The Culled Part 6

I had the vague idea I'd pa.s.sed out from loss of blood. There was something about a... a bus? A plane? What the f.u.c.k? Maybe I was still hallucinating.

Maybe this hazy curtain obstructing everything I was seeing was just an effect of my traumatised mind, or something cloudy dripping in my eyes, or... or whatever.

a.s.sume a worst case scenario.

Sir, yes sir, etc etc.

So: Major damage following oxygen starvation to the brain, leading to sensory corruption and an inability to effectively continue.

Solution: Abort mission.

I remembered where I was. I remembered the plane crash and the gunfight and was even starting to piece together the thing with the bus when the biggest puzzle-piece of all dropped into place: I remembered why I'd come here.

The Signal.

'Inability to effectively continue' wasn't an option. 'Abort Mission' could, pardon my French, f.u.c.k off.

I mentally nutted the worst-case scenario and tried out a little optimism for a change. When I twisted my head to glance at the floor beneath me - I was lying on my right shoulder, aching from my own weight - the cracked tarmac of the airstrip came into perfect and un.o.bstructed focus. It was only when I looked further afield that my vision became obscured, as if the horizon was playing hard-to-get.

"Stay still," someone croaked. "Nearly done. Can't finish-up if you keep moving."

My skin p.r.i.c.kled, and it took a moment or two to realise why. I was half naked. Lying on a mangled runway surrounded by debris and fuel, unable to see anything past a few dozen feet, in nothing but my underwear.

"H-hey..."

"Dammit! Stay still." A wrinkled hand - dark brown knuckles and a pale palm - dipped briefly into my field of view and gave me a chastising flick on the forehead, not doing much for my sense of security. I felt my whole body rocking a little, as if a dog had got hold of my left sleeve and was tugging it from side to side, though I wasn't wearing anything and consequently had no sleeves.

It was all very odd. There was no pain.

I poked my tongue around my mouth, half testing for the taste of blood, half summoning the strength to speak, and eventually tried: "What are you... uh...?"

"Sorting you out." the speaker said. His voice was hard-accented - African-American, New York sharp - with an inbuilt semi cackle that turned every statement into a grandfatherly demonstration of humouring the kiddies. I felt vaguely patronised, and couldn't work out why.

"And how," I said, failing to focus yet again on the murky distance, "are you doing that?"

"Minor transfusion, first up." The voice sounded matter-of-fact about this, despite the subject. "About the only good d.a.m.n thing about The Cull. Everyone's a donor, see?"

"Blood?"

"He's a quick one!" I got the impression the guy, whoever he was, was squatting behind me. "Yeah, blood. Which is to say: you were seriously lacking for the stuff, pal."

"A-and you gave m... From where?"

"No need to worry 'bout that."

I silently begged to differ, but the same tugging sensation from my left shoulder was distracting my attention and the voice - an old man, I'd decided - wasn't finished.

"Then it was tidying up, see? I mean... who made this d.a.m.n mess of your arm here?" There was a quiet tap-tap-tap, and I imagined a finger poking the skin next to the bullet hole - though again I felt nothing. "Might as well have poured a quart of mud in the hole and closed it down with knitting needles."

"I... I did it."

"Done it yourself?" The voice went quiet for a moment, then whistled softly. "Well... maybe that's different. Still a f.u.c.kin' mess, mind."

"You've... You've sorted it?"

"Yep. Anitsep, new st.i.tches, new dressing." He paused, considering my voice. "Limey, huh?"

"But I can't feel it. My arm."

"Lived over there myself, for a time. Nice place. But for the weather."

"I said I can't fee..."

"Yeah. That'd be the anaesthetic."

I started to blurt: Anaesthetic? Where the f.u.c.k did you get th-, but my thought-process shifted rails with an inelegant clang and ran up against a far more obvious quandary.

"Why?" I said.

"Why what?"

"Why are you doing all this? What's going on?"

"Ah."

The syllable was p.r.o.nounced with the sort of enigmatic significance that said: More to follow.

There was a heavier tug on my left side, executed with a certain amount of rough finality and a breathless grunt - "There!" - and then a coa.r.s.e hand rolled me onto my back. I felt a little like a turtle inverted in the sun, unable to lift myself upright. Not that I'd tried yet. I was far too busy staring up at my benefactor, wondering if I was still asleep and hadn't realised.

"Evening." The shadow said. "Name's Nate."

He was an older man. I think. Five years since the Cull it was already difficult to say, hard living took its toll on some worse than others; youngsters quickly hardened, faces became taught, lines (not laughter, obviously) gathered at corners of eyes and mouths. Plus fallout, starvation, exposure, injury. Who could say? My best guess put this guy at sixty, but he looked older and acted younger. His skin was a uniform teak that gave his face an unreal quality every time he smiled. Perfectly white eyes and teeth lighting up like bulbs set into a dark sculpture.

"Nate." I repeated. He grinned.

He wore a strange getup, like he'd spent all his life pilfering clothes of a vaguely uniform bent. Tan and khaki camo combat trousers (sorry, pants), a pale blue shirt with an NYPD insignia st.i.tched into the lapel and an outrageous jacket - dark blue, festooned with gold pips and double-b.u.t.tons - which it took me a moment to recognise as an Union Army antique. I figured he'd looted it from some re-creation society or fancy dress store, though admittedly - thanks to scuffs, stains and frays - it did have a century-and-a-half-old look about it. Its effect was simply to add to the overall impression of a uniformed nutter, driven to steal anything vaguely official-looking like a magpie hording shinies.

I resisted the urge to salute.

This curious attempt to look authoritative was undermined somewhat by the accessories he'd chosen: bright red sneakers, a white New York Mets baseball cap and a vivid yellow belt with the most enormous buckle engraved with the legend: POP b.i.t.c.h.

There was a dead guy sitting next to him.

Nate followed my glance and his grin faltered a touch. "Ah," he said again.

The corpse was one of the Clergy-soldiers, though I didn't recognise him from inside the plane. He didn't have a hole through his face, for a start.

His grey robes were blackened and singed, spattered with blood and dirty water, and the patches of his skin I could see were just as soiled: peeled back in moist red welts or incised totally by razor-like fragments of shrapnel. One of his arms was hanging off at the shoulder by a few threads of gristle and a notched bony core, and his head was so tattered the scarlet tattoo around his eye was barely visible at all. He sat slumped, semi-upright, against the tangled remains of the same armoured school bus that prowled my recent memories. It reminded me, surreally, of a novelty firework: its front-end all but untouched; the remnants of its length blown-to-s.h.i.t so totally that their remains barely made any physical sense at all.

The dead Clergyman had been the guy inside. The grenade chucker.

Nate coughed, embarra.s.sed.

A thin rubber tube meandered from a grimy canula thrust into the corpse's wrist, out onto the floor where it coiled once or twice towards me, then vanished beneath the edge of my exhausted peripheral vision. I didn't want to turn my head to confirm it, but I had a pretty good idea where it led.

It was full of blood.

"Not like he needed it..." Nate said, a little surly. "And I disconnected plenty of time before he died."

Well that's okay then.

Nate fussed beside me - lifting up the other end of the transfusion tube and waggling it like a glove puppet - and then started tidying away the various equipment he'd scattered on a mostly clean blanket beside me. St.i.tching needles, b.l.o.o.d.y rags, sealed packs of military-issue sterilisers and antiseptic pads, and a roll of off-white bandaging that'd come partly unrolled and scampered off along the oil-spattered tarmac.

The horizon still hadn't come into focus. I was starting to worry.

"Why can't I see properly?" I asked, finding that I could control my body - just - but was so exhausted it hurt even to think about moving.

Nate scowled for a minute, confused, and peered around us. If I'd had to guess, his expression was one of someone who'd just spent hours saving a stranger from bleeding to death, only to discover they were already vegetative in the brain department.

"Can't see?" He said.

"It's... it's like a... a blur. Like... Near-to things are okay, but the further away stuff gets..."

He looked at me like I was a r.e.t.a.r.d.

"Well that," he said, "is what's sometimes called fog."

Even despite the panicky relief, I still had some headroom for feeling like a f.u.c.kwit.

"B-but... but it was perfectly clear when the plane... when it..."

"Well, that's New York for ya." He waved a dismissive hand, gazing out into the wall of soupy white. "It's called the QuickSmog Eff-Why-Eye."

"Eff...what?"

"Eff-Why-Eye. For Your Info. Sorry... Guy gets sorta used to talking in letters, hanging around with the grunts, you know." He hooked a thumb towards the slumped body and shook his head. "Soldiers and monks, Jeez-us! Nary the twain should meet."

I struggled to hang on to a single thread. Nate was the sort of guy who could hold three schizophrenic conversations at once, leaping from tangent to tangent like a monkey on speed. There was a shielded intelligence simmering away in those eyes, too, hiding behind the accent and the daft clothes, but watching everything. Paying attention.

"QuickSmog." I repeated, bringing him back.

"Yeah, yeah. Guy I knew one time told me it started right after the camel-jocks zapped out DC. 'Cause, you know, I wasn't stateside back then. Never saw the lightshow. But yeah, QuickSmog... Comes in quick, goes out quick. Just like that. No rhyme or reason. Doesn't seem to do much harm, though if you ask me right now it's a good thing."

"How come?"

"You kidding? f.u.c.king great plane wreck, burning to s.h.i.t... sending up a pillar of smoke higher'n a pothead's p.r.i.c.k." He grinned. "And with your robe-wearin'-pals here gone away, nothing to stop the scavs from coming to take a look."

Scavs. Robe-wearin'-pals. Camel Jocks zapping DC.

One f.u.c.king detail at a time.

Know everything.

Cover the angles.

"There was a sniper... a-and a driver. Guy in the bus. He dead too?" The effort of talking was becoming appalling now; even as the sensations started to return to my numbed arm the rest of me was screaming for rest.

Nate sniffed, wiping a dewdrop off his nose.

"Well now," he said. "Your sniper up there, that's a mean pieceas.h.i.t Cardinal name of Cy. Near as I can tell he wasn't milit'ry before The Cull, so I guess something pretty d.a.m.n nasty musta happened... Man's f.u.c.ked in the head but good. Gen-u-ine psycho. Heh." Nate spat on the ground. "High-up too. Maybe take over from the Abbot some day. See, Cy's in charge of bringing the freight from the airstrip back to the city. When the bird comes down all wrecked-up like that, and all the kids missin', he knows straight away his neck's on the line. That's how come the Choirboys went in so hard. Cy wanted to have a... a body, whatever. Like: 'yeah, the airport's f.u.c.ked and we didn't get the Brit t.i.the, but I caught the guy who did it...'"

"Me?"

"Right. Only he didn't. And then you come out killin' every motherf.u.c.ker left and right, and Cy starts to figure maybe he should stop worryin' what his boss gonna say, and start saving his a.s.s. So he sends out the bus, all packed-up with grenades and s.h.i.t, to keep you busy. Maybe even kill you, if he's lucky." He nodded towards the shattered school bus. "Soon as old Bertha went kablooie you can bet your a.s.s Cy was hightailing back for the city in the Outrider."

"Just a diversion?"

"Right. Couple of... sacrificial lambs, you might say. Told to go die so Mister-Hat-Wearin' f.u.c.k gets to breathe another day. I figure he'll spend the whole journey wondering what to tell the boss. Ask for reinforcements - my guess. Be back here... maybe a day and half? Suggest you get yourself gone by then, huh?"

"And the driver?"

Nate grinned again, and leaned further over. Deep in the shadows of his left eye, all but indiscernible against the blackness of his skin, I could make out the long curve of a scarlet tattoo.

A half circle.

I stiffened.

He waved a set of keys playfully above me, then tossed them over his shoulder.

"Not much left to drive now."

"You're... you're Clergy too?"

He chuckled to himself, lifting up a bundle of something ragged and stinking which I first a.s.sumed was a dead dog, and then realised were my clothes.

"Not really," he said. "Not any more."

An hour later, Nate and I sat in the alcove beneath the front wall of the shanty-compound, hiding from the wind, listening to the great Welcome sign flapping above us. The QuickSmog had surrendered to a sudden squall that darted up with no obvious warning, phasing away into the dark.

Out across the waters encircling the airport, the distant smudge that was the northern reaches of the city faded by degrees into darkness. I'd expected - stupidly - the same neon jungle I'd seen in every film, the same speckled star field of glowing tower blocks printed in every guidebook. The same scene of candle-like serenity glossily reproduced on the cover of the city map I'd plundered from a bookshop in Covent Garden, and sat studying for days and days back in Heathrow, as Bella and I planned the journey. It was still in my pack, that much-thumbed map; not that I needed to look at it any more. I knew all its lines, all its labels, all the red blotches marked on its surface...

But no. From a distance the post-Cull city, just like London, was a haunted place; an inky nothingness flecked here and there by the fragile, sputtering lights of nestled survivors, and the brazen fumes of miniature industry.

Nate had moved me into the shadow of the blue compound's corrugated walls, across the gra.s.s and away from the wreck, as soon as I'd been strong enough to make the journey, bracing me with one arm and lugging my pack with the other. He said it would be best to get away from the plane before true darkness fell. The local scavengers would be slinking in to take a look at what had caused all the commotion, and it was all too easy to get caught up in the sc.r.a.ps and squabbles as they fought over the spoils.

I got the impression he wasn't talking about coyotes and wild dogs.

Now, on the cusp of night, the air was getting cold and the view growing grim.