Simon Spurrier - The Culled

Someone had painted 'THICKER THAN WATER' in black tar across a fifty-foot expanse of the parking lot. I wondered if it would be visible from space.

Next to Malice, in the cab, was where Spuggsy sat. Well, reclined anyway. Lazed.

Slobbed.

Spuggsy, from what little I'd seen, wasn't much of an engineer. Granted, he had a gift for smoothing-out the most angular of mechanical kinks, though I couldn't help noticing his technique tended to involve hitting things hard with a spanner until they started making the right noises. He was short and plump, as bald as a cueball and sat there flicking lazily through porno mags with an expression of unconquerable boredom. His one concession to arousal was the copious sweat oozing off his chubby face, but given that it remained even when he wasn't browsing Anal Carnage, Wet Domination or whatever the hell it was, that didn't mean much. When he spoke it was with an enthusiastically sleazy good nature – like a mischievous schoolboy who discovered German hardcore before he discovered snot-eating contests – and I found myself liking him and wanting to disinfect him in equal measure.

The Cross Bronx Expressway petered-out in a fug of chipped road segments – mottled like they'd been in a firefight – and then the Hudson was below us, wide and shimmering and almost passable for clean. The George Washington Bridge stood just as solid and untroubled as always, as if this 'End Of Humanity' business was a passing fad by which it was neither impressed nor concerned. A couple of scavs had hanged themselves from the rails on one side (I like to think it was a tragic death-pact between lovers despairing of this cold new world… but it could just as easily have been a drunken dare) and a crowd of others was tugging them down as we passed by. Tugging a little too violently, actually, with knives and roasting-sticks in hand and a fat man building a campfire, waving-away the gulls like the unwanted competition they were.

Tora kept them covered from the pintle-cannons all the way past.

"Fucking cannies," she spat.

Tora was sort of weird. She came from Japanese stock she said – a heart-shaped face and dark hair (dyed deep blue at its tips), with a delicate sweep to the edges of her eyes and a nose like a button – and was one of the most mixed-up women I've ever known. Not beautiful exactly, but she knew how to move, had an attitude you wouldn't believe and could easily have flirted for her country. But it was skewed – the whole thing – like you knew somehow she was damaged; fucked-up deep inside, and everything she did was just a facade to create the impression of humanity. She used sexual friendliness like a battering ram. Like an act of aggression. Her arms were covered – wrist to shoulder – in thin little scars where she'd cut herself, and she sat in the dangling canopy above our heads – half poking-out to man the guns – singing a pretty song and carving new tally-marks into her skin. I asked her about it, later on. She shrugged and said:

"Why do you scratch when you've got an itch?"

"To make it feel better."

"Uh-huh."

I never found out what had happened to her – shit, maybe she was just born that way – but you could see it every time she looked at you, or spoke to you, or smiled. Like… just behind the veil, behind the spunky playful bollocks and cleavage-jutting body language, she was eyeing that scalpel and wondering just how deep she'd have to cut to make all the itches go away.

We bounced into New Jersey in a blur; Malice finally able to throttle-up all the way. Fort Lee, Leonia; names on crooked signs that drifted by without any sensation of reality. Just echoes of something that might once have had some significance, but now… Nothing. Skeletons on the edge of the road – picked clean – and blasted wrecks that jutted and trailed, forcing us to slow. Highway 80, place names fogging-by.

Hackensack.

Saddlebrook.

Elmwood Park.

At one stage Malice muttered something darkly to Spuggsy – spotting something ahead – who huffed and dropped his magazines then scrambled back towards us, poking Nike and Moto awake from their nest of sleeping bags and telling Tora to stand-by. The Inferno jinked hard to one side; overtaking.

It was strange to see another vehicle on the open road; but even stranger to see one so… normal. I'd expected dune-buggy gangs, flame-jobs, hotrods and… oh, I don't know. Nuclear-fucking-powered bulldozers, maybe. Skull-hurling catapults. Something a little more… survivalist.

Passing an HGV hauling a trailer marked Cheesy Snax was pretty surreal.

A couple of heads poked warily from the roof – guns arrayed cautiously towards us, just in case – and I spotted square slits in the corrugated sides of the container, bulging with naked flesh and squinting eyes.

"Workers," Tora told me, swinging in her harness. "'Burb klans. Scavs work the fields, different shifts going back and forth all the time."

"Dangerous?"

"To us? Pfft."

But still, but still… It was tense, as we passed them by, and Moto stared back at them – through the square porthole above the rear gun mount – for long minutes afterwards.

Moto and Nike kept themselves to themselves, mostly. The former was a well-built young man with startling white hair and an almost perfect face. I figured before The Cull he was maybe a model in cologne commercials, or a male escort, and he looked simply wrong – out of place, somehow – in the midst of all us raggedy bastards in the back of the Inferno. Actually, scratch that: he looked almost out of place. His one concession to chaos and ugliness was worn proud on his cheek. A mess, shredded and rippled in all kinds of gravely keloid contours, so that his lip and eye were all but joined by the matted tangle of scarring. He'd been whipped with barbed-wire, Spuggsy told me later with an indecent grin. Held down by a bunch of thugs and whipped carefully… lovingly, almost, by Nike. He didn't say why.

Towns went by. The QuickSmog came down, hid the distant rooftops and tree lined avenues, then went back up again.

Denville.

Roxybury.

Netlong.

Hills and gorge-blasted roads, the weak sun, the Inferno rumbling ever on.

That scar on Moto's cheek, I figured it was like a brand. Like some jealous tribal elder, maybe, defacing his young spouse to dissuade all thoughts of adultery. Maybe it was punishment. Some quiet misdeed, some jealous retribution. Fucksakes, who knows? The types of people out there these days, for all I knew Nike might have done it to improve the poor kid's face according to his own twisted tastes.

Either way, it was a mark – a signature – left by Nike, that said loud and clear:

Mine.

Moto said pretty much nothing to anyone except Nike for the whole journey, and when he did it was quiet and deferential, and he turned his face to one side so that all anyone ever saw of him was the scar. He seemed quite happy. They seemed quite happy.

Love, huh?

Nike, by comparison, was tall and skinny, quite old, I'd guess, and a perfect gentleman in every way. He nodded and smiled, and passed the time of day, and traded dirty songs with Nate. Towards the end of the first day, when Malice swapped with Spuggsy for a kip, Nike chatted to me about what sort of state London was in. He told me how he used to be a teacher – American history – and collected model aircraft for a hobby.

Everything about him oozed calm, rational, intelligent, polite decency.

And then you happened to glance at Moto, staring like a devoted dog at the older man, face all fucked-up like that, and you wondered.

We stopped for a bite to eat on the freeway, just outside a place called Knowlton. Nate cooked, giggling and dancing annoyingly. The Inferno carried a heap of supplies as part of the cost of rental, and amongst the tins and rats there were three actual chickens and a genuine, freshly baked loaf of bread. If it's possible for your tongue to have an orgasm, mine did.