Simon Spurrier - The Culled

BIN CALLED IN.

MAYB 2 WKS?

U WAIT?

I stared at it for about an hour. Like watching a football replay, hoping against hope you'll spot something you missed last time, hoping it'll all turn out differently.

"Oh." I said. To myself. To the invisible fish in the tank, maybe. Maybe just to the phone, which kept switching off its illuminated display every time I left it alone. "Oh."

Another ambulance went past.

And I woke up for absolutely the last time in the blood-streaked shuddering cabin of a hijacked Boeing 737, feeling like a volcano had taken a shit in my skull, wondering why everything was rushing backwards and forwards.

This time, it really was Bella. Gripping me by the moist rags that passed for my clothing. Shaking me back and forth, so the base of my skull rebounded over and over off the plasticated upholstery of the seat.

"…know you can hear me, you fuck, you wake up, you wake up, you…"

I mumbled something inarticulate. Her vocal barrage didn't stop, just shifted gear like a machine heading straight for burnout.

"…we're going to die, you prick, we're going to crash! The gear, okay? It didn't deploy! Bloody autopilot's taking us down and, fuck, we're going to die…"

I wondered if I had enough time to take more 'Bliss'.

I've always had a thing about landings.

Before The Cull, before the streets filled with dead/dying/hoping-for-death bodies, before the survivors realised what was going on, before the public accusations and riots and whirlwinds of violence and lynchings and general bad shit, I was a frequent flyer.

Under less sinister circumstances I would have built up enough air-miles to take me as far as Jupiter, but when every flight is accompanied by a new passport, new name and new identity, it's difficult to keep track. In my line of work, there wasn't much by the way of perks. Not that it mattered much. Not any more.

The point is, I'd been on enough journeys to know the routine. The sudden gees of the take-off run, the misery of getting a seat next to the toilet, the Sod's Law ratio of passengers in the neighbouring seat (normal people to weirdoes, 1 to 3).

And every time, at the culmination of every tedious stint, after hours and hours of staring glumly at the inner surfaces of a brightly lit tube, when the captain's voice crackled in hidden speakers to announce the imminent touchdown, every time my stomach took a little lurch.

I know all the arguments. I've had them all. Usually with the weirdo next to me.

"…still statistically the safest way to travel…"

"…more likely to get hit by a bus than…"

Blah blah blah.

Call me a pessimist, but there's something about the image of 40,000kg of tightly compacted metal and plastic descending at catastrophic speed towards a strip of rock, which is not – let us be quite clear about this – renowned for its softness, that does my head in. There's something about 200-plus people strapped together in a cylinder with fins, undertaking a controlled stall in mid-air, that gets my palms a little sweaty.

Paint me irrational.

Five days before I woke up from the Blissout in the cabin of a doomed 737, with Bella shaking my head and telling me we were going to die, she and I had been making plans.

Talking it through, sat in a burnt-out pub in a burnt-out street on the outskirts of Heathrow, eating feral rabbit and an optimistic harvest of wild berries. Bella had told me about autopilots. I'd only found her the week before and we were still getting used to each other. To me she was someone with piloting experience, too dosed out of her head to care about the hazards, with her own private reasons for wanting to get Stateside. I didn't waste any energy caring what they were. Not then. It meant she'd help me without needing payment, cajolement or threats. Bonus.

To her, I was just the gun-toting psycho that'd get her aboard.

"Thing is," she'd said, picking blackberry pips out of her teeth, "an autopilot can do pretty much everything."

"You what?"

"S'right." She waved a dismissive hand. "I mean… obviously you need a real pilot too. Keep an eye, re-plot, react to shit. But basically the auto's doing the tough stuff. Following the course, regulating height and speed, all of that. If it weren't for the takeoff thing I figure they would've got rid of the crew altogether, given a year or ten." She scowled, adding the silent:

If not for The Cull, I mean…

Still a common thing, in conversation, talking about the future like there still was one.

"The takeoff thing?" I repeated, confused.

"Yeah. Don't ask me why. Trainers never explained it, and I was only on the course three weeks. Needs a human touch, I guess. Too many variables, too much left to chance."

I nodded, faintly relieved. The idea that each time I'd taken off in the past my life had been in the hands of a glorified calculator hadn't sat well.

Until:

"Hang on. Only takeoff?"

Bella had smiled at that. She'd cadged a cigarette off me earlier (I don't smoke, but currency's currency) and now she lit it carefully, tar drawling lazily past her teeth.

"Only takeoff."

"Then… the landing's… ah…"

"Yep." Another evil little grin, blowing out smoke like a squid venting ink, then a shrug. "Not always. Most pilots'll do it themselves. Matter of faith, I guess. But say it's raining, or there's mist on the runway. Hit some buttons, sit back, Bob's your uncle."

"Fuck."

"Yep."

"So when we, ah…"

"Heh heh."

She had a pretty laugh, all things considered. She was far more prone to sniggering nastily, which got on my nerves, but still. It's not like there was much to laugh about.

"When we fly," she said, "you can bet your last soggy Marlboro I'll be using the auto as much as I can. Trust me, it's the more reliable option."

Needless to say, this conversation had not filled me with confidence.

At around a thousand feet, with the alarms hitting an unbearable crescendo and a visible gash of smoke rising past the starboard windows, the full stinking reality of the situation leeched its way past the Bliss hangover and punched me between the eyes.

I was flying aboard a plane belonging to a notoriously unforgiving sectarian movement, which hadn't been properly maintained or serviced in five years, which had an unknown quantity of fuel in its reserves, a terrified junkie at the controls who'd never progressed in her training beyond a computerised flight simulator, and a catastrophic amount of damage to part or parts unknown of its undercarriage.

And it was being landed, single-handed, by a geriatric computer.

"Oh fuck." I said. "We're going to die."

Bella stopped shaking me.

"S'what I've been trying to saaaaay!" she screamed, eyes bulging.

For a moment or two we stared at each other, with nothing but the irregular whine of the engines and the spasmodic whooping of alarms between us. Then we burst into laughter.

Adrenaline does funny things.

Bella's laugh didn't sound all that pretty just then.

As near as I can tell, the auto brought us in on target.

I wasn't watching closely – the seat I'd buckled myself into was set some way back from the cockpit on the grounds that if things did get ugly the further forwards one sat the uglier they'd be – but in snatched glimpses through the open doorway I could make out the distant scar of what might be an airstrip, burnished in the bronze light of the afternoon, bordered on one side by a blurry haze of outbuildings and on the other by a bright mirror of water. To me it seemed to be directly ahead and low on the horizon, which I can only assume is the best place for an airstrip to be.

Bella sat next to me, singing freaky little nursery rhymes, refusing to talk.