like a puppy dog. He looked even worse now, twitching and sweating and jerking. I couldn’t be bothered to ask what was wrong. Not when I was this close. Not when nothing else mattered.

  I ignored him.

  The fight was all but over anyway. Still a few pockets of resistance. Clergymen scrabbling behind improvised cover to mow down scavs in their dozens, stuttering cones of perfect light drizzling lead into onrushing walls of black rags and snarling flesh. The bodies piled up like human ramps, twitching and groaning, but there was more to come, more plugging the gaps, more stolen vehicles blasting away with heavy weapons.

  Little by little the Choirboys were becoming isolated; cut off from buildings, rounded up in coils of the mob and gradually ringed in, hemmed, set upon.

  None of them went quietly. And after the first few who tried to surrender were torn apart – limbs wrenched clean away, eyes put out, scalps sliced off and ribs broken – none of the others bothered to throw themselves on the scavs’ mercy. They’d seen the look in their eyes. The excitement, the primal joy of being caught up in... in something.

  The pack instinct. That old-brain thing, rustling inside my head, howling to go and join its brothers. But no mercy. None of that.

  One or two of the Choirboys sang hymns as their ammunition ran out and the crowds seethed forwards. Mostly they didn’t get past the first line.

  There were fewer robes out there than I’d expected.

  Where are the others?

  I turn
ed away. Pretty soon the big, spectacular part would be over and the scavs would be slinking inside the buildings. Kicking down doors under the auspices of finding their lost children; secretly yearning for nests of resistance, dorms piled with sleeping Choirboys, easy targets.

  Let them.

  Oddly enough, the Secretariat itself was almost deserted. On floor after floor, the plush offices of another time – structured with all the ergonomic ingenuity of too much money, in broad stripes of grey and beige and airy spaces and comfy sofas and padded swivel-chairs and blah-blah-blah – sat silent; deserted. It reminded me, in a homesick sort of way, of Vauxhall Cross, my base for the past five years, where once the SIS had controlled its agents all across the world, keeping fingers on the pulses of foreign threats, adjusting and prodding regimes they didn’t like, sneaking about with a distinct absence of Martinis, pithy one-liners, Q-Department gadgets and obscenely horny chicks.

  Well. Mostly.

  The difference was that the offices back in London had a dangerous sort of mystique lacking here in the Secretariat. Sharper edges, maybe. Deeper shadows. Tight corners and internal windows. Em-Eye-fucking-Six, the place said. Don’t you cock around with us.

  The Secretariat just looked like an expensive software corporation.

  Still, at least it felt lived in. Most of its airy floors had been comprehensively violated. Desks and waiting sofas used as sleeping palettes, walls covered in neat lines of devotional graffiti (Book of Revelations, mostly, which I guess is sort of de rigeur amongst insane apocalyptic cults). I figured the Clergy used them for sleeping dorms, store-rooms, pantries, whatever.

  Which sort of begged the question: Where were they all?

  The battle outside was still raging, still going strong, but there was no way in hell the scavs had overrun every last Choirboy in this place. It was enormous.

  So where were they?