The Culled Part 14

About all those thousands of tons of rock and soil and water pressing down above your head. About ant colonies in zoos - with walls made of gla.s.s - and thousands of thoughtless creatures going about their business in the arteries of the earth.

The Queens Tunnel was kind of the same, except this wasn't an artery. It was a vein; sluggish, deoxygenated, blue with worthless blood. Nate pointed ahead to another sharp turn and we cruised towards the faintest glimmerings of light - an illusion of day, always lurking beyond the next corner. Nate said this was the route he took whenever he was bringing kids from the airport. He said he knew the way like the back of his hand.

I asked him how many people really knew what the backs of their hands looked like.

He ignored me.

I was glad of his knowledge anyway. The number of rusting obstacles and dangling patches of ruined tunnel were prodigious, and without his instructions we would have collided with something straight away.

I asked him again what happened to the kids when they'd been delivered. Did they grow up to become priests? Did they go off to some secret place to begin building the future?

I couldn't see his face, but it took him longer than usual to answer.

"I told you," he said. "I don't know."

The tunnel cornered and re-cornered in defiance of all obvious directional architecture. I'd been under the impression it joined Queens to Manhattan with the minimum of fuss, directly across the strait, but evidently its sinuous course took us deeper into the island, below the knot of blocks and stores of Murray Hill, before curving back on itself to spit us out into the daylight up a debris-strewn ramp shadowed by overarching blocks. The muggy humidity retreated, and it would almost have been a relief to enter the sunlight had the QuickSmog not slunk back during our time underground; covering the blunt buildings of Midtown in an unsettling, gloomy whitewash. Over my shoulder the distant peaks of the financial district were masked - just the ghostly suggestion of needles penetrating the earth - and every street corner had become a cheap special effect.

Just as before, the Clergy markings were everywhere. Territory poles, graffiti-tags of scarlet and red, banners strung across empty streets. An enormous mural showing a smiling John-Paul Rohare Baptiste regarded us from the gable-end of an apartment block. For some reason I couldn't have found it any more menacing, even had the grinning Abbot been clutching at an AK47 or wearing a balaclava like the terrace-markers in Belfast. He just radiated... wrongness.

The whole place was still. Static. No distant movement, no scavs, no dogs, no rats. Even the birds hadn't bothered to hang around, and from the empty horizon to the north - Central Park, I guessed, beneath the level of the rooftops - to the haze-choked shadow of the Empire State that rose above us over our left shoulders, the whole uncomfortable place more than deserved its epithet: h.e.l.l's Kitchen.

After the communal degradation of London, and the noise of the Wheels Mart, it felt a lot like the surface of the moon. Silent as a graveyard, with its own vacant atmosphere and a sort of giddying gravity; like nothing was real and would all spin-away into the universal haze at any moment. I let the quad trundle to a stop at an intersection, and morosely scanned the skyline.

"There." Nate said. "Manhattan."

I'd expected something busier. Some sectarian commune, perhaps, filling the entirety of the midtown district, swarming with children abducted from across the ravaged world. I imagined a glowing paradise. An industrious enclave of forward-thinking radicals, blocks wide, staffed with the young and the enthused, building and rebuilding, working hard on the civilisation of tomorrow.

What a load of old b.o.l.l.o.c.ks.

There were cars, frozen in time, b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper. Dead tyres and shattered windows. Skeletons slumped in front seats, or curled in skinless patterns on the sidewalk. Here and there fire-damage had blackened a rusty hulk, or scoured a section of street of its rough surface. Flamewagons, I guessed; burning the bodies of Blight victims, trundling by five long years ago.

Newspapers flapped. Colourful litter sat like bright decorations speckling the rusting, filthy mora.s.s.

The sun was sinking to the west. It even made the whole thing sort of beautiful.

I asked Nate where everyone was, and caught myself whispering. He glanced around at the rooftops, sniffed noisily, then shrugged.

"Two answers to that."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. First one is: all holed-up. Central office. See, your Clergyman, he's not a regular Klanner. No scavs and Klansmen, like that, no no no. This crew, they got the clerics, the soldiers, the pilgrims, the trustees." He tapped the tattoo on his face, eyes grim. "Whole different hierarchy. Besides, these f.u.c.ks got more on the mind than the usual. Territory. Drugs. Guns. Whatever. These a.s.sholes got faith. Whole worlda complications."

I glanced around again, unnerved by the quiet. I slipped off the quadbike and rummaged in my increasingly empty pack, producing the battered city map and unfolding it carefully. "So... they don't mind strangers strolling about up here?"

"Ah, well... There's that 'mind' again. Do they mind? Yeah, yeah, I figure they do. But they ain't gonna do anything about it until someone raises a hand. Then you better believe they'll go Krakatoa on your hairy white a.s.s."

I looked up from the map, trying to get my bearings.

"My a.r.s.e isn't ha..."

"Not the point. Point is, depending on whatever the f.u.c.k it is you're doing here, as long as it ain't to do with p.i.s.sing off the Clergy, we'll be fine."

There was something strange in his eye. I pretended not to notice and rotated the map, staring off into the east.

Nate cleared his throat.

"So?" he said.

"So what?"

"So are you?"

"Planning on going up against his nibs there?" I nodded at the smirking mural on the wall. "Nope. None of my business. Couldn't give a rat's t.i.t, mate. I'm just here for some information."

Nate looked relieved. I glanced down at the heavy red ring marked on the map's surface, then back at the eastern horizon, feeling an unexpected shiver of antic.i.p.ation. Then I folded the booklet away and clambered back onto the quad, suddenly remembering something.

"You said there were two answers."

"Yeah. Yeah, I did. Answer number two is: they're all around us."

And he was right. I could feel it. Eyes peering out of the shadows, regarding me from half-boarded windows on either side, squinting from rooftops. I couldn't see anyone.

That just made it worse.

I gunned the quad towards 42nd street and turned a sharp right, winding my way north-east in a series of step-like diagonals, working hard to create the impression I knew what I was doing. Nate had gone quiet. On the horizon a shape swarmed slowly out of the haze. A blank slab of stone - vast and wide but skinny along its third dimension - like a cereal packet built to colossal proportions.

Nate seemed to be fidgeting, suddenly, throwing looks in all directions. I still hadn't told him where I was headed, and certainly not why I was headed there, but as the brooding shadow of the building loomed ever nearer, I guessed it was pretty obvious.

I should say something to him, I guessed. Ask him if it was safe. Ask him his opinion.

But: Something not right...

Something not right about him...

Something to do with his story, with his name, with London...

It was the same old confusion. The same old contradiction between the information supplied by my senses - that Nate was easy to trust, a fun guy, a diamond in the rough - and my instincts; which grated against some tiny snippet of subconscious knowledge and made me wary.

But then, I'd been wrong before.

Eventually he leaned forwards on the saddle and called out over the noise of the quad's angry little engine, voice thick with trepidation despite the volume.

"You remember I told you how come none of the robe-wearin' f.u.c.ks're on the street?" He called. "All in the... the Central office, right?"

"Yeah?"

He pointed at the black building.

The quad roared. The buildings blurred-past, the black monolith got bigger.

"Oh," I said. "f.u.c.k."

"And now, his holiness Abbot John-Paul shall demonstrate yet again the miracle of his bein', that those who do not believe may be enlightened, and those sons and daughters who cleave already to the bosom of our great community may be strengthened further by his diviniteh!"

Deep-south accent. Nothing better for delivering a bit of sermonising showmanship.

The tragic thing is, when the robe-wearing b.a.s.t.a.r.d said the word "bosom" I glanced round the fringes of the crowd to make eye-contact with some likely-looking kid, to t.i.tter conspiratorially at the naughty word.

But there weren't any kids. Obviously.

That was the point.

This was back in London. This was maybe two, maybe three years ago. This was one of the few times I let curiosity get the better of me, and went to see The Tomorrow Show.

Standing in a knackered old warehouse somewhere in Docklands, with a crowd gathered round a snazzy plasma screen TV, I couldn't help remembering midnight ma.s.s at Christmas, as a kid. Standing there with the family, heads bowed, singing carols...

Even then, I was old enough to know what I believed and what I didn't. Even then, that same sense of awkwardness, of hypocrisy, of toeing the line of something you don't believe in. That same half-formed urge to leap up and slap the vicar, and start shouting at everyone to think, to open their f.u.c.king eyes, to stop being so stupid!

I was young. What can I say?

But yeah, the same sensation. Huddled with the TV crowd on a Sunday, zombie-like expressions fixated on that square of flickering light, drinking every word the announcer said. That same sense of not belonging, as everyone around me listened with an alien devotion to the words of John 'look-at-the-size-of-my-b.l.o.o.d.y-hat' Paul Rohare Baptiste, and his crew of evangelising loudmouths.

That day the broadcast was stronger than usual - the signal more p.r.o.nounced, the flickering of the screen less intrusive - and the gathering was determined to eke every last iota of information and holiness out of it that they could get.

"The miracle" They wittered around me. "He's going to do it! He's going to do it!"

Oh yeah...

The Miracle.

He performed 'The Miracle' maybe once a month. We'd all seen it before. Even so a little thrill went through the crowd; the fortifying knowledge that their faith was not only being reaffirmed, but positively vindicated. They saw this s.h.i.t as proof of the Abbot's divinity, and despite all my carefully-polished cynicism I couldn't help but be a little impressed. Oh, yeah, the routine was full of holes, any number of cheats and camera-tricks to muddle the results, but still... It was something about the faces of all the people on-screen, marvelling and gasping in astonishment. You could fool the camera, maybe, but it was a h.e.l.l of a lot harder to fool the geeks in the studio.

"Hallelujah!" shouted one of the guys in the crowd. Probably a Clergy plant.

It began like it always began, with the announcer bringing two smiling young acolytes into frame. Both were under 18 - a girl and a boy - either so utterly indoctrinated into the church that their beaming smiles were natural symbols of their contentment, or so doped out of their skulls that they didn't care at all. They wore the same dull grey ca.s.socks as everyone around them, with one notable exception; they each lacked a left sleeve, exposing their bare arms to the shoulder.

"Brother James, Brother Tilda." The announcer introduced them with a smile and a swagger, leading them to a white desk inside the same old dusky studio. Three Petri dishes sat waiting, empty, next to a sophisticated microscope with a cable-drenched camera affixed to its viewing column.

The announcer smiled at the camera, mumbled a prayer with his eyes closed, then pulled a trio of sealed hypodermic needles out of a recess in his cloak.

The crowd shivered again.

"Both these fine young acolytes of the Rediscovered Dawn - bless their souls, lordah! - got 'emselves blood type 'O-negative'. Same as us all, brothers and sisters! Same as everyone alive on this good green earth, created and Culled by Him Above!"

He jabbed a needle into the girl's arm, drawing out a puddle of blood with practiced speed. He then thanked the girl, made the sign of the cross between her and himself, and waved her out of the camera's frame. The syringe was emptied into the first Petri dish, and the whole process repeated with "Brother James."

"Now," said the preacher, placing a tiny swab of Tilda's blood on a gla.s.s slide beneath the microscope and brandishing the syringe containing James's like an old West sharpshooter. "Since both these wonderful sons and daughters of Je-sus have the same blood types, it's no trouble at all to mix 'em together." He smiled ironically. "All you doubters out there - that ain't faith, people, that's science!"

The crowd laughed on cue.

The image shifted to a microscope view. A uniform expanse of red blobs, so tightly-packed together on a field of bright light that they could almost be mistaken for a solid block. Red blood cells.

The tip of the needle shunted into view like a clumsy freight-train, skimming layers of Tilda's blood aside in its haste. I wondered abstractly if there was some deliberate rationale behind choosing acolytes of different genders; some discreetly s.e.xual overtone in the public mixing of their blood.

Maybe I just had s.e.x on the brain. It'd been a while.

John's blood streamed down the needle and oozed into the patch of cells already cramping the screen. Without a pulse to meld them together there was little natural movement, but again the needle whisked back and forth, blending like an artist on a palette.

"Same as before," the preacher said. "No change, y'see? No reaction. No rejection. Both the same kinda blood."

Cut back to the smirking preacher, only now he had a guest. Seated and frail in a chair beside him, looking even less healthy - more zombified - than usual, was John-Paul Rohare Baptiste, filled with quiet serenity or incontinent senility, depending on your view.

The crowd around me - predictably - went nuts.

The preacher bent down, fussed, muttered prayers, kissed the old git's robes, and eventually got the h.e.l.l on with it and stuck a needle in the withered skin of the 'Human Prune's' arm. There were a few artfully displayed bruises cl.u.s.tered in the same area where the poor dear soul had undergone previous tests, making the audience cluck and sigh in sympathy at his selfless suffering. They all looked like makeup to me.

Whatever the truth, the preacher was eventually successful in drawing-off a spoonful or two of the holy man's divine fluids, and quickly returned to the microscope, syringe in hand.

The needle slid into the silent mixture of the acolytes' blood and immediately disgorged its own cargo, a slick of ruby covering over the rest.

The effect was almost immediate.

The cells intermixed. Knots formed. Colours darkened. Like some glue-smeared retraction, the whole b.l.o.o.d.y mora.s.s shrunk-down together, accreting and clinging, separating into dark nodules. It was like watching something perfectly transparent held over a flame warp and ruck into sharp new angles, forming nodes.

"What y'all are seeing," the preacher said, "is called clumpin'. It's what happens when you put the wrong kinda blood into someone. Now, all us O-negs, back before the Holy Wrath of Him On High - Hallelujah! - delivered The Cull upon our miserable sinner's world, you coulda' given our blood to just about any Tom, d.i.c.k or Harry. You do it slow enough, you get no reaction at all. Universal donor, brothers and sisters! Amen!

"But you try introducing something else into an O-neg system, it's gonna react. It's gonna get to clumpin'."

Cut back to the preacher. Face serious, now, all fire and brimstone, sweat p.r.i.c.kling on his brow.

" 'And I heard a great voice'", he hissed, " 'out of the temple, saying to the Seven Angels, "go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of G.o.d upon the earth!"

" 'And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast; and upon them which worshipped his image!'"

The preacher wiped his brow, as if he'd been overcome then released from some powerful trance. I stifled a yawn.

"Revelations!" He yelled. "Revelations 16, one and two! The prophet foresees the wrath of G.o.d, claiming to death and d.a.m.nation all them miserable sinners and heathens he's marked! Marked on the inside, brothers and sisters! Marked in their very blood!"

He took a deep breath, and in the pause I glanced across the crowd beside me. None of them could stand still; quivering, hopping from foot to foot, shivering in elation.

"Brothers and sisters," the preacher said, "the righteous Cull swept across creation and took from us the means to pursue our iniquities, our selfish agendas, our unholy wars. It took away our great numbers, our great technologies, our great civilisations - ha! Amen! - and left us only with our spirit and our faith. He spared only those without the mark - the O-negs - and all others have perished! Science tells it! The Lord-ah explains it!"

Extreme close-up.

"All were Culled - except one! One great man, whose purity was so great, whose vision so intense, whose strength was so indomitable, that he withstood the mark placed upon his vile family of sinners, that he bore the pain of his ancestry with cheek turned, and was spared, alone in all the world, by the Lord on high!"

A crash-zoom, crude and old fashioned, but just right for the intensity of the moment; slinking away from the preacher and straight onto John-Paul's face.