Simon Spurrier - The Culled

Somewhere over the Atlantic, with a canyon of heavy clouds spilling open below like a hungry gullet, I decided enough was enough.

"Fuck it." I said.

I'd moved three times already. Like a trail of cheap Pollock imitations I'd converted the aisle-seats of rows one and two into sticky red monuments to my own mortality, and already First Class Reclining Lounger 2B was streaked with enough congealing blood to saturate the upholstery. I felt a lot like I was dying, and if not for that boring old voice spitting from the back of my mind – don't you fucking give up, soldier – the idea might even have seemed alluring. The pain killers we'd lifted from the storage lockers at Heathrow appeared to have achieved exactly squat – except maybe enhance the growing desire to puke – and try as I might to sit still the ugly little 'O' of puckered gore just below my left shoulder was refusing to clot. It dripped and oozed, and soaked through everything I wore, and got into places I'd rather it didn't. Last time I took a piss in the cubicle behind the cockpit – door missing, safety lights plundered years ago – I looked down and for one horrible second thought I'd caught a stray in my undercarriage. Even the relief at disproving that theory hadn't occluded the pain.

So. The decision crept up slowly enough, but lacking for any idea of what sort of reception committee we'd get at LaGuardia, I couldn't put it off indefinitely. I chewed my lip for a while, munched philosophically on a thought-displacing can of dog food from my pack and decided to have a dig.

They teach you self-triage in the first year of training, but it's rudimentary stuff. The basic attitude is that if you get wounded on a mission you've already fucked up the whole 'covert' gig, so what happens to you afterwards is entirely your problem. I remember the staff medic they sent over from the MOD squinting thoughtfully at the roomful of grunts ranged out in front of him, with an expression that said: Oh, you poor bastards. He spent two weeks lecturing us on sterilisation and euthanasia policy, and when he got to the part about bullet-removal simply sighed over his clipboard and said:

"Just make sure you're dosed to the gills."

Sir, yes sir, etc etc.

I stood up, refusing to concede to the shakes in my legs, and made my way forwards. The pack we'd loaded with tranqs and stimms – and every other bloody thing we could find – sat in the co-pilot's chair next to Bella. From the glassy eyes, and beads of sweat tangled in her hair, I guessed she'd been staying awake care of amphetamine pick-me-ups, and she barely looked round as I rummaged for a cocktail of my own. She'd come through the firefight at Heathrow unscathed – mostly by hiding behind me – and looked like she was taking the piloting pretty seriously. Knuckles white on the control stick, breath laboured, lower lip creased where she'd bitten too hard. The amount of empty vials scattered on the floor, I hoped she didn't give herself a heart attack before we hit the tarmac at the other end.

Hit. Bad choice of word.

I found a stack of hypoderms marked 'Bliss' – stylishly bound with an elastic band – and shrugged. Since the whole 'End of the World' shtick a veritable smorgasbord of crazy narcotics had bubbled to the surface – repressed military Perf-Es, street drug mixtures and DIY chembrews – and who the hell was left to say what they all did? But 'Bliss' sounded better than 'infected screaming agony', so I told myself side-effects be damned and yanked one out of the bundle.

The elastic band snapped and stung me on the cheek. Very fucking macho.

"Might be out for a bit," I grunted, hoping Bella hadn't noticed, unwrapping a hypo and ambling back to the cabin. If she heard me at all, she didn't answer.

I took time setting myself up. Despite the engine's growl and the unsettling bong-bongs of warning instruments from the cockpit, the empty plane was an eerie sort of place. Like a dried-up river, or a morgue without a corpse, you take away the thing that makes something what it is – in this case the passengers required to make this thing more than just a big flying cigar-tube – and all that's left is a hollow promise.

Oh, and a wounded man getting shitfaced on 'Unknown Drug X', with an unsterilised pair of tweezers and a roll of nylon twine set aside.

I took it easy with the dosage. No telling what's normal, what's an OD, what's instant death. The candyfloss comfort came up like a warm bath, sliding along each limb in turn, and for a second I worried I'd spiked myself with some barbiturate crap that'd put me to sleep before I'd even poked into the wound. But then it hit my brain like a slap, airburst an embarrassingly orgasmic sensation into my crotch and told me – over and over, like a scratched vinyl playing in my ear – that everything was going to be okay.

Seriously good shit.

I was already jabbing about in the exposed muscular layers of my upper arm before it even occurred to me I should be in agony. I guess that in some abstract sense I was, but like watching a bad film through the wire-caged windows of the TV shops they used to have on Tottenham Court Road, it was a distant and silent sensation; and it didn't take much to turn around and focus elsewhere.

Don't you fucking give up, soldier.

Sir, no sir, etc etc.

When it came out, grinding against something I'm pretty sure was bone, trailing strands of half-congealed blood like cobweb threads, the bullet was an unimpressive little thing. For the amount of pain it'd caused, I was half-expecting an AMRAAM sidewinder with barbed fins, so the amorphous blob of iridescent snot that emerged was curiously disappointing. I plinked it down on my foldout meal tray, squirted a thick loop of military-issue antiseptic into the crater and got to work with the twine. The whole thing was a botched job – I knew that – already oozing pus and still refusing to stop bleeding, but in the absence of an emergency unit, doctor, nurse, or person with the slightest clue what they were doing, it was a work of fucking art.

I tied the last knot, broke the cord with my teeth, slapped an antiseptic dermal pad over the top and wound a thick strip of torn cloth round it several times.

Then I stopped, felt smug, allowed myself a moment or two of self-satisfaction and passed out.

Maybe the 'Bliss' was mildly hallucinogenic. Maybe I was delusional from loss of blood and suppressed pain. Maybe the sleep deprivation was getting to me and screwing with my thought process.

Or maybe I've just got a lot of nasty shit clogging up my imagination.

Whatever the reason, slumped there in my seat aboard an empty 737, thirty five thousand feet above the Sargasso Sea, my unconscious brain shat a kaleidoscope of blurred irrelevance: contradictory and clashing symphonies of half-remembered experience. I felt sick.

It felt a lot like rewinding through my own life. It felt a lot like viewing my history in cinematoscope vibrancy, except with DVD extra features and a meaningless musical track, on a TV screen with the colour mixers fritzed to shit.

It took a while to stabilise (whatever meaning time had) and when the psychedelia surrendered and the ugly memories came into uglier focus, I would have done anything to wake myself up – except that when you're asleep you don't know it. The human brain's annoying like that.

It all went in reverse. It jumped about and skipped important stuff and generally confused the hell out of me. I don't know for sure, and Bella wasn't much good for paying attention right then, but I'm guessing I scrabbled about inside the cabin like an epileptic sleepwalker. Should have remembered to buckle-up.

In my head, I was back in London, running and panicking, and Chattering rifles, out in the darkness. Muzzle flash behind the slats of scripture-daubed blast-shields and swabs of knackered concrete cracking open as strays struck the earth.