Simon Spurrier - The Culled

Then the sound. Almost perfectly synchronised; two rolling thunderbolts that echoed and coalesced in the eerie fog, becoming a single sub-aqueous roar.

And then screams. Even at this distance, even separated by water and haze, the shrieks of the maimed and the groans of the dying. Ghostly. Haunting.

The Collectors had left behind their C4 and their snazzy little detonator when they tried to kill us in the night. It would have been rude to waste them.

"kkk… orth bridge… Got 'em… got the fuckers… bridge is down, bridge is down!"

"…owbear here, same for the south. Hoo-ee! Can't see for smoke yet, but they're not coming any further…"

The dozer-scoop shunted the Inferno like a casual distraction, bashing as it went into the side of the nearest caravan. The driver wasn't watching. I guessed he was staring in shock at the baleful firelight hovering on either side in the distance, or shouting into a radio, or just wondering what the fuck is going on.

Distracted, one way or another. Otherwise he might have noticed the cables. Iron cords, tied-off to the railings at either side of the bridge, each one carefully tensioned, leading in through the shattered windows of the caravans.

Each one holding aloft, in the stripped-out spaces inside, a dangling gallery of jam jars.

Each of which contained a single fragmentation baseball grenade, pin removed, trigger prevented from releasing by the glass of the jars.

Fort Wayne barracks, Slowbear had told me during the night. One of the few armouries that hadn't emptied its supplies into the Clergy's hands. Forget bows and bloody arrows. These Injuns were packing.

The first caravan shifted. Jerked against the other, like marbles colliding.

On both sides of the bridge, the cables went slack. A tinny sound of shattering glass filled the air, and maybe I was imagining it or maybe I suddenly went fucking psychic, but I swear to god I could hear the driver in that colossal sodding rig mutter:

"Aw, piss."

A second or two, with the echoes of the C4-detonations still ringing, and then:

Think Baghdad. Think Hiroshima. Think surface of the fucking sun.

It was big, and flashy, and I could feel the heat from my cover. Frag-shrapnel turning the air to razorwire, men somersaulting out of gunner-mounts on the cusp of the blast, flesh sliding off bone, fingers clutching at air then clutching at nothing. The lorry-rig pelted onto its spine, its nose upright, then crashed down in dust and death on the vehicles behind, bouncing in a way that something that big shouldn't. Driver and gunners alike screamed and died, sliced to ribbons; soot and black smoke washed over the top of the bridge and the tarmac gaped where the explosives had tripped. The caravans were gone. The Inferno's shredded corpse was gone. What remained was modern art.

And finally the Iroquois rose-up from their cover, screamed like an operatic banshee, and let loose.

It would have been a massacre. We had them boxed-in. Exposed on the bridge, unable to back-out at speed. We had machineguns and grenades and autocannons. We had a couple of rusty old mortars that found their range after two watery explosions (by which time Rick had already clambered, panting, ashore, so no damage there) and a crateful of anti-tank rockets which all the Haudenosaunee had been clamouring to play with.

Above all we had surprise and stealth, and well-camouflaged men and women using smoke and shadows and patience. We had so much lead and fire raining down on those pricks that they never realised how much knifework went on, how much scurrying and slicing was taking place in the noxious gaps between packed-in vehicles.

I know. I was there. I was doing it.

It would have been a massacre. It started out just dandy. The Iroquois vehicles came tearing back up, the bikes slipped onto the bridge to sow madness and death, AVs and lorry rigs popped like fiery bubbles with each shrieking mortar-round, and oh god yeah it felt good. Malice and me with pistols and knives, scrambling over bonnets and under tankers, slipping grenades through open windows whilst drivers shouted and raged at the back-up, then scuttled off to listen for the boom…

Great times.

And fine, the convoy just kept getting bigger and bigger. More and more lorries oozing from the haze, trying to back-up, trying to manoeuvre in the madness. Fine, there were a lot more of the bastards than we expected, a lot more guns and psychos slowly getting their act together and returning fire. Fine, it would have been messy. But we had them. We could've taken them.

And then my radio hissed, and everything changed.

Malice and I were holed-up behind the vast tyres of an earthmover, waiting for the wanker in the cab to stop blasting our end of the bridge with whatever fat-shell cannon he was manning for long enough to sneak up there and blow his brains out, when Slowbear's voice broke through the maelstrom; tinny and tense.

"…ou there? Oh shit… oh shit… This is Slowbear! Are you there?"

"Yeah, here. What is it?"

Something bit at the rubber tyre next to me and made the whole vehicle shudder. Malice winced.

"The lorry! The… shit… shit… kkkhh… the lorry on the south bridge!"

"We got it, right?"

"Yes! F-fuck, yes, it's not that, it's…"

"Slowbear?"

"…t's full of children! You hear me?"

Malice's eyes bulged.

"…orries are all full of fucking children!"

It would have been a massacre.

We turned and ran back to our lines without another word, and as we strafed through optimistic fire streams I caught a glimpse of Malice's eyes, and the liquid glistening inside them. She'd left her baby with the Matriarchs in safety but still… it didn't take a genius to figure out what she was thinking.

It'd been her that pressed the button, after all.

A weird noise filled my head. Like an engine, but airier; filtered through the fog and the gunfire, distorted by the screams and shouts all around. I wondered if I'd damaged my ear more badly than I'd thought, then shook my head and stopped worrying. What, exactly, could I do about it anyway? I spotted the incline facing the bridge where we'd left Nike and Moto, and together with Malice I scrambled up the bank, forgetting all about the noise, concentrating on staying alive.

…thrpthrpthrpthrpthrp…

Nike and Moto were hunkered-down with five Iroquois holding shoulder-launchers. Nate was there too, watching, staying apart and looking shifty. I ignored him and he ignored me, making a show of staring directly upwards into the turbulent QuickSmog. It seemed to be getting worse. Odd bursts of fire snapped at the tops of the ridge, off-target but getting closer, and before I could take the time to work out how someone was keeping track with us, at this distance, at this elevation, we threw ourselves down into safety. Rick was standing below the grenadiers; sopping water and trying to catch his breath, dishing out the tank busters.

"Aim for the lorries…" he was saying, unable to keep the twinkle of testosterone-choked-male out of his eye. He'd done his part. He'd lured the fuckers into the trap. No wonder he sounded older.

Nike was already lifting himself gingerly into a sitting position, head above the edge of the ridge, tube to his shoulder, when Malice gathered her breath and shouted:

"No! Stop! Don't fire!"

The older man swivelled his head to look at her, brows furrowing.

"But wh…"

The hesitation almost killed him. A round caromed dustily off the ground beside his face, within inches of splitting his head. He swore out loud and let gravity pull him back down into cover, the rest of us tugging him along in a knot of shouts and grunts. When we'd got him back down to the bottom of the ridge Moto flopped-down next to him and clutched at his arm, horrified.