The Culling

by Charles Ray

  “It was unprecedented behavior, but it didn’t go beyond chanting,” he said. “I believe a slight change in the messages we deliver to them will erase that impulse.”

  “You put too much faith in your propaganda messages,” Cruz said derisively. “I think it’s time for a stronger message to our worker population.”

  Before he could explain, a monitor slipped quietly into the room and walked over to Gravius-One. When the commander nodded, the monitor leaned over and whispered something in his ear, and then stood back to attention. Gravius’s dark face creased in worry. He dismissed the monitor with a wave and turned to face Cruz.

  “I’m afraid, citizen, that the chanting incident is not the worst of our problems,” he said levelly. “Last night, someone attacked the armory, killing one guard and seriously wounding another. They took a large quantity of arms and ammunition.”

  Cruz’s face drained of color. His mouth opened in shock.

  “Who? How?” he demanded.

  “The surviving monitors said it was a large group armed with bows and spears. They were dressed like the Wild Ones.”

  “How did a group of barbarians get inside the fence undetected?”

  Gravius’s face was ashen, and the quivering of his cheek muscles caused the flesh on his face to ripple.

  “They were led by a former monitor, Leland-27, and the prole, Hiroshi Jackson,” he said quietly.

  “A monitor?’ Cruz’s eyes widened. “Wait, is that the one you exiled to the external patrol, the one who was supposedly lost in the search for Jackson?” Gravius nodded. “So, we now have a rogue monitor and a prole aiding our enemies.

  Cruz looked across at Armand Wainwright.

  “It would appear that your fears were well-founded, citizen. Sending the entire militia force away and leaving internal security in the hands of the monitors was not wise.”

  31.

  Wainwright glanced at Gravius. He found himself enjoying the man’s discomfort. For over a year now, since Cruz had made the stupid decision to send the militia force south to scout the former American military bases that dotted the south of the old United States in search of arms and ammunition, and to map out any potential military rivals that might spring up, Gravius and his monitors had been given complete control of the community’s security.

  A former general in the defunct American army, Wainwright had deeply resented being displaced by a glorified security guard. In time, he had come to hate the man with a passion. The monitors, in his opinion, were well-suited to perform internal security, and keep the proles in line, but it was his elite militia that was capable of securing the community’s borders. Typical of Cruz, he thought, to come to that conclusion only after a crisis. The man wasn’t capable of real strategic thinking, unlike his father, who Wainwright had respected.

  “Unfortunately, citizen,” he said. “We must now make do with what we have.”

  Cruz looked at him with a narrow-eyed expression that he couldn’t read.

  “The militia should be on its way back by now, surely,” he said. “They can then take charge of our external security.”

  Wainwright didn’t miss the way Gravius’s lips turned down at that. As much, though, as he enjoyed the man’s discomfort, he had to face the situation as it was.

  “The last scouts indicated that the force made it as far as the new coast of what was once Florida,” he said. “All of the military bases between here and there were completely looted before being deserted. They’ve not encountered anything more than a few scattered settlements hanging on by their fingernails -nothing to fear from any of them. They’ve started back this way, but without motorized transport, they’re at least six months away from arriving.” He didn’t add that the militia commander had destroyed every settlement he’d encountered, slaying every man, woman, and child. He’d save that bit of information for later.

  “That’s not good enough,” Cruz said. There was a note of petulance in his voice that Wainwright found irritating. “The Wild Ones have infiltrated New Liberty at least twice, and now they have weapons and traitors helping them. I’m leaving it to you to find an answer.”

  Wainwright saw an opportunity to finally put Gravius in his place, and at the same time, elevate his own status.

  “Well,” he said. “There’s always the possibility of turning command of the external monitors over to me. After all, I not only have experience in combat command, but I’m far more familiar with conditions beyond the borders.”

  He didn’t have to say, ‘more familiar than my esteemed and hated colleague, Gravius,’ but he could tell from the flicker of hatred he got from the man that his meaning wasn’t lost on him.

  Cruz smiled. “Good work, Wainwright,” he thought. “You’ve just given me what I need to start bringing Gravius down.” He nodded at Wainwright. “That sounds like an excellent idea.”

  Gravius cleared his throat and leaned forward. “I’m not so sure, citizen,” he said in his gravelly voice. “Disrupting the unity of command is not a good idea.”

  “It would only be command over those doing external patrol,” Wainwright insisted. “I have no desire or need to worry myself over manning internal guard posts. I’m sure you are capable of that.”

  The dig hit home. Gravius’s nostrils flared.

  “We are more than mere guards,” he said.

  “Oh yes, I forgot, you also babysit the proles to keep them in line. You can keep that, too, as far as I’m concerned.”

  His massive fists clenched, Gravius started to rise from his chair.

  “That will be enough,” Cruz said in a loud and commanding voice. “I have made up my mind. Citizen Wainwright will assume command of the external forces. You, Gravius, will maintain control of those inside the community. This is to take effect immediately. Now, Citizen Gravius, I have another task for you.”

  “Yes, citizen, what is it?”

  “The proles of New Liberty need to be taught a lesson that they cannot learn from information broadcasts,” Cruz said. “They need to learn that insurrection will not be tolerated. Therefore, I want you to take a unit of monitors into the prole community and deliver a lesson they will not forget.”

  Gravius stared across the table. “The fool’s losing his mind,” he thought. “That’s the last thing we should be doing now. It’ll only drive them to further resistance.” He knew, though, from the stony expression on Cruz’s face that trying to dissuade him would not only be futile, but foolish. It wouldn’t take much for the insane fool to order Wainwright to replace him entirely, or worse.

  “Very well, citizen,” he said. “I would request, however, that Citizen Wainwright be directed to provide assistance should we encounter any resistance from the proles.”

  That was as close as he dared come to stating that he thought the idea was bad. Under the table he crossed his fingers in hopes that Cruz wouldn’t interpret his remark for what it really was. He knew from the expression on Wainwright’s pale face, though, that he knew.

  The defense minister lifted his eyebrows slightly. “Smart move,” he thought. “It won’t save your ass completely when Cruz decides to get rid of you, but it might buy you some time.”

  “With Citizen Cruz’s approval,” he said. “I’ll have a unit of the external monitors standing by to assist – should it prove necessary.”

  32.

  Ordinarily, Gravius liked being right. In the present instance, however, it was decidedly unpleasant to be proved right in his assessment of the situation.

  He’d gone straight from the early morning meeting to the monitor barracks at the bridge nearest Committee headquarters. He’d ordered up a team of twenty monitors, fully armed, and accompanied them across the bridge. He would personally command them, hoping that he would be able to keep events from spiraling out of control.

  The officer in charge asked him what he was planning, and got a glacial stare in response. Gravius didn’t tell the men what he wanted them to do until they arrived at the first pro
le residential building. As he predicted, there was no response to his orders other than, ‘yes sir.’ The monitors were trained well. They were conditioned to follow orders, and this they would do. Gravius, though, felt sick inside. Not that he had any special sympathy for proles, but he hated doing foolish things, and this, in his view, was just about the most foolish thing Hector Cruz had ever come up with, ranking right up there with sending the entire external security force off on a wild goose chase.

  He pointed to five monitors sitting in the back of the truck. When they dismounted, he had them line up.

  “You are to enter,” he said. “And kill two people on each floor, no more, no less. Do you understand?”

  One of the men raised a hand. Gravius nodded.

  “What if we encounter resistance?”

  Everyone knew the story of the two monitors who’d been killed at Hiroshi’s crèche. Before, such a thing would have been unthinkable, but no longer. This worried Gravius. Never before had monitors had doubts like this. If this man’s concern was shared by the others, they were in for trouble. “The situation is worsening,” he thought. “Before the first shot is fired. Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound. Maybe we can still salvage this mess.” He only wished that he really believed that.

  “If anyone resists, do what is necessary,” Gravius said.

  As the five men entered the building, Gravius returned to the truck and ordered the driver to Columbus Heights. What he’d been ordered to do there was really gut wrenching. Killing adult proles, as wasteful as it was, only bothered him because it was wasteful, but children, even prole children – it offended his sense of right. His mission, as he saw it, was to maintain order. But, even docile proles were unlikely to remain so if wantonly attacked, and this was just that.

  Cruz, however, had been specific. He wanted everyone, prole and attendant, at the facility eliminated. For some reason, he was convinced that the place was the center of the resistance he was sensing, and that the only way he could quash that resistance was to utterly destroy its center. “Cut off the head, and the beast will die,” he’d said to Gravius just as he was departing. Gravius was convinced the man had finally gone completely insane, but was in no position to really do anything about it. So, for now, he would merely carry out the orders he’d been given to the best of his ability, and try to salvage it afterwards, if there was anything left to salvage.

  The five monitors he’d sent into the building would complete their mission and move on to the next task on their list. They, at least, wouldn’t have the distasteful task of killing children.

  What Gravius didn’t know was that when the monitors began shooting on the ground floor, information about what was happening moved to the upper floors like the speed of light. A middle-aged prole, on his way home after a late shift at the power plant, saw the truckload of monitors on their way to the Columbus Heights Crèche, and figured they were up to no good. He immediately turned and ran back into the alley.

  By the time the monitors arrived at the crèche, all but five or six students, two attendants, and a prole janitor had slipped out the back of the building, and were running through alleys, led by Washington Benedict, who had been just about to depart for his work assignment, and was the first to get word that something was terribly amiss in the community.

  In the meantime, the five monitors who had been left at the first building, after encountering no resistance on the first floor, were met with a deluge of furniture and crockery as they mounted the stairs to the second floor. With more than a hundred people occupying each floor, the ten story building had more than a thousand angry people who were unprepared to see their friends and relatives arbitrarily slaughtered. With almost a hundred angry proles behind them, and an unknown number on the floors above, they were soon pinned down in the stairwell, and fighting for their lives.

  Unable to move upwards, they concentrated their fire on the targets below. Bloodied and torn bodies littered the stairwell and hallways, including two of the monitors, before they made their way back to the front exit and outside. The sound of hundreds of footsteps and angry yells was a greater motivator than anything else they’d ever encountered - the three surviving monitors began running, running for their lives.

  At Columbus Heights, Gravius stood in the entry lobby, looking down at a couple of cowering attendants who were trying to quiet several brawling brats.

  He approached one of the attendants, a skinny, red-haired female citizen with frightened blue eyes and a constellation of freckles on her pallid cheeks. “Where are the other attendants?” he asked.

  The quaking girl shrank from him.

  “I d-don’t know,” she said. Tears welled from her eyes. “A m-man came in, and t-then, they started l-leaving. He s-said s-something about k-killing. I d-don’t know where they went.”

  The child, a young boy of about five, whose hands she’d been holding, buried his face against her thigh and began wailing.

  “Shut that brat up,” he ordered.

  The attendant tried to soothe the frightened child to no avail. His crying had affected the others who also began crying.

  Gravius looked around, disgust creasing his dark face. The monitors were shifting nervously from foot to foot awaiting his orders. From what he’d told the five he’d left in the residential zone, he knew they could guess what they were to do. “But, orders be damned, I will not slaughter babies.”

  “All right, monitors,” he barked. “Outside and start looking for the trail of those who fled the facility. When you find them, you know what to do.”

  Fifteen pairs of boots slammed together in unison. The monitors whirled on their heels and fairly flew from the facility. Gravius stood there for a few moments longer taking in the scene around him. He had a sinking feeling in his massive chest.

  33.

  Ten blocks west of the crèche, Washington Benedict, Octavia Olympus, and fifty proles, ranging in age from ten to seventeen, huddled in a dust-covered first floor room of an abandoned apartment building.

  “What do we do now?” a frightened looking boy with lank brown hair that hung over his eyes asked.

  Washington frowned down at him. He was trying to come to terms with the fact that the others looked to him for leadership.

  “I bet Hiroshi would know what to do,” a girl cowering in the corner said. “He knew just about everything.”

  Washington felt a stab of jealousy, which was quickly replaced by guilt. They were right. Hiroshi did seem to know a lot of things that were far beyond the others’ ability to imagine. Maybe, he thought, that was because he’d been raised differently, and had experienced so many things they never had. Maybe that’s why Clementine preferred Hiroshi to him, and maybe that had been why he’d betrayed his friend to the monitors.

  He’d been thinking of Hiroshi when he began chanting at the culling. It hadn’t been planned – the words had come unbidden – but, once it started, and others picked it up, it just seemed the right thing to do, the thing that Hiroshi would have wanted him to do. It didn’t completely make up for his betrayal, but it was better than nothing.

  As he thought of his friend, Washington remembered how the two of them, when they were little, shortly after Hiroshi had been brought to the crèche, would play in the abandoned tunnels that Hiroshi had told him underground trains called subways had rushed through. Though partially blocked in places, the tunnels, Hiroshi had said, ran all over New Liberty, in some places near the surface, in others deep underground. They even ran underneath the river separating the prole community from the area inhabited by the citizens. Entrances to the tunnels were all over the community, often overgrown with tangled vines or covered by debris, they were avoided by everyone. If they could make it into the tunnels, even if the monitors came looking for them, there were so many side tunnels, they could hide forever.

  “If Hiroshi was here,” he said. “He’d tell us to hide in the tunnels.”

  “What tunnels?” the girl asked.

  H
e told them. “It’s dark down there,” he said. “But, we can make torches. Hiroshi and I used to play there when we were little. If we go in far enough, no one will find us.”

  Washington knew that being in the dark wouldn’t bother them. Because the output of the power plant was routed primarily to the citizens, they had spent most nights of their lives in darkness. The rats might be a problem, he thought, but they could learn to live with them. Anyway, it beat being torn to bits by a monitor’s flechette pistol.

  “We’ll wait here until dark,” Washington said. “I think there’s an entrance to the tunnels not far from here.”

  Olympus had been standing in a far corner, silently regarding the young prole that she’d not noticed much before, quietly establish leadership of this group of frightened youngsters. What she’d seen with Hiroshi, and now with Washington, was challenging everything she’d been taught about proles. And, if it was true that the monitors were roaming through the community killing people, what she’d been taught about citizens was also in question.

  She now walked over to where Washington squatted among the others. “I think it might be better if I returned to the crèche to look after the younger children left there,” she said to him.

  His expression as he looked up at her was troubled.

  “That’s not a good idea, headmaster. They’re going to know we’re missing, and since you weren’t there, they might think you had something to do with it. Besides, someone needs to stay with this group and take care of them.”

  She smiled at him – the first time he remembered her ever doing that.

  “You’re doing a very good job at that, Mr. Benedict.”

  ‘Yes, but once I have everyone hidden in the tunnels, I’ll have to leave.” At the gasps of surprise coming from everyone, he held up his hands. “Not for good. I’ll just be going to find Hiroshi to get him and his friends to help us.”