THE AFTERBLIGHT CHRONICLES.

THE CULLED.

Simon Spurrier.

CHAPTER ONE.

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

"f.u.c.k 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 Cla.s.s 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 f.u.c.king 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 p.i.s.s in the cubicle behind the c.o.c.kpit - 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 att.i.tude is that if you get wounded on a mission you've already f.u.c.ked 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. 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 b.l.o.o.d.y thing we could find - sat in the co-pilot's chair next to Bella. From the gla.s.sy 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 c.o.c.ktail 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 h.e.l.l was left to say what they all did? But 'Bliss' sounded better than 'infected screaming agony', so I told myself side-effects be d.a.m.ned and yanked one out of the bundle.

The elastic band snapped and stung me on the cheek. Very f.u.c.king 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 c.o.c.kpit, 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 pa.s.sengers 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 s.h.i.tfaced 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 c.r.a.p 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 embarra.s.singly o.r.g.a.s.mic 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 s.h.i.t.

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 f.u.c.king 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 f.u.c.king 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g with my thought process.

Or maybe I've just got a lot of nasty s.h.i.t clogging up my imagination.

Whatever the reason, slumped there in my seat aboard an empty 737, thirty five thousand feet above the Sarga.s.so 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 s.h.i.t.

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 h.e.l.l 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.

Heathrow. It'd gone downhill since the Culling Year. Planes stood like dead sentries; plundered for gla.s.s or metal, listing at strange angles where tyres had punctured or wheel columns had snapped: all marks of whatever violence had first swept through the compound five years before.

Back in the centre of the city, the random aggregate of survivors and raggedymen I ever actually spoke to had dismissed such scars - everywhere you looked - with a shrug and a philosophical grunt.

"Cullin' Year," they'd say. As if that covered - and excused - every anarchic sin, every thoughtless act of destruction that went along with a city entering self-destructive free-fall. All the looting. The thieving. Murdering. Raping. Burning the shop fronts, clogging the river with car wrecks, h.o.a.rding tinned foods, slaughtering police horses, coughing and stumbling and spitting blood from lungs on the verge of liquefaction.

Waiting for the nukes that never came.

The Culling Year. It was a crazy time.

Here and now in the airport, the devastation was all that much harder to ignore. The precision of the planes, the carefully mapped elegance of the compound: all distorted, broken, salvaged and left to withdraw behind bristly weeds and the slow creep of rust. The violence had ended years ago, but its effects stood untouched, like alabaster monuments to the insanity of an entire population.

Over my shoulder, the gunfire faded out. I kept running, dragging Bella along by either her coat or her hair - I hadn't stopped to check - and headed for the one aircraft that was patently undamaged: repainted in the garish blue of the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn.

Neo-Clergy. Currently trying to kill me.

Somewhere, out between the hungry darkness of the airstrip and the humming lights strung up around the tower, someone shouted. A rasping burst of biblical condemnations, to cover the clattering of clumsy hands reloading rusted hardware. Even further away, booted feet raced towards the racket with the sort of haste one learns to a.s.sociate with hardcore well-trained military types, and I reminded myself with a groan that most of the barracks emptied their survivors into the Church during the year, with the casual abandon of men swapping one inst.i.tution for another. I wished the shouting voice would shut the f.u.c.k up.

I was a heretic, apparently. A defiler, a philistine, a walking abomination, a devil fit only for immediate destruction and above all else a sneaky motherf.u.c.ker. I recognised the dulcet tones of the same fat monk I'd 'befriended' earlier that day - playing unscrupulously on the hints of his s.e.xuality he'd betrayed in coy glances and coquettish gestures - then unceremoniously clubbing him over the head with the stock of a rifle when he turned to fetch me some water.

It was a way in, anyway.

And then Bella was shrieking something behind me - "the bag! the bag!" - and as I turned to a.s.sess what was going on, the Kalash' opened up again. Something dull and hard happened to my left arm, and I was pirouetting in my place without meaning to.

"Oh." I said, wondering why cracked concrete was pressed against my cheek. "Oh."

And Bella screaming, and the engines of the aircraft powering up with a whine, and the throb of more guns, and pain and confusion and drugs and more blood than I've ever seen before, and- Bong-bong.

The aircraft, flying itself, chiming out warnings about who-knew-what.

I half-opened my eyes; a fissure of light strong enough to spot the curved steel struts of underchair braces, the lifejackets stowed in wire compartments beneath each one, and an ancient packet of dry roasted peanuts. Empty, of course.

Back in the present.

You're on the floor, soldier.

Addled thoughts turned over lazily, wondering how long I had before the hostess came and told me to get up, whether I'd barfed on anyone's hand luggage, whether I could ask someone to get me a coffee. I think reality would have a.s.serted itself pretty soon after that, if the Bliss hadn't flexed in my veins again.

Another proto-climax, building in my groin. Another rush of shivering oddity, and the most distant reports of pain in my left arm, before- The signal.

This was before Heathrow. s.h.i.t - this was the reason for Heathrow. This was before the Neo-Clergy and Bella and all that.

This was lying alone on my palette, stretched out in the corner of Comms Room 221A, in the eastern wing of the Vauxhall Cross SIS building. Dozing, staring out at the river and wondering at all the other raggedy survivors, curled up in tube stations and mall stockrooms, cl.u.s.tered round oil drum fires and squabbling over rats and pigeons.

I wasn't smug at my own warm little womb of safety - not exactly - but it came close.

London was ugly before the Year. Afterwards, it was...

Different.

Let me tell you: a city looks strange without lights. At night, the sky is black and star-pebbled, just like anywhere else, and if you've lived in London any length of time you know that's wrong. The sky should be yellow-green. Blazing with light pollution, oozing out of the constant clouds. It was like The Cull had stolen the very colour from the sky; flattening all that was civil, all that was advanced. Look at the world now, it said: Eco-friendly, yeah. But not much f.u.c.king fun.

Curled there in my room, mind empty, chin resting on a heap of stolen pillows, it was a well practiced thought process. Five years into this dismal new reality, and there was nothing much left to say about it.

Nothing new to get excited abo...

The signal sparked the consoles to life with a neon-storm and a chatter of code, and I jumped like I'd been electrocuted. Down to reserve power, the building wouldn't even let you switch the b.l.o.o.d.y dimmers on, let alone the systems. There must be some kind of automated kicker, powering-up for the duration of an incoming signal. Clever.

Five years, they'd stood silent. Consoles growing dusty, covered in tinned-soup spillages and stolen p.o.r.n, or whatever other luxuries I'd plundered on any given day. For five years the antennae on the roof - concealed ingeniously within blocky, deco architecture - had stood inert, listening to a silent spectrum.

Five years I'd slept in the same room, getting by, scavenging up and down the riverbanks by sunlight, creeping back at night like a bear to its den. I'd always ignored the others who'd adopted the same routine. Old administrators or low-level secretaries, I guess, lucky enough to remember the entry codes to let them in, but never getting past the divisional checkpoints inside the central lobby. All automated. All closed.

But not to me. Not to senior personnel.

Up here there was still the ghost of power. Low-level illuminators at night, self-sealing doors. Solar panels on the roof, I think, though I'd never found them. There was even a functioning vending machine down in the armoury, though the coffee tasted like plastic and the tea frothed with mouse s.h.i.t. Still, here was safety. Here were sealed doors built to shrug-off a missile-strike, a tunnel beneath the river to the heart of bleak, deserted Whitehall and all the accoutrements of my old life.

Files. Computers. Weapons.

And now a signal.

I thought it was a joke first of all, but that was daft. Who amongst my friends - and there were never many of them to start with - had the means, let alone the diseased sense of humour?

n.o.body. n.o.body was left. n.o.body senior enough to know the codes, n.o.body who knew how to tap-in up here. Not since the Chief choked on the mushy debris of his own lungs and the two surviving directors were mobbed en-route to a Cobra meeting. Since then, camaraderie amongst ex-employees had been pretty low on the agenda.

The code chattered away like a chorus of angry crickets, transferring to the flickering screen in unbroken columns; flashing green as each security clearance was challenged, negotiated, allowed.

And then a word, immersed in the stream of data.

It scrolled by so quickly I almost missed it. Eyes wide, I convinced myself I was mistaken, and ignored the p.r.i.c.kles of sweat wriggling out of my forehead as I hunted it down again.

There.

+PANDORA++.

My stomach lurched. Something happened to my heart that felt a lot like a black hole opening in my rib cage. I staggered, I think, because suddenly I was sitting down with my hands out, pressed on the edge of the desk like a safety-bar holding me into the carriage of a rollercoaster.

The word raced past again, bottom to top, a pixellated burst of... of what?

Choirs of angels, rays of light, divine intervention. Who the b.a.s.t.a.r.ding h.e.l.l knows? It wasn't possible, but there it was.

And then the final security clearance was offered, the linkage was established, the vocal channel opened with a greasy pop, and I was listening to static.

And someone breathing.

And a voice that said: "Are... Are you there?"

I recognised it.

"Oh." I said. It was all I could manage. It came from the one deep-buried part of me that - alone - was able to function in the face of this revelation. The rest of my brain was a stunned fish, flapping on a pier, waiting for a rock to pound it to paste.

"Oh..."

And then the reserve power died, the channel closed, the screens winked to blackness one by one, the lowlights perished and the great black silence rolled in to gobble the building like never before.

I remember losing it. Just a little.

I remember storming and breaking things and snarling. I remember the blood so thick on my mangled knuckles, from beating on the walls and the consoles, that they dripped across the carpet. But most of all I remember the feeling swelling up inside me; the feeling I'd forgotten, cast off like a dead skin all those years ago. The feeling that said, loud and clear in the base of my skull, wrapping iron knuckles around me, straightening my posture and giving me no room to argue: Don't you f.u.c.king give up, sold- Something touching my face.

I came out of the delusion/flashback far quicker this time, and with the scream of engines abusing the edge of my consciousness I remembered where I was without much preamble. It felt like I'd managed to pull myself up into another of the plane's chairs - still as groggy as f.u.c.k - and, nylon be praised, the blood had stopped trickling down the inner edge of my arm. I wondered how long had pa.s.sed.

Somewhere an alarm was whooping quietly, a polite emergency. I almost laughed at the idea, and decided, with a half-hysterical chuckle, the drug was still in me.

Concentrate.

I felt another light touch, a gentle something brushing against my lips and, with sluggish realisation, tried to form words.

"No, Bella..." I mumbled, struggling to open my eyes. "S'not... s'not likethat..."

The plane seemed to shiver. She touched my lips again.

"Toldyou..." I slurred, aware of the spittle hanging off my chin and the cotton wool dampening every movement. "I'm not... not innarstd inthats.h.i.t..."