Simon Spurrier - The Culled

But:

Something not right…

Something not right about him…

Something to do with his story, with his name, with London…

It was the same old confusion. The same old contradiction between the information supplied by my senses – that Nate was easy to trust, a fun guy, a diamond in the rough – and my instincts; which grated against some tiny snippet of subconscious knowledge and made me wary.

But then, I'd been wrong before.

Eventually he leaned forwards on the saddle and called out over the noise of the quad's angry little engine, voice thick with trepidation despite the volume.

"You remember I told you how come none of the robe-wearin' fucks're on the street?" He called. "All in the… the Central office, right?"

"Yeah?"

He pointed at the black building.

The quad roared. The buildings blurred-past, the black monolith got bigger.

"Oh," I said. "Fuck."

"And now, his holiness Abbot John-Paul shall demonstrate yet again the miracle of his bein', that those who do not believe may be enlightened, and those sons and daughters who cleave already to the bosom of our great community may be strengthened further by his diviniteh!"

Deep-south accent. Nothing better for delivering a bit of sermonising showmanship.

The tragic thing is, when the robe-wearing bastard said the word "bosom" I glanced round the fringes of the crowd to make eye-contact with some likely-looking kid, to titter conspiratorially at the naughty word.

But there weren't any kids. Obviously.

That was the point.

This was back in London. This was maybe two, maybe three years ago. This was one of the few times I let curiosity get the better of me, and went to see The Tomorrow Show.

Standing in a knackered old warehouse somewhere in Docklands, with a crowd gathered round a snazzy plasma screen TV, I couldn't help remembering midnight mass at Christmas, as a kid. Standing there with the family, heads bowed, singing carols…

Even then, I was old enough to know what I believed and what I didn't. Even then, that same sense of awkwardness, of hypocrisy, of toeing the line of something you don't believe in. That same half-formed urge to leap up and slap the vicar, and start shouting at everyone to think, to open their fucking eyes, to stop being so stupid!

I was young. What can I say?

But yeah, the same sensation. Huddled with the TV crowd on a Sunday, zombie-like expressions fixated on that square of flickering light, drinking every word the announcer said. That same sense of not belonging, as everyone around me listened with an alien devotion to the words of John 'look-at-the-size-of-my-bloody-hat' Paul Rohare Baptiste, and his crew of evangelising loudmouths.

That day the broadcast was stronger than usual – the signal more pronounced, the flickering of the screen less intrusive – and the gathering was determined to eke every last iota of information and holiness out of it that they could get.

"The miracle" They wittered around me. "He's going to do it! He's going to do it!"

Oh yeah…

The Miracle.

He performed 'The Miracle' maybe once a month. We'd all seen it before. Even so a little thrill went through the crowd; the fortifying knowledge that their faith was not only being reaffirmed, but positively vindicated. They saw this shit as proof of the Abbot's divinity, and despite all my carefully-polished cynicism I couldn't help but be a little impressed. Oh, yeah, the routine was full of holes, any number of cheats and camera-tricks to muddle the results, but still… It was something about the faces of all the people on-screen, marvelling and gasping in astonishment. You could fool the camera, maybe, but it was a hell of a lot harder to fool the geeks in the studio.

"Hallelujah!" shouted one of the guys in the crowd. Probably a Clergy plant.

It began like it always began, with the announcer bringing two smiling young acolytes into frame. Both were under 18 – a girl and a boy – either so utterly indoctrinated into the church that their beaming smiles were natural symbols of their contentment, or so doped out of their skulls that they didn't care at all. They wore the same dull grey cassocks as everyone around them, with one notable exception; they each lacked a left sleeve, exposing their bare arms to the shoulder.

"Brother James, Brother Tilda." The announcer introduced them with a smile and a swagger, leading them to a white desk inside the same old dusky studio. Three Petri dishes sat waiting, empty, next to a sophisticated microscope with a cable-drenched camera affixed to its viewing column.

The announcer smiled at the camera, mumbled a prayer with his eyes closed, then pulled a trio of sealed hypodermic needles out of a recess in his cloak.

The crowd shivered again.

"Both these fine young acolytes of the Rediscovered Dawn – bless their souls, lordah! – got 'emselves blood type 'O-negative'. Same as us all, brothers and sisters! Same as everyone alive on this good green earth, created and Culled by Him Above!"

He jabbed a needle into the girl's arm, drawing out a puddle of blood with practiced speed. He then thanked the girl, made the sign of the cross between her and himself, and waved her out of the camera's frame. The syringe was emptied into the first Petri dish, and the whole process repeated with "Brother James."

"Now," said the preacher, placing a tiny swab of Tilda's blood on a glass slide beneath the microscope and brandishing the syringe containing James's like an old West sharpshooter. "Since both these wonderful sons and daughters of Je-sus have the same blood types, it's no trouble at all to mix 'em together." He smiled ironically. "All you doubters out there – that ain't faith, people, that's science!"

The crowd laughed on cue.

The image shifted to a microscope view. A uniform expanse of red blobs, so tightly-packed together on a field of bright light that they could almost be mistaken for a solid block. Red blood cells.

The tip of the needle shunted into view like a clumsy freight-train, skimming layers of Tilda's blood aside in its haste. I wondered abstractly if there was some deliberate rationale behind choosing acolytes of different genders; some discreetly sexual overtone in the public mixing of their blood.

Maybe I just had sex on the brain. It'd been a while.

John's blood streamed down the needle and oozed into the patch of cells already cramping the screen. Without a pulse to meld them together there was little natural movement, but again the needle whisked back and forth, blending like an artist on a palette.

"Same as before," the preacher said. "No change, y'see? No reaction. No rejection. Both the same kinda blood."

Cut back to the smirking preacher, only now he had a guest. Seated and frail in a chair beside him, looking even less healthy – more zombified – than usual, was John-Paul Rohare Baptiste, filled with quiet serenity or incontinent senility, depending on your view.

The crowd around me – predictably – went nuts.

The preacher bent down, fussed, muttered prayers, kissed the old git's robes, and eventually got the hell on with it and stuck a needle in the withered skin of the 'Human Prune's' arm. There were a few artfully displayed bruises clustered in the same area where the poor dear soul had undergone previous tests, making the audience cluck and sigh in sympathy at his selfless suffering. They all looked like makeup to me.

Whatever the truth, the preacher was eventually successful in drawing-off a spoonful or two of the holy man's divine fluids, and quickly returned to the microscope, syringe in hand.

The needle slid into the silent mixture of the acolytes' blood and immediately disgorged its own cargo, a slick of ruby covering over the rest.

The effect was almost immediate.