Simon Spurrier - The Culled

Familiarity.

Confidence.

Avarice.

When he saved my life, when he made the choice to attach himself to me rather than kill me, as I lay with a dying man's blood pulsing into my veins, he'd had hours and hours to go through the bag. Was that it? Was that all there was to him staying with me?

He'd seen the goods and wanted to earn his share?

No. No that made no sense. He could have just let me bleed out, let me die there on the runway, then taken it all for himself.

What then?

That same scratching. That same itching something at the back of my mind.

Something not quite right.

Something not adding up.

"Nate."

"Mm?" He said, sparking the cigarette.

Just ask, dammit…

"Why are you helping me?"

The air smelt of salt and car fumes. For a long time, there was silence.

He watched me. Eyes unmoving.

"Thought we'd established that." He said, slowly, as if I was being ungrateful. As if I'd told him I didn't need him.

"Try again." I said, gently.

He sighed. Pursed his lips.

"I walked out on the Clergy, pal. Saved my own skin when I shoulda… shoulda died like a martyr. That's what they expect. Thoughtless obedience, you understand?"

"So?"

"So if they catch up with me, it's… It'll be…" He looked away, face fearful, and coughed awkwardly. Another long suck on the cigarette, calming his nerves.

"Anyway," he said. "I seen you in action."

"And?"

"I kept you alive, raggedy-man. Now all you got to do is return the favour."

And it was an explanation, I suppose. It made sense. It all added up.

And underneath it all the dark voice in my mind, shouting:

Don't you fucking give up, soldier.

Don't you get distracted, boy.

Don't you let things slip.

Sir, no sir, etc etc.

Nate was helping me. Because of him I was healthy enough to carry on; to get the job done; to go after it like a flaming fucking sword. Everything else was just dross. Everything else was just peripheral shit that didn't matter. Who cared why Nate was helping me? He'd given his explanation. Now move on.

Except, except, except.

Except that as Nate dropped the cigarettes back into the bag his hand paused – a split second, no more – next to the battered city map with its New York scrawl and red ink notes, and his lips twitched. A fraction. Just a fraction.

Then he caught me staring, and closed up the pack with a friendly smile, and led me further inside the power plant.

I took the pack and shouldered it myself.

"How you feeling?" He said, as we walked. "Got your strength back? Lot of blood you lost, back there."

Reminding me. Keeping me indebted.

Not subtle, Nate.

"I'm peachy." I told him, a little colder than I'd meant.

Basic training, year two:

Call in favours. Get people good and beholden. Make friends. Make the fuckers owe you one.

But don't you let yourself owe anyone anything. You hear me, soldier? Don't you get yourself in arrears. Don't you feel obliged to take care of anyone.

People are parasites, boy. They see something strong, they clamp on.

They slow you down.

They complicate shit.

"Just peachy," I mumble-repeated, morose.

By then, the TV broadcasts were getting random.

The signal itself was okay. Would continue to be for another year or two, up until the power died and the generators sucked dry on fuel and all the diehards up at White City gave up. By which time barely anyone had a TV left working anyway.

But at the start, loud and clear, picture-perfect, 100% dross.

Mostly it was repeats. A computer governed the scheduling, I guessed, to cover holes and overruns. Endless episodes of Only Fools and Horses, long-gone seasons of Porridge and The Good Life, a smattering of game shows whose contestants won or lost years before. Friends reruns, over and over and over and over, and anyone who gave a shit waited in vain for an episode called 'The One Where Everyone Dies of an Unknown Flesh-Digesting Virus.'

No one was making anything new. No documentaries about the present emergency. No one had the time or energy to programme the channels.

Everyone was too busy staying alive.

This was at the beginning. This was during The Cull itself, as The Blight swept the country, as the infrastructure gave way like a dam made of salt and all the comfortable little certainties – advertising, street-sweepers, hotdog stalls, the Metro newspaper on the underground, discount sales, pirated DVDs, free samples in supermarkets, full vending machines – all the little frills you never fucking noticed, just slowly…

…went away.

Except the news. Sometimes, anyway. "God Bless the BBC!" People would say, as they passed in the street, tripping on bloody bodies and dead riot cops. Sometimes days would piss past with nothing – no bulletins at the top of the hour, no "we-interrupt-this-antique-comedy-to-bring-you-breaking-news" – and out in the rain all the uncertain crowds who couldn't work out why they weren't coughing and dying like everyone else were all anxiety and confusion, waiting beside the screens. But once in a while… once in a while.

I imagined a skeleton crew, struggling on bravely at Television Centre; sleeping and living in its ugly bulges just to get the word out. I imagined them feeling pretty good about themselves, like the fireman who goes above and beyond to save a crying kid, like an artist who doesn't sleep for a week to get the right tones, the right shades, the right effects. Like the soldier who keeps going, who never gives up, no matter what.

In a civilised – and I use the word with the appropriate levels of irony – world, news is just another commodity. It so rarely affects you. It so rarely intersects with the sheltered, blinkered universe of your real world. It's just another entertainment. Another distant work of fiction (or as good as) to be picked apart and discussed in the local boozer, over tea or coffee, sat on the train, wherever.

The Cull changed all that. The Cull made it so everyone was living the news, all the time. Suddenly all the people – the quiet little nobodies who called themselves 'normal' and never made a fuss – knew what it was like to be a native of Baghdad, or an earthquake widow, or a disgraced politician. Suddenly they all knew what it was like to switch on the box and hear all about themselves, their own world, their own shitty lives, discussed in the same autocue-serious tone as every other dismal slice of bad news.

It must have been a weird sensation.

(Not for me, though. I'd been making the news for years, one way or another. And I mean 'making'. Some weeks it felt like foreign affairs correspondents would've been out of a job but for me and mine, though they didn't know it. And no one ever said my name.)

On this particular day, the eagerness to receive fresh information was stronger than ever. All throughout the blistered wastes of London, little knots of people had formed – their clothes not yet raggedy, but getting there; their faces not yet malnourished and gaunt, but getting there – to crowd around flickering sets in front rooms and electronics shops, tolerating the dismal repeats on the off-chance of a new bulletin.

Two days ago, they'd mentioned the bombs falling in America. Rumours of atomic strikes, attacks all across the world, missiles going up and tumbling back down, EM pulses like technological plagues and supertech 'Star Wars' defences misfiring; farting useless interceptors into lightning storms and spitting heat seekers into the sea.

When they'd made that announcement – a couple of days before – it had been tricky to know how much was confirmed and how much was fabrication. Concocted, one suspected, by the dishevelled creature sat behind the news-desk, staring in terror at the trembling camera. It was difficult to imagine the usual BBC specimens – bolt upright, faces slack, Queen's English spoken with a crisp enunciation that bordered on the ridiculous – stammering and coughing quite so much as the nervous girl huddled behind her sheaf of papers, as she told an entranced London that nuclear Armageddon was right around the corner, then sipped carefully at her water.