Simon Spurrier - The Culled

The second guy was luckier. Used his mate for cover, even held him up like a human shield – hand on the hem of his jeans – and pumped three panicky rounds into Nike's legs, hanging from the gun mount above, before I pushed up close and shot him through his buddy's throat. Even then he took his sweet time, bashing about, trying to get a bead on my head as he squirted from his neck and screamed like a bullhorn. I had to bash his fucking brains out against the heavy iron edges of the gun-mount above, and he stared at me – eyes burning, accusing; lips spitting and frothing – all the way.

Somewhere a great noise went up. Like… like an army of hyenas, all laughing at once. I had no time to think about it, no time to try and place it, no time even to notice – in any sense except one of pure instinct – that outside the Inferno the gunfire had stopped…

The third man to tear into our little space, the man I should have killed first, he was hollering.

Ignoring everyone.

Throwing down his gun in contempt.

And leaping onto Hiawatha with an inhuman scream.

"K-k-kiiilled Sliiiiip!" he growled, knife held above the boy's eyeball, wrestling and grunting and rolling. "Ffffucking kill you!" Beneath the Cullis of his helmet his face was a mass of festering wounds, skin scraped-clear, bloody welts from chin to brow, nose a smeared mess.

Hiawatha was babbling, eyes wide, tears on his cheek, both hands wrapped around the hilt of the blade, shrieking "Sorries" and "Pleases" and "OhGodDon'tKillMes". Human again. A boy, scared and lonely and pissing himself and And I placed the muzzle of the M16 against the man's head, feeling abruptly calm, and said:

"Hey."

He looked at me. I shot him through the eye. So it goes.

And then everything was quiet. At least, quieter. As quiet as it could be with Hiawatha sobbing for his mother, Nike yelling and moaning, Malice's kid screaming like a dying cat, and my own heart pounding in my ears.

But no more gunfire. No more biker engines. No more grenades detonating or trucks rumbling towards us.

I stared out the window – through the crazy spider web shatter-patterns on what little glass remained – and saw why.

"Fffuck," said Malice.

The Collectors had been scared off. I knew how they felt.

There was an army. Hundreds upon hundreds of men and women.

Guns.

Bikes. Cars. Horses.

They looked kind of pissed.

His Holiness John-Paul Rohare Baptise closed his eyes and kneaded his temples.

Inside his head a sealed gate was opening wide. Every time he stopped to think. Every time there was no distraction – nothing to stare at, nobody to talk to, nothing to think about – it was like… like stepping into a great bazaar, full of painful exhibits he'd never seen before.

Or… worse, like a labyrinth. Yes. That was it. The memories didn't come pouring out, exactly. He had to go in and explore, hunt them down, look for them. Afraid, tentatively digging into dark corners.

Never too sure what he'd find.

He'd always known there had been buried treasures. Always felt, instinctively, that for whatever reason his mind had shut him away, closed itself down to him. He'd called it, privately, a gift from 'Above'. A purification designed solely to plant him firmly in the Now and the tomorrow. Never concentrating on 'then'. Never looking back. It was as if everything that had existed about him, from before five years ago, had been stripped away in a rush of balefire. God had severed his past, he felt, because he was no longer a creature of history. His was a role of divine prescience. Shaping the world for the new dawn.

Why should he need a personal past for that?

And now this.

"Hmm."

It was all terribly confusing.

John-Paul Rohare Baptiste was remembering what it was to be something he hadn't been for a very, very long time, and it was giving him a headache above and beyond the state of near-intolerable pain he spent the majority of his life experiencing. The 'something' he was slowly remembering was:

Normality.

The car shuddered – just another pothole, probably, or at worst a car wreck being bumped aside by the snaking convoy – and he straightened out the crumpled sheets of paper in his lap. He supposed it could have been a coincidence… The English scum, the destroyer who'd come so close to finishing the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn, rummaging about in old records… Coincidental that he'd just happened to find… this…

This.

This sheet. This crumpled personnel dossier with its clipped photograph and personal details, its family affiliations, service history, recommendations and citations.

One of the Cardinals had brought it to him. Found in some nameless file in some empty part of the Secretariat.

There was a story attached, he recalled – something about a struggle, a death? He couldn't remember. It hardly seemed important, now. Compared to this file, nothing seemed important.

John-Paul fingered the sheets and licked dry lips.

He'd always known his real name, at least. That had never been a shock. Back at… at the start, when he wandered into the city out of the west, alone and confused, filled only with the certainty of his own divinity and the exact requirements of his body in order to preserve it, even then he'd known. He'd had his birth certificate with him, hadn't he? Or… Or maybe he faked it? Maybe he…

Anyway.

Anyway, it didn't matter. He'd known he was John P. Miller, somewhere at the back of his skull. He just hadn't cared, until now. Didn't want to remember where the name had come from, who he'd been, what he'd done, what he'd been like as a person before he became more than a person; before he became John-Paul Rohare Baptise, Abbot of the greatest institution existing in the world today, architect of Tomorrow's Civilisation.

In a roundabout sort of way.

Another group of robed outriders swept past the limousine on his left. The driver was being boringly silent – probably star struck, the poor devil – and John-Paul found himself craving conversation, or distraction. Something of interest to stare at, perhaps, rather than the bland hills and blander roads of suburban nowhere. Something, anything, to take his mind off the sheet.

But no.

Sergeant John P. Miller. N.A.T. O liaison officer.

Assigned 4332/GGfT/332-099#1

PROJECT PANDORA.

It was a lot like watching a film. Like the trigger on a projector, immersing the viewer immediately in a cannonade of scenes, shots, impressions, memories. The only difference was, it was all inside his eyelids.

It all came right back to him, and for the fiftieth time he struggled with the desire to vomit. Soon he'd have to tell the driver to stop, to get the Acolytes up here, to prepare the Host.

It was a lot to take in.

And this, at his age. At his time of life. In his current state of health. Oh, was there no end to the tests he must pass?

He mumbled a prayer and tried to ride out the nausea.

He'd seen his empire shaken to its roots. He'd seen his fortress invaded by heretics and filth, his perfectly structured city ripped away from his grasp and – oh, worst of all – his link with the world denied to him. The great satellite dish on the banks of the East River, the great studios and broadcast suites his loyal children had pieced together inside the General Assembly buildings. The means of speaking to the world.

The means of reaching out.

Spreading the Good Word.

All of it taken away. Destroyed, ripped apart, trampled underfoot by the ignorance and hatred of those who could never hope to understand his Divine Plan; who were led by The Man. The Stranger. The…

The fucking Devil.

John-Paul muttered a second prayer, shocked at the crudity of his own thoughts. Perhaps, though, it didn't matter. Perhaps… Mm. Perhaps being reawakened to his past was no simple coincidence, but an act of the Lord in itself?