The Culled

by Simon Spurrier

  Hard.

  Trying to get the shithead bleeding inside. Emptying him of oxygen. Playing it carefully, thoughtfully. Not a brawl but an amputation, not a fight but a fucking dissection. He coughed blood and tried to lever himself up, sucking back air, and I broke his nose with a smile and kept hitting, sat astride him; pounding away until my fingers felt broken and my arms ached from wrist to shoulder.

  Intelligent application of force.

  Yes.

  Yes, you fuck.

  Controlled violence.

  Thwap

  Thwap

  For Rick. For Malice and the others. For Bella, you shit.

  Yes.

  For Jasmine.

  I took him apart, little by little, and no brain-surgeon was ever as precise as me in that glorious flurry of aggre –

  Snuk

  My fists stopped moving.

  Cy smiled through teeth smeared with bloody spittle, gripping my hands in mid-swing as if he’d caught a pair of tennis balls, then sat up in a single continuous movement and nutted me on the bridge of my nose. Something snapped.

  Fact: It’s possible to kill people like this too.

  I went over backwards. A fist in my eye helped me down. Warmth spattered off my lips and chin.

  And I lay there panting as he dragged himself out from beneath me, and stood with no obvious aches or pains, spitting the blood away and clearing each nostril with a viscous rasp of snot and gore. He rolled his head as if he’d fallen asleep in the wrong position; jumped up and down in his spot once or twice, then gave me a great, bright smile.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Fuck.

  It took a long time to pick myself up. Every inch a mountain. Every movement a defeated consolation.

  I couldn’t win. This... this thing wasn’t even human any more. With his veins clogged-up with freaky narcotic shite, nothing would work. Clever fighting. Precision and stealth. Fuck it. Fuck it all.

  I’ve seen guys on PCP. I’ve seen guys go psycho on Yaba crazy medicine. Twenty bullets, major organs shredded. Doesn’t matter. Takes the body longer to realise it’s dead than it takes to kill whoever’s killing you.

  Cy was worse.

  Cy soaked it up then smiled sweetly. He didn’t rush. Didn’t race to squish me before the wounds caught up on him. He just...

  Enjoyed it.

  So what happened was, my brain went away.

  The conditioning shivered somewhere deep, unflexed like a great squid-thing, untangling from the murk. I’d held it down too long. Let it grow in the dark.

  It took a hold of me and blurred away all those insignificances, all those useless extremities of thought and intelligence. Sharpened me as it blunted me down.

  The trainers at the SIS would have been proud.

  Good little soldier. Good little killer. Good little machine.

  The wolf came out from its shadows, and its eyes glowed in the gloom, and I stopped thinking. Let the instincts take over.

  Don’t you fucking give up, soldier!

  Sir, no sir, etc, etc.

  And this time when he rushed me I was already hitting him, and when he scooped at the air to knock me back I was ducking into his belly with a knee, and when he snarled and spun and kicked out I let him, and enjoyed the pain in my hips because it meant I was close, and hungry,and I lamped him so hard in the ear that the skin on my fist popped.

  Chased him down to the ground.

  Snapped his shin with my boot.

  Took out his eye with a finger.

  Caught a hold of his jaw as it flapped open and yanked down so hard something shattered and tore.

  Grabbed a handful of his neck and balled my fist ’til the skin broke and the cords underneath moved in my hand.

  Punches raining on my face.

  Like I care.

  And I locked my fingers round his throat, bloody and slick and crackling down deep, and squeezed.

  His eye bulged and bled. He gurgled.

  And then the gun was in my face.

  The wolf loped away.

  Cy’s lips twitched into something like a smile.

  I sighed. “You said no guns. Not for me.”

  “N’t...nk... n’t less... yuh... made me...”

  His finger tightened on the trigger.

  And from the corner of my eye a black hand reached out from nowhere, gripped the rubber handle still poking from Cy’s head, and pulled.

  It made a noise something like a champagne cork.

  He rustled as he died, and a soupy sort of stuff oozed out of his skull, and Nate – shivering on the floor with the knife in his hand, foot still pulsing blood – grinned his pearly grin and said:

  “’Nother... ’nother one you owe me.”

  IT WAS STRANGE.

  To have come this far for a maybe...

  To have fought and killed and cut my way across... shit, across half the fucking world, on the strength of a feeble radio transmission and the half-a-chance idea of someone who should be dead not being dead.

  To have shut myself off, to have sliced across any prat who stood in my way, because:

  If John-Paul can do it, maybe Jasmine can too...

  I’d come a long way. Following the voice in my head every step. Listening to its orders. It told me not to give up, and I didn’t. It told me to know everything, and I had. It told me to cover the angles, and I covered them. Though it left me bloody and broken and knackered, I fucking did as I was told.

  Right?

  My head hurt, and the world spun around me. I giggled.

  The voice, the voice. That was it. At the end, when the time came to find some things out, to finish it, the voice told me not to get distracted, to do the job, to stay focused. It told me:

  Not your problem.

  I wondered if I’d done the right thing, taking the syringe from Nate’s bag. It made the world... different.

  I giggled again.

  I stood outside a room on the fifth sub-level of the South Bass Island UN Bunker complex, and shivered, trying to concentrate. Things were happening, somewhere. People running, voices raised, footsteps clattering and guns being armed. Right now, nobody was paying me much attention, which made a refreshing change. Earlier on, as I staggered out of the detention room with my eyes watering and my head spinning, a couple of guards had got lucky and noticed the red patches soaking through my stolen robes. I’d lifted them from the Clergy aide on the floor, whose blood was currently filling my veins. It had seemed elegant, somehow. Like... regardless of whether the damp patches came from him or me, it was all the same thing. Ha-ha.

  Should that be funny?

  (The two guards who’d spotted the blood hadn’t thought so. I tried to explain it as patiently as I could – not even slurring much – but they kept on telling me I was stoned, and asking me who the fuck I was, and poking me with their fingers. It got boring quickly. I like to think I left them alive – just – though to be honest I can’t say I was subtle about it.)

  The point was, I was free to roam. And right now I stood outside a door, on the deepest level of the complex, and stared in confusion at the sign.

  COMMS

  This was where it came from. The transmission. The word PANDORA. The voice. This is where she sent it. I could almost taste it. Could almost reach out and pluck her from the air, and remind myself of all the guilty sensations that time had stolen. The smell of her hair. The slant of her nose. The exact shade of her eye.

  I could remember them all. Ish. But memories are like regrets, they linger and haunt you, but they evolve with time. They lose their edge. Become idealised.

  I wondered, in some quiet giggling abstraction, if I’d even recognise her when I saw her again. Then my brain reminded me she was dead – must be. Had been for five years.

  Idiot. It said.

  All this way, for nothing.

  Without even realising it, I’d placed a hand on the door handle and begun to push. And that, really, was all there was to it. Inside this
room I’d find out. Had she been here? Was it really her that sent me the message?

  I felt like a pilgrim who never expected to get to his shrine.

  I relaxed the pressure on the door and stepped back. The air was full of light. Hallucinations turned my brain upside-down; twisted synaesthetic confusions swapping sounds for tastes, musical tones for physical feelings, emotions for colours.

  Scents for light.

  In the detention room, the syringe I took from Nate’s pack had been marked: SNIFF.

  I recalled a time that seemed long ago, and a chase through city streets, and a big man in red injecting another man with... Well. With something that made him a little less than human. That sharpened up his senses. I recalled being pretty fucking impressed, at the time.

  And now here I was. A wolf in the true sense.

  And I turned away from the Comms Room with my nose in the air, and followed a pulsing trail of light-stink that moved and shifted like electrified neon, because maybe it wasn’t my problem, and maybe it wasn’t part of my mission, and maybe no one would care but me –

  – but some things need to be finished, whether it’s your job to finish it or not.

  Jasmine could wait.

  She’d waited five years.

  I FOUND JOHN-PAUL Rohare Baptiste in a room decked in red and blue velvet, with flags hung up behind him. The country they signified was dead.

  It had been easy, closing in on him, down bunker tunnels and twisting corridors, with lights shimmering before and behind me, sniffing the air.

  He smelt of me.

  He was sloshing with me.

  He was talking as I stepped quietly inside, through a door marked:

  STUDIO

  “...and... and so I’m putting this message on... onna loop...”

  He was swaying unsteadily. Face all busted up – cleaned of raw blood but clearly bruised – eyes crossed. He was holding himself upright on the barn doors of an old TV camera, staring deep into the lens. The red light was on.

  “...We’ve... had some troubles. You c’n... c’n see from my face, I think. But... h-hallelujah! We have prevailed, my sons and daughters. God’s righteousness has... has shone through. We have been sorely tested, and faced down the... the evil of ignorance. We have endured our great Exodus, and in the... in the process have found our ‘Promised Land.’ My children... we have been found deserving of glory.”

  There was nobody behind the camera. Nobody behind the glass window in the control booth set to one side. Not any more. Not since I stopped off to say hello.

  It had been impressively soundproofed. John-Paul hadn’t even noticed.

  There was nobody listening to him. Nobody except me, and the world.

  What was left of it.

  “I send out this message to say to you all: do not be alarmed. We have moved, as God’s will has dictated. But our mission remains steadfast. We must build a brighter tomorrow. We must open the eyes of the children! Amen. Mm. A-men.”

  His eyes rolled and closed up; communing with the divine. His withered face creased in a perfect smile.

  “And... and so I say to you all, continue to send me the architects of the future. Continue to bring me your sons and daughters. Bring them to Cleveland, and Toledo, and we will reveal to them the paradise we are building here.

  “We will take them and raise them up, and... a-and...ah...”

  His voice tailed off. His eyes fluttered open.

  I pushed the silver pin a little harder against the frail skin of his neck. He hadn’t even heard me approach him. Hadn’t been aware I was behind him, looming like some great fucking bat, until the sliver of metal was pricking his throat.

  The sliver Rick gave me. Buried in my own flesh.

  John-Paul gurgled.

  The red light continued to burn.

  “Wh... who... who’s there?” he asked, not daring to move.

  “I’m the Holy Ghost,” I said. “I move in mysterious ways.”

  “Y-you! You would... you would commit this sin before the world? Y-you would expose your evil?”

  I leaned down until I was close to his ear, senses alive with the drug, tasting his fear. Enjoying it.

  “I will if you will,” I said.

  “Wh... what d... do you m...?”

  “The children, Abbot. You were about to tell us about the children. About how you ‘raise them up.’ That was as far as you got. Why not... tell us about that?”

  “B-but... But I...”

  “Now, now. The world watches, your Holiness.” I pressed harder with the pin. “Let’s not scrimp on details.”

  And so he told them.

  He told them how he’d survived. He gibbered and snotted and cried as he went, and he dressed it up in holiness. Didn’t matter. Still came across like a desperate man polishing a turd.

  It wasn’t murder, he said, it was the Touch of God. It wasn’t blood, it was divinity itself.

  Listen: people might be a little short-sighted when confronted with miracles. And okay, maybe humanity has a hole in its common sense where the idea of deity sits nice and firm. Maybe there’s something to be said for the infuriating fucking gullibility of mankind, but here’s the thing:

  You can only push it so far.

  I think the message got through.

  I think what they heard, out there, clustered round TVs for weeks to come, as the message looped and re-looped over and over, was not a divine prophet delivering words of hope and purity...

  ...I think what they heard was a wretched little freak, explaining with patience and politeness how he’d stolen the blood of a thousand kiddies, how he’d convinced the world of his perfection, how his acolytes had flocked to serve him, just to fend off the virus that was killing him.

  He told them that there were no ‘marks.’ No angels pouring out their vials onto the earth. Nothing. Just people with a particular type of blood. Whole ethnic groups, with genetic traces that he neither understood nor cared about, but had nothing to do with the wrath of God.

  He told them that the virus was just that: a virus. Biological. Predictable. It killed certain people and left great swathes of others alive. The O-negs. The Native Americans. Eastern Asians. Australian Aborigines. He told them he knew this because he’d been with the group who found it all out. They’d seen what the virus killed and what it spared, and they’d failed utterly to find out how to stop it. They’d hidden away down here in the bunker until the virus caught up with them too, and there was a time of madness and... and things he couldn’t remember, and then...

  Then he was reborn as John-Paul, the Holy.

  Stealing blood to stave off the virus. Whole transfusions of O-neg, to replace the juices the Blight guzzled every day. Injections of plasma from Iroquois captives, to plant whatever genetic armour they possessed deep inside him.

  He told them everything. Then his voice went quiet and his face went slack, and he told them that children were better than adults.

  Purer, he said.

  More perfect. Like drinking the blood of an angel.

  More beautiful.

  And...

  And when they were weak from blood loss, he said, when the Light of God was in them...

  They never said “no” to anything...

  He went on and on and on, and when he was done I patted him on the head like he’d done well, pushed the silver needle into his jugular so the blood went out of him like a balloon losing air, and when he was on the ground I stamped on his head with a noise like a cockroach crackling.

  And there were choirs of angels singing, and shafts of light, and the warm gaze of divinity to assure me I’d done well. But then again I was hallucinating like a motherfucker, so I ignored the whole stupid show and told myself – one way or another – I’d made the world a slightly better place.

  “Architects of tomorrow,” John-Paul had said.

  Heh.

  Sometimes architects have to tear down before they can build up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONEr />
  PREDICTABLY, THE PLACE was in uproar. Things were moving too quickly now, cascading towards a shit-littered abyss before anyone could even prepare for the fall. I wondered why. I wondered what was going on. I wondered why I couldn’t give a damn.

  Tangled cords of scent-trails braided and split apart in the air of the bunker; a three-dimensional map in the hallucinogenic chambers of my mind that documented fear and panic and confusion. Men in Clergy robes sprinted along corridors, rushing up tangled stairwells and queuing five deep at the cavernous elevators. Somewhere high above, on the first or second sub-level, shouts filtered downwards. Everyone seemed to be ignoring me.

  The drug made me giggle. Or maybe I just felt like it. I don’t know.

  With my senses on overdrive – whole body thrumming to some internal beat, like an iron butterfly flapping great wings inside my chest – it was all too much to bear. The noises and smells and sights. Eventually I stopped paying attention, turned away and just... walked.

  I found myself, eventually, back outside the Comms room, and slumped to the floor on the opposite side of the corridor. Just staring. Wondering.

  Was she here, once?

  Did she... did she die here?

  Where are the bodies?

  I killed some time picking lumps of brain and bone out of my boots.

  The drug was doing something to me. Not just hotwiring my senses and overloading my brain, but picking away at parts of my mind, doing something insidious and unwelcome. Something that involved the wolf, somehow. Something that tugged at the upper layers – those useless skeins of civility and rationality – and went nestling below, into the ‘Old Brain,’ into the scratching suspicions of the subconscious and paranoia.