The Culled

by Simon Spurrier

  It didn’t seem to have slowed him down.

  He put a hand – almost tender – on Rick’s cheek. “Old man says... old man says. Bring troublemakers to him. Ones who caused all this. Fuss. Likes to tidy things up personal. Y’see?”

  Rick spat on the surface of his red glasses.

  “Mm.” Cy smiled, wagging a finger. “Mm. Except, except, except. Never even saw you, did he? Doesn’t even know. So. Maybe you’re too much trouble, eh? Don’t you think? Maybe I should tidy up. Personally.”

  He twisted Rick’s face to the side, hand digging deep into his cheeks and brow, forcing him down and round, making him stare out into the empty sky below the chopper.

  I stayed silent. Wondered at the weird pain in my arse – the silver needle, I supposed – and watched. Waited for Rick’s face to contort in horror as he saw the remnants of his tribe’s war party burning away.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  “Lake Erie,” Cy said. “Know what I heard? Used to be... so much shit came downriver, man could almost walk across. Some years, surface caught fire. Believe that?”

  He pushed Rick’s head further down, forcing him out, smoke billowing round him, held up only by the arms of the guards.

  “Course... nowadays, all sorts. Weird shit pouring in. Oil from them... big refineries up north. All deserted. Gas, debris, timber. You name it. And pal... no fucker left to put out them fires.

  “Now, the old man. When he kills a guy, just got one way. But me? I’m understanding. Got mercy. So what it is... Giving you a choice. How to die.

  “Three options. Number one. You drown. Number two. You burn. And number three. You fall from on high.”

  The Cardinal put a hand on Rick’s chest.

  “Decide on the way down. Huh?” he said.

  Rick said something in a language I didn’t understand. His face changed.

  Smoothed out.

  And then he smiled at me, and I cried out something wordless, and Cy pushed, and he was gone.

  BELOW, WOW!

  Below, thunderbirds soared on fiery thermals. They keened and screamed as he fell, and squabbled to catch him.

  And the trees sang and the wind murmured, and far away buffaloes grunted moronic greetings, and he settled as light as a feather on the back of the greatest fire-crow of all. It laughed and laughed, and so did he, and in its eye was lightning, and as it rose across the burning lakes Rick-Hiawatha felt something dull and insubstantial continue to fall away from him: something heavy and clumsy and solid, which he didn’t need anymore.

  The thunderbird kept pace with a garishly-painted helicopter for a moment, then veered off into the smoke, heading for the sounds of the plains.

  IT’D END HERE. I’d figured that much out already.

  Don’t call it a hunch, or a spooky sensation. Call it reality. Call it there’s-no-fucking-way-I’m-getting-out-of-here-except-dead-or-victorious.

  Call it: I know when to stop chasing.

  It would end on this green-and-brown splat of land, choked up by the curtains of smoke that hid the horizon and denied the mainland ever existed. It would end, for better or worse – probably worse – in the middle of a sludge-like lake, whole patches of which were flaming away happily, with a trail of dead people behind me, a psychotic cardinal with a knife in his brain bearing a grudge, and a throbbing pain in my right buttock.

  Way to go.

  They’d chained me to a sign. Mottled and half-cracked where a small golf-buggy had toppled into it (and indeed sat there still, crumpled and rusting in the tall grass) it was the only thing to keep me amused whilst the world turned blithely on around me, and I’d read it several times already.

  It announced that in 1813 a bloke by the name of Oliver Hazard Perry kicked the shit out of a fleet of British ships on Lake Erie. I’m paraphrasing. It was a minor engagement, all things considered, but had a knock-on effect that ensured that a year down the line the peace talks were in full swing. Eventually some bright spark decided a memorial to the guy in charge was exactly what was needed, and it only took a hundred years to raise the cash. This was considered a triumph of human persistence rather than a lamentable token of inefficiency.

  The sign was obviously intended to enlighten any visitor unfortunate enough to find themselves stranded on South Bass Island, and was crammed with interesting facts regarding the construction of said monument. At any other time I’d have expected to see fat tourists clustered around it making “ooh” sounds and taking pictures.

  Alas, today, there was nobody but me to enjoy the info-feast. Instead there were dozens of armed Choirboys – men and women alike – spreading out across the tiny arsecrumb of land to convert any locals from their savage un-Christian ways to –

  – well, death, probably. As it happened they hadn’t found anyone yet, though they continued to kick in each mouldering door and holiday-home porch with optimistic enthusiasm. In the meantime I’d been left chained here with Nate – still not talking – to watch the two Clergy choppers ferry people from the shore. It was boring. It was boring and it was underscored by the imminent probability of my own death, which made it even worse. It was like these pricks had dug a hole in my stomach, told me to make peace with my maker, placed the gun against my head, then told me to amuse myself for a while.

  As they dragged me out of the chopper I’d asked Cy what happened to the rest of the Haudenosaunee. He’d sneered and ignored the question. I couldn’t work out if that was good or not. I couldn’t work out if I cared.

  The monument itself, for the record, stood nearby. I glanced up at it for the fiftieth time, on the off-chance it might be doing something interesting. Like so many military monuments it was basically a giant penis, cunningly disguised as a three-hundred-and-fifty foot Doric column with a bronze ‘urn’ (eleven tons, you’ll be fascinated to learn) in the place of a throbbing glans, which was constructed, apparently, to inculcate the lessons of international peace by arbitration and disarmament.

  Which was odd, because to me it looked a lot like it had been built to inculcate the lessons of international one-upmanship, specifically by stating: my cock’s bigger than yours.

  A foghorn blasted nearby, and I watched with a minor flicker of interest as the clapped-out old ferry they’d found deserted at Port Clinton made its third journey towards us, this time bearing two blue lorries and a school bus, undoubtedly crammed with scared kids in white robes. Next to me Nate stiffened, reminded of the innocuous job he’d held down for two years before all this mad shit started with a plane crash and a –

  No. No, hang on.

  ‘Innocuous’ my arse. He was driving kids to a prison, or worse. And he knew it.

  I hadn’t entirely made my mind up yet how I felt about Nate.

  I leaned back against the pillar of the signpost and sighed.

  The long and the short of it was: the Clergy had invaded a nowheresville island in the middle of the burning Erie, en masse, and were in the process of transferring their entire stock of idiots, arseholes, arsenals and initiates. Don’t ask me why. Don’t ask me what they expected to find here, or how they thought it would advance their march towards a new future. I didn’t know.

  All I knew was that this place, this island, this dull little shithole, was where I had been diligently trying to reach too.

  That sheet of paper from the file in the Secretariat, remember? The photo.

  REASSIGNMENT LOCATION, it said.

  UN INSTALLATION SAFFRON. SOUTH BASS ISLAND, OHIO.

  The tourist map they’d chained me to didn’t mention any UN installations. That would’ve made it too easy, I guess.

  I sighed again.

  There seemed to be a lot of activity around the base of the column. I couldn’t see clearly from where I stood, but it looked like a lot of figures were waving a lot of hands, pointing and nodding profusely.

  There was someone in a wheelchair with them, and it struck me that every now and again the crowds’ gesturing hands would freeze, thei
r heads would twist to stare down, and then a fresh wave of nodding and scraping and bowing, in response to whatever the chair-bound figure had said.

  John-Paul, then.

  The group disappeared behind the great stone column in an excited bundle, and I waited for them to emerge from the other side, pleased to be watching something mildly diverting. They never reappeared. They’d vanished.

  “Huh,” I said to myself. Nate glanced at me, briefly, as if maybe he thought I was about to talk to him.

  I looked away.

  My arse hurt. More specifically, my buttock hurt where a tiny silver pin had been rammed into it, and every now again I felt a fresh dribble of blood down the back of my leg. Every time I moved it stung, like it was worming deeper into the muscle, and every time that happened it made me think of Rick.

  Tumbling off into smoke and death with a smile.

  And that made me think of Malice.

  Dumped, thoughtlessly, over the edge of the pier where the chopper landed, when one of the Choirboy crew bothered to tell Cy she looked like she’d croaked during the flight.

  And that made me think of Bella.

  And that made me think of... of something else.

  And that made me think of all sorts of shit, which made the hole in my stomach burn and writhe, and my teeth clench, and my eyes sting, and –

  You get the idea.

  So I stopped thinking about the pain in my arse and ignored the voice growling – no, shrieking – in my skull:

  Don’t you fucking give up, soldier!

  Dull, dull, dull.

  The ferry docked, and the trucks rolled off. Someone shouted at someone else.

  Gulls wheeled overhead on smoky updrafts. A hundred miles south and east, a bunch of dead Iroquois were going hard in the sun.

  The chopper headed back across the lake. Somewhere in the distance came a short burst of gunfire, and I figured the goons must have found a local or two after all. The chopper wheeled off on a new course, vanishing into the smoke.

  Time stretched on.

  My arse continued to hurt.

  In my head, Rick continued to tumble backwards, smiling.

  Malice continued to sink and burn beneath the waters.

  Spuggsy squished, Tora dragged off to be squabbled-over by human animals, Moto shot.

  Bella screaming and thumping like a boneless doll against the insides of the pla –

  “You think they’ll kill us?”

  Nate was looking at me. There was something like... pleading,in his eyes. Something that cut through all the shit, all the anger at how he’d used me, tagged along to get his fix, lied. Something that whispered frostily in my ear:

  But didn’t you use him too?

  “Yeah,” I said, not unkindly. “Probably.”

  I looked back at the monument. It was something to stare at, I guess. Didn’t move, didn’t change: just stood there, defying the wind, a granite prick raping the sk –

  “Whoa,” said Nate.

  The monument moved.

  At the top, the tip of the great upturned basilica creaked, squealed in protest, then opened.

  “Well there’s a thing,” I mumbled.

  It was like a flower blossoming. Petals rattling into place, unoiled pistons groaning deep inside the rock. Without being entirely sure when it changed from one to the other, I suddenly wasn’t looking at an enormous phallus any more.

  I was looking at a bloody gigantic broadcasting dish.

  And then Cy was standing in front of me, sneering.

  “Time to go,” he rasped.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  WITH EACH NEW room, a new calamity of memory. A new disastrous, deadly (wonderful) explosion of sights and smells and sounds, bubbling up from the past, like liquid pouring into a mould; taking its time to slip into the deepest recesses.

  Or, like dust blowing free from a hidden treasure.

  Like cataracts dissolving.

  His Holiness the Abbot John-Paul Rohare Baptiste allowed his minions to wheel him through the great, secret facility beneath South Bass Island, saying nothing, and felt his memories slither back one by one. They gathered pace the deeper he went, with each new level, each new string of concrete walls, each new dim light fixture that flickered and illuminated as it sensed movement.

  Until eventually he remembered it all, like it had just been yesterday.

  He’d arrived here, on the Island, five years ago: angry and bitter. It was beneath him, he’d thought. A man of his experience – of his record – sent to keep an eye on a bunch of backroom nerds.

  Sergeant John P. Miller, the reassignment form had said. NATO Liaison Officer.

  It should have said: fucking nursemaid.

  But still the facility had been a pleasant surprise. Hidden away beneath the monument, below vaults supposedly for the Lake Erie dead – in fact crammed with generators and feeds from the solar panels above – down creaking elevator shafts and plunging stairwells. Always the drip-drip-drip of condensed water.

  Oh-so-very exciting. Oh-so-very impressive. It almost made up for the ignominy.

  Here and now in the present, his assistants wheeled him past doors marked LAB #1, LAB #2, LAB #3...

  He didn’t like using the chair – it created the wrong impression – but it’d been an exhausting journey from the city and he wasn’t as spry as he was. He was forty nine years old. He looked approximately seventy.

  This was living with anaphylaxis. Constant pain.

  This was living with AIDS, and more drugs than he could count, administered by Clergy-doctors who’d have their testicles ripped off and fed to them if they breathed a word to anyone.

  This was three anti-coagulation shots every day, and antihistamine solutions three times a week.

  This was the AB-virus, eating his blood cells every second, staved off only by communing with the divine.

  This was living by numbers.

  This place, it’d been a nuclear bunker once. So his superiors told him. Secondary or tertiary governmental; an alternative to the presidential chambers beneath Washington and NY. Somewhere safe to rule an irradiated country. Somewhere cosy for a ragged government to sip clean water and make comforting addresses.

  The whole thing had been converted at short-notice to the requirements of the UN team. Dormitories and armouries stripped-out, curious equipment shipped-in for days on end. ‘Project Pandora,’ they’d called it. An international attempt to stop the virus in its steps.

  Out loud, as his wheelchair squeaked its way down the ramp to the sub-third floor, he mumbled:

  “When all the evil spills out, there’s still a... glimmer of hope...”

  Pandora’s box.

  His chief minder must have heard him. An effete man named Marcus, good for very little but wheeling a chair and kissing arse, he gave John-Paul a concerned glance and crouched down to address him, unintentionally condescending. John-Paul approved of ignorance and ineffectuality. The soldiery were all very well; the cardinals and their units served a purpose, but one couldn’t trust them. They were too full of their own ideas. Too focused.

  “Your holiness?” The man said softly. “Did you say something?”

  “Mm? No, no...” he closed his eyes and let the memories absorb him again, enjoying the concern on the man’s face. “Everything’s fine, Marcus.”

  He remembered wondering, at the time, why they’d sent the team here. Why not to some scholarly lab in New York? Why not out in the open?

  And then the riots had started. They’d listened to the news every day before work, gathered together in the social room. Riots and police actions and union strikes, and embassies closing down at a rate of knots.

  Then the diplomatic wrangling.

  Then the rumours of DEFCON escalation.

  Then the standoffs and false alarms and real-actual-genuine-fear-of-Armageddon type talks, and suddenly everyone was living in a bad disaster film, and Sergeant John P. Miller became very very grateful indeed that his superiors had se
nt him deep underground.

  Even then, he’d been bored out of his brain. The team’s progress was just so slow.

  No – correction: the team’s progress was non-existent. It just took them forever to figure that out.

  Outside, the world went to hell in a handcart, and inside... inside, test-tubes clinked and microscopes whirred and men and women in white lab-coats made fussy notes with fussy biros. A lot of them had families. A lot of them looked unwell.

  More rooms glided past the wheelchair, now circuiting the fifth level. COMMS, RESOURCES, the door names went, RECORDS, STUDIO, ENGINEERING...

  The place was enormous. He remembered thinking that, too, all those years ago. Far too big for the research team. They’d set themselves up in their little corners and got on with it, and with nothing to do but file reports that said ‘No progress,’ he’d taken to wandering, exploring, poking in the dark.

  A mothballed war room, with its displays darkened and tactical consoles disconnected.

  A water purification plant.

  A dozen storerooms marked NON-PERISHABLE. All empty.

  And the communications room. And the broadcast suite.

  And the Presidential Address studio. Plush red and blue walls. Elegantly draped flags. TV cameras jacketed in plastic wraps and rubber covers.

  That was it. That was what brought him back here, now. In the flash of a triggered memory – those records unearthed from the Secretariat, presented to him by Cardinal Cy even as the doctors fussed over his bleeding skull – he’d remembered the place, the resources, the cameras and broadcasting equipment and security.

  And as the exodus convoy had slipped away from the overrun UN headquarters – lost, futureless, despairing – that crumpled file from all those years ago had been like a bolt from the heavens. A sign. In that perfect instant he’d known, clearly and immediately, where to take his Clergy to find safety and security.

  It was perfect. An island with its own tiny airstrip. Easily defendable. Perfectly secure quarters for the luminaries of the sect. Plentiful housing for the soldiery and devotees. Vast holding-rooms below ground where anything could be conducted in secret and silence. Airports a mere spit away in Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit...