Simon Spurrier - The Culled

He hadn't asked me why. He hadn't asked me what I was here to achieve.

Hadn't told me why he was tagging along.

Hmm.

Standing outside the power plant, it was plain to see the whole place was inactive. Rusted to fuck; plundered for raw materials, stripped apart in a million acts of petty vandalism and selfish salvage.

There was red bunting dangling above the concourse as we stepped off the street – giving the whole thing an air of ludicrousness – and the corrosion-melted gates slumped awkwardly, reminding me of reclining figures watching the world go by. The health and safety signs above their heads had been neatly crossed through with red spray paint, and someone had erected a billboard above the entrance, which read simply: WHEELS

I felt someone staring, that same old prehistoric instinct, and glanced around, with hairs prickling, for the culprit. Only when I looked directly up did I find him: a dead head, sockets empty, skin tattered, lipless jaws set in a timeless grin. This grisly voyeur sat mounted on a telegraph pole; cables stripped away and its solid girth painted in stripes of tar and red paint.

"The fuck does that mean?" I said, nodding up at it.

"Territory marker," Nate mumbled, smoking a straw-like cigarette. One of mine. "Black and red means this is En-Tee."

I gave him a blank look. The acronym thing was starting to piss me off.

"Neutral Territory," he grinned, pointing further into the plant's network of alleys and avenues, all festooned with the same black and red flags and bunting. "No Klan business."

"So the dead guy…?"

Nate shrugged, drooling smoke. "Maybe picked a fight. Got outbid, tried to pull pecking rank. Who knows? Maybe just an unlucky schmo inna wrong place when someone wanted to make a point. Folks that run the En-Tees don't take kindly to rule-breakers. They can afford to enforce, y'see?"

Like so much that poured from his mouth, Nate's casual explanations mixed the common sense with the bewildering. Pecking ranks, territory markers… it was all the stuff of just another drug-dream. A revisit to the malleable memories and landscapes of the Bliss trip. But still, I wasn't entirely in the dark. I'd spent much of the morning at the airport dozing and thinking, listening to the old man snore, picking his brains about the Klan-system whenever he deigned to wake.

If I understood one tenth of what he'd said, during the Culling year, New York – not to put too fine a point on it – had gone straight to hell. He'd painted a picture of streets clogged up with empty cars, skeletons tangled along sidewalks. Of the military running out of control with water cannons and teargas. Of riots like full scale wars and whole blocks burning to ash on the grounds of a single suspected infection. He hadn't been there – he was still in London at that point – but leaving aside the narrator's propensity for hyperbole it still wasn't easy listening.

What was certain was the Klan system. In a weird sort of way, despite everything, I was impressed by it. It was easy to see how it must have started, and at the back of my mind – beyond the doubts and disapprovals – it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Like some new species released onto the savannah, frightened herds running together; accreting like shit flowing into a bowl.

Strength in numbers.

Pack mentality.

The oldest instincts in the book.

The way Nate told it, the Klans all had their origins in different places. Maybe some grew up round whichever politicians survived the Cull and got lucky, outside of Washington when the nuke skyburst. You can imagine that happening, maybe. Little guys in suits, standing on stone steps, kicking up a fuss. Like you used to get in Hyde Park, like Speakers' Corner every Sunday. Angry men and women on stools and ladders, spouting fire and brimstone. Since the Cull, they would have been Kings.

Still… It's a big step from there to gang colours, to skin brandings, to closed territories and aggressive expansion and nightly raids and sallying-forth and midnight skirmishes and blood in the gutters…

The night before, as Nate explained this stuff, as I told him I just didn't see rational people acting so dumb, sinking so low, he stopped with a grin and said:

"Desperate times, man."

The main driveway along the interior of the power plant took a sharp corner, every inch of the way draped in swatches of fabric and makeshift adverts. Most carried the names of food stalls and barter points (promising FARE TRADE, WIDE SELECSION, ALL SCAV CONSIDERD), branded in each case with iconic images of bygone snacks; hotdogs, burgers, bagels. I found my mouth watering at the memory of such extravagant-seeming meals, and asked Nate what the stalls really traded.

"Rat." He said, not looking around. "It's all rat."

Some of the Klans, maybe, came up from less obvious sources. Lantern-jawed drill sergeants discovering they had no country left to fight for, nobody left to shriek at, no way of draining off the dynamo-level testosterone. Civic leaders, celebrities, lawyers. The local bloody postman. It didn't take much, back at the start, to be the centre of a pack; to let something comfortable and secure grow around you. Maybe some of those putative mobs – coalescing and running together – could even claim they'd formed their miniature little states for all the right reasons. Nate told me one of the Klans, back at the start, was called the 'Thin Blues.' Bunch of NYPD grunts, he said, banding together, facing down the chaos. He said that to start with they even had a decent stab at maintaining the peace; driving about, making arrests, shooting looters. He used the word 'altruistic', which sounded weird when he said it, and tricky to take seriously.

He said it didn't last long.

He said ever since then, the Thin Blues had been one of the smaller Klans.

Inside the industrial sprawl of the Con Ed facility we reached a checkpoint, where two enormous blokes in black clothes and red bandanas stood divesting everyone of weapons. A small queue of raggedy scavs had formed, and beyond the canvas-draped checkpoint I could see the peristaltic movement of large crowds, deeper inside the facility. It made me nervous. In London, the only time you saw that many people gathered together was for the Abbot's sermons, and just thinking about those left a bad taste in my mouth.

I watched the guards frisking and checking, allocating each person a number to be used in recollecting their guns and knives, and tilted my head towards Nate.

"What Klan are they?" I asked, nodding towards the muscular goons.

"Right now," he said, "no Klan at all. Neutral Territory, remember? They're being paid to keep it that way."

As if to reinforce this point, the guards commanded each entrant to display his or her Klan marking. Elbows and shoulders were silently brandished, knees held out, necks craned, and I caught a few fleeting glimpses of the squiggles and meaningless icons depicting each different group. In every case the guard quickly tied a black rag, plucked from a filthy basket, around the scar; hiding the brand from sight.

"Neutral." was all that Nate said.

We reached the front of the queue and caused something of a commotion. For a start, Nate's branding could hardly be covered with a simple piece of rag – unless he was prepared to submit to blindfolding, which he wasn't – but it was the nature of the mark itself that really got them riled. They kept exchanging looks, clenching their jaws, wondering out loud if they should fetch the 'Em-Bee'.

More fucking acronyms. Nate seemed to be enjoying all the consternation.

He'd explained it to me last night, the instant that the scavs he'd called 'Mickeys' scuttled off into the dark.

"The Neo-Clergy," he said, "the mighty New Church, the holier-than-thou warrior priests of the New Dawn were really just another Klan."