Simon Spurrier - The Culled

I'd filtered out the noise of the crowd by now, but the force of it was still there at the back of my head, nudging against my concentration. I'd spent an hour flicking through my tattered map, and a series of notes Nate had gathered from the scavs nearby; all of them covered in spidery descriptions that didn't help at all ('gud rats!' and 'watr mostly clean'). I had a vague idea where I'd go. I wasn't stupid enough to let myself believe I had a plan; that I was ready. In situations like this, there's no such thing as 'ready'. There's just people who can wing it, and people who can't.

I let the instincts take over, like shrugging on an old coat; patched and frayed and stinking, but so comfortable you can't imagine ever taking it off.

Vehicles rumbling nearby. The five Gulls glared at me, weapons bristling in every direction. Four blokes, one woman. That same crazy chick who had the sword before, but the others were just faces. Muscular, armoured-up, ready to play. All except Big Scrim. He stood out; encased in flashy sports gear and rubber body-armour, holding the Clergy's tracker-device like a novelty TV aerial in the back of an open-top jeep.

Everywhere I looked, Clergy.

Clergy guns. Clergy AVs. Cardinal Cy whispering to Scrim, his four goons cross-armed behind him, pointing and directing, throwing glances my way beneath hooded eyelids. Silent communication between us, crackling like static.

Twat.

The crowd gets noisier. Arms slap against my shoulders, people shout and laugh, something painful digs beneath the skin of my neck.

The tracer.

Stay calm.

Breathe.

Are you ready, soldier?

Sir, no sir!

Well done, son. Right answer. Now get goi A flare went up.

I ran.

Trees whipping past. Branches scraping cheeks already sliced and puffy from last night's melee. Legs pounding like pneumatics.

It's almost a joy to open-up. All cylinders. Let go. Feel the burn.

Know everything.

Cover the angles.

Their advantages: Speed, local knowledge, the tracker in my neck, more guns than a survivalist all-comers WorldCon and enough drugs to make a pharmaceutical multinational look like a primary school chemistry kit.

So. One thing at a time.

Get off the track. Confound the vehicles.

I took the verge beside the street at a vault, darted through more trees; heading for the dark blot of stone ahead. Heading west, I think, over slimy husks of rotting trunks. Something man-made looming between the boles. An escape from the preternatural chaos of the park with its forested wilderness. Too many shadows here. Too many unknowns.

I paused for a second, shaking my muscles down, taking the time to stretch whilst I caught my breath, then onwards. Up steps greasy with lichen and mould, past knots of scavs hoping for a good view, clamouring in the shadow of a colossal building. The poor buggers recoiled and ran when they saw they'd got their wish, terrified I'd bring-down the Gulls on their viewing spot.

A second flare went up behind me – blood red and baleful – and I stumbled without pausing through a shattered doorframe into a great emptiness.

It took my eyes a while to adjust, and as I groped the echoes of my clumsy movements suggested a vast void all around me; the tinkling of broken glass and crunch of rubble underfoot. Shapes swam into focus. Button-like eyeballs regarded me. Brass signs and red ropes.

A fucking great elephant, staring down. Someone had snapped off its trunk.

AKELEY HALL OF AFRICAN MAMMALS

…a banner read; plucked out of the shadows in my peripheral vision by the overstretched blur of the instinctive training.

Trust your perceptions.

Don't think. Just react.

Trust yourself.

Go!

Reality swam and reformed, and I'd barely noticed myself rushing up stairs that folded back and forth in concertina ribbons, up the sides of a great hallway, passing glass cabinets crammed with taxidermy's greatest trophies and fossilised impressions screwed to walls beside plastic plaques.

Engines growled in the distance, rushing nearer, audible through crack-holed windows, arched and medieval. Raised voices.

Fuckers.

On the fourth floor a frieze of limp connections and cable-like structures swam together in my mind to form great prehistoric beasts: fleshless and comical in their gawky poses, tangled amidst steel supports and gaudily-coloured waxwork models.

In my state of mind, adrenalised to hell and incapable of rationalising through the tsunami of reactions, finding dinosaurs on the fourth floor of a vast building did not seem worthy of remark. Just another bunch of dumb bastards, wiped out before their time.

Up here, scav kit was everywhere. Blankets and cushions concealed lazily between titanic ribs, small piles of combustible rubbish pulled off the displays, heaped in odd corners for tinder and late-night fires. Beside me a glass cabinet containing rows of fossilised teeth had been partially shattered; torn away from the wall, left jagged with razor panels incised. On the other side of the room someone had used the Apatosaurus as a toilet, and the whole chamber was thick with flies and dust.

Voices spiralled up from the great hall far below, shouts and curses followed by the conspicuous silence of people being quiet. I peered cautiously over the rim of the balcony, hoping the radio marker didn't provide a vertical reading. Sure enough, ghostly shapes moved in the light-dappled lobby; oozing from cover to cover with the exaggerated care of those who think their enemies are close.

Cat and Mouse. Rule number one:

Don't be the mouse.

Sir, yes sir etc etc.

So I picked up the remains of the cabinet with all the care I could muster, winced at every tinkle of fragmented glass, and pitched it with a roar over the balcony's edge.

The snarl took on a violent life of its own in the acoustic void of the stairwell, modulating musically with the xylophonic traumas of the cabinet.

Someone below reacted fast. The poor sod.

Automatic gunfire stitched the open stairwell with muzzlefire and noise, and then nothing but glass. Like champagne. Like watery froth, dazzling.

Shattering.

Tumbling.

Slicing.

The sound was shocking. A calamitous crash that resounded in every dimension and shook the air.

Then nothing but silence.

Then screams that bubbled away into gasps, as whoever was underneath the cabinet rustled off their jagged little coil. Then more silence.

Then just the moans of shocked survivors, cut to shreds.

And the soft sound of me, running like hell.

I'd stopped twice on the way down from the dinosaur exhibits. The few fractured shards of rationality still spinning inside my head had decided I was inside a museum, and the one thing museums always have is an enormous floor plan in every corner.

That was stop 'Number One.'

In a display of the Woodlands Indians, in the far western wing of the third floor (within easy sprinting distance of a stairwell which – I was reliably assured – led down to the side exit on West 77^th street), I crouched and bled.

This was the result of stop Number Two.

Thick rivulets down my spine, oozing under the hem of my trousers and down the backs of my legs. Didn't matter. I was in control.

Taking my time. Calm. Breathing well.

The sensible savage.

I think somehow, somewhere inside, I felt indignant, too. Like: how dare these fuckers chase me? How dare they? How dare they outnumber me?

Me!

It was a useful emotion.

This was home, in a way. Worming through the darkened corridors of an embassy in some exotic place, waiting for the moment to strike. Lurking, stalking, closing in.

Or letting them come to me.

This time the arseholes came mob-handed. They'd closed on the tracker beacon with admirable speed, slinking along open corridor corners to avoid ambushes, sidestep-by-sidestep. I could hear their progress with practiced acuity: three together on point then another (a softer tread, probably the woman) taking rearguard.