The Culled ac-1

by Simon Spurrier

  Somewhere an alarm was whooping quietly, a polite emergency. I almost laughed at the idea, and decided, with a half-hysterical chuckle, the drug was still in me.

  Concentrate.

  I felt another light touch, a gentle something brushing against my lips and, with sluggish realisation, tried to form words.

  "No, Bella…" I mumbled, struggling to open my eyes. "S'not… s'not likethat…"

  The plane seemed to shiver. She touched my lips again.

  "Toldyou…" I slurred, aware of the spittle hanging off my chin and the cotton wool dampening every movement. "I'm not… not innarstd inthatshit…"

  Then my ears accustomed themselves to the whine of the plane (higher pitched than before?), filtered it out like layers being peeled clear, and picked up the mantra of garbled words hammering out of the distance, lurking beneath.

  "…fuck…" it hissed. "Fuck fuck fuck… oh god fuck no… what's… what's… oh, fuck…"

  Bella. Still in the cockpit. In trouble.

  So who's-?

  I rammed my eyes open, combat conditioning superheating every instinct, muscles tensing from head to toe… and wished I hadn't. My senses shortfired, adrenalised my fragile waking mind, and kicked the last vestiges of the Bliss into action. It came on like a storm of white noise, wrapped under and over everything I could see and hear and touch, and my last impressions before I slid under for a third time were of a tangled, tentacled thing stretching down towards me from above, brushing sensually against my lips.

  Air mask. Emergency procedure. The plane's in trouble.

  Shit.

  Alarms and swearing and airquakes, adjustments to fickle impermanent gravity A siren raced past outside. Two, maybe three weeks ago I would have bothered to get up and check what it was. Police, fire, ambulance, mountain-sodding-rescue?

  Now there wasn't much point. They were all ambulances.

  This was… before. At the start. This was before The Thing went airborne, before the mass graves and gasmasks, before they firebombed St Mary's and sent out the A-Vee body carts with the speakers and the flamethrower turrets ("…deposit all corpses upon the pavement… do not approach this vehicle… deposit all corpses upon the…"). This was at the very beginning, when the hysteria hadn't had time to get going, when people clung to their fragile little hopes of stability, when no one had quite figured out how bad things were going to get and the brass were playing it cool. No need for alarm, blah-fucking-blah.

  This was five years before I got the signal.

  I slumped into an armchair, alone in my flat, listening to the alarm dopplering its way into the distance, and swirled the ice in my drink. For some reason the tinkling of cube against glass put me in mind of the street cafe in Kabul – tanbur and sarinda music, heavy scent of melon-molasses in shisha pipes – where two months before I'd broken two of my fingers.

  I winced at the memory. Getting old, maybe. The mark's guards had soaked up both clips of hollow point. 22, and in the end I had to choke the poor bastard to death as he did his best to prise my fingers off his windpipe.

  Krak, krak, gurgle.

  Don't you fucking give up, soldier.

  Sir, no sir, etc etc.

  I took a sip of scotch. Glanced around, gloomy.

  The flat wasn't up to much, if I'm honest. A smattering of CDs on shelves, expensive but unnecessary gadgets to sharpen kitchen knives and open wine bottles, an aquarium with no fish (who'd feed them?) and a double bed that was rarely double booked.

  I believe "unlived in" is the phrase.

  Sometimes I'd feel inclined to pluck shirts and socks – fresh – out of the drawers in the bedroom, and drape them artfully about the place, like they'd been thrown off or forgotten about. Designer slobbery, for Christ's sake. How tragic was that?

  Well it was all going to change, and there was no avoiding that. I glanced at my watch and took another sip, wondering why the removal van was so late, and fidgeted.

  Another ambulance, another streetside-dirge for the slumbering city. I think even the throb of a helicopter (air ambulance, sure as eggs are eggs) passing somewhere in the background hum of London.

  On the TV a BBC anchorman was busily disseminating the day's developments.

  "…and was joined by the health secretary in re-issuing his assurances that all possible efforts are being made to contain and counter the epidemic. When challenged by protestors on the alleged withholding of public inoculations, the prime minister appeared visibly shaken; assuring members of the press that viable treatments could not be issued until scientists understood more about the nature of the disease.

  "In a parallel incident, the Pentagon was today sealed off as protestors converged upon Washington, DC demanding action against soaring cases of infect…"

  I hit the 'standby' stud like it had offended me.

  Another ambulance, outside. Sounds of people arguing in the next flat along.

  Someone coughing in the room above. Not a good sign.

  I was woken up an hour later – unaware I'd even fallen asleep – by a shrill double-bleep from my mobile phone. A text message. I flipped the oyster-lid open, spotted the name in the 'Sender' register and hurried to open the message, feeling a vague sense of unease that I could neither shake nor explain.

  SOZ. It read. CHANGE F PLAN.

  BIN CALLED IN.

  MAYB 2 WKS?

  U WAIT?

  I stared at it for about an hour. Like watching a football replay, hoping against hope you'll spot something you missed last time, hoping it'll all turn out differently.

  "Oh." I said. To myself. To the invisible fish in the tank, maybe. Maybe just to the phone, which kept switching off its illuminated display every time I left it alone. "Oh."

  Another ambulance went past.

  And I woke up for absolutely the last time in the blood-streaked shuddering cabin of a hijacked Boeing 737, feeling like a volcano had taken a shit in my skull, wondering why everything was rushing backwards and forwards.

  This time, it really was Bella. Gripping me by the moist rags that passed for my clothing. Shaking me back and forth, so the base of my skull rebounded over and over off the plasticated upholstery of the seat.

  "…know you can hear me, you fuck, you wake up, you wake up, you…"

  I mumbled something inarticulate. Her vocal barrage didn't stop, just shifted gear like a machine heading straight for burnout.

  "…we're going to die, you prick, we're going to crash! The gear, okay? It didn't deploy! Bloody autopilot's taking us down and, fuck, we're going to die…"

  I wondered if I had enough time to take more 'Bliss'.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I've always had a thing about landings.

  Before The Cull, before the streets filled with dead/dying/hoping-for-death bodies, before the survivors realised what was going on, before the public accusations and riots and whirlwinds of violence and lynchings and general bad shit, I was a frequent flyer.

  Under less sinister circumstances I would have built up enough air-miles to take me as far as Jupiter, but when every flight is accompanied by a new passport, new name and new identity, it's difficult to keep track. In my line of work, there wasn't much by the way of perks. Not that it mattered much. Not any more.

  The point is, I'd been on enough journeys to know the routine. The sudden gees of the take-off run, the misery of getting a seat next to the toilet, the Sod's Law ratio of passengers in the neighbouring seat (normal people to weirdoes, 1 to 3).

  And every time, at the culmination of every tedious stint, after hours and hours of staring glumly at the inner surfaces of a brightly lit tube, when the captain's voice crackled in hidden speakers to announce the imminent touchdown, every time my stomach took a little lurch.

  I know all the arguments. I've had them all. Usually with the weirdo next to me.

  "…still statistically the safest way to travel…"

  "…more likely to get hit by a bus than…"

  Blah blah blah.

&nb
sp; Call me a pessimist, but there's something about the image of 40,000kg of tightly compacted metal and plastic descending at catastrophic speed towards a strip of rock, which is not – let us be quite clear about this – renowned for its softness, that does my head in. There's something about 200-plus people strapped together in a cylinder with fins, undertaking a controlled stall in mid-air, that gets my palms a little sweaty.

  Paint me irrational.

  Five days before I woke up from the Blissout in the cabin of a doomed 737, with Bella shaking my head and telling me we were going to die, she and I had been making plans.

  Talking it through, sat in a burnt-out pub in a burnt-out street on the outskirts of Heathrow, eating feral rabbit and an optimistic harvest of wild berries. Bella had told me about autopilots. I'd only found her the week before and we were still getting used to each other. To me she was someone with piloting experience, too dosed out of her head to care about the hazards, with her own private reasons for wanting to get Stateside. I didn't waste any energy caring what they were. Not then. It meant she'd help me without needing payment, cajolement or threats. Bonus.

  To her, I was just the gun-toting psycho that'd get her aboard.

  "Thing is," she'd said, picking blackberry pips out of her teeth, "an autopilot can do pretty much everything."

  "You what?"

  "S'right." She waved a dismissive hand. "I mean… obviously you need a real pilot too. Keep an eye, re-plot, react to shit. But basically the auto's doing the tough stuff. Following the course, regulating height and speed, all of that. If it weren't for the takeoff thing I figure they would've got rid of the crew altogether, given a year or ten." She scowled, adding the silent:

  If not for The Cull, I mean…

  Still a common thing, in conversation, talking about the future like there still was one.

  "The takeoff thing?" I repeated, confused.

  "Yeah. Don't ask me why. Trainers never explained it, and I was only on the course three weeks. Needs a human touch, I guess. Too many variables, too much left to chance."

  I nodded, faintly relieved. The idea that each time I'd taken off in the past my life had been in the hands of a glorified calculator hadn't sat well.

  Until:

  "Hang on. Only takeoff?"

  Bella had smiled at that. She'd cadged a cigarette off me earlier (I don't smoke, but currency's currency) and now she lit it carefully, tar drawling lazily past her teeth.

  "Only takeoff."

  "Then… the landing's… ah…"

  "Yep." Another evil little grin, blowing out smoke like a squid venting ink, then a shrug. "Not always. Most pilots'll do it themselves. Matter of faith, I guess. But say it's raining, or there's mist on the runway. Hit some buttons, sit back, Bob's your uncle."

  "Fuck."

  "Yep."

  "So when we, ah…"

  "Heh heh."

  She had a pretty laugh, all things considered. She was far more prone to sniggering nastily, which got on my nerves, but still. It's not like there was much to laugh about.

  "When we fly," she said, "you can bet your last soggy Marlboro I'll be using the auto as much as I can. Trust me, it's the more reliable option."

  Needless to say, this conversation had not filled me with confidence.

  At around a thousand feet, with the alarms hitting an unbearable crescendo and a visible gash of smoke rising past the starboard windows, the full stinking reality of the situation leeched its way past the Bliss hangover and punched me between the eyes.

  I was flying aboard a plane belonging to a notoriously unforgiving sectarian movement, which hadn't been properly maintained or serviced in five years, which had an unknown quantity of fuel in its reserves, a terrified junkie at the controls who'd never progressed in her training beyond a computerised flight simulator, and a catastrophic amount of damage to part or parts unknown of its undercarriage.

  And it was being landed, single-handed, by a geriatric computer.

  "Oh fuck." I said. "We're going to die."

  Bella stopped shaking me.

  "S'what I've been trying to saaaaay!" she screamed, eyes bulging.

  For a moment or two we stared at each other, with nothing but the irregular whine of the engines and the spasmodic whooping of alarms between us. Then we burst into laughter.

  Adrenaline does funny things.

  Bella's laugh didn't sound all that pretty just then.

  As near as I can tell, the auto brought us in on target.

  I wasn't watching closely – the seat I'd buckled myself into was set some way back from the cockpit on the grounds that if things did get ugly the further forwards one sat the uglier they'd be – but in snatched glimpses through the open doorway I could make out the distant scar of what might be an airstrip, burnished in the bronze light of the afternoon, bordered on one side by a blurry haze of outbuildings and on the other by a bright mirror of water. To me it seemed to be directly ahead and low on the horizon, which I can only assume is the best place for an airstrip to be.

  Bella sat next to me, singing freaky little nursery rhymes, refusing to talk.

  Listing vaguely to the right, even through the muddy soup of my senses (ironically the pain from my arm had returned to full strength long before my instincts had), I sat grimly prepared for the wingtip to clip the tarmac, shearing off the entire thing and sending us cartwheeling – trailing fuel and smoke – like a colossal Catherine Wheel.

  Or maybe the tail would dip, and we'd ricochet up like a throwing knife on the backspin, somersaulting up and over until the cockpit nosed into the rock like a blunt javelin, shattering every surface and filling the cabin with atomised glass.

  Or maybe the starboard engine would blow on impact. Maybe we'd know nothing about the crash at all except an exquisite burst of fire; a supernova to shred every window, every seat, and every fragile little bone in our bodies.

  Maybe we'd hit a building.

  Maybe we'd over-fly the runway and bury ourselves, full tilt, into the mass of service yards and hangars cluttering the distant reaches of LaGuardia. Maybe we'd topple down into the mid-island water, venting bubbles as the dark swarmed up around us.

  Maybe we'd…

  Oh, fuck.

  Having an imagination is never a good thing in a desperate situation.

  "…in the tree top… when the wind blows, the cradle will…"

  "Bella?"

  Distant bushes through the windows at the edge of my vision.

  "…when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall…"

  "Bella – shut the fuck up…"

  The horizon bobbed into view on both sides. The tarmac came up.

  "…down will come b…"

  Kroom.

  Sparks. Alarms screaming like abandoned babies.

  Everything shuddered. A backblast of air funnelled down the cabin from ahead, peppered with glass and stone, and my neck twisted so hard I yelped in shock. Grass and distant buildings snickered past outside the window, but not in a straight line. We were curling on the runway, half-deployed landing gear screaming and twisting in protest beneath us, rolling us sideways, careening in a cloud of molten metal and whirligig embers. Spinning off the tarmac.

  A sudden moment of weightlessness, and pain all across my midriff as the seatbelt bit. From the corner of my eye I saw Bella rise into the air, pancake-spreadeagle on the ceiling with a cockroach crunch, and then back down, nutting a headrest and flipping, upside down, onto her side.

  No seatbelt.

  Shit.

  A bone jarring shudder, and crippled metal twisting with an operatic screech. Through the window beside me, lost behind a grid of contradictory smoke-trails and fluttering debris, I could make out the arrowhead of the wing tilting backwards and up, shearing itself off as the plane barrel-rolled into its slow skid. It ripped clear with a terrifying lurch, sprayed fuel which ignited immediately, and shattered itself magnificently across the tarmac like a neon waterfall. The metal of the fuselage – four seats in front
of me – buckled with a shriek, shattering all the glass down the left side and vomiting smoke into the cabin. Everything went black and toxic, and even through the acrid fog and my own desperate coughing I could hear the battered impacts of the plane's death throes. It snarled and groaned its way across the last of the runway, ripping gouges of rock with an angle-grinder roar, then dipped with another lurch onto the grassy rough. Bella groaned somewhere in the murk.

  Time started to return, piece by piece. Sparks drooled.

  And – slowly at first, but gathering speed as inertia surrendered to the shifting weight – we rolled. Landing gear comprehensively AWOL, single remaining wing arcing up and over the fuselage like a shark's dorsal, ceiling bowing and sagging then snapping straight as it took the strain. My seat swapped verticality for an abrupt horizontal, lifting the whole cabin like a theme-park ride, sharp-edged seatbelt constricting me again.

  The second wing slapped at the ground with a bowlike shudder and snapped off. Like some cylindrical juggernaut the fuselage rolled across it, breaking apart at the seams as it went.

  Inside: tumbling chaos.

  Debris dropping then lifting, blood rushing to and from eyeballs, hands swapping between lap and forehead.

  Bella flapped like a dying fish, thud, thud, thud, off ceiling and floor with each new rotation. If she was still alive, she didn't look it. Nothing much I could do to help.

  We seemed to be slowing down.

  Then something detonated behind us. The all pervading jet-whine of a long-lost engine maxed out with a painful hiss and – oh fuck oh fuck – striated everything, inside and out, with shrapnel. Metal was punctured. The craft rocked and shunted forwards, heat-blast roiling back from the mangled tail, and hacked at the rags of my bloody clothes. Something stung my knee. My face bled. What few windows remained exploded like froth on a wave, and I had the fleeting impression of singed grass surfing past the shattered porthole as we rolled again. Something sharp and long punched itself through the metal beside me, coming to rest a scant foot from my side: a shattered stanchion from the rough beside the runway, picked up like a thorn.