Simon Spurrier - The Culled

Until someone who stands out shows up. No one likes a guy who rocks the boat.

I got the impression Malice and the other guards were mighty twitchy. Ready to snap. Ready to kill.

And they didn't like the Clergy.

Hmm.

After long, boring minutes had passed, I cracked my knuckles nastily and said:

"So. You going to let us get on with it, or what?"

Malice made a show of ignoring me, pulling off that same weird rolling motion, hip-twitching as she soothed the baby.

I stood up.

"Or do you guys make a habit of pulling this shit on anyone who does your job for you?"

She smiled, and this time I think there was at least a glimmer of genuine humour in there, no matter how guarded it was.

"You want a job, limey? That it?"

"Fuck no."

"What, then?"

"Want a set of wheels."

"Going somewhere?"

"Yep."

"Want to tell me where?"

"Not really." I shrugged my tattered coat back on over the top of Nate's bandage, and threw Malice an impatient stare. "We able to do business here or not? 'Cos if it's less of a timewaster I'm quite happy to go stand in the crowd and shout at the wanker on the wire."

Her nose wrinkled thoughtfully. "You got currency?"

"Apprehending known villains not good enough?"

"Covers fuel costs, maybe. World don't turn on good deeds, pal."

"Too fucking right."

I picked up the pack the thieves had been after and brandished it for Malice's inspection, oozing all the business-like cool in the world.

"Ten cans Pedigree Chum," I said, letting the bag spin on its straps. "Six packs of cigarettes. Two bottles Jack Daniels, one bottle supermarket-brand vodka. One tin powdered milk. Three cashmere blankets, only the best will doodle-do. Two packs condoms." (Malice's eye met mine, lightning-speed) "Three vials amphetamine, six sachets barbiturate tablets, eyedropper full of acid, an eighth of Moroccan woodbine – if you believe the dealer – and five hypos of some weird mil-shit called 'Bliss'." I smiled sweetly. "Take your pick."

Nate coughed, awkwardly. Malice was staring at me with an ironic eyebrow, like she was trying not to laugh. I became distantly aware of a quiet noise, like:

Spitaspataspitaspata

The pack was leaking. A few jagged shards of glass – half a vodka bottle and the angular rim of a JD litre – had torn their way through the fabric in several places, and their wasted contents were puddling on the floor. It looked like a lot of other shit had fallen out too. Somewhere outside, in the thick of the crowd.

"Ah," I said. "Bugger."

This minor calamity seemed to adjust the atmosphere somehow, as if by demonstrating that I wasn't quite as cool as I'd made out, I'd taken the sting out of Malice's suspicion. I'd like to say I'd planned it that way. The woman even smiled openly once or twice – her posture relaxing for a beat – as we rescued what we could from the doomed offerings.

The alcohol was all gone and the cigarettes reduced to a soggy mess, stinking of whisky. Nate (self-elected expert) declared them to be utterly worthless, then pocketed them quietly when he thought I wasn't watching. The blankets were stained but useable, the dog food and rubbers untroubled by their liquor soaking, and the drugs – which I'd hoped would be my most valuable bargaining chip – had alternately dissolved, shattered, fallen out of the pack, or dribbled away. Two of the Bliss hypos remained, along with a single vial of 'phets and the baggie of skunk. Nate kept moaning quietly under his breath every time we found something else ruined or missing, like he'd had it in his mind that the longer he stuck with me, the more of my stash he was liable to inherit.

I wondered vaguely if the drastic losses were enough to make him stop following me round. To break the debt.

I let the thought go, for now – content to let things carry me, trusting my instincts – and poked about in the miserly little stash we'd rescued. Five years of misery and starvation since the Cull, and the 'drugs problem' had mutated mysteriously from 'There's Too Much', to 'There's Not Enough'. It's hard to take the moral high ground when you've watched your friends die, when you've spent all day chasing ornamental ducks along stagnant canals, when you're freezing to death and when someone's offering you a quick and easy way to escape.

'Just say no?' Fuck that.

Just say gimme.

If fuel was gold in this mean-arsed new world, then hardcore narcotic stimulation was platinum.

"Not going to get you much." Malice shrugged. "How far you gotta go?"

"How about you show me what you've got?"

She shrugged again – the baby hiccupped – and gestured towards the rear door of the tent.

I stepped outside and felt my neck prickling. This is the same feeling all men get, when they step into a room full of gadgets, or fast cars, or big guns.

Set back from the main square, on an adjacent street between black painted walls of corrugated iron and criss-crossed walkways manned by gun-toting guards, Malice led me through rows of cars, vans, pickups, SUVs, motorbikes, bicycles and – shuffling nervously against the rope walls of a makeshift paddock – a trio of horses. Amidst the dozens of wheeled contraptions the whinnying livestock was about the only means of transport in the place that hadn't been radically altered in some way, and even they'd been daubed with crazy patterns in black and red branding paint. On everything else clashing colours and crudities were smeared along every chassis, windows were shattered or missing, innards had been comprehensively plundered. It would have been faintly depressing – like a scrap yard refusing to give up the ghost – had it not been for the special area, roped-off with its own guards. Inside its boundaries everything had been augmented, streamlined, changed. I gazed lovingly at steel roll-bars, wheel-covers in three types of mesh, hulking nitro canisters wedged inside passenger seats and ten different variations on the theme of 'heavily armed.'

Pintle mounts poked like miniature SAM-sites from the roofs of jeeps and spot-welded AVs. Swinging hatches – just like on Nate's old school bus – replaced side-doors and load containers, whilst several cars sported a sneaky set of exhausts below the rims of the front doors, to blast flames at the touch of a button at anyone dumb enough to try getting inside.

I wanted to play.

All of them were painted black and red.

"What're these?" I asked Malice, barely able to control the drooling.

She smirked. "Rentals."

"And how do you make sure the customer brings them back?"

"Oh, that's easy."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. We go with them."

At the far corner of the section my eye fell on something. Something big and angry-looking. Something spiky.

I nearly fell in love.

"The Inferno," said Malice, following my eye. "Cute, huh?"

It had been a fire truck once, though to be fair it bore about as much similarity to its previous incarnation as a shark to a diving bell. It was… sleek, which was an adjective I'd never have picked to describe a fire engine before. 'Like a speeding brick', maybe, but never dangerous. Never predatory.

Progressive layers of sheet-iron had been built-up from a sort of conical crest along the truck's nose, like the scales of a dagger-like fish. Below its new snout a shallow dozer-scoop clamoured with spikes and barbed wire, whilst wide flanges protected the windshield above.

All four tyres wore heavy swaddles of chains, canvas padding, rubber coils and thick iron rims, and a set of spares were lashed carefully beneath a wire and sheet gurney on the left flank. Halfway down the truck's 30-foot length an angle-poised turret reclined its muzzles towards the sky, its firing position enclosed on all sides by a low balustrade of welded plate steel. At one time it'd been a water cannon, easily hitched to a tanker truck and fired in great arcing loops. Now it had been modified. Converted in ways I couldn't easily see, so the central cannon stood surrounded in a clutch of cables, secondary devices and dangling controls. I think I picked out a Mk19 grenade launcher amongst the oily barrels, which told me everything I needed to know.