episodes where they have to fetch replacements, or the preacher's used his own blood, or the microscope-camera fucks-up and they have to mix such massive quantities – live in Petri dishes – that the Abbot ends-up looking whiter than a sheet.
Always the same. Always the clotting and the clumping.
I've seen episodes where they've held up his birth certificate for the camera, focused hard on the 'A(Rh+)' box. His name was John P. Miller, for the record, before The Cull.
I've seen episodes where they've filmed his blood – exposed to the air – shrivelling and dying as the Culling virus withers it away.
It could all be a stunt. It could, but it wasn't. My instincts told me.
So how the fuck had the old shithead managed it?
Either way, it was great TV.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We started seeing people – real ones, out in the open, slinking out of our way – as we approached our destination.
Evening came down like a curtain – sudden and soft – and the egg yolk sun sat on the encrusted skyline and punctured the milky haze just enough to blaze along every angle of that great slab of rock, that great blue-black monolith, that towered over the East River like a gravestone.
Once, it had been the Secretariat building; the administrative heart of the United Nations HQ, with the library and the General Assembly (a shallow curl of white concrete with a colossal bowling ball embedded in its roof) cowering in its sunless shadow; the whole complex pressed-up against the river like it was trying to swim to freedom.
As we swept nearer, I couldn't help noticing how many of the windows were broken; how vividly the great satellite-dish squatting beside the river had been painted.
Scarlet. A great scarlet 'O'.
Clergy territory.
I've always been a tad conflicted, as far as the UN went.
On the one hand, it's a pretty bloody obvious idea, isn't it? An organisation to get all the contrary fucks in the world talking, cooperating. It's what an American would call a 'No-Brainer.' And yeah, you could whinge at length about how, at the end, it had no power to speak of, how its hands were tied-up in red tape and corruption, how its goals were too vague or too elitist, how its unity didn't extend quite as far as everyone made out… but at least it was there. At least people could look at it and say:
'Check it out. There's hope.'
On the other hand, I spent my entire professional life doing nasty secret things the UN had made illegal decades before, so chalk another one up to national disharmony.
Besides, there was a steaming crater where the White House once stood – along with everything else inside a ten mile radius – serving as cancerous testament to the UN's ability to mediate in a crisis.
I'm being uncharitable again. These poor fuckers must've been hit just as hard as everyone else when The Blight struck. It's not like you can calm someone down when their finger's on 'The Button', when the whole world's dying around you, when a mystery virus is in the middle of slaughtering 59 billion people, just by appealing to their bloody humanity. These are politicians we're talking about!
But still. It was hard to reconcile the dismal uselessness of the whole bloody organisation with the magnificence of its home.
On the approach, the people on the road were moving slowly; barely looking-up as we passed. One or two vehicles shunted along cracked streets, full of people with dead eyes and no words. I got that quiet chill in the base of my spine, like with the combat conditioning except colder, more logical, and let my senses fill-in the blanks.
Tear-streaked faces, eyeing-up the brooding edifice with fear and disgust curling their lips. Knuckles white.
Anger, resentment, terror.
Heads lowered, bodies resigned. Dejection and despair.
They had the look of people who'd come to see something; who'd travelled expressly for a sight, a vision, and were now wending their way home having seen it, heartbroken.
They had the look of pilgrims whose journey had been wasted. Misery tourists.
None of them were Clergy. None even sported the same brand as Nate. They wore Klan colours of a dozen different kinds, avoiding one another but united in the uniformity of their expressions.
And the vast majority were women.
'What's got them so pissed?' I asked Nate, as we took the last corner onto 1^st Avenue. 'I thought people loved the Cler…'
My voice just… stopped.
In the guidebooks, it was flags. A great arc of them, fluttering and proud, lining the approach along United Nations Plaza, one for each member-state. I used to wonder what happened every time someone new signed-up. Did they have to stick up a new flag? Re-space the others? Who determined the order?
It wasn't flags anymore.
Nate had warned me about this. The Spartacus moment. The forest of crucifixes.
The warning hadn't worked.
At one edge of the road there stood a tall truck with a cherry-picker, painted blue and scarlet in the Clergy's colours, and at the peaks of each immense flagpole, T-squared with crudely welded crossbeams, its grisly works hung down and moaned.
And bled.
And pissed.
And crapped on the heads of the crowd below.
Distraught lovers, I started to understand. Friends. Family. Unable to reach up to cut them down, eyed warily by the robed fucks with guns and vehicles and all the toys in the world, from the other side of the great razor-wire fence. Spike-tipped stanchions, scaffolds with heavy machine-gun positions, looping ribbons of barbed wire and more guns than I could count.
The United Nations had become a fortress, and it displayed its captured enemies with all the medieval subtlety of heads on gateposts.
'What did they do?' I whispered, as the quad chugged away to silence. One of the dangling men was screaming down at a face in the crowd, telling her to get away, to not see him like this, to go back home, forget him. Eventually the Choirboys took turns pelting him with stones until he shut up, then glared and sneered at the woman in the crowd, daring her to stop them.
They had a basket of rounded pebbles standing-by. I guess this sort of thing happened a lot.
Nate clambered off the quad and sighed. He looked jumpier than I'd ever seen him, hopping from foot to foot, nervous energy renewed, chewing his nails.
'Mostly rule breakers.' He said. 'Fight starters, thieves. Maybe tried to settle shit without appealing to the adjudicators. Skipped-out on a Tag. Who the fuck knows?'
Staring up at those men and women – stripped naked, black and blue, lashed to their poles with barbed cables, necks sagging, shoulders aching – I found myself too exhausted, too disgusted, to even bother asking Nate what the fuck he was talking about.
The crux of it had come through loud and clear.
'Anyone who pisses them off.' I said.
Nate nodded, expression wary, and pulled his cap lower over his face.
An even larger crowd was gathered directly outside the gates. They had the look of a picket or protest, but stood in silent rows with arms lowered, a bulging semicircle of quiet indignation, staring in with eyes smouldering. Their gazes were lifted past the bored guards, past the barricades and silent vehicles, past the shanty-buildings clustered like barnacles around the base of the Secretariat. Here an even greater proportion were women, and
