Simon Spurrier - The Culled

The trail led into the Secretariat.

Hiawatha skidded on blood, marvelling deep-down at the raw apathy of a man who could bring about such wanton violence in the sole pursuit of… of what?

He stepped into the gloomy building, and went to meet his destiny.

I couldn't help smiling. The heat coming up from the fires, the smell of unpleasant things cooking, the acid stink of gun smoke.

Yeah. Let it out. Let the grin break through. You're so close. Enjoy. You deserve it.

Then with the guilt. Screams and blood and desperate people cutting chunks out of each other, just because I told them to. Just because I needed to get past those big fucking gates. I lied to them. Worked them up like a sculptor hammering clay.

Monster. Manipulator. Don't you care about anything? Don't you Then with the irritation at the guilt.

You trained for this. This is what you DO. This is who you ARE.

Round and round and round.

Fuck it. Fuck them all.

Don't feel guilty.

Look at what you did. Enjoy it.

From the third floor, looking down through the Secretariat's shattered mirror glass, it was quite a sight. Barely visible in the darkness, the undulations of the throng could easily have been mistaken for a gloomy sort of fog; wafted about by contrary breezes, lit internally by wyrd lights and wil-o-the-wisps; all of it sped-up by a factor of ten and replayed to a BBC Sounds Of War effects tape. Now and then something solid differentiated itself from the melee – a moonflash along the edge of a blade, a torn strip of pale robe, an effervescent burst of cranial fluids. Little details, like individual brushstrokes discernible within a completed painting.

They didn't last. Big, crazy spectacles have a way of homogenising like that. Little by little everything was sucked inside; reabsorbed by the heaving, living, collective amoebic monstrosity that was the crowd.

"Jesus," I muttered, not really thinking.

Being stuck in a fight on ground-level, that's a messy, brutal, untidy sort of shit. No time to think. No time to gauge the way it's going. Just act, react, dodge, stab, duck, shoot. Gunfire ripping from left to right, contrary angles of devastation, panicky shouts and thoughtless responses, friendly fire.

But from above…

Oh yes. From above you get a pretty good idea of why generals get to be such arrogant arseholes. Why politicians don't talk about individuals, just 'the people'. Why the guys who make decisions – the top dogs, the head honchos – get to be sadistic fucks with no concept of human expenditure whatsoever. From above, it's all…neat. Tidy. Like playing war games with over expensive models, rolling dice to determine movements, accuracies, wounds.

Nobody ever rolled a dice to determine how many sobbing loved ones each dead model leaves behind. How much the poor bastard suffered before he was removed from the playing table.

It takes a funny sort of brain to see a crowd of people, and mentally note them down as a 'diversion'. 'Cannon fodder'. 'Acceptable losses.'

Guilty as charged.

Again with the guilt.

Something exploded down below, and lit them all up. Just for a fraction, they were people. Different faces, contorted in anger and pain and fear. Individuals, locked together. All unique.

For just a fraction, fat with guilt and empathy and all that other bollocks, I wasn't the cold-hearted manipulative scheming fuck I thought I was.

Then the light faded and the mob coalesced in the shadows, and I was back to enjoying the spectacle, congratulating myself on getting inside the Secretariat without a scratch, being me.

"You… ah… You don't want to go help 'em?" Nate rumbled from somewhere behind me. He'd followed me up here like a puppy dog. He looked even worse now, twitching and sweating and jerking. I couldn't be bothered to ask what was wrong. Not when I was this close. Not when nothing else mattered.

I ignored him.

The fight was all but over anyway. Still a few pockets of resistance. Clergymen scrabbling behind improvised cover to mow down scavs in their dozens, stuttering cones of perfect light drizzling lead into onrushing walls of black rag and snarling flesh. The bodies piled up like human ramps, twitching and groaning, but there was more to come, more plugging the gaps, more stolen vehicles blasting away with heavy weapons.

Little by little the Choirboys were becoming isolated; cut-off from buildings, rounded-up in coils of the mob and gradually ringed in, hemmed, set upon.

None of them went quietly. And after the first few who tried to surrender were torn apart – limbs wrenched clean-away, eyes put out, scalps sliced off and ribs broken – none of the others bothered to fall on the scavs' mercy. They'd seen the look in their eyes. The excitement, the primal joy of being caught-up in… in something.

The pack-instinct. That old-brain thing, rustling inside my head, howling to go and join its brothers. But no mercy. None of that.

One or two of the Choirboys sang hymns as their ammunition ran out and the crowds seethed forwards. Mostly they didn't get past the first line.

There were fewer robes out there than I'd expected.

Where are the others?

I turned away. Pretty soon the big, spectacular part would be over and the scavs would be slinking inside the buildings. Kicking down doors under the auspices of finding their lost children; secretly yearning for nests of resistance, dorms piled with sleeping Choirboys, easy targets.

Let them.

Oddly enough, the Secretariat itself was almost deserted. On floor after floor the plush offices of another time – structured with the all the ergonomic ingenuity of too much money, in broad stripes of grey and beige and airy spaces and comfy sofas and padded swivel-chairs and blah blah blah – sat silent; deserted. It reminded me, in a homesick sort of way, of Vauxhall Cross; my base for the past five years, where once the SIS had controlled its agents all across the world, keeping fingers on the pulses of foreign threats, adjusting and prodding regimes they didn't like, sneaking about with a distinct absence of Martinis, pithy one-liners, Q-Department gadgets and obscenely horny chicks.

Well. Mostly.

The difference was that the offices back in London had a dangerous sort of mystique lacking here in the Secretariat. Sharper edges, maybe. Deeper shadows. Tight corners and internal windows. Em-Eye-fucking-Six, the place said. Don't you cock-around with us.

The Secretariat just looked like an expensive software corporation.

Still, at least it felt lived in. Most of its airy floors had been comprehensively violated. Desks and waiting-sofas used as sleeping palettes, walls covered in neat lines of devotional graffiti (Book of Revelations, mostly, which I guess is sort of de rigeur amongst insane apocalyptic cults). I figured the Clergy used them for sleeping dorms, store-rooms, pantries, whatever.

Which sort of begged the question: Where were they all?

The battle outside was still raging, still going strong, but there was no way in hell the scavs had overrun every last Choirboy in this place. It was enormous.

So where were they?

Nate and I had bumped into a few of the little shits on the stairwell on the way inside. Mostly they were sprinting down from above, guns and heavy packs stowed on their backs and crooked beneath overladen arms, and I'd been obliged to shoot them as they came clattering down the last flight without waiting for them to arm-up. I'd be discreetly ashamed, if I could be bothered. No; more worrying was the reason for the sudden evacuation. These grunts weren't dashing off to join the defence of the outer gate, or form a second layer of repulsion. They were getting out. All possessions carried; scampering off through the vast lobby (now strewn with military netting and a blotchy mural of John-Paul) and out, towards the wide shape of the General Assembly Building.