CHAPTER TWO

 

 

IT FELT ALMOST unreal to be back under the clean sunlight of the Caribbean. As soon as we landed I was given a list of patients and put right back into the routine I’d had before the flight to Paris, as if nothing at all had changed. The slowly healing bullet wound in my leg was the only concrete reminder of what had happened. Everywhere I went, Soren and Kelis came too. For the first two days I refused to speak to either of them. Soren took the snub with his usual stoic restraint, or possibly indifference. Kelis didn’t say anything, but there were tight little lines around her eyes, deepening every hour I ignored her. For some reason, my opinion seemed to matter to her.

Good. I could use that.

On the third day, we were eating breakfast in our customary silence when Kelis suddenly said, “You can keep this up forever, I can tell. You’re stubborn as hell. But really, what’s the point? You’ve made the same decision we have – to accept what’s been done to us and to live rather than die.”

My mouth tightened. “Yeah. But my decision involves curing people and yours involves killing them. Excuse me if I don’t see the equivalence.”

Soren grinned, his blond hair blowing in the sea breeze. “You cure them so that we can kill them later,” he said. “Excuse me if I don’t think that makes you any better.”

“Soren,” Kelis said, frowning at him. “You know that isn’t –”

But I interrupted her. “No. He’s right. Where do I get off thinking I’m any better than you?”

And yeah, it was a calculated move. First the punishment, then the forgiveness. But at the same time, it was true. I wasn’t any better. And if they’d found him, then left him behind somewhere with a tracker in his thigh and a death threat hanging over him, would I even be thinking about escaping?

Of course, he’d have found a way to remove the tracker – probably amputating his own leg – and have tracked me down by now, taking out Queen M’s entire army in the process, but that was another story. I’ve always remembered an interview I once saw with a survivor of one of the Nazi death camps, someone whose job it had been to drag the corpses from the gas chambers to the ovens.

“Until you find yourself there,” he’d said. “You don’t know the things you’ll do for just one more minute of life.”

I guess something of that acceptance must have registered in my face, because the third week after we returned I finally woke to find that Kelis and Soren weren’t outside my door. “Recruiting mission,” someone told me at breakfast on the big communal tables out on the deck, but they didn’t explain. No one else had anything very much to say to me either, and I wondered what Queen M had told her people about me. I realised I was lonely without my two constant shadows.

I spent the morning running a small surgery on the ship, giving the once-over to people suffering everything from colds to colitis but mostly VD. I didn’t have to hear the noise from some of the cabins at night to know how most of Queen M’s crew killed the idle hours. Nothing like living through the apocalypse to reawaken your lust for life. If they kept going at this rate, we’d be developing antibiotic-resistant strains of syphilis which were just going to be a whole bundle of laughs.

After lunch a call came through that there’d been an injury on one of the plantations on St Kitts. A machete wound; deep, by the sound of it. I was required to treat it and get the man back in working shape. And if I couldn’t... I could already imagine the cold little cost-benefit analysis going on in Queen M’s head. I’d seen her only once since my return from Paris, and we hadn’t spoken. She’d just looked into my furious eyes and smiled, patronisingly – as if I were small child throwing a temper tantrum that would be indulged at first and then, if necessary, punished. I don’t think, up to that point in my life, I’d ever hated anyone so much.

But when I got the order to go to St Kitts, I went, just like she knew I would. What was I going to do, leave the man to die of his injuries?

The small schooner which took us bounced on the waves like an over-eager puppy. I was eager to get to the island too – my first unescorted trip away from the ship. The shoreline was rocky, rising quickly to a forested, hilly interior with terraces that had been cut into the hills. Fruit trees and sugar-cane plantations were slowly eating up most of the fertile land.

We made landfall at a small jetty on the sort of beach that would once have been heaving with fish-belly-white British tourists. Just two people were waiting for us there that day, a tiny Chinese woman who looked as delicate as a doll, and a big North African man whose face was deeply marked with tribal scars.

I hopped off the boat onto the sand. My sandals sank in, grains seeping in over the side to cascade grittily over my toes.

“The doctor?” the Chinese woman asked.

I nodded, and to my surprise, turned to see that the schooner was leaving, none of its crew of four staying to baby-sit me. “We’ll be back at sunset,” the captain told me. “When you’re finished with the patient you can relax, take a tour of the island if you want. Queen M said you’d earned a holiday.” He grinned at me like he expected me to be grateful, and I managed a thin smile back.

They brought the injured man down to the beach, transporting him on the back of a rickety donkey trap. They’d given him a leather cord to chew on, but muffled whimpers were escaping. The edges of the wound were already blackened, starting to rot in the humid tropical air. His eyes stared into mine, pleading. I guess he knew what the price of my failure might be. It all depended on the state of his ligaments, but I didn’t tell him that. I just shot him up with enough morphine that he wouldn’t be worrying about anything very much for a while.

After that I injected local anaesthetic around the wound and got to work. It was jagged and deep enough to have nicked the bone. At the edge of the nick I saw a small piece of metal and after a second I realised that I was seeing a tracking device. Finally – a piece of luck. Except not really, because now I knew that it was embedded right in the bone. No way to remove it without breaking the bone around it.

Nothing about this was going to be simple.

I sighed and carried on with the job I’d been brought to do. There was dirt in the cut too, and I could see the beginning of sepsis. As I irrigated the wound and cut out the tissue that was already past saving I found myself drifting back into that trance-like state I’d first learned when I was a junior house officer putting in sixty-hour weeks at the Royal London. You couldn’t see the person you were working on as a person. It had to be a job, a little bit of technical expertise you were displaying. Saving a life was only secondary. You focussed on the skin and subcutaneous fat and bone until it was just another material you were sculpting.

I was so caught up in it that it wasn’t until I’d nearly finished, delicately sewing the edges of the wound together with the smallest stitches possible – as if he was going to care about the ugliness of his scar – that I noticed someone watching me as I worked. Not just watching. Drawing. I caught the brief blur of a pale face and dark hair, the scritch-scritch of pencil on paper.

When the bandage was in place, I took a moment to look closer. A Japanese guy, younger than me probably, with a slightly rakish air. His hair was gelled into sharp little spikes and his clothes looked like he’d spent too long thinking about them.

Without asking for permission, I took the sketch pad from him. I blinked, twice, and then I let out a small, helpless laugh. I’d expected something lifelike, a medical journal illustration or a vérité style of war-reporting maybe. But he’d turned us into a comic: soft, round curves and big doe-eyes which made me look like a ten-year-old mutant. The guy I’d been working on was drawn screaming in pain. There were Japanese characters coming out of his mouth in a speech balloon which I guessed loosely translated as ‘holy shit that hurts.’

I looked up from the drawing to the artist. “Okay, who the hell are you?”

He smiled. He had shockingly white teeth, so straight you could use them as a spirit level – but there was a wide gap between the two front ones. It turned his rakish look to something slightly goofy and I instantly found myself liking him more. “I’m Haru. And you, I think, are Jasmine. I’m very pleased to meet you.” His voice was strident, accent a little Japanese, a little American.

“Yeah. You’ve clearly heard of me but strangely no one’s said anything to me about you.”

He looked a little offended. “Really? Well, I’m the court artist.” I laughed, which pissed him off still further. “No, I’m serious. Queen M knows that a society isn’t just about the physical things, the food and the power. Without art and culture we may as well return to the stone age.”

“Funny,” I said flatly, “she didn’t seem too bothered about the artistic qualifications of the people we left behind when I went recruiting.”

He winced. “Yes, well – I guess culture’s a luxury still. You can only afford so much of it.” His eyes skittered around, trying to avoid mine, and after a moment I looked back down at his work, flicking through the drawings.

They were good. They were all in the same style as the first, some of them divided into actual panels, super-heroic figures leaping across the page in tight-fitting, brightly coloured costumes. I was pretty sure the beefy guy in the blue spandex rescuing a little child from a fire was supposed to be Soren. I wondered if that was something which had actually happened. “So I’m guessing you were a Manga artist in a previous life,” I said, looking back at him.

He shrugged. “Wanted to be. Never seemed to find the time to go professional.”

“Then Queen M came along. Lucky old you. She just leaves you free to wander, does she? Draw when the inspiration strikes?”

He flushed slightly. “I travel the islands. I guess you could say I’m the court reporter. A sort of... photo-journalist.”

“So you’ve been pretty much everywhere?” And this, suddenly, was interesting. A short cut to finding out what I needed to know if I was ever going to get out of here.

“I’ve been here seven months now so... yes, I’d say I’ve seen most of it.”

“Good.” I smiled, almost sincerely. “Then you can give me the tour.”

 

 

HE TOOK ME round the plantations first. It was cotton-picking season and the fields were crowded with people of pretty much every nationality, backs bent achingly over the scrubby plants. It was like a scene from three hundred years ago, given a United Colours of Benetton makeover. I wondered how many people here were natives of the island, survivors of the Cull. Had Queen M used the already available resources or had she wanted a clean sweep, no complications from people who saw this place as their home and her as an interloper? For once, without Soren and Kelis watching and judging every move I made, I felt free to ask.

“I’m going to speak to some of them,” I told Haru. “Find out if there are any parasites, diseases, something that might get passed on to the rest of the crew.”

He shrugged, not very interested. When I looked back at him a few moments later he was already sitting cross-legged on the ground, sketchbook on his lap.

I could see the workers snatching quick glances at me as they toiled. There were two women, armed, lounging at the edge of a field. But they seemed more concerned with the game of dominoes they were playing than with watching the workers. I ignored them and they ignored me as I headed over to the cotton pickers.

“Hi,” I said to the first person I came to, a petite white woman who couldn’t have been much older than twenty. Her hair was flame red, darkened by sweat.

She smiled shyly but kept on picking.

“I’m Jasmine. The new doctor.”

“You come to treat George, then?” Her accent was hard to place. Czech maybe.

“Is George the guy who got too friendly with a machete?”

She nodded.

“Yeah. He’s going to be fine.”

“It wasn’t an accident, you know.”

I raised an eyebrow, and she finally looked right at me. “Yochai meant to hit him. George was making moves on his woman.”

“And what’s George going to do about it now he’s staying in the land of the living?”

She became very interested in her work; small, clever fingers pulling out the cloud-puffs of cotton, and I knew that I wouldn’t get any more out of her. Still, this was interesting. Queen M’s rule wasn’t absolute, if nasty little squabbles like this broke out. There was some freedom of movement in the chains.

I spoke to more people: a dockworker from Portsmouth who’d been chosen for his knowledge of ship repairs; a Jivaro from the Amazon, picked, I guessed, for his sheer brawn. It was hard to tell from his few words of English. There were several Americans, mainly from the South, and there were people who’d been born and raised on St Kitts, then watched, five years ago, as everyone else around them died. They’d been trapped here with food rotting in the fields, the corpses of their friends and family for company, before Queen M had come. They didn’t see Queen M as an interloper; they saw her as a saviour.

Some of the others though – they were a different story. Hidden in their eyes was the same burning anger I felt in myself, tamped down now but ready to burst into flames at the right provocation.

I believed that they would rise up, if they were given the chance. But I didn’t get the slightest sense that they’d begun to plan it yet. There was no underground railroad spiriting slaves away, here, as there had once been in the Deep South. Most of them barely spoke each other’s languages. They’d never met before being brought here, terrified and powerless. I began to appreciate Queen M’s strategy, the reason she was willing to burn jet fuel, travelling to every corner of the world. These people’s diversity, their disunity, was her strength.

And she didn’t make their lives too unbearable. There was one day’s rest a week; food and drink for everyone in the evenings, along with parties, good times. They had something to live for and therefore something to lose.

Still, there was a power in their buried fury, here under the relentless Caribbean sun, the brilliant blue skies. I had to hold onto that hope.

After an hour, I went back to Haru. He looked up when my shadow fell across the page and flipped round the last sketch he’d been working on without my asking: the workers in the field, bent over the crop. It was a surprisingly melancholy picture. He’d captured the blankness in some of the eyes, the sense that the labour was given unwillingly. A sort of hopelessness.

“It’s good,” I told him.

“Yeah.” He looked back down at his picture. After a moment he carefully tore it from the pad, rolled it up and shoved it into his backpack. “Maybe I won’t show that one to Queen M.”

I could still see it in my mind, though, all the faces, the people I’d talked to today. And I knew that escaping wasn’t enough. I had to free them too. Don’t get me wrong – my motives weren’t that altruistic. A big part of it was because it would piss Queen M off, and I really wanted her to realise that she’d underestimated me. But it was also because if he were there, I thought it was what he would do.

 

 

I ASKED HARU to take me to some other plantations. I spoke to more people, who told the same stories, only in different languages. But that wasn’t really why I was there. By the third plantation I’d figured out that there were two guards for every hundred people, and neither of them stayed the whole night. There was only one permanent garrison on the island, according to a rickety old Barbadian, but the soldiers there tended to stick to themselves. Queen M was pretty bloody confident in her power over these people.

Pretty bloody confident of her power over the guards too, I realised. The people she armed and let out of her sight.

“How are people chosen for guard duty?” I asked Haru.

He looked at me suspiciously, a raised eyebrow asking why I wanted to know.

I shrugged. “Seems like a pretty plumb job to me – sitting on your arse all day when everyone else is working in two hundred degree heat. I just wondered how people landed it.”

“Thinking of signing up?”

“Guns have never been my thing,” I told him. “I don’t like the feel of them, you know? The knowledge that you’ve got something in your hand that could kill everyone around you and you wouldn’t even raise a sweat.”

“Really?” He frowned. “I think I like them for exactly the same reason. That incredible potential to change the world, in such a small thing. But the soldiers – she chooses them because they’re big and strong and maybe a little stupid. Same as everywhere, I guess.”

“People with previous training?”

He shook his head. “Not usually. She prefers to train them herself.”

Prefers people who know only what she wants them to know. But I didn’t say it.

Still, Haru wasn’t stupid. His black eyes narrowed, considering me. “You’re wondering how she makes sure they’re loyal, right?”

I tried to look casual. “Well, it must be a concern.”

“I guess. What I heard is she chooses people who have no family, or people whose whole family is here.”

Of course, that made sense. People who could be loyal to her unambiguously.

The sun was beginning to sink towards the horizon as we walked back along the rough tarmac road towards the beach. I watched it for a while, the astounding reds and pinks as the light refracted through thicker layers of polluted air. Dirt making beauty. I was sure Haru would have something to say about that.

When I looked across at him, he was still studying me, and I thought maybe he had been this whole time. “Yes, there aren’t many guards,” he said quietly. “But it’s not that simple. To escape, you need a way off the islands, or all you are is a sitting target and Queen M can come and deal with you when she wants. More importantly, you need to take care of the tracking device. No one will leave her while they’ve still got it in them. You might think you can persuade them, but you’re wrong. You’ll tell them that if everyone goes, she won’t be able to hunt them all down. And they’ll know that’s true – but she’ll hunt some people down, and what if that person’s you?”

I shook my head as if I didn’t know what he was talking about.

He grabbed my arm, fifty metres from the beach. The schooner was waiting for me in the water, the figures of the crew black silhouettes against the sunset. “I can help you. If you’ll trust me. I know this place better than you, the people too.” He was talking in an urgent whisper, as if afraid that the distant figures of the crew might overhear us.

How can you help me, I wanted to ask him, when you don’t even have the courage to say what you’re saying out loud? But all I said was, “I’m not interested in escaping. I don’t have any family out there, either. And I’ve got a cushy job too.”

He released my arm, but he didn’t stop staring at me. “Are you going to report me to Queen M?”

I shook my head, turning away from him.

I caught his crooked smile out of the corner of my eye. “Then you’re not the happy little citizen you pretend to be, are you? I’ll be waiting – when you’re ready to talk.”

 

 

THE CAPTAIN INFORMED us that the flagship had moved, so the journey back would take us a couple of hours. The stars were crisp and bright, and I guessed that our crew, grizzled islanders who looked like they’d been born on the waves, were using them to navigate. I tried to talk to them about it, but the replies they gave were monosyllabic. After a while I gave up and went to stand in the bow, as far from Haru as I could put myself on the small boat. I watched our white wake, disappearing into the distance until it was impossible to distinguish it from the waves.

There’s something very peaceful about sailing at night, the solitude of it. The noise of the sails as the wind caught them suddenly seemed very loud. And there it was again: a sharp flap that was almost like a whip-crack.

Except that it wasn’t our sails.

There was absolutely no reason to panic. We were in friendly waters; the sea was filled with Queen M’s ships. But when I saw the expression on the sailor’s faces, the sudden flush of fear in Haru’s pale cheeks, ghostly in the starlight, I knew that what I’d heard was the start of something very bad.

“They’re windward and gaining,” one of the sailors shouted, voice hoarse with panic. I was shoved aside roughly as the others hurried to the sails and swung the boom right around. The wind caught the sails again and the deck tilted sharply as the ship veered. I’d been completely unprepared. The motion flung me like a rag doll against the starboard railing – except that the railing wasn’t there, it was ten feet lower than it should have been and instead of the bone-thumping crash I was expecting I just kept on falling.

The ocean looked dark and deep beneath me, and somewhere out there was whatever had caused this sudden, frantic flight. Without any conscious thought, I flung my arm out, grabbed hold of the railing as my body arched over it.

My fingers caught and held, the weight of my body yanking at them as I fell. The pain in my shoulder was indescribable. I was sure it was dislocated. My fingers felt like every single one of them had been broken at once. But I held on, until I felt the brutal thump of my body against the side of the ship, my chest bruised to the bone by the impact. I let out a shout of mingled relief and pain.

My body bounced once, twice, against the hull. I thought I heard the sound of a rib snap, or it could have been something on the boat breaking. I was too dazed to tell. My eyes flicked shut, wanted to stay shut. My brain wanted to switch off. I wished all that noise would just go away so that I could go to sleep like I wanted to. All the shouting, the screaming. That infuriating whimpering.

My fingers had almost slipped from the railing when something inside me shouted and I jerked back into consciousness. For a second, it had sounded like a voice. Like the Voice – willing me not to let go just yet. But it couldn’t be, could it? The anti-psychotics were supposed to have killed the Voice for good.

And then I didn’t really care about it anymore, because my head swung round as I tried desperately to claw my other arm up to the railing, to drag myself back onto the deck – and I finally saw the boat which had been pursuing us.

At first I thought I might be delirious, that the side of the boat had cracked my head as well as my ribs. Because the people on that boat... they shouldn’t have been alive. Not in any sane universe.

They were still fifty feet away and closing fast, and I could see their eyes glaring at us, even at that distance, as bright and flat as coins. They were dressed so normally, in chinos, t-shirts, loose flowing skirts... as if there was nothing wrong with them at all. But their bodies... their faces...

Twenty feet away now and I could see all five of them, leaning over the side of their boat, grappling hooks in hand, almost panting in their eagerness to get to us. Animalistic. I could see a string of drool trickling down the chin of one, a fifty-something woman. After a moment, her tongue flicked out to lick it up and I saw with a nauseous shock that the tongue was split down the middle, wriggling hideously.

The other damage was more obvious. One of her hands was gone entirely but no one had done anything to set or heal the wound. I could see a stump of bone, poking through the centre of her arm, white in the newly risen moonlight. There were deep, infected cuts on her face. Ten feet and I could smell the corruption pouring off her, off all of them.

They shouldn’t have been able to walk. Not the teenager with the gaping hole in his body where his spleen must once have been. Or the older man with the festering pit where he once had an eyeball and the fingers of one hand all hanging off, swinging in the sea breeze on strips of skin. They should all have been screaming in agony.

But I was the one who was screaming. Ten feet now and the first grappling hook sank into the hull inches from my head. Desperation gave me strength and, an inferno of pain in my shoulder, I managed to drag my other arm to the railing. Another grappling hook pierced the hull on the other side of me and I could feel the shift and sway as our schooner was slowly dragged off its course. I didn’t have time to look, I knew the other boat was drawing closer, side on. If I didn’t move soon I’d be flattened between the two vessels, slowly enough to feel every second of it. I didn’t know if that would be preferable to the alternative.

My arm felt like it was tearing itself out of its socket, but inch by inch I managed to draw myself upwards, towards safety. And then another grappling hook hit the side of the boat, failed to find purchase and splashed down into the water fifteen feet below me. A gout of seawater splashed up, spraying across my eyes, and for just a second I lost concentration as the salt burned. My arms straightened and I was right back where I’d started, facing one sort of death or another.

“Fuck!” I screamed. “Fuck!” It just couldn’t end like this. How could it, when I didn’t even know if he was alive? When I’d spent the last five years doing nothing but shooting junk into my veins, and now those were going to be the last five years of my life.

With one last adrenaline-fuelled burst of energy, I flexed my arms and lifted myself up. I couldn’t see anything now because the other boat was so close, the stars above me were nearly gone. I was rising. And then it wasn’t just my own force bringing me up because someone else had hold of my arms, and Jesus it hurt, but it didn’t matter because I was over the railing and lying on the deck, gasping in fear and shock. Haru’s face, three inches from mine, looked like it had aged twenty years since I’d last seen it.

“What..?” I said, but he didn’t let me finish, just yanked on my arm – my injured arm, and this time I managed not to scream, biting down on my tongue until it bled – and dragged me as far away from the other boat as he could.

“Don’t touch them!” he screamed. “For fuck’s sake, don’t let them touch you!”

But how the hell didn’t you touch four people who were climbing onto a thirty-foot wide boat with you? And why not? Were they contagious? Christ, could we turn into what they were? I suddenly wished, fiercely and hopelessly, that Soren and Kelis were with us. Or if not them, at least one of their guns.

I was unarmed and Haru didn’t have anything more deadly than a 2H pencil, and the crew of our boat were sailors, not soldiers. I saw one of them now, wrenching open a lockbox under the tiller with desperate fingers. The youngest of the... things which had boarded our boat trotted over the deck towards him. I’d been half expecting them to shamble, like B-movie zombies, but somehow, these people were still alive.

The other three were watching the sailor, heads tilted as if in idle curiosity. But they were leaving the boy to take him on alone.

“What do you want?” I said, not expecting any sort of answer.

The one-eyed man turned to face me. “Nothing you’ll give us willingly,” he said with a light Spanish accent, a voice you could have heard on the street and not thought about twice.

Even on the other side of the boat I could hear the sailor’s teeth chattering with fear. The boy was almost within touching distance now, but then the key snicked into place and the gun was out of the lockbox and in his hand. He might not have been a soldier, but the kid was standing right next to him. Even with his hands shaking so hard that he could barely hold the weapon, he managed to put three bullets straight into the boy’s chest.

The boy staggered back a few paces – then kept on coming. Not enough stopping power, my man’s voice said inside my head. The little girl in me who was still afraid of the dark was gibbering in fear of the unnatural things that couldn’t be killed. But I was a scientist; nothing was irrational, only yet to be understood. I’d seen soldiers walking around with injuries that should have laid them out cold, because the body’s own anaesthetic had kicked in and they just didn’t know how bad things were yet.

But there were some injuries no one walked away from.

“The head!” I shouted. “Aim for the head!” After I’d said it I let out a choked, hytserical laugh, because maybe we were in a zombie movie after all.

The sailor turned to look at me, as if he was about to ask me if I was certain, and for a moment I wanted to kill him myself. When he turned back, the boy’s hands were only inches from his throat, but the gun roared one final time. The bullet tore through the boy’s left eye and exited messily out the back of his head. He let out one quick, surprised cough, then dropped on top of the sailor like a marionette with its strings cut.

The sailor screamed an almost unearthly wail of complete panic. I thought he must have been hurt in some way. Maybe the boy had been carrying a knife, although I hadn’t seen it. But then he pushed the boy off him and shoved himself to his feet, his mouth still open and screaming. His whole face and his white t-shirt were drenched in the boy’s blood, black and shiny in the moonlight. Infected, I realised. He thinks he’s been infected.

And by the time I’d realised that, it was already too late, because the sailor turned wide, desperate eyes to us for just one second and then turned and leapt over the side of the boat. Another second later, and the remaining three infected turned their heads to us, moving in an eerie kind of unison.

The sailor had taken the gun with him, out of reach into the depths.

Still, I knew they could be killed now. Haru was huddled behind me, whimpering. His stock of courage seemed to have been entirely used up dragging me over the side. Now he was hugging the boom as if it might offer him some sort of comfort.

The boom.

I pushed Haru out of the way, not really caring when I heard his head crack against the deck. He swore viciously in Japanese. The boom was tied off – of course it was.

Fuck!

How could a rope that thick be knotted that tightly? My fingers picked at it feverishly, and then Haru was with me, helping. Shit! They were spreading out, the three of them fanning across the deck. There was no way I was going to get all of them. Abruptly, the boom was free. Haru and I heaved on it together, and for once things were going my way because it swung easily, quickly, well-oiled and beautifully counterbalanced. They can’t have been surprised by the move, but they weren’t expecting it to come so fast. It took one, then two of them, and swept them clean off the deck and into the water.

“They’ll come back!” Haru said. “They’ll climb back onboard!”

“Then stop them!” I screamed because, for fuck’s sake, did I have to think of everything myself? “Get rid of the grappling hooks – or use one to hit them with if they try to climb the sides!”

He nodded, jerkily, but he still just stood there. His eyes were so wide that I could see the whites all the way around them. I yanked his shoulder round to turn him in the right direction and then shoved him on his way. He stumbled, then kept on walking, and I caught a flicker out of the corner of my left eye. She was coming straight for me.

I felt like a creature of pure adrenaline. My senses were hyped, the smell of the invaders almost making me gag, only made bearable by the salt smell of sea water that seeped through everything. Like a vague buzzing in the back of my mind, a half-recalled memory, I felt the pain of the bruises on my side, and my dislocated shoulder, but they weren’t enough to distract me.

Later, I’d wonder if that was what he felt when he went on those missions he could never tell me anything about. He’d always said danger was a high and I’d thought yeah, that’s the cliché, but really isn’t danger just frightening? In that instant I understood that it was absolutely both. And this, this moment when my actions would decide whether I lived or died, was the purest of my life.

The thing was smiling at me as she walked forward, not a sneer or a grimace of rage but a real grin. Up close I suddenly saw that her cheekbones had the same angles, her eyes the same tilt as the dead boy’s. Her son, I thought, but she didn’t seem to care that he was dead. She just seemed... happy.

Her split tongue flickered out, lizard-like, through her smile.

I didn’t have any weapons, not even a knife. The boom was over the other side of the boat now. Even if it swung back, it would hit me and not her. And if I let her touch me, it was all over. She walked forward and I walked back, a pace at a time. One step for her. One step for me. Two. Then three. I was nearly at the railing and after that there was nowhere else to go but into the water.

“What do you want?” I said to her again. “I’m a doctor. I can help you with... whatever the hell it is that’s wrong with you.”

That made her stop, just for a second. She held up the jagged stump of her right hand, eying the protruding bone as if she hadn’t really noticed it before. Then she looked back at me. “But why would I want to change?” she asked in a warm, friendly Jamaican accent. “Everything’s perfect just the way it is.”

And then she took one last step forward, and instead of stepping back I stepped forward too. I put my hands on the lapels of her denim jacket and I dropped back, bringing my foot up and into her stomach. It had been years since I’d learnt this. Since he’d made me go to self-defence classes, then made me practice with him at home, again and again, because London’s a dangerous place and he couldn’t bear it if anything happened to me. But I guess he was right, that once you’ve learnt it you never forget. It took no effort at all to pull her over my head and then kick off with my heel and flip her over the railing. Less than a second later, I heard the splash as she hit the water.

I lay there for a second, shaking. She hadn’t touched me. No part of her had touched me, I was sure of it. But the adrenaline had burnt itself out, purpose served, and all I could feel now was the desperate, paralysing fear I should have been feeling earlier.

 

 

IT TOOK US another forty-five minutes to reach the flagship. There was a radio on the boat but a bullet had taken it out and there was no way for us to let anyone else know what had happened.

Haru and I spent the time keeping watch, peering uselessly into the dense night for any more pursuers. The sailors had wanted to tip the infected boy’s body overboard but I’d persuaded them not to. I’d need to study it, figure out just what the hell was wrong. Grumbling, they complied, taking the wide detours around his body and the pool of blood spilling from it.

When we got back to the flagship I asked to be taken straight to Queen M, but it was near midnight and the only person I could find was Kelis, back from whatever mission she’d been out on. She told me that it could wait until morning. I needed to sleep or I’d be making no sense to anyone anyway.

I let her lead me back to my room because I was exhausted – my whole body was one big ache – and also because she just hadn’t seemed that surprised when I told her about the people who attacked us and what seemed to be wrong with them. I needed some time to think about what that meant.

 

 

THE MORNING DAWNED bright but cooler. I shivered when I went out on deck in my shorts and tank-top, squinting against the piercing light of the rising sun. The blue sky, the blue seas, the distant palm trees suddenly looked a whole lot less reassuring than they had when I’d first arrived. Trouble in paradise, and then some.

Queen M was already enthroned in the empty pool, lounging back with one leg slung over an arm of the chair, looking like she hadn’t a care in the world. She stood and smiled when I approached, and I guessed she’d been waiting for me. Only a few people were out at that time of the morning and they drifted away when they saw me.

“They come from Cuba,” she said when I was ten paces from her. “My people call them the Infected.”

That stopped me in my tracks. “Cuba?” I don’t know why it surprised me; there was just something too known, too package-holiday about Cuba for it to be the source of that terrible affliction.

But she nodded. “They don’t make any effort to disguise it, their boats are easy enough to track.”

“And has anyone gone there to find out what’s going on?”

Her bright eyes narrowed. “Would you go?”

I felt the throb of the deep bruises covering my legs and chest and I shook my head.

“I sent some people, back when they first showed up,” Queen M said. “Twenty-four went, five returned. Back then it wasn’t the whole of the island. Now as far as we can tell it’s everyone. And it’s started to spread. They say there have been cases on Haiti, some of the other Greater Antilles. As for what causes it...” She shrugged.

“But you’re sure it’s infectious?”

“How else could it be spreading?” Her eyes were still staring into mine, weighing everything up. She knows I want out, I thought. And this is her way of getting me to stay.

I sighed because, yeah, she might be manipulating me, but whatever it was that was coming out of Cuba was more important than my anger at her, or my desire to escape. The world just couldn’t take another Cull. It would be the end of us. “I’m not just a doctor,” I reminded her. “I’m a researcher. I was part of the team investigating the Cull, so I’ve picked up a thing or two. We brought one of the Infected back. I can do an autopsy on him if you like, get some blood work done, whatever you’ve got the equipment for. See what I can find out.”

She smiled like a cat that had just been given detailed directions to the creamery. It occurred to me then that I’d never been told why the flagship had moved while I’d been on St Kitt’s, or why she’d so unexpectedly decided to give me the day off.

What I knew now was that she was the kind of person who was more than happy to kill a sailor or two if it got her what she wanted.

 

 

THE LAB WAS in the bows of the ship, tucked away behind the casino in one of those areas that Kelis and Soren had steered me carefully away from. I thought it might once have been a crew kitchen; the gleaming metal surfaces and sinks were obviously original, but the pipettes, Bunsen burners and centrifuges were more recent additions. As was the autopsy table right in the centre of the room.

I had a sudden flash of it being used by Queen M for other purposes, living subjects, the runnels to carry away the blood at the sides a convenience when you were trying to extract information from someone you didn’t want to die quite yet.

The current occupant of the table was very definitely dead though. Now I could see him under the halogen lights I realised he was even younger than I’d first thought, barely into his teens. There were three others in the room when Kelis and I arrived, white-coated and bending intently over their workstations, test-tubes and Petri dishes spread out in front of them like a particularly unappetising meal. I gestured at the corpse of the Infected. “Mind if I take a look?”

The nearest scientists, a harried looking woman in her forties, shrugged. “He’s all yours. I’m an agronomist. Corpses aren’t my thing.”

“We’re both electrical engineers,” the man beside her said, nodding over at a third man who was peering through a microscope at some kind of circuit board. “You’re the crew’s first pathologist.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Except I’m not. I’m a doctor and a biochemist, but I haven’t performed an autopsy since medical school.”

“At least you’ve done one,” the first woman said. “I wouldn’t have a clue where to start.”

Kelis hovered at my elbow, peering over at the body with open curiosity. “First one you’ve seen close up?” I guessed.

“Yup,” she said. “Queen M always told us to steer clear, leave them be. Only recently they started getting aggressive, coming after us.”

I looked down at the boy’s body, the gaping bullet wound where his left eye had been, and lower, were something had cut into his chest. Now that he was naked I could see other wounds too: a chunk out of his left thigh, two toes hanging off and another two broken and twisted. It was easy enough to tell which injuries were the result of the confrontation on the boat and which had been around a while. The new ones weren’t running with puss, oozing yellow and green into the surrounding flesh.

I decided to take a look at the wounds to his legs and stomach first. The edges of the cuts had been blurred by swelling and infection, but on the leg there was one little area that had remained relatively unscathed and it told me everything I needed to know. “Teeth marks,” I said to Kelis, pulling back on the flesh and standing aside so that she could get a clear view.

She turned her head aside and made a face. Funny, you wouldn’t think a woman doing her job could be squeamish. “Joder! You’re saying they eat each other?”

I shook my head. “Not human. Shark, I think, though I’ve never treated a shark attack victim, so I can’t be one-hundred per cent sure.”

She held a hand over her nose in a futile attempt to ward off the stink and leaned a little closer. “Doesn’t look like they did anything to it after the attack. There’s no stitches, nothing. Why would anyone let an injury like that go untreated?”

“Yeah.” I looked at his stomach, sure now that the flesh had been torn in the same incident. The level of infection was consistent too, both injuries dating back a couple of weeks. “It’s like the shark bit him, he fought it off, climbed out of the water and then carried on like nothing had happened.”

“But that’s not possible, is it?”

I shrugged. “Short term, sure, it’s amazing what a flood of adrenaline can do for you. Long term – no, it shouldn’t be. He should have been in agony.”

“Any sign of brain damage maybe?” She peered at the boy’s head, what was left of it. “Something that might explain why he can’t feel any pain?”

She was quick. I needed to remember that, in my plans. I sawed the boy’s skull open but the damage from the bullet was too extensive to make out any subtler trauma around it. “Brain damage might explain what happened to him, but not the rest of them. It’s too much of a coincidence for them all to have suffered the same condition.”

After the brain I went for the other organs, cracking open the ribs to get at them, wincing as blood splashed back at me from the corpse. The gown and mask caught it all and the examination didn’t tell me anything I could use. The state of his liver would suggest too much drinking, but alcoholism just wasn’t going to explain the things I’d seen on that boat. I used a scalpel to slice off a sliver of it anyway, along with the heart and the lungs, but I wasn’t really expecting to find anything. I thought Kelis was probably at least partly right: whatever was wrong with these people was wrong with their brains.

After I was done with the body, hauling a sheet over it because I didn’t want to look at the ruin of that young man a second longer, I took the samples over to one of the microscopes. And yes, I’d been right – they told me nothing. Normal. Which left only... but I’d been putting that off since I came into the room, almost as if I’d known from the beginning what I was going to find.

“What about his blood?” Kelis said, watching it soak through the thin white sheet covering his body like a guilty secret that wanted to be known. “Aren’t most infectious diseases blood-borne?”

“They can be air-borne too, transmitted by touch...” But I was just talking, the words didn’t mean anything, because she was right. I had to look at the blood. My fingers trembled as I prepared the slide, and I wondered if Kelis had noticed. And then I wasn’t thinking about anything at all because what I could see in front of me was what I’d somehow feared without even knowing it, and the memories washed back over me, too strong to resist.

 

 

MOST OF ALL I remembered the excitement, a taste in the back of my throat that was very much like fear. My heart pounding, loud in my ears and heavy in my chest. And maybe it was fear, a little, because what if we were wrong? If we doled out hope and then took it back again, would anyone there forgive us? With the way nerves were on edge, tempers frayed – it would only take one spark, and that might be it. But...

“I really think this is it,” Ash said, and there was an edge of excitement in his normally cool voice.

I looked at the slide again, at the lab work, the electron microscope images and grainy NMR scans, but they were all telling us the same thing. “This is... you know how fucking dangerous this is, right?”

But Ash was grinning now, that smile I remembered from college but hadn’t seen in a while, when he knew he’d done something clever and was planning on being insufferable about it. “Yeah, because dying in agony while your brains slide out of your ears isn’t dangerous at all.” The lab felt too small to contain him when he was in a mood like this.

I ignored him and took one final look at the slide, the papers. As if the facts might have changed while I wasn’t looking. But of course they hadn’t. “It really is O-neg.”

“Yeah,” Ashok said, “and before that, it really was AB. This is it, Jasmine. Stop second guessing and start celebrating!”

“Shit,” I exclaimed. “Shit. We are geniuses!”

He swept me up into a hug. “Yeah, babe, we really are.”

“Twisted geniuses.”

He gave me a last squeeze, and then let me go. “The best kind.”

“Because what we did here is mental. You know that, don’t you? I mean, we’re generally in the business of curing retro-viruses, not creating them.”

“Not to mention the military tech in there that would make al-Qaeda’s eyes light up. If they weren’t, you know, dying in agony along with everyone else.”

“And the stem cells – don’t want to forget them.”

“How could I? But the FDA’s out there melting right alongside the terrorists we also don’t have to worry about.”

Our jubilation had tipped over into near hysteria, and we must have been shouting pretty damn loud, because Abuke poked his head round the door and frowned. Then he saw our faces and his frown slipped into another expression, harder to define.

“You did it?” he said. “You’ve found it?”

I smiled. “Yeah, I really think we have.”

But a vaccine that turns a rat’s blood from one type to another isn’t necessarily the same as a Cure that does the same thing for humans. In any normal medical research there’d be years of testing to go before we moved on to live subjects. Fat chance. It was live testing or nothing, and there weren’t a whole lot of subjects to choose from.

 

 

THE FIVE OF us lay in identical beds wearing hospital gowns, tubes in our arms, expressions of unease on our faces. I guess it was flattering in a way, that the other three were prepared to put so much trust in mine and Ash’s work. Or more likely it was just desperation.

Yesterday, the base had seen its first Cull. The rest of us would follow; weeks or days later, who knew, but it would be soon.

On the bed beside me Ash smiled, but it was strained. The muscles in his cheeks tensing and releasing as he ground his teeth, a nervous habit I’m not sure he knew he had. “Ready?” I asked him.

“Jasmine...” he said softly, and I realised that he was going to say something serious, probably about us – but I had a man at home.

“We’ll be fine,” I said hurriedly. “I’ve got faith in us.”

“Yeah.” His eyes closed slowly, then opened again, and he knew I didn’t want to hear what he wanted to say. “I’m glad I’m here with you,” he said finally, “whatever happens.”

And then we both took the needles nestling in the cannula in our arms, and pushed. A second’s hesitation, then the other three did the same. The Cure, mainlined, spreading through our system like the virus it was. Taking our DNA and changing it. DNA transcribing to RNA, coalescing and knotting to form the templates for alien proteins inside us, closing off the source of the AB blood cells that marked us for death. Telling our bodies that we’d been O-negs all the time, we just hadn’t realised it yet.

Doing all of that – and something else too. A second after the small pain of the injection came a pain that was a thousand times worse. It felt as if something essential was being ripped loose right in the heart of us, and then again, and again, and again, until I couldn’t imagine that it would ever end. Ash was the first to start screaming and once he’d started, he didn’t stop. None of us did.

 

 

AND NOW, HERE, as I looked at the slide, I knew exactly what I was seeing. Except, of course, that it shouldn’t be possible. I turned to Kelis, hoping she couldn’t see my shaking hands, that she wouldn’t notice the way all the blood had drained from my face. Blood – ironic how everything comes back to that.

“Hey,” I said, and tried not to wince at the fake casualness of it, my inability to seem normal when everything inside me was screaming as loud as it had when I first took the Cure. “Any chance you can scare up some food? I didn’t have any breakfast earlier.”

She looked at the boy’s corpse, and then at me, eyebrows raised. “You’re hungry – seriously?”

“Yeah, what can I say – I’m a doctor. Gore gives me an appetite.”

She shrugged and headed out the door, maybe glad to get away from the gore herself. Strange to think of a killer being queasy at the sight of blood. But then killer didn’t quite capture her. It implied a love of it, or a clinical efficiency. Soren was a killer. Kelis had gone about killing with a kind of weary resignation, like it had been her third-choice career while there was a kid at home with an out-of-work husband and she needed to bring in the dough.

I’d brought my medical bag with me. The sterile needle and syringe were right where they always were. I had to stop myself shooting edgy, guilty looks at the other scientists as I drew out my own blood from the crook of my elbow and carefully smeared it onto a slide. They wouldn’t think there was anything odd about it. Why should they? I was just a fellow scientist, going about my scientific business.

The slide clicked into place beside the one I’d taken from the Infected boy. I already knew what I’d see, but like a lump of vomit stuck halfway up my throat, I was still reluctant to bring it all the way into the light of day. I took one deep shaking breath, a second, then put my eye against the microscope and focussed.

The slide of my blood was on the left. The boy’s blood was on the right. I remembered that – but there was no other way to tell. The two slides were identical, the same sickly, deformed red blood cells, twisted into a shape that nature had never seen before Ash and I had had our bright idea, five years ago. When we’d believed we might be able to save the human race.

The cobbled-together, wing-and-a-prayer hybrid we’d engineered in a lab from cutting-edge medical tech and code-black military wetware had driven me insane. Somehow, it had done something very different, but equally terrible, to the people of Cuba.

Ash and I had meant to cure one plague. Had we managed to start another? I guess I should have been feeling guilty, for letting loose this thing that could wipe out the last, ragged remnant of humanity. But that wasn’t what I was thinking about right then. What I was thinking was that Queen M had been right: this thing was infectious, and I was a carrier. Hell, I was Patient Zero. And if she ever picked up even a hint of it, I’d be shark meat.

Suddenly escape was looking a whole lot more urgent. Fuck everyone else. I had to get out of there right now.