The Culled ac-1

by Simon Spurrier

  The second guy was luckier. Used his mate for cover, even held him up like a human shield – hand on the hem of his jeans – and pumped three panicky rounds into Nike's legs, hanging from the gun mount above, before I pushed up close and shot him through his buddy's throat. Even then he took his sweet time, bashing about, trying to get a bead on my head as he squirted from his neck and screamed like a bullhorn. I had to bash his fucking brains out against the heavy iron edges of the gun-mount above, and he stared at me – eyes burning, accusing; lips spitting and frothing – all the way.

  Somewhere a great noise went up. Like… like an army of hyenas, all laughing at once. I had no time to think about it, no time to try and place it, no time even to notice – in any sense except one of pure instinct – that outside the Inferno the gunfire had stopped…

  The third man to tear into our little space, the man I should have killed first, he was hollering.

  Ignoring everyone.

  Throwing down his gun in contempt.

  And leaping onto Hiawatha with an inhuman scream.

  "K-k-kiiilled Sliiiiip!" he growled, knife held above the boy's eyeball, wrestling and grunting and rolling. "Ffffucking kill you!" Beneath the Cullis of his helmet his face was a mass of festering wounds, skin scraped-clear, bloody welts from chin to brow, nose a smeared mess.

  Hiawatha was babbling, eyes wide, tears on his cheek, both hands wrapped around the hilt of the blade, shrieking "Sorries" and "Pleases" and "OhGodDon'tKillMes". Human again. A boy, scared and lonely and pissing himself and And I placed the muzzle of the M16 against the man's head, feeling abruptly calm, and said:

  "Hey."

  He looked at me. I shot him through the eye. So it goes.

  And then everything was quiet. At least, quieter. As quiet as it could be with Hiawatha sobbing for his mother, Nike yelling and moaning, Malice's kid screaming like a dying cat, and my own heart pounding in my ears.

  But no more gunfire. No more biker engines. No more grenades detonating or trucks rumbling towards us.

  I stared out the window – through the crazy spider web shatter-patterns on what little glass remained – and saw why.

  "Fffuck," said Malice.

  The Collectors had been scared off. I knew how they felt.

  There was an army. Hundreds upon hundreds of men and women.

  Guns.

  Bikes. Cars. Horses.

  They looked kind of pissed.

  His Holiness John-Paul Rohare Baptise closed his eyes and kneaded his temples.

  Inside his head a sealed gate was opening wide. Every time he stopped to think. Every time there was no distraction – nothing to stare at, nobody to talk to, nothing to think about – it was like… like stepping into a great bazaar, full of painful exhibits he'd never seen before.

  Or… worse, like a labyrinth. Yes. That was it. The memories didn't come pouring out, exactly. He had to go in and explore, hunt them down, look for them. Afraid, tentatively digging into dark corners.

  Never too sure what he'd find.

  He'd always known there had been buried treasures. Always felt, instinctively, that for whatever reason his mind had shut him away, closed itself down to him. He'd called it, privately, a gift from 'Above'. A purification designed solely to plant him firmly in the Now and the tomorrow. Never concentrating on 'then'. Never looking back. It was as if everything that had existed about him, from before five years ago, had been stripped away in a rush of balefire. God had severed his past, he felt, because he was no longer a creature of history. His was a role of divine prescience. Shaping the world for the new dawn.

  Why should he need a personal past for that?

  And now this.

  "Hmm."

  It was all terribly confusing.

  John-Paul Rohare Baptiste was remembering what it was to be something he hadn't been for a very, very long time, and it was giving him a headache above and beyond the state of near-intolerable pain he spent the majority of his life experiencing. The 'something' he was slowly remembering was:

  Normality.

  The car shuddered – just another pothole, probably, or at worst a car wreck being bumped aside by the snaking convoy – and he straightened out the crumpled sheets of paper in his lap. He supposed it could have been a coincidence… The English scum, the destroyer who'd come so close to finishing the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn, rummaging about in old records… Coincidental that he'd just happened to find… this…

  This.

  This sheet. This crumpled personnel dossier with its clipped photograph and personal details, its family affiliations, service history, recommendations and citations.

  One of the Cardinals had brought it to him. Found in some nameless file in some empty part of the Secretariat.

  There was a story attached, he recalled – something about a struggle, a death? He couldn't remember. It hardly seemed important, now. Compared to this file, nothing seemed important.

  John-Paul fingered the sheets and licked dry lips.

  He'd always known his real name, at least. That had never been a shock. Back at… at the start, when he wandered into the city out of the west, alone and confused, filled only with the certainty of his own divinity and the exact requirements of his body in order to preserve it, even then he'd known. He'd had his birth certificate with him, hadn't he? Or… Or maybe he faked it? Maybe he…

  Anyway.

  Anyway, it didn't matter. He'd known he was John P. Miller, somewhere at the back of his skull. He just hadn't cared, until now. Didn't want to remember where the name had come from, who he'd been, what he'd done, what he'd been like as a person before he became more than a person; before he became John-Paul Rohare Baptise, Abbot of the greatest institution existing in the world today, architect of Tomorrow's Civilisation.

  In a roundabout sort of way.

  Another group of robed outriders swept past the limousine on his left. The driver was being boringly silent – probably star struck, the poor devil – and John-Paul found himself craving conversation, or distraction. Something of interest to stare at, perhaps, rather than the bland hills and blander roads of suburban nowhere. Something, anything, to take his mind off the sheet.

  But no.

  Sergeant John P. Miller. N.A.T. O liaison officer.

  Assigned 4332/GGfT/332-099#1

  PROJECT PANDORA.

  It was a lot like watching a film. Like the trigger on a projector, immersing the viewer immediately in a cannonade of scenes, shots, impressions, memories. The only difference was, it was all inside his eyelids.

  It all came right back to him, and for the fiftieth time he struggled with the desire to vomit. Soon he'd have to tell the driver to stop, to get the Acolytes up here, to prepare the Host.

  It was a lot to take in.

  And this, at his age. At his time of life. In his current state of health. Oh, was there no end to the tests he must pass?

  He mumbled a prayer and tried to ride out the nausea.

  He'd seen his empire shaken to its roots. He'd seen his fortress invaded by heretics and filth, his perfectly structured city ripped away from his grasp and – oh, worst of all – his link with the world denied to him. The great satellite dish on the banks of the East River, the great studios and broadcast suites his loyal children had pieced together inside the General Assembly buildings. The means of speaking to the world.

  The means of reaching out.

  Spreading the Good Word.

  All of it taken away. Destroyed, ripped apart, trampled underfoot by the ignorance and hatred of those who could never hope to understand his Divine Plan; who were led by The Man. The Stranger. The…

  The fucking Devil.

  John-Paul muttered a second prayer, shocked at the crudity of his own thoughts. Perhaps, though, it didn't matter. Perhaps… Mm. Perhaps being reawakened to his past was no simple coincidence, but an act of the Lord in itself?

  Yes. Yes, that was it.

  His tribe was beaten, but not destroyed. His
home was taken from him.

  What better time to recall another place? A better place. A hidden place, where once he'd served a far lowlier authority than the Lord. A place with communications facilities of its own. With defences and secrecy.

  A place to start again, and grow strong.

  He found himself clenching his jaw.

  And if, in the course of this Holy Exodus to new lands and new futures, he should come across that same troublesome bastard, that Limey cumrag, if that should occur – and the Collectors had been sent out to make fucking sure it did -

  Then fine.

  Fine. Whatever the Lord willed, of course, but… Yes. Mm.

  If. If they met him…

  There would be a reckoning.

  Hiawatha was real again. Curled on the floor, shallow breathing, fighting tears and trauma, the dead Collector hunched over beside him with his brains leaking out.

  This was how the poor kid must have been, before. Before he came all the way to find me, in a city he'd never visited, with a head full of mumbo-jumbo and a mission I still wasn't any closer to understanding.

  It was like the whole thing with the psycho and the knife – the guy with his face scraped off – had been the last straw, and whatever weird-arsed personality he'd been hiding behind these last few days, inhaling it up through each of his sweet-smelling spliffs, it was comprehensively gone.

  Thank fuck.

  In the sudden silence after the fight, as we traded glances and worked ourselves over to find wounds and scars, as we eyed the horde gathered outside the truck with growing anxiety, Hiawatha wiped his eyes and started to laugh.

  We all stared at him. Even Nike, crippled on the floor, fussed over by Moto (who clearly had never expected to be the one to do the fussing), looked up from his pain and misery in shock. Even Nate, curled in smacked-up otherworldly confusion, stared and muttered.

  Hiawatha took one look out the window, grinning at the hordes of silent figures standing there. Just standing, staring. He smiled like he'd overcome constipation and shat a gold brick, then rummaged in his bag for the dope he'd been smoking and threw it with undisguised satisfaction through the mangled hole where Tora had been taken.

  Like he didn't need it any more.

  "We're home," he said. "We're fucking home."

  "But. Uh. Hiawa…"

  "Rick." He said, shaking my hand warmly. "My name's Rick. Everything's going to be fine now. Come on."

  He wriggled up and out through the gun-perch. I glanced significantly at Malice and checked the load in the M16. Then I went after him.

  "Careful!" Nate giggled, eyes rolling. "Injun's a… Injun's a fucking liability."

  Junkie.

  Hiawatha was down on the ground, walking away. I went to follow him, then stopped.

  There was a man on the roof of the Inferno.

  I don't know how long he'd been there. I hadn't heard footsteps since the Collectors fucked off, and he didn't look the sort to go anywhere quietly. The wind moved in his hair, and the beads under his ears, and the feathers on his shoulders.

  Which was sort of weird.

  Because.

  (what the fuck is going on?)

  Because there wasn't any wind.

  The sky smiled.

  "Welcome," he said. And his face moved as he talked in ways I didn't understand, and the skin beside his eyes was a red desert that shifted with continental patience, and his eyes sucked in the universe, and the great decorated robe he wore, furled like the wings of a bat, danced in my eyes.

  Messages in patterns.

  The smile on the corners of his lips.

  The The walkie-talkie poking out of his cloak.

  What?

  It hissed.

  The man looked away for a second.

  "kkk… llo..?" The radio said.

  This vision before me, this ancient God of plains and prairies, this magnificent man with skin like leather and whorls of black and white across the bridge of his nose, with a great feather-totem spread across his shoulders and a long war-club held in his hand, he shifted from foot to foot, and said:

  "Uh."

  "kkk…cking talk to me, asshole motherf…kkk… said, is he there yet?… llo?… kkk… oddamn food's nearly ready an…"

  The man rolled his eyes and sighed.

  "C'mon," he said, turning away with a despondent beckon, reduced abruptly from awesome Earth Deity to an old bloke with a crazy costume. "Let's get a beer before the old bitches get pissy."

  The Haudeno… Haudanosaw… Haw… oh, fuck, the Iroquois weren't what I expected at all.

  Listen: I'm English. Only exposure I ever got to indigenous life was a school trip to a Stone Age village when I was a kid, and a whole shitload of John Wayne movies. You ask me, a Native American lives in a wigwam, says "How" a lot, and has a name like Two-Ferrets-Fucking. I know, I know. It's despicable, stereotypical and downright unforgivable. But I yam what I yam.

  Still, I was ready to be educated, you know? As the quiet tribesmen loaded us all into cars and trailers, patching up Moto as best they could, and swarmed around the Inferno in our wake, I was prepared to have my eyes opened. Rick – Hiawatha, whoever he was – babbled the whole away about the 'new' Iroquois. About how, in a cruel post-Cull world, the Old Ways worked best. He said the people who'd come out here, they forgot all that bullshit we used to call 'society' and went back to the land. Back to basics.

  Funny thing is, he sounded sort of bitter as he said it.

  Rick told me it was a popular movement. Sure enough at least half the tribesmen around us – variously wearing scavenged trousers, leather jackets or woolly jumpers, all with beads and mouse-skulls and intricate tattoos decorating heads and faces – were whiter than white. It was funny to see them like that. Embarrassing, in a way; like being seen in public with a raging tourist who doesn't mind stopping to take a photo every five seconds, and wears a hilarious T-shirt saying something like:

  I CAME TO LONDON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY STD

  But they looked so earnest, smoking their cigarettes and hefting their guns, and they acted so friendly as we drove, that I kept myself from pointing and laughing. It was a struggle.

  The point is, I guess I was ready to be… impressed. Stunned by the allure of this atavistic lifestyle. I was awaiting nomadic groups, great tribal fires, comfy lodges made of wood and mud.

  Oh, piss… I admit it: I was expecting a spectacle.

  Instead I got thirty caravans, assorted Winnebago clones, two dozen pickups and one of those prefab mobile homes, like a cheap Swiss chalet, on the back of a lorry. I almost choked. They stood formed together in a rough circle around the prefab, on the banks of a clean-looking reservoir, in the shade of a huge bridge carrying the I-80 to the opposite bank.

  The old man who'd greeted me, who'd introduced himself as we clambered into the waiting car as a 'Sachem' named Robert Slowbear, caught my look of vague disappointment. He seemed to bristle.

  "Just a mobile base," he said, defensively. "Not regular at all. We're a long way from home too, stranger."

  "Yeah?"

  He settled back and smiled. "You should see the lodges, Englishman. Fields giving crops. Herds of swine all through the forests. More people coming every day…"

  Hiawatha muttered under his breath. "Caravans as far as the eye can see…"

  Slowbear threw him a shuddup, kid look.

  "You all live in the same area?" I said, intrigued by the vision of some sprawling trailer park in the middle of Indiana.

  The Sachem shook his head. "No, no… The Haudenosaunee is a… a Confederacy, not a state. Settlements with the right to roam. Mostly they stay still… farm, raise livestock, fish… Others move with seasons. We come together, now and then. Trade news. Share stories and lessons."

  "Party…" Rick murmured, slightly more enthusiastic.

  Slowbear ignored him. "The means of living vary, stranger. That is my point. Does it matter if a man sleeps beneath a pelt or a… a duvet? In a wooden lodg
e or a… hah… a TrekMaster 3000? The circumstances by which he acquired items do not lessen their value. It is the ways that matter. The councils. The families. The beliefs."

  I felt my fists tighten, just a tad. Bugbear.

  "What beliefs?"

  He met my gaze, and we held eye-contact for a long time, without any sense of threat or status. It was an extraordinary sensation.

  "Consider," he said, pausing to slurp on a flask of something that smelt like lager. "What is unchanged?"

  He passed it to me. It tasted okay.

  "What do you mean?" I said, wiping froth off my lip.

  "This… this Blight. The 'Cull'. Call it what you like. What didn't it affect?"

  I wasn't in the mood for a guessing game. "Tell me."

  "Ha. The world."

  I scowled.

  "Do the animals care?" He said. "Did the deer fall down and die? Or the crows in the trees? Did the soil turn barren, or the rains stop? Did the earth care?"

  "I guess not. Unless you count the minor case of nukage…"

  "I don't."

  "Figures."

  "The point is, why look to some… heavenly God? Some crucified idiot born of mortal man." He stretched his arms out wide and gestured across the fields and hills, the glittering water of the reservoir and the clear sun in the sky. "Isn't this enough?"

  I gave it some thought. It was a cute speech. Tempting, even. But still…

  "Sounds a lot like just another faith-specific boys' Club to me." I said. "You don't believe, you don't get to play along."

  He didn't look offended.

  "You must understand," he smiled. "It's not the tasks a man performs that defines who he is. That's just staying alive. That's just being. It's what sings in his heart as he does so."

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Rick rolling his eyes.

  "And what sings in these peoples' hearts?" I said, only a little wry, gesturing around me at the beered-up white-man-Injuns with their polished guns and rattling pickups.

  Slowbear smiled faintly, and took a long time to answer.