The Culled

by Simon Spurrier

  And the studio. It couldn’t be any better.

  Halfway down the main hallway of the fifth sub-level a priest stood waiting, dressed strangely. He wore not robes but overalls – oil-stained and heavy with tool pockets – but in deference to his spiritual allegiance they were pale grey, with a scarlet circle on the breast, and the same pattern tattooed over his left eye.

  Marcus waved towards him with an introductory nod. “Chief Engineer Maclusky, your holiness.”

  “Mm. Yes? Yes?”

  The man dipped in a bow that combined deference, religious awe and sphincter-tearing-terror. John-Paul resisted a smirk.

  “Studio’s up and running, your holiness. Cameras work fine. Shocking, frankly, but then again they built this shit to last and I guess we can’t be surpr...” The man stopped. His eyes snapped wide as his brain caught up with his rambling and noticed what it’d just said. “Uh... E-excuse my French, your holiness, i-it’s n...”

  “Please go on, child.”

  “W-well, uh.”

  “The cameras.”

  “Yeah, yeah, well... they ain’t maybe as advanced as we’re used to, but...”

  “That doesn’t matter. We can find new ones, eventually. As long as we can broadcast.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Another mad little bow. “The dish needs some tuning – but no problem. Up and running whenever you want it.”

  “Good. Very good. One hour.”

  The man’s eyes bugged out again. ‘Whenever you want it’ clearly hadn’t included ‘right now.’

  “One hou...! B-but...”

  “That’s a problem?”

  “B-but... uh, no. No, your holiness, no. It’s just... I assumed you’d want to wait for Sunday. H-how will people know we’re going to be broadcasting?”

  John-Paul treated the sweating man to a look that contrived to inform him his assumptions weren’t worth a scrotumful of diseased spunk, then broke into a friendly little smile.

  He liked to keep people off-balance.

  “Aha.” He said. “The people aren’t my first concern, my child. The Cells need to know we’ve moved. London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing... All those little mini-churches, happily ferrying the Divine Initiates to LaGuardia. What will they do, I wonder, when they get there?”

  The terrified man shook his head. He dripped.

  “No, no. What we need is a message of reassurance. Just to... let them know where we are. Where to re-route. A permanent broadcast. A loop. You can manage that, I trust?”

  “W-well, yes, I should think that would be...”

  “Good. One hour, then. I believe I will be feeling rather stronger, by then.”

  The wheelchair squeaked on, and left the engineer behind. John-Paul hummed to himself.

  At the end of another corridor, round a pair of sharp right angles, was one final doorway. It was marked:

  DETENTION.

  His smile dipped.

  Here.

  Here was where it all began.

  It made sense, he supposed. A nuclear bunker, containing dozens of important personalities and their families, all crushed together for an extended period. It was inevitable, perhaps, that tempers would fray. Behaviour would slip. A wise precaution, then, including somewhere to let troublemakers cool down. To keep them out of harm’s way.

  Another aide opened the door, infuriatingly casual, and John-Paul felt cold prickles shivering across his entire body. Didn’t they know? Didn’t they understand?

  Here.

  It began here.

  Five years ago, this was where it happened.

  The research. The virus getting inside. The first symptoms. The discovery of the trend – the O-negatives unaffected, the antigens revealing their secrets – and the broadcast to the UN to let them know. Then the luckiest ones shutting themselves away, fearing the anger of the dying. The place was supposed to be airtight. How did the disease get in? Who was to blame?

  For just a little while, the place became... hell.

  There were gaps in what he remembered. Something a little like insanity had gripped the bunker, for a time. But here in this room he’d let God touch his blood, and let his memories swallow themselves up, and let purity cleanse his bitter soul; and then there was nothing... nothing at all... until he staggered out of the haze and into New York, to claim his destiny.

  It was a curious sensation, returning.

  They wheeled him into the dull little chamber, stepped formally aside and let him see.

  The prisoners.

  He smiled. He smiled with a vicious little glimmer of glee at seeing these fuckheads, these arch-devils, stripped of their clothes and humiliated, beaten and captured. He stared with an imperious smirk at their exposed genitals and the bruises criss-crossing their bodies. He sneered and smiled and tittered quietly. He was smug and arrogant and self-righteous, and the best thing was: he didn’t care.

  “Leave us,” he told the aides. “Wait outside. Someone find Cardinal Cy. He’ll want to watch, I think.”

  They were smart enough not to argue, leaving in a silent gaggle of grey and white. John-Paul called out to Marcus as he reached the threshold.

  “Y-yes your holiness?”

  “Prepare the equipment, Marcus. Hurry back.”

  “The... the cameras?”

  “No, Marcus. The other equipment.”

  “Oh... oh, y-yes. Of course.” The young man swallowed, blinking. “Where would you like to... uh...”

  “Here, Marcus. Right here. I shall... commune... with the Lord before we broadcast. I will perform the miracle, I think. People must see that all is as it should be.”

  “I understand, your holiness.”

  “See to it.”

  “Y-yes, uh...” he lingered, shifting his weight awkwardly.

  “What is it?”

  “The... the communion. Would you like me to fetch an... an initiate?”

  John-Paul stared at him for a moment or two, then broke into a wide smile.

  “No,” he said. “No, Marcus. My friends here are all I require.”

  And he smiled up at the prisoners, and Marcus scraped and kowtowed his way through the door. It swung shut with a heavy clang behind him.

  And then there were three.

  His Holiness the Abbot John-Paul Rohare Baptiste turned to face the pair of bruised fucks who’d caused him so much annoyance, and said:

  “Blessed are the children.”

  “YOU WHAT?” I grunted.

  He smiled.

  My arse, for the record, continued to hurt.

  The detention room was a boring cube with a grille-fronted cell set into each of the three walls unoccupied by the door. Rather than sling me and Nate into the cells themselves – oh no, that would’ve allowed us all sorts of unfair luxuries like being able to bloody sit down – Cy and his goons had cuffed us with our hands behind our backs to the front of the grilles themselves, then taken great pleasure in stripping off our clothes and covering us from head to toe in foul-smelling antiseptic powder. The upshot was that we were standing there buck-naked, stinking like necrotic kippers, unable to either turn, sit or slouch without dislocating our shoulders, and now faced with an unlikely audience with a chairbound old git with a gargantuan hat.

  My top ten surreal moments had a brand new highest entry.

  “The children,” he repeated, watery little eyes glimmering. “Blessed, blessed, blessed. Mm. Yes.”

  He twitched and giggled.

  I exchanged a silent look with Nate. Whatever unspoken enmities might exist between us, this overrode them all. I looked back at the mummified vision and chose my words with care.

  “You,” I said, “are mentally diseased.”

  Nate moaned quietly. For the fifth time he tried to reach out with his foot towards the red case on the floor, the same pack he’d been lugging about ever since the raid on the Secretariat. Cy had positioned it carefully next to our discarded clothes with a gleeful sneer, ensuring it was just out of Nate’s reach.

 
Glancing now at my companion, in this light – with none of his daft costume-clothes to cover him – I could see the needle marks, the collapsed veins, the train-track bruises of a lifetime’s using. He was sweating. Coming down again.

  John-Paul Rohare Baptiste barely even looked at him, sitting directly before me and jerking strangely to some silent beat. He had eyes, as they say, only for me.

  “They called the prophets insane,” he said quietly, like he was talking to himself. “They called the apostles madmen.”

  I shook my head and looked away, more disappointed than anything. All this grief, all this bloodshed, all this struggle: caused by an incontinent chimpanzee in a squeaky chair.

  “They had a point,” I said.

  The first shock was: his frailty. On the telly, during those annoying bloody broadcasts, he looked old, true enough. He looked old and calm and maybe a tad doddery, like a friendly old boy who’d had his share of an eventful life and more besides. He looked like the sort of human raisin who’d fall asleep halfway through his favourite soap opera but could shout and rant with the best if someone mentioned the War.

  He looked, in other words, like an old man with a lot of life left in him.

  In the flesh, in that cold detention room, under strip lights that strobed just too fast to notice, he was a cheap zombie special effect from an art-student B-movie. Skin so paper-thin you could make out the veins beneath the surface, hands so withered they looked like finger bones dipped in molten plastic. His eyes were set so far back in his head the sockets looked like volcano calderas, ready to bubble-up with pus and rheum.

  Nice image.

  This close up, under these lights, without the benefit of makeup, he wasn’t old. He was sick.

  I remembered the photo I’d seen inside the Secretariat. The NATO Staff-Sergeant, sat with an expression of quiet seriousness, staring into the camera. Forty, forty-five years old, well-groomed, no-nonsense.

  The man before me hadn’t got older. What had changed about him had nothing to do with age. It was simpler than that.

  He’d just... withered.

  He saw me staring.

  “The Lord has sustained me,” he said, like he could read my thoughts. With one hand he reached down to pluck a long coil of rubber tubing from a pocket on the side of the chair. “The Lord has shown me the Way.”

  “The Lord has taken a shit in your brain,” I told him.

  The second shock was: his smile.

  It wasn’t friendly. It wasn’t pure. It wasn’t the beatific expression of extreme serenity that basked in the studio lights every Sunday in the weekly broadcast. What it was, was:

  Fucking vicious.

  “The Lord has given me life in the midst of death. He has scoured the world with plague and fire, and wiped away those who bore his mark, and only I – whose blood runs with impurity – have been spared by his hand. The Lord favours me, Englishman, and in the hour of my greatest need – when the arch-Satan stormed at my door – he has delivered me from evil.”

  “The arch-Satan?”

  “The arch-Satan.”

  “That’d be me?”

  He smiled again. He smiled and underneath the God-talk, underneath the brimstone bullshit, I think maybe I saw...

  – yes, I’m sure of it –

  ...a rational man staring out. A rational man who knew the truth.

  A rational man who wasn’t such a nutter after all.

  Just a great liar.

  “What happens to the children?” I said, suddenly exhausted. My body ached. My head hurt. Felt like it always had. I couldn’t be bothered any more – not with any of it. With my own journey, with the goals I’d picked up en route like a travelling orphanage, with the whole twisted plate of crap this stupid bloody journey had become.

  Don’t you fucking give up, soldier!

  Training. Secret Intelligence Service. MI6. Drill Sergeants screaming and yelling, shattering conventional wisdom, plumbing the depths of each grunt’s soul for reserves of anger, for animal resilience, for the snarling shadow-lurking wolf loping about in the pits of the mind.

  “The children?” John-Paul said. “Oh. Oh, yes. Oh, I see...”

  Don’t you fucking give up, soldier!

  Blah-blah-blah-the-fuck-blah.

  Not your problem, said Bella, and I believed her.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” the little man sniggered, chair squeaking. He carefully fitted a bung to one end of the rubber tube and drew back the fabric of his sleeve. A plastic cannula, stoppered up, sat in the crook of his elbow, lodged deep in the vein underneath. “That’s what it’s for. That’s why you came to get me.” He looked pleased with himself.

  I scowled. “Come again?”

  “A little boy, was it? A little girl? Hmm? Did I... Did I steal one away from you? Some little blonde slut, eh? Some filthy little brat with his finger up his nose?

  “Came all this way, did you, Englishman? All this way to get back your kiddiewinks?”

  Slowly, lip twisting, he pushed the tube onto the end of the cannula.

  “Think you’re the first, do you? The first disgruntled daddy to come get his brat?”

  I could see the way his brain was working. It was logical, I supposed. It made sense. It was the same lie I’d told the scavs in Central Park; the same idea of aching loss, borrowed from Bella and Malice and all those others, who’d surrendered or deserted or handed over their own children.

  It was the best rational reason for someone – someone like me – to do all that I’d done.

  To clamber over piles of bodies. To cross oceans. To lock horns with the great Church.

  It was so wrong it was funny.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t have children. Never have.”

  The old man’s eyebrows furrowed together. He stopped fiddling with the rubber tubing, let it hang loose in his hands.

  “Then... but. Then why? Why did you come after me?”

  I laughed, and I admit it must have sounded manic. Even in my head, the stupidity was too much to bear. The arrogance. This dried-up old lizard, this piece of desiccated skin.

  He thought I’d come all this way for him. He thought this thing, between him and me, was personal.

  “I didn’t,” I said in between chuckles, which grew thicker and damper with each breath, until my eyes fuzzed with water and I could barely see. “You silly old twat. I didn’t.”

  I said:

  Listen.

  Her name was Jasmine Tomas.

  She was... she was more beautiful than a new moon reflecting off a perfectly still sea. She was so beautiful I spouted corny old movie bullshit like that all the time, and I could get away with it and not get even a little bit embarrassed. She had skin and hair the colour of coffee – one with cream, the other without – and curves in all the right places. When she laughed it was too loud and made people look, but they always looked then smiled, because when she laughed it was like... an infection. Like everyone caught it straight away.

  We disagreed about almost everything, but we disagreed in a weird way. Like it meant we thought just the same as each other, but would go hammer and tong to disagree over details. Ha. The colour of wrapping paper. New music. Pretentiousness of art. We couldn’t start a conversation without arguing. It was great.

  We loved each other so much it scared the living fuck out of me.

  An aide came shuffling into the room, then, as silent as death. He didn’t speak. He wheeled a medical stand before him, carrying a small steel machine with a glass front and a system of tubes dangling below it. I ignored him. I carried on talking.

  A week before Jasmine Tomas moved into my flat, she told me to get rid of all the photos I’d taken of her. This was six years’ worth. She said... she said when we lived together all our photos should be of both of us, or neither of us.

  She said that sort of thing a lot.

  The thing about Jasmine Tomas was, it would be easy to mistake her for a romantic. It would be easy to be fooled by the thing
s she said, the gestures she made. And then just when you figured you’d got her pegged she’d switch on the footy, or tell a sick joke, or come home from work with stories of scalpels and infections. One time, I cooked Jasmine a stew. I mean, fuck... my job was to go overseas and kill stuff. I don’t cook. Still, it turned out okay, you know? Cheese, leeks, you name it.

  So I took the lid off the stew when she arrived – wearing the purple-and-blue dress with the earrings I got for her birthday – and oh, God, I wanted her, and everything was just perfect, and the first thing she said was:

  Looks just like the inside of a gangrenous leg.

  And then she laughed too loud, like a drain, and I laughed too. I couldn’t help it.

  The aide took the end of the rubber tube John-Paul had fitted to his arm. He slotted it neatly onto a spigot on the side of the steel machine, and turned towards me. He avoided my gaze.

  My arse hurt. I kept talking.

  He pulled a needle out of a plastic wrapper, and came forwards.

  The first time I met Jasmine Tomas, for the record, she was teaching a group of wankers with too much testosterone about biohazards. All part of the training. She’d been seconded to the MOD from some governmental research-team or other – had more letters after her name than an episode of Sesame Street – and there she was, stuck in front of a room of leering arseholes who spent far longer staring at her tits than at the projector presentations she brought along. So... a few of those same arseholes dared another arsehole to ask her an embarrassing question about the dangers of sexual infection during fieldwork, and she didn’t skip a beat. Told him she’d examine his infected areas after the lecture as long as he promised not to leak pus on her, then kept on talking over the top of the laughter.

  I was the arsehole. I went and apologised after she’d finished. She took it well.

  A week later we got dinner, then coffee, then the best fuck I ever had.