Simon Spurrier - The Culled

"Self-sacrifice, man. That's what the Klans do."

"Can you get inside there?" I said, suddenly tired of it all, hungry to press-on.

He chewed on the smouldering dogend of his cigarette for a long time, closed his eyes, reopened them, and said:

"Snowman's chance in hell. Sorry."

We camped out on the plaza in front of the crucifixes overnight, warming ourselves at an oil drum fire some of the desolate women had built, and ate dog food. We discussed getting inside.

Nate kept asking me why. Why the hell was I doing this? Why the hell would I go up against the Clergy?

I didn't answer. It wasn't his business. Nobody's but my own.

Nothing to do with anyone but me. Not Nate, not the Clergy, not these scavs with their dead eyes.

Just me.

Good soldier. Good soldier.

Except that every time I looked at the building, or at Nate, or at the sobbing mothers, I ended up thinking of Bella; sat in that burnt-out pub in Heathrow, with her bitter glances and don't-fuck-with-me face. Then hunched over the controls of the plane, shivering and sweating. Then dead.

Impaled in the middle of a mashed up plane.

By midnight, when Nate's voice was getting croaky from explaining the ins-and-outs to me, when my eyes were starting to droop and the stink of his endless cigarettes was all over me, I had a plan.

At two in the morning – give or take – a convoy of AVs entered the compound. Seven in total. Old military models, repainted in sky-blue with scarlet circles, covered from tracked wheels to pintle-weapon roofs in ablative shields and home-made deflectors.

In the lead vehicle, a tall man with a long face, a pale robe, and a strange cap stood with his arms folded, gesturing angrily in heated conversation with someone out of sight beside him. He wore scarlet sunglasses.

Nate almost popped.

"That's Cy," he hissed, shivering. "That's fucking Cy…"

The old man covered his face, lurking in my shadow like a terrified child, peering between his fingers.

As the lumbering machines took the final corner I caught a glimpse of Cy's companion, the unlucky receiver of his displeasure. I felt the skin prickle on my forehead, recognising the muscular man with perfectly white hair – bare chested – whose shoulders were criss-crossed with rank scars like a sergeant's stripes.

"The Mickey." I muttered. "That's the guy who saw us take the tunnel."

Nate moaned quietly, hopping from foot to foot.

The Klansman had a black eye, a foul expression, and a hateful glare reserved just for Cy. They appeared to be arguing, though if I know body language at all – and I do – the Mickey wasn't getting anywhere fast.

The Clergy've been tracking me.

Asking questions.

Plotting my movements.

It felt vaguely exhilarating. Almost a pleasure, to be hunted, to be second-guessed, to be looked-for but never found. Just like the old days; sneaking and scuttling in the shadows. Staying covert, staying secret. Doing what I'd been sent to do, then melting away.

Don't you fucking give up, soldier!

Sir, no sir! etc etc.

It was an effort to push down the shivery desire for action. I flipped the remaining blanket over the quadbike's body; trusting to the darkness to hide the confused shape. I needn't have bothered. Cy was barely conscious of his surroundings; so busy grilling his unhappy witness that he didn't so much as glance at the crowd.

When he'd calmed down, Nate hazarded that the convoy had returned from the airport. He said that coming home empty-handed wasn't going to help Cy's standing in the Clergy at all, and it stood to reason he'd bring a witness back with him. Evidence that he'd been doing his job.

Nate said the Church wasn't exactly renowned for being forgiving. Not towards guys who'd slaughtered entire companies of Choirboys, trashed functioning aeroplanes and rendered one of the three Clergy airports useless.

I told Nate: thanks for the good news.

He didn't mention how the angry-looking Cardinal would certainly also have noticed that he hadn't been amongst the dead. He didn't mention that the white-haired Mickey would certainly have reported an elderly black man clinging to a stranger, on the back of a clapped-out quadbike, entering the Queens Midtown tunnel.

He didn't mention that he'd just become an official enemy of the Church, right up there beside me, with the added epithet of 'traitor.'

But it was all over his face and heavy in his voice.

Somewhere deep inside me – somewhere petty-minded and sadistic, which didn't really understand its own motivations – I liked that he was worried.

Something about him.

Oh yeah, one other thing:

As the last vehicle in the convoy growled its way through the razor wire fences, just before the guards slid the tracked walls back into place, a group of the women in the crowd broke free from the shadows and rushed the guards, sobbing as they ran.

The guards shot a few – almost perfunctorily, just to prove they could – but did their best to keep the others alive; clubbing at them with rifle-stocks and batons. I almost mistook it for mercy.

But at first light, as the sun broke over the sooty limits of the river, there were six new bodies dangling and shrieking at the tops of the flagpoles, and three more turning black on a pyre inside the gates.

They were called the Red Gulls, though in defiance of all naming-logic their headquarters were black. Very black. Black in the same way the ocean is damp.

The whole thing was built of wood, laid down over shattered concrete. Cut and fixed lumber, crudely planed and inexpertly joined, sealed with sinuous rivulets of tar and vomit-patterns of wax, draped in layers of black bin-liners. Ultimately the whole thing looked not so much constructed as congealed; spreading out in a great glossy puddle like a drying cowpat.

Just as Nate had warned, the far perimeters were a tangled morass of razor wire, crude trip-alarms and grotesque territory-markers with picked-clean skeletons skewered at their peaks. It was almost embarrassingly easy to slink past.

The whole wretched thing stood near the heart of Central Park, set to one side of what had once been the great lawn, and where the twisted trees loomed out of the dappled sunlight they seemed to tangle and grow into the weird construction, as if its boundaries had little meaning. As if it intended to spread as far as it could, without human aid.

I worked my way towards a knotted entrance on the quietest face, using the shadows of the tree trunks and my own raggedy camouflage to avoid the traffic heading in and out in all other directions. To the south of the park the Clergy ruled absolute, so it didn't surprise me in the slightest that of all the scavs and muscular Klansmen striding out on their business – red feathers rising like spines from their scalps – hardly any did so in this direction. The guard at the door looked positively catatonic.

I opened his neck from the side – punching in and cutting forwards – oozing from the shadows before he could even call a challenge. I dumped the body on a natural shelf above the doorway, formed by a crook in a mouldy tree, and oozed inside like a ghost.

I love this shit.

Prowling. Slinking like an ethereal fucking tiger. Corridor by corridor, beaver-like nest chambers crossed in a doubtful blur, shadows adhered-to, every passing footstep used to mask my own.

It was beautiful.

The Red Gulls were the biggest Klan in the city, besides the Clergy itself.

This was important to my plan.

Years ago they'd put down a concerted coup by some long-gone uptown gang calling itself the NeverNevers, who thought they could take a crack at the Choirboys' power-base. Ever since the Gulls had been John-Paul's most favoured underlings. Permitted to spread through territories on the Clergy's own doorstep they were gifted with all the best weapons, all the choicest scav and all the craziest narcotics.