Simon Spurrier - The Culled

In the guidebooks, it was flags. A great arc of them, fluttering and proud, lining the approach along United Nations Plaza, one for each member-state. I used to wonder what happened every time someone new signed-up. Did they have to stick up a new flag? Re-space the others? Who determined the order?

It wasn't flags anymore.

Nate had warned me about this. The Spartacus moment. The forest of crucifixes.

The warning hadn't worked.

At one edge of the road there stood a tall truck with a cherry-picker, painted blue and scarlet in the Clergy's colours, and at the peaks of each immense flagpole, T-squared with crudely welded crossbeams, its grisly works hung down and moaned.

And bled.

And pissed.

And crapped on the heads of the crowd below.

Distraught lovers, I started to understand. Friends. Family. Unable to reach up to cut them down, eyed warily by the robed fucks with guns and vehicles and all the toys in the world, from the other side of the great razor-wire fence. Spike-tipped stanchions, scaffolds with heavy machine-gun positions, looping ribbons of barbed wire and more guns than I could count.

The United Nations had become a fortress, and it displayed its captured enemies with all the medieval subtlety of heads on gateposts.

"What did they do?" I whispered, as the quad chugged away to silence. One of the dangling men was screaming down at a face in the crowd, telling her to get away, to not see him like this, to go back home, forget him. Eventually the Choirboys took turns pelting him with stones until he shut up, then glared and sneered at the woman in the crowd, daring her to stop them.

They had a basket of rounded pebbles standing-by. I guess this sort of thing happened a lot.

Nate clambered off the quad and sighed. He looked jumpier than I'd ever seen him, hopping from foot to foot, nervous energy renewed, chewing his nails.

"Mostly rule breakers." He said. "Fight starters, thieves. Maybe tried to settle shit without appealing to the adjudicators. Skipped-out on a Tag. Who the fuck knows?"

Staring up at those men and women – stripped naked, black and blue, lashed to their poles with barbed cables, necks sagging, shoulders aching – I found myself too exhausted, too disgusted, to even bother asking Nate what the fuck he was talking about.

The crux of it had come through loud and clear.

"Anyone who pisses them off." I said.

Nate nodded, expression wary, and pulled his cap lower over his face.

An even larger crowd was gathered directly outside the gates. They had the look of a picket or protest, but stood in silent rows with arms lowered, a bulging semicircle of quiet indignation, staring in with eyes smouldering. Their gazes were lifted past the bored guards, past the barricades and silent vehicles, past the shanty-buildings clustered like barnacles around the base of the Secretariat. Here an even greater proportion were women, and when I let my senses slip into that subconscious state of information ravening – drinking in every tiny indicator around me, letting my old brain piece it together – I could almost taste their hunger, their sorrow, their desperation. They'd come here to reclaim something they'd lost.

"Moms." Nate said, fussing with the quadbike. "Come to see their kids."

"They get to visit them?"

Nate gave a grim little laugh and shook his head. "Hell, no. Mostly they just… stand here. A week, maybe two. Hoping for a glimpse, some sort of sign, I dunno. Something to show 'em their kids really are building that… 'New Tomorrow.' Make them feel better, maybe. Not so guilty."

"They ever get their wish?"

"Uh-uh. Whatever happens in there, it stays in there."

"But you used to bring them here. You must have seen the inside."

Nate shrugged. "Parts. Reception garage, fuelling pump. But I tell you this… the New Tomorrow looks kinda the same as the Old Today, and there ain't no hordes of happy kids rushin' about in there, either."

I stared across the scene for a long time, letting the misery infuse. Nate lit a cigarette and sat smoking, turning away with overblown discretion every time one of the guards happened to glance our way.

If I'd stopped, if I'd thought about it right then and there, I might have been surprised. For all his posturing, for all his fear and anguish at the Clergy getting their hands on him, here he was. Hadn't raised a word of protest, coming to this place. He'd walked right up to the outskirts of the dragon's den, and sat down outside with his new-found protector and his knightly armour lowered to his ankles.

But I wasn't thinking of that, right then. Call me dumb. I was thinking of the groans from the crucifixes, and the sobs from the mothers, and the silence from inside the compound.

And Bella, briefly. Thinking about Bella, when I should have been focusing on the mission. When I should have been concentrating on Don't you fucking give up, soldier.

Sir, no sir, etc etc.

"In London," I said, eventually, "they used to send out Catcher squads. Clergy goons. All armed. Lot of them were women… Maybe the bigwigs thought it'd make things easier. Woman's touch, that sort of thing.

"A lot of the people who survived The Cull ended-up well into the Church anyway. All those broadcasts, every Sunday. Never ceased to amaze me, but I saw it happen all the time. People giving-up their own kids, shit. Treated it like a fucking ceremony."

Nate blew a smoke ring. "I was there too. Remember? I seen it."

"Yeah. But did you ever see them with the people who didn't give-in so easy? The ones who… wouldn't let go. Hid their kids. Kept them safe. You ever see that? The Clergy used to call them 'selfish.' You believe that?"

He sighed.

"You ever see the Catcher squads?" I said, feeling strangely angry with him, wanting to press until he snapped. I couldn't work out why.

He shook his head.

"You ever see them kicking down a door, or shooting a screaming woman in the street, or dragging-off kids to the fucking airport and telling the parents they were dead if they tried to follow? You ever see that Nate? You ever see that shit, before they brought you over here to ferry the sprogs back and forth?"

He looked away.

The sun dipped below the horizon. A few fires were being built by the more enterprising segments of the crowd. The silence stretched on.

"It's different here," Nate said, after long minutes had eked away. There was… something in his voice. Bitterness? Guilt? "All the Klan shit, you know? It's what's expected."

"I don't follow."

"Choirboys keep the Klans in order. Oversee disputes. S'what the Adjudies are for. And they… they parcel out guns, sometimes food, sometimes water. And the drugs. They got so much of that shit in there…" he nodded to the Secretariat, and again that something in his voice "…it's coming out their fucking asses."

"So they dish it out to all the Klans? Why? Just for… for loyalty?"

"Cos in return they get the tithe."

I glanced around the crowd, the tattered clothes, the dirt-smeared tags.

"But these are just scavs. These aren't Klansmen."

"Right again. But they gotta do what the bosses say. They want to eat? They want to stay alive? They don't wanna get skewered on no territory-pole like a fucking shish kebab? Then it's easier to go with the flow. Hand over the youngsters. Believe they going someplace better." He sighed again, staring at the crowd. "You act like a good little scav, you give up your own flesh and blood; you maybe get an extra ration, maybe a better sleepin' pitch. Maybe you get promoted to Klansman earlier than otherwise. And if you're smart, if you figure out that's the way to the top, then the only way to do it is to… to make yourself believe. You understand? Make yourself believe it's right.