Simon Spurrier - The Culled

The cells intermixed. Knots formed. Colours darkened. Like some glue-smeared retraction, the whole bloody morass shrunk-down together, accreting and clinging, separating into dark nodules. It was like watching something perfectly transparent held over a flame warp and ruck into sharp new angles, forming nodes.

"What y'all are seeing," the preacher said, "is called clumpin'. It's what happens when you put the wrong kinda blood into someone. Now, all us O-negs, back before the Holy Wrath of Him On High – Hallelujah! – delivered The Cull upon our miserable sinner's world, you coulda' given our blood to just about any Tom, Dick or Harry. You do it slow enough, you get no reaction at all. Universal donor, brothers and sisters! Amen!

"But you try introducing something else into an O-neg system, it's gonna react. It's gonna get to clumpin'."

Cut back to the preacher. Face serious, now, all fire and brimstone, sweat prickling on his brow.

" 'And I heard a great voice'", he hissed, " 'out of the temple, saying to the Seven Angels, "go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth!"

" 'And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast; and upon them which worshipped his image!'"

The preacher wiped his brow, as if he'd been overcome then released from some powerful trance. I stifled a yawn.

"Revelations!" He yelled. "Revelations 16, one and two! The prophet foresees the wrath of God, claiming to death and damnation all them miserable sinners and heathens he's marked! Marked on the inside, brothers and sisters! Marked in their very blood!"

He took a deep breath, and in the pause I glanced across the crowd beside me. None of them could stand still; quivering, hopping from foot to foot, shivering in elation.

"Brothers and sisters," the preacher said, "the righteous Cull swept across creation and took from us the means to pursue our iniquities, our selfish agendas, our unholy wars. It took away our great numbers, our great technologies, our great civilisations – ha! Amen! – and left us only with our spirit and our faith. He spared only those without the mark – the O-negs – and all others have perished! Science tells it! The Lord-ah explains it!"

Extreme close-up.

"All were Culled – except one! One great man, whose purity was so great, whose vision so intense, whose strength was so indomitable, that he withstood the mark placed upon his vile family of sinners, that he bore the pain of his ancestry with cheek turned, and was spared, alone in all the world, by the Lord on high!"

A crash-zoom, crude and old fashioned, but just right for the intensity of the moment; slinking away from the preacher and straight onto John-Paul's face.

Smiling. Beaming.

Crowd goes wild!

I let myself out at the back of the warehouse whilst the cheers were still echoing about.

He should be dead, the old shit. He should have choked and died.

Oh, fuck, I know, it could easily be a fake. Who's to say they're cutting to that same microscope as the one in the studio? Who's to say it's not someone else's blood in the syringe? But I've seen the cockups, when the blood of the acolytes react weirdly because of this or that blood disease, or some other unusual condition. I've seen the episodes where they have to fetch replacements, or the preacher's used his own blood, or the microscope-camera fucks-up and they have to mix such massive quantities – live in Petri dishes – that the Abbot ends-up looking whiter than a sheet.

Always the same. Always the clotting and the clumping.

I've seen episodes where they've held up his birth certificate for the camera, focused hard on the 'A(Rh+)' box. His name was John P. Miller, for the record, before The Cull.

I've seen episodes where they've filmed his blood – exposed to the air – shrivelling and dying as the Culling virus withers it away.

It could all be a stunt. It could, but it wasn't. My instincts told me.

So how the fuck had the old shithead managed it?

Either way, it was great TV.

We started seeing people – real ones, out in the open, slinking out of our way – as we approached our destination.

Evening came down like a curtain – sudden and soft – and the egg yolk sun sat on the encrusted skyline and punctured the milky haze just enough to blaze along every angle of that great slab of rock, that great blue-black monolith, that towered over the East River like a gravestone.

Once, it had been the Secretariat building; the administrative heart of the United Nations HQ, with the library and the General Assembly (a shallow curl of white concrete with a colossal bowling ball embedded in its roof) cowering in its sunless shadow; the whole complex pressed-up against the river like it was trying to swim to freedom.

As we swept nearer, I couldn't help noticing how many of the windows were broken; how vividly the great satellite-dish squatting beside the river had been painted.

Scarlet. A great scarlet 'O'.

Clergy territory.

I've always been a tad conflicted, as far as the UN went.

On the one hand, it's a pretty bloody obvious idea, isn't it? An organisation to get all the contrary fucks in the world talking, cooperating. It's what an American would call a 'No-Brainer.' And yeah, you could whinge at length about how, at the end, it had no power to speak of, how its hands were tied-up in red tape and corruption, how its goals were too vague or too elitist, how its unity didn't extend quite as far as everyone made out… but at least it was there. At least people could look at it and say:

"Check it out. There's hope."

On the other hand, I spent my entire professional life doing nasty secret things the UN had made illegal decades before, so chalk another one up to national disharmony.

Besides, there was a steaming crater where the White House once stood – along with everything else inside a ten mile radius – serving as cancerous testament to the UN's ability to mediate in a crisis.

I'm being uncharitable again. These poor fuckers must've been hit just as hard as everyone else when The Blight struck. It's not like you can calm someone down when their finger's on 'The Button', when the whole world's dying around you, when a mystery virus is in the middle of slaughtering 59 billion people, just by appealing to their bloody humanity. These are politicians we're talking about!

But still. It was hard to reconcile the dismal uselessness of the whole bloody organisation with the magnificence of its home.

On the approach, the people on the road were moving slowly; barely looking-up as we passed. One or two vehicles shunted along cracked streets, full of people with dead eyes and no words. I got that quiet chill in the base of my spine, like with the combat conditioning except colder, more logical, and let my senses fill-in the blanks.

Tear-streaked faces, eyeing-up the brooding edifice with fear and disgust curling their lips. Knuckles white.

Anger, resentment, terror.

Heads lowered, bodies resigned. Dejection and despair.

They had the look of people who'd come to see something; who'd travelled expressly for a sight, a vision, and were now wending their way home having seen it, heartbroken.

They had the look of pilgrims whose journey had been wasted. Misery tourists.

None of them were Clergy. None even sported the same brand as Nate. They wore Klan colours of a dozen different kinds, avoiding one another but united in the uniformity of their expressions.

And the vast majority were women.

"What's got them so pissed?" I asked Nate, as we took the last corner onto 1^st Avenue. "I thought people loved the Cler…"

My voice just… stopped.