Simon Spurrier - The Culled

"Ah."

"Yeah. With her secretary."

I looked away, unsure whether to cringe or snigger. "Ah."

When I looked back, Nate's expression was… well, sad – obviously – but something else too. Like the face an exec gets when the deal falters at the last meeting. Like the face I used to see on missions, when the grunts and agents round me realised it'd all gone to tits, and people were probably going to die, and it just wasn't fair. Like… frustration, maybe. A sense of annoyance at circumstances beyond one's control.

Which is sort of weird, given that it was all his fault.

Something dark flitted through the shadows outside the circle of light cast by the fire. Nate stared at it for a moment, utterly untroubled, and spat into the flaming logs.

He said – the story rumbling on as if uninterrupted – that the money dried up pretty quick after that. He said he only realised how much he'd appreciated her (and/or her cash, depending on how you wanted to interpret it) when it was too late. Sandra cleared off, heartbroken. He let things slide. His Visa hiccupped and lit-up alarms on a Home Office computer and before he knew it he was Nathaniel C. Waterstone of no fixed abode, with a deportation warrant next to his name and a brand new shiny heroin addiction to support.

I coughed as politely as I could, aware that this man had just sewed me up. "So when you said you'd been a doctor…"

"Yeah." He shrugged. "Kind of."

He looked away and sighed, as if he could see all the way across the Atlantic from where he sat. "London, man. Docklands, Tower Hamlets, the East End. Plenty of places they pay good money for a guy knows what he's doing with needles. Someone… unofficial. You know?"

Nate said he'd been a backstreet sawbones. Mob cutter. Bullets removed, knife wounds cleaned, bodies disposed: no questions asked. I guess I believed him, mostly.

He had an honest face.

Out across the roughage bordering the airstrip, somebody yelped. There were voices out there too – masked by the crackling of our little fire, muttering and arguing. More shapes darting in the dark.

"Scavs." Nate shrugged.

I kept a hand on the M16 and asked what would happen to the bodies of the men aboard the plane. I didn't mention Bella. I wasn't sure why, at the time, but I know now. Even then, sitting with Nate in the cold, the scratching at the back of my head was gearing-up…

Something about him.

"Depends." He said.

"On what?"

"On what Klans they're with. Mostly they'll just… steal clothes, leave the bodies. Coupla tinpot tribes up west got a thing for fresh meat, way I heard, but no way we'll get that shit down here. Guy I knew once – you'll like this – said you go through Ess-Eye these days – that's Staten Island, you know? – you're a… heh… a goddamn moveable feast. They got crossbows and arrows, man, he says. They got fuckin' spit roasts, and I don't mean like in no porno.

"Up here, nah. Nah. Civilised, man. Welcome to Queens."

His grin lit up his face. With Nate, you never knew how serious he was being.

I asked him again to tell me about the Klans. He chuckled and lit a cigarette.

When The Cull started, he said, and folks started dying in the streets of London, he was holed-up with a gang of Albanians. He said up 'til then he'd been passing from group to group – Triads, Afghans, Jamaicans, even the old-school suit-wearing Pie and Chips brigade. He said these Kalashnikov-waving psychos took him on as a kind of examiner: checking the girls they ferried-in from the continent, making sure they'd last in the massage parlours and interactive peep-booths. Nate said he'd never stared at so much pussy in his life, and there came a point where it sort of stopped having any attraction.

He said at around the same time, he decided to go cold turkey.

He looked away again.

I got the impression there was more to it than that. But sitting out there in the cold with a fresh bandage on my arm and a half-digested rat inside me, listening to human filth arguing in the dark over guns and knives and all the other shit I'd left behind on the plane, I didn't have the heart to probe.

The thing was, someone almost certainly made Nate give up the skag. Maybe someone helped him, nursed him through it, whatever. I don't know. But the thing about Nate was, the thing I could tell within seconds of meeting the guy; he wasn't the kind who made decisions. Not on his own. He wasn't the kind to lead the way.

"Was eight days into the detox when the… the virus, you know? When it got as bad as it got. I had me a… a tee-vee, little one, in the room. News shows, back to back. Bodies on the streets, hospitals over flowing. Pretty much all the Albanians dropped right there. Spat blood, hit the deck. I'm telling you, man, the stink… Rest of them upped and gone. Tried to get home, maybe. Everyone's got a family, huh?"

He sighed.

"I tell you, man… I was scared. There's me, pissing outta my ass, shivering, puking, all that shit, immune system fucked to hell, and the end-of-goddamn-times plague outside my door. Just about gave up."

I remembered too. London. Chaos. Panic. It was weeks before they could tell why some people survived. Why most didn't. Revealed little by little on garbled TV shows and home-printed leaflets, in that spasmodic time before the media gave up the ghost.

"But I survived." Nate said. "Fuck, yeah. Came out clean."

And so did I.

What I remember most is, the unfairness.

I suppose I always felt I was lucky. Due a fall, surely, but there I was, winning a lottery I never even bought a ticket for. Outside there's priests and nurses and charitable souls rotting on the pavement, and here's me – he's a fucking killer – breathing clear.

It didn't seem right.

It's a weird thing, feeling guilty for being alive.

"Anyways," said Nate, flicking a chunk of wood onto the fire from a stack beside the corrugated wall, "that put the cap on doctoring."

He said he'd wandered in London for a year or two. He hinted he'd done his best to help where he could – triage, treatment, tidying – but I guess there was always a price.

Nate didn't exactly radiate selflessness.

After two years the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn was up and running. I remember that too. The Abbot broadcasting his miraculous sermon every Sunday, the crowds gathering, the scarlet tattoos and chanted prayers.

The robe-wearing creeps strolled straight out onto the charred remains of the world stage, and declared that they alone – as an entity embracing values of community, integrity, intelligence and of course faith – could sweep aside the horrors of the Cull and work towards a new, restored civilisation.

They said that they alone could overcome the 'inertia gripping humanity' and rebuild, recreate, restart!

Those.

Arrogant.

Fucks.

They came to London and spread the word. I ignored them.

They said for most people it was too late. The world they'd known was long gone. They said the people could console themselves with living as best they could, embracing Jesus, making the most of their lives in the rubble. They said devoting oneself to the Neo-Clergy was the only expression of purity and hope for the average man.

But for the children… For the children there was so much more. Innocent, unsullied by the calamities of the past, not responsible for the sins that had visited the Cull upon the world. For them the future was clear. So said the Clergy.

They must build a new dawn.

So the priests came and got them.

At gunpoint, sometimes. But mostly they didn't even need to threaten, mostly it was parents waving goodbye, smiling, proud of their contribution to the world, and that was the worst thing of all.

The church ferried the kids off in blue-painted planes, and ignored the tears and shrieks, and told everyone, everyone involved: