The Culled

by Simon Spurrier

  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 – 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 way 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 pointi
ng 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 lodge 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.

  “Freedom,” he said.

  I stared at him. Worked my jaw. Thought about it. Said:

  “Just another way of saying ‘nothing left to lose’...”

  We finished the journey in silence.

  They took Moto away to be looked after and sat the others down to eat and drink. Pork, bread, freshly harvested vegetables, thick soups and wooden bowls of porridgey-paste and whiskey. I eyed it all longingly as Slowbear led me away. Nate tried to follow, shivering as he came-down off whatever he was on, but a couple of big guys wearing freaky blue masks politely told him to get some food in his belly, and steered him back towards the campfire.

  I made a mental note to have a word with the guy. He looked like death warmed-up, and things had been far too crazy for far too long for me to find out what he was taking.

  Where he’d got it from.

  What the hell he was doing...

  The big mobile home was a lot more impressive on the inside than the out. Someone had stripped out most of the dividing walls and blanketed the floor in a cosy mish-mash of cheap Persian rugs, animal skins, fur-coats and a thick pile of carpet off-cuts. It was like wading through the shaggiest patchwork in the world, and contrived to give the structure an earthy, russet-brown air; helped along no end by the chipboard walls. Each panel was so industriously graffitied with a swirling combination of text, iconic drawings and childlike scribbles that each component ceased to have any meaning on its own, and became just a part. A raw splat of language, of culture.

  I caught myself getting abstract again, and noted the thick pall of smoke in the air, the sweet-sour smell of something that wasn’t just tobacco.

  Ah-ha.

  It was weird. It was like I’d stepped through the door of this whitewashed suburban kitschism and entered some magical beaver-lodge. Some ancient cave, or skin covered bivouac. It just happened to have a few more right angles than you’d expect.

  Slowbear lurked at the door and waved me inside.

  “Who’m I looking for?” I asked, irritated by the mystery.

  “The boss.” He grinned, and closed the door.

  At the end of the hallway I came to a large chamber, where the windows were boarded up and the high ceiling lost behind a canopy of drooping skins and weird shapes. Knotted ropes and dyed fabrics, a mournful cow-skull and a stuffed eagle turning on a string tied to the roof-joists. There was a very old man sitting beneath it, hunched over an electric fire, wearing a bland little chequered shirt with a brown waistcoat. His hair was almost white, and pulled back in a silvery ponytail that left his face uncovered; magnificently uplit by the glowing heat. Each line on his face was a fissure in a great glacial surface; ruddy-red but still somehow icy, like it radiated age and a slow, unstoppable determination.

  There was absolutely no doubt at all that this man was in charge, in every sense, and despite the lack of gaudy costumes and outrageous symbols, I had to wrestle with my own desire not to dip my head.

  He was smoking a pipe in the shape of a bear-totem. It looked cheap.

  “Please,” he said, and waved to a low chair placed opposite him. I made a move towards it, not thinking, and hesitated. Call me shallow, but the memory of the food cooking outside and the hole in my stomach was more powerful than I’d expected.

  “No offence,” I said. “But is this likely to take a while? I’m fit to fall down, here.”

  And then I smelt it.

  Rich. Gamey. Good enough to kill for.

  Vegetable aromas mixed with the smoky emanations of the old man’s pipe, underscored at all times by the unmistakable scent of cooking meat. I realised with a stomach-gurgling jolt that the chamber led – via an archway in the corner – into a kitchen, and from inside caught the shadow of movement and a fresh burst of steam and smoke.

  I almost dribbled.

  “It is on its way.” The old man smiled. He had a kind voice, and spoke with the thoughtful enunciation of a
man to whom English is a second language.

  I sat.

  “Who are you?”

  “Tadodaho,” he said. “You would say... chief. Over all the Haudenosaunee. Over the sachem council.”

  “And why have you brought me here, chief?”

  He puffed on the pipe, letting white coils billow upwards with that curious slowness of silt sinking through water, but reversed; rising to the surface, lifting up to –

  Abstract bollocks.

  Hold it together.

  “You are here for a talk with the highest authority within our great Confederacy.” He smiled, rotating the pipe in nimble old fingers. “The Haudenosaunee have been waiting for you.”

  “You knew I was coming?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sent that kid to fetch me.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did he know where to look?”

  He held out the pipe.

  “A better question is: how did he know how to look?”

  I pursed my lips. Stared at the pipe for a long time, then slowly shook my head.

  “No thanks.”

  Clear head.

  Know everything.

  Cover the angles.

  If my refusal constituted some big bloody cultural insult, or whatever, the old man gave no sign, shrugging good-naturedly and continuing to smoke himself.

  Eventually, as the silence was killing me and the desire to blunder through to that kitchen and go crazy was starting to hotwire my muscles, he sighed through eddying clouds and said:

  “My blood is not like yours.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Blood, Englishman. Blood types.I assume you are normal? Type ‘O.’ Rhesus negative. Yes?”

  It was fucking weird, I don’t mind telling you; sitting there in that warm lodge with a genuinely creepy tribal mystic, listening to him go off on one about bloody pathology. Like a brontosaurus with an MP3 player.

  “Well...” I said, a touch too sarcastic. “You’ll notice I’m technically alive..?”

  “Mm.”

  “Then obviously I’m O-neg... What the fuck is tha – ?”

  “I, on the other hand, am not.”

  He stared at me. His face was still. And in his eyes, oh fuck, I could see, I could just tell: