Simon Spurrier - The Culled

The challenger was stripped of all guns, tools and blades. An electrical tag was pinned beneath his skin (joyously provided by the friendly neighbourhood Clergy), and with all due ceremony, gravity and cheer, he was told to fuck off and get running.

The hunters were released five minutes later.

When you initiated a Tag, there was only one rule worth knowing:

Stay alive for two hours; you've won. Everything that belonged to the loser now belongs to you. Power. Privileges. Property. Rank.

I got the impression it didn't happen often.

And just for the record, just to make the whole shitty thing even more wonderful, it was overseen from start to finish by representatives of – take a wild guess – the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn.

The cleverest thing I'd done – and if I'm honest it wasn't until afterwards that Nate explained why it was such a smart move – was to wade-in heavy and cause some serious collateral along the way. At the time I'd done it as a path-of-least-resistance thing: I wanted to get to the boss, his goons were in the way – QED.

But no. I'd got lucky. It turned out that killing a Klansman in the normal course of life carried an immediate penalty of 'Oh-God-Make-The-Pain-Stop-Please-Please-Please' death. It was supposed to prevent gloryhunters from killing their way up to the top without effort, to stop disgruntled scavs getting mutinous around their overlords, and to deter internal arguments from spilling-over. It worked too – most of the time – and the only ones exempt were the Klanbosses themselves.

Which meant I'd accidentally carried-off a neat spot of playing the odds. If I won the Tag I'd be the new Boss, and they couldn't hold me accountable for all the chop-socky I'd caused en route. And if, Nate said, I lost, then it didn't matter then either.

I scowled. "How come?"

"'Cos you'll be dead anyway."

I'd crippled, killed or incapacitated more of my potential hunters than seemed fair or decent. I'd wiped out the Klanboss's top dogs in one fell swoop. I'd left him with an untested rabble to try and catch me, and put the fear of god up them at the same time. They'd seen what I could do. They'd hesitate, I hoped, to corner me alone.

And, frankly, I needed every advantage I could get.

All this just to get into the UN building. It had better be fucking worth it.

They kept us waiting until ten o'clock. It meant that when things kicked off, the two hour limit would expire at midnight. I guess they thought it was more dramatic.

I wasn't about to complain. It gave me the rest of the day to sleep and prepare, whilst they – the Gulls – scuttled about like headless chickens, conspiring and scheming, treating the wounded and carting-off the dead.

All through the day, Nate kept a nonchalant sort of 'watch' while I kipped, nestled up in a bed of dry leaves beneath a footbridge, on an out-of-the-way path in the park. He shuffled off once or twice to chat to the little knots of Red Gull scavs living in bivouacs in other parts of the greenery, keeping himself out of sight of any Clergy passing through, and seemed to be warming to the role of information gatherer. I like to think he saw himself as a duellist's 'Number Two', preparing for his benefactor's moment of pistol-waving tribulation… but frankly behind his open face and warming smile it was fucking impossible to work out what he was thinking, let alone what historical-romantic notions he was dreaming-up.

He mumbled a lot, just under his breath, and had started to sweat too much.

All very weird.

As I slept, I dreamed of the signal on the computer in the Vauxhall Cross building – the glowing word PANDORA, beaming bright. I dreamed of Bella impaled on her spike, shouting at me to stop being so selfish and think, dammit, about what she'd told me. I dreamed of Nate, laughing, and John-Paul Rohare Baptise, dancing through it all like a daddy-long-legs, battering himself against polished glass to reach the shining light outside.

The light was red, and sticky.

I dreamed of somebody else too, but the face I should have memorised years before had become a fuzzy collection of features in my mind, and the figure dissolved the instant I reached out to grab it.

Nate woke me at eight. He'd caught a couple of rats off the banks of the stagnant Turtle Pond and sat cooking them, not once complaining at doing all the hard work, rambling away blithely on the events of the day, apparently not troubled by whether I was listening or not.

I was.

He said the whole territory was in uproar. He said the scavs were all but hysterical at the news of what I'd got up to that morning, and it was a toss-up as to whether said hysteria was based on delight or disgust.

He said no one had ever heard of a Klanboss getting himself Tagged before. He said already the other tribes in the area – the StripLims to the east and the Globies up on the edges of Harlem – were choked with gossip and book-running. Already barter-wagers were hot business all across the Island, he said, and scavs from Klans he'd never even heard of had been showing up in the En-Tees all round the edges of the Red Gull patch, to stand about and murmur in low voices about the 'Big Tag', hoping to catch a glimpse of the action.

He said it was big news.

"You, ah…" He coughed awkwardly, and twitched. He looked unwell. "You sure you wanna do this?"

I told him, of course I did. How the hell else was I going to get into the UN building?

"Yeah, yeah… Yeah." He coughed again. "Only, ah… That Cardinal asshole, Cy. He was up here 'round noon." His voice shook.

"Did he see you?"

"You think I'd be talking to you if he did? Shit, no! Stayed well outta his way. You live in En-Why any lengtha time, you get good at making sure folks ignore your ass. Like… There was this one time I got stuck with…"

"Nate." I interrupted the tangent before it got started, troubled by his uncomfortable manner. Even in the midst of his most enthused ramblings, he'd never seemed quite so twitchy. "You were saying. About Cy."

"Yeah. Sure. H-had himself a little chat to Scrim, that's all. In-depth, man. Intense."

"Who's 'Scrim'?"

Nate looked at me like I was stupid. "Motherfucker you tagged. Top dog."

"Fair enough." I poked the rat in the fire. "Stupid name, but fair enough. So what did our friend Cy have to say for himself?"

Nate shook his head, eyes rolling weirdly. "Pass. No way was I getting close enough to hear. But you want me take a wild stab, I'd say he's keeping an eye. Knows it's you. I mean, shit, it don't take a genius! Raggedy-assed stranger shows up at LaGuardia, goes through a pack of Choirboys like a razor. Next day you got witnesses see the same guy heading through Queens on a quad. And next day, Mister 'Nobody-Knows-Who-The-Hell-He-Is' not only gets himself balls-deep in the Red goddamn Gulls, but slaps a challenge on Big Scrim.

"You think Cy ain't gonna make the connection? C'mon! He knows. He knows it's gonna be you out there tonight."

"But you said this shit is sacred, right? You said nobody else gets to interfere."

"And that's the truth. But that don't stop our pal the Cardinal from helping the odds. Clergy got themselves every killing toy in the world holed-up over there." He nodded east, towards the unseen slab of the Secretariat. His hands were shaking. "They got every brand of… of chem with a name, and twice as many without.

"I hate to say it, most guys, running a Tag, they got less hope than a snowball in hell. But you…? Up against the Gulls? And them tooled-up by the Choir?

"Shee-it!"

I let this sink in.

"I see," I said.

Ten o'clock. I stood and waited, tensed, beneath a canopy of spindle-fingered trees. Beside me the stagnant water sucked at the south bank of the Turtle Pond, on the fringe of what had once been 79^th street and was now a crippled lane of rubble; its tarmac long since plundered for the construction of the Gulls' shanty nest.