Simon Spurrier - The Culled

Back in the dark, a quarter hour or so later, I swerved to avoid a lump of congealing debris – a much-rusted car wreck, probably, and considered the tunnel roof above us. Back in London, a year or so after The Cull, I ventured down into the underground, just to see. Back there the place had been busy; thronging with communities trying to stick together, trying to stay warm. But the effect was the same. In the lightless depths you started to think…

About all those thousands of tons of rock and soil and water pressing down above your head. About ant colonies in zoos – with walls made of glass – and thousands of thoughtless creatures going about their business in the arteries of the earth.

The Queens Tunnel was kind of the same, except this wasn't an artery. It was a vein; sluggish, deoxygenated, blue with worthless blood. Nate pointed ahead to another sharp turn and we cruised towards the faintest glimmerings of light – an illusion of day, always lurking beyond the next corner. Nate said this was the route he took whenever he was bringing kids from the airport. He said he knew the way like the back of his hand.

I asked him how many people really knew what the backs of their hands looked like.

He ignored me.

I was glad of his knowledge anyway. The number of rusting obstacles and dangling patches of ruined tunnel were prodigious, and without his instructions we would have collided with something straight away.

I asked him again what happened to the kids when they'd been delivered. Did they grow up to become priests? Did they go off to some secret place to begin building the future?

I couldn't see his face, but it took him longer than usual to answer.

"I told you," he said. "I don't know."

The tunnel cornered and re-cornered in defiance of all obvious directional architecture. I'd been under the impression it joined Queens to Manhattan with the minimum of fuss, directly across the strait, but evidently its sinuous course took us deeper into the island, below the knot of blocks and stores of Murray Hill, before curving back on itself to spit us out into the daylight up a debris-strewn ramp shadowed by overarching blocks. The muggy humidity retreated, and it would almost have been a relief to enter the sunlight had the QuickSmog not slunk back during our time underground; covering the blunt buildings of Midtown in an unsettling, gloomy whitewash. Over my shoulder the distant peaks of the financial district were masked – just the ghostly suggestion of needles penetrating the earth – and every street corner had become a cheap special effect.

Just as before, the Clergy markings were everywhere. Territory poles, graffiti-tags of scarlet and red, banners strung across empty streets. An enormous mural showing a smiling John-Paul Rohare Baptiste regarded us from the gable-end of an apartment block. For some reason I couldn't have found it any more menacing, even had the grinning Abbot been clutching at an AK47 or wearing a balaclava like the terrace-markers in Belfast. He just radiated… wrongness.

The whole place was still. Static. No distant movement, no scavs, no dogs, no rats. Even the birds hadn't bothered to hang around, and from the empty horizon to the north – Central Park, I guessed, beneath the level of the rooftops – to the haze-choked shadow of the Empire State that rose above us over our left shoulders, the whole uncomfortable place more than deserved its epithet:

Hell's Kitchen.

After the communal degradation of London, and the noise of the Wheels Mart, it felt a lot like the surface of the moon. Silent as a graveyard, with its own vacant atmosphere and a sort of giddying gravity; like nothing was real and would all spin-away into the universal haze at any moment. I let the quad trundle to a stop at an intersection, and morosely scanned the skyline.

"There." Nate said. "Manhattan."

I'd expected something busier. Some sectarian commune, perhaps, filling the entirety of the midtown district, swarming with children abducted from across the ravaged world. I imagined a glowing paradise. An industrious enclave of forward-thinking radicals, blocks wide, staffed with the young and the enthused, building and rebuilding, working hard on the civilisation of tomorrow.

What a load of old bollocks.

There were cars, frozen in time, bumper-to-bumper. Dead tyres and shattered windows. Skeletons slumped in front seats, or curled in skinless patterns on the sidewalk. Here and there fire-damage had blackened a rusty hulk, or scoured a section of street of its rough surface. Flamewagons, I guessed; burning the bodies of Blight victims, trundling by five long years ago.

Newspapers flapped. Colourful litter sat like bright decorations speckling the rusting, filthy morass.

The sun was sinking to the west. It even made the whole thing sort of beautiful.

I asked Nate where everyone was, and caught myself whispering. He glanced around at the rooftops, sniffed noisily, then shrugged.

"Two answers to that."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. First one is: all holed-up. Central office. See, your Clergyman, he's not a regular Klanner. No scavs and Klansmen, like that, no no no. This crew, they got the clerics, the soldiers, the pilgrims, the trustees." He tapped the tattoo on his face, eyes grim. "Whole different hierarchy. Besides, these fucks got more on the mind than the usual. Territory. Drugs. Guns. Whatever. These assholes got faith. Whole worlda complications."

I glanced around again, unnerved by the quiet. I slipped off the quadbike and rummaged in my increasingly empty pack, producing the battered city map and unfolding it carefully. "So… they don't mind strangers strolling about up here?"

"Ah, well… There's that 'mind' again. Do they mind? Yeah, yeah, I figure they do. But they ain't gonna do anything about it until someone raises a hand. Then you better believe they'll go Krakatoa on your hairy white ass."

I looked up from the map, trying to get my bearings.

"My arse isn't ha…"

"Not the point. Point is, depending on whatever the fuck it is you're doing here, as long as it ain't to do with pissing off the Clergy, we'll be fine."

There was something strange in his eye. I pretended not to notice and rotated the map, staring off into the east.

Nate cleared his throat.

"So?" he said.

"So what?"

"So are you?"

"Planning on going up against his nibs there?" I nodded at the smirking mural on the wall. "Nope. None of my business. Couldn't give a rat's tit, mate. I'm just here for some information."

Nate looked relieved. I glanced down at the heavy red ring marked on the map's surface, then back at the eastern horizon, feeling an unexpected shiver of anticipation. Then I folded the booklet away and clambered back onto the quad, suddenly remembering something.

"You said there were two answers."

"Yeah. Yeah, I did. Answer number two is: they're all around us."

And he was right. I could feel it. Eyes peering out of the shadows, regarding me from half-boarded windows on either side, squinting from rooftops. I couldn't see anyone.

That just made it worse.

I gunned the quad towards 42^nd street and turned a sharp right, winding my way north-east in a series of step-like diagonals, working hard to create the impression I knew what I was doing. Nate had gone quiet. On the horizon a shape swarmed slowly out of the haze. A blank slab of stone – vast and wide but skinny along its third dimension – like a cereal packet built to colossal proportions.

Nate seemed to be fidgeting, suddenly, throwing looks in all directions. I still hadn't told him where I was headed, and certainly not why I was headed there, but as the brooding shadow of the building loomed ever nearer, I guessed it was pretty obvious.

I should say something to him, I guessed. Ask him if it was safe. Ask him his opinion.