The Culled Part 21

The trail led into the Secretariat.

Hiawatha skidded on blood, marvelling deep-down at the raw apathy of a man who could bring about such wanton violence in the sole pursuit of... of what?

He stepped into the gloomy building, and went to meet his destiny.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

I couldn't help smiling. The heat coming up from the fires, the smell of unpleasant things cooking, the acid stink of gun smoke.

Yeah. Let it out. Let the grin break through. You're so close. Enjoy. You deserve it.

Then with the guilt. Screams and blood and desperate people cutting chunks out of each other, just because I told them to. Just because I needed to get past those big f.u.c.king gates. I lied to them. Worked them up like a sculptor hammering clay.

Monster. Manipulator. Don't you care about anything? Don't you- Then with the irritation at the guilt.

You trained for this. This is what you DO. This is who you ARE.

Round and round and round.

f.u.c.k it. f.u.c.k them all.

Don't feel guilty.

Look at what you did. Enjoy it.

From the third floor, looking down through the Secretariat's shattered mirror gla.s.s, it was quite a sight. Barely visible in the darkness, the undulations of the throng could easily have been mistaken for a gloomy sort of fog; wafted about by contrary breezes, lit internally by wyrd lights and wil-o-the-wisps; all of it sped-up by a factor of ten and replayed to a BBC Sounds Of War effects tape. Now and then something solid differentiated itself from the melee - a moonflash along the edge of a blade, a torn strip of pale robe, an effervescent burst of cranial fluids. Little details, like individual brushstrokes discernible within a completed painting.

They didn't last. Big, crazy spectacles have a way of h.o.m.ogenising like that. Little by little everything was sucked inside; reabsorbed by the heaving, living, collective amoebic monstrosity that was the crowd.

"Jesus," I muttered, not really thinking.

Being stuck in a fight on ground-level, that's a messy, brutal, untidy sort of s.h.i.t. No time to think. No time to gauge the way it's going. Just act, react, dodge, stab, duck, shoot. Gunfire ripping from left to right, contrary angles of devastation, panicky shouts and thoughtless responses, friendly fire.

But from above...

Oh yes. From above you get a pretty good idea of why generals get to be such arrogant a.r.s.eholes. Why politicians don't talk about individuals, just 'the people'. Why the guys who make decisions - the top dogs, the head honchos - get to be s.a.d.i.s.tic f.u.c.ks with no concept of human expenditure whatsoever. From above, it's all...neat. Tidy. Like playing war games with over expensive models, rolling dice to determine movements, accuracies, wounds.

n.o.body ever rolled a dice to determine how many sobbing loved ones each dead model leaves behind. How much the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d suffered before he was removed from the playing table.

It takes a funny sort of brain to see a crowd of people, and mentally note them down as a 'diversion'. 'Cannon fodder'. 'Acceptable losses.'

Guilty as charged.

Again with the guilt.

Something exploded down below, and lit them all up. Just for a fraction, they were people. Different faces, contorted in anger and pain and fear. Individuals, locked together. All unique.

For just a fraction, fat with guilt and empathy and all that other b.o.l.l.o.c.ks, I wasn't the cold-hearted manipulative scheming f.u.c.k I thought I was.

Then the light faded and the mob coalesced in the shadows, and I was back to enjoying the spectacle, congratulating myself on getting inside the Secretariat without a scratch, being me.

"You... ah... You don't want to go help 'em?" Nate rumbled from somewhere behind me. He'd followed me up here like a puppy dog. He looked even worse now, twitching and sweating and jerking. I couldn't be bothered to ask what was wrong. Not when I was this close. Not when nothing else mattered.

I ignored him.

The fight was all but over anyway. Still a few pockets of resistance. Clergymen scrabbling behind improvised cover to mow down scavs in their dozens, stuttering cones of perfect light drizzling lead into onrushing walls of black rag and snarling flesh. The bodies piled up like human ramps, twitching and groaning, but there was more to come, more plugging the gaps, more stolen vehicles blasting away with heavy weapons.

Little by little the Choirboys were becoming isolated; cut-off from buildings, rounded-up in coils of the mob and gradually ringed in, hemmed, set upon.

None of them went quietly. And after the first few who tried to surrender were torn apart - limbs wrenched clean-away, eyes put out, scalps sliced off and ribs broken - none of the others bothered to fall on the scavs' mercy. They'd seen the look in their eyes. The excitement, the primal joy of being caught-up in... in something.

The pack-instinct. That old-brain thing, rustling inside my head, howling to go and join its brothers. But no mercy. None of that.

One or two of the Choirboys sang hymns as their ammunition ran out and the crowds seethed forwards. Mostly they didn't get past the first line.

There were fewer robes out there than I'd expected.

Where are the others?

I turned away. Pretty soon the big, spectacular part would be over and the scavs would be slinking inside the buildings. Kicking down doors under the auspices of finding their lost children; secretly yearning for nests of resistance, dorms piled with sleeping Choirboys, easy targets.

Let them.

Oddly enough, the Secretariat itself was almost deserted. On floor after floor the plush offices of another time - structured with the all the ergonomic ingenuity of too much money, in broad stripes of grey and beige and airy s.p.a.ces and comfy sofas and padded swivel-chairs and blah blah blah - sat silent; deserted. It reminded me, in a homesick sort of way, of Vauxhall Cross; my base for the past five years, where once the SIS had controlled its agents all across the world, keeping fingers on the pulses of foreign threats, adjusting and prodding regimes they didn't like, sneaking about with a distinct absence of Martinis, pithy one-liners, Q-Department gadgets and obscenely h.o.r.n.y chicks.

Well. Mostly.

The difference was that the offices back in London had a dangerous sort of mystique lacking here in the Secretariat. Sharper edges, maybe. Deeper shadows. Tight corners and internal windows. Em-Eye-f.u.c.king-Six, the place said. Don't you c.o.c.k-around with us.

The Secretariat just looked like an expensive software corporation.

Still, at least it felt lived in. Most of its airy floors had been comprehensively violated. Desks and waiting-sofas used as sleeping palettes, walls covered in neat lines of devotional graffiti (Book of Revelations, mostly, which I guess is sort of de rigeur amongst insane apocalyptic cults). I figured the Clergy used them for sleeping dorms, store-rooms, pantries, whatever.

Which sort of begged the question: Where were they all?

The battle outside was still raging, still going strong, but there was no way in h.e.l.l the scavs had overrun every last Choirboy in this place. It was enormous.

So where were they?

Nate and I had b.u.mped into a few of the little s.h.i.ts on the stairwell on the way inside. Mostly they were sprinting down from above, guns and heavy packs stowed on their backs and crooked beneath overladen arms, and I'd been obliged to shoot them as they came clattering down the last flight without waiting for them to arm-up. I'd be discreetly ashamed, if I could be bothered. No; more worrying was the reason for the sudden evacuation. These grunts weren't dashing off to join the defence of the outer gate, or form a second layer of repulsion. They were getting out. All possessions carried; scampering off through the vast lobby (now strewn with military netting and a blotchy mural of John-Paul) and out, towards the wide shape of the General a.s.sembly Building.

Something was going down.

I couldn't give a flying f.u.c.k.

On the third floor we came across a shattered desk covered in telephone switchboard pins, and I rummaged through piles of discarded paperwork whilst Nate stood watch with that same nervous foot-to-foot hop. Amidst crumbling cards and files I found, finally, a yellowing printout of floor designations. Thirty-nine levels; thirty-nine busy little worlds dedicated to 'World Peace'.

A spray of stray bullets knocked out the windows beside me. Kind of ironic.

'32-35', the printout said. 'SCI/TECH RESEARCH ADMINISTRATION,' with a list of departmental names as long as my arm and the telephone extensions of each. Someone had ringed one of the entries in green ink, with the bored a.s.siduousness of someone who was tired of being asked for the same department over and over.

Towards the end, I guessed, as The Cull turned the city outside into a ghost town, the phones would never have stopped ringing.

Fl 34. Ext 34033. Epidemiology.

"Right," I said.

"You found what you been looking for?" Nate grunted, trying not to look too interested. He'd been pretty good so far, I supposed, at not asking out loud what the h.e.l.l I'd dragged him into. He'd got his payment. He'd got his protection, and a little sliver of fame as the guy who's with the stranger. He was doing okay, and the Clergy hadn't tried to kill him yet.

But you could see it in his eyes. The curiosity was killing him.

I wondered if I should take him with me.

But.

Something not quite right...

Still that sensation of disquiet. His eyes twinkled over his soggy dogend, his teeth sparkled with every smile. He cooked a fine rat. He told a fine story. He looked a clown and acted a clown, and his shaky-handed approach to medicine had saved my life at least twice. Nothing to dislike about the guy, right?

Right.

But no. No. Something not right.

Something besides this new twitchy, sweaty routine he was going through, something besides the weird behaviour since yesterday.

A little tentacle of memory uncurled. A voice cut-through with exhaustion and inebriation, curdled with heavy breathing and fresh sweat.

Bella.

I only knew her a couple of weeks. Planning for the airport, mostly. Getting provisions, working out where to hit, how to get through, who to target. Mostly.

Except the one night we got smashed on whatever brain-killing homebrew the local survivors had been cooking up in their bathtub stills. Lost track of our conversation.

Ended up f.u.c.king on the bar in the abandoned pub we'd been using as home.

Even off my face, even after five years of hardcore celibacy, even in a world as careless and repercussion-free as this one, the guilt!

Didn't matter, in the end. We fell asleep all cuddled-up on the trapdoor behind the bar, and as I dozed-off I got confused and kept kissing her forehead, like she was someone else. And she started telling me things. Stuff I hadn't asked about, hadn't expressed any interest in. Stuff I barely bothered to listen to.

When she was finished there was a long silence, then she said: "Doesn't matter. Not your problem. But that's why I'm going."

Back on the fifth floor of the United Nations Secretariat building, with people shouting and dying outside, I turned to Nate and said: "Go help the others. Find the kids. Look everywhere."

He stared at me like I was mad. Half relieved, half terrified.

"But..." He waved a hand, searching for the right words. "Why, man? Ain't like you care. Ain't like you expect 'em to find anything. Why the sudden ch..."

Doesn't matter, she'd said, sweat making the grime on her face streak and run. Not your problem.

I snapped. Just a little.

"f.u.c.ksakes, Nate! Just f.u.c.king... Just..."

His eyes bugged. I looked away.

Took a breath.

"Just... Just go help them, will you? Please? I'm going upstairs. Might be dangerous. Just give them a hand."

Outside, a fireball licked at the edges of the building and blew-in the rest of the windows, letting in the screams from outside. Nate grunted.

I started to climb the stairs.

From the thirty-fourth floor I couldn't even see the fight outside. This high up, the green-gla.s.s windows were all intact, and I couldn't hope to angle my vision down to the base of the tower without bashing my head in the process.

I was sweating heavily, by the time I arrived. Not a good sign. Since The Cull robbed us all of a functioning power grid, elevators had been a survivor's wet dream. Judging from the lack of empty food cans and discarded sleeping-mats, very few Clergy goons had taken the trouble to come this high. Even the walls were mostly free of nonsensical graffiti, and any plundering of office supplies appeared to have been more a matter of overturning desks and causing a mess, than looking for useful stuff. If I'm honest, as I climbed the stairs I was quietly entertaining the suspicion that sooner or later I'd come across floor-after-floor of children, packed together in tiny bunks, poring over ma.s.s-produced bibles and reciting the day's lessons like good little acolytes.

Bella's words, getting to me.

"Not your problem."

It's a funny thing, convincing a horde that something was a lie whilst dimly suspecting it might just be true. I guess, deep down inside - maybe - there was a little bit of me expecting that the scavs would find their kids. Behind the carefully maintained disinterest, behind the rock-solid focus on my own goals (Don't you f.u.c.king give up, soldier!), it was lurking there like an irritating little piece of humanity.

The looks in the eyes of the women, standing outside the gates last night.

The way Malice rocked her child to sleep in the midst of the Wheels Mart, knowing she had four more years before the little mite was whisked away.

The edge in Bella's voice.

Was it so unlikely that they'd find them, after all?

Why did the Clergy want the kids, if not for their grand future-shaping scheme? Why fly the little b.u.g.g.e.rs in from overseas, from all over the b.l.o.o.d.y world, if not to train them in the ways of the Lord, to fill their heads with destiny-based-b.o.l.l.o.c.ks? It's not like the Clergy were running a secret sportswear sweatshop, or ma.s.s-producing child meat pies...

No. They had to be here somewhere, somewhere inside the compound, hidden away.

But not here. Not a soul. Just the dim moonlight through thick plate gla.s.s, a mora.s.s of overturned desks and stalwart filing cabinets, and endless silence.

I started searching.

Once or twice I heard voices from the stairwell, torches wobbling in the gloom, puddles of hard light wafting past walls and windows. I froze every time, hands reaching for the M16, convinced they'd followed me. They knew what I was after.

Then they went clattering past - upwards - and were lost to the endless silence. I half-wondered what was on the roof that was so b.l.o.o.d.y important, then rammed my head into another heap of cluttered files and forgot all about it.