Simon Spurrier - The Culled

"I said I can't fee…"

"Yeah. That'd be the anaesthetic."

I started to blurt: Anaesthetic? Where the fuck 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 pronounced 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 coarse 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 stitched into the lapel and an outrageous jacket – dark blue, festooned with gold pips and double-buttons – 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 BITCH

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-shit 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, embarrassed.

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. Stitching needles, bloody 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 retard.

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

Even despite the panicky relief, I still had some headroom for feeling like a fuckwit.

"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? Fucking great plane wreck, burning to shit… sending up a pillar of smoke higher'n a pothead's prick." 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 fucking 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 pieceashit Cardinal name of Cy. Near as I can tell he wasn't milit'ry before The Cull, so I guess something pretty damn nasty musta happened… Man's fucked 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 fucked and we didn't get the Brit tithe, but I caught the guy who did it…'"