CHAPTER FOUR

 

 

KELIS LOOKED HURT, as if everything we’d just done had been a personal slight. “Yeah,” I said. “This is certainly a surprise.” I tried edging a little closer to her, a millimetre shuffle forward of each foot, but a quick twitch of her gun stopped me in my tracks.

“We told you not to do this,” Soren said in a dull, heavy voice. For the first time, in the bright morning sunlight, I noticed the strands of grey in his ash blond hair and the fine wrinkles raying out from his mouth. There was something a little off-centre in his pale eyes. We’d broken something he never thought could break and now he wasn’t sure about anything.

I shrugged. “You told me I wouldn’t be able to. Not the same thing.”

Kelis stepped forward until the barrel of her gun was pressed into the thin material of my t-shirt.

I carefully didn’t look at it, only into her eyes. “As a matter of academic interest, how exactly did you find us?”

“A boat with no keys and a full fuel tank. You’re not that subtle.”

“No, I guess not. But you’re free too now, you know. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

Soren frowned. “Maybe we didn’t want to be free.”

“The sea around here is full of people who did,” I said. “So are the islands. I wanted to be free, and I’ll die before I let you make me a slave again.” With a confidence I didn’t feel, I pushed my fingers against the barrel of the gun pressing into my chest. There was a moment of resistance, then Kelis let me brush it aside. Soren shot her a look and didn’t let his own barrel drop. I ignored him and turned back to the wheel of the boat.

“And how many people did you kill to get free?” Kelis asked. “How many of my friends?”

That hurt more than I thought it would. I was sure she could see the sudden tension in my shoulders, but I kept my voice light. “I don’t know, I didn’t keep count. Did you?”

I felt Haru’s sharp intake of breath, but I thought I knew Kelis now. She didn’t need things sugar-coated. She didn’t like them that way.

“You could come with us, of course,” I said, when there’d been a moment without either a reply or a gunshot. “We’ve got the brains covered, but now we’re out we could do with some muscle.”

“That’s one of the least flattering offers I’ve ever received.” I risked a look at Kelis and saw that she was almost smiling. “What makes you think that we won’t just take this boat ourselves and push the rest of you overboard?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the fact that you haven’t already?”

“No, they cannot come,” Ingo said suddenly. He seemed completely unconcerned that two very large guns were now being pointed right at him by two pretty pissed-off people. He just frowned, as if mildly annoyed that they couldn’t see it for themselves. “Their tracking devices are still functional. Once the computers are back on line, Queen M will be able to find them.”

“Yeah?” I said, before Kelis could actually shoot him. “And how is Queen M going to get the network back up, now her entire crew has fled?”

“Fled from the ship,” Ingo said. “The islands are still hers. And there is nothing to say that the loyal will not return to her once the danger of Cuba is passed. It is that, not freedom, which drove many away.”

In the time we’d been talking, the prow of the boat set on a straight course, the island had grown larger, the details of the coastline clearer. I could see individual palm trees now – and there were people, streaming towards the golden beach. To starboard, and slowly drawing ahead of us, was another vast bulk between us and the sun: the flagship, still on a collision course.

“If the danger of Cuba does pass,” I said.

“But taking them remains an unnecessary risk,” Ingo said stubbornly, and I wanted to punch him.

To my surprise, Soren just laughed. “Yeah, well, it’s a risk you’re going to have to take.”

Ingo opened his mouth to protest some more and this time I did stop him, grabbing his arm hard. “They’re with us. Accept when you’ve lost and move on. Besides, they’ll be useful. I hear it’s a dangerous world out there.”

Kelis holstered her gun. A warm salt breeze blew up and the boats all around us bobbed on the waves, and it almost felt like we were pleasure cruising, somewhere where nothing could harm us. But plenty of things could and some of them were heading right towards us.

“Those aren’t our boats,” Kelis said, eyes straining against the brilliance of the Caribbean sun.

Haru squinted short-sightedly. “How can you tell?”

Kelis gave him a look of contempt. “How about because they’re comingfromCuba?”

They were. The sea ahead of us was suddenly dark with vessels, small and fast, darting across the waters towards the refugee fleet. The other boats were beginning to realise the danger. The fleet began to split, no longer a unified shoal, now just a series of individuals, happy to leave everyone else behind if it saved them from the predators. Soren put his beefy hands on the wheel, ready to swing us around and join the panicked flight.

The swarm of Infected was gaining fast, five hundred meters and closing. The wind was in their sails; if we turned we had little chance of outrunning them.

I held Soren’s hand firm against the wheel. “No. Keep course – straight for the shore.”

He looked at me like I was going crazy and he wasn’t the only one. Maybe I was, but I didn’t need the Voice to tell me that this was the right thing to do. “They’re all in the water,” I said. “If we can get past them, they’ll have to turn into the wind to follow us – and why would they, when all the other ships are straight ahead?”

“She’s right!” Kelis said. “Straight on, full throttle.”

Soren obeyed her without question. We powered forward and now we were three hundred meters from the Infected.

“Head for Cuba – are you crazy?” Haru screamed. “So what if their boats are all at sea? Who’s to say there aren’t twenty more of them on the island? There could be thousands of them, just waiting on the beach for us to arrive.”

“No, this is a good plan,” Ingo said firmly.

Haru sagged, realising that he was outnumbered.

“We don’t need to land, we can skirt the island,” I said. “All we need to do is get past the Infected.”

They were barely a hundred meters away now – too close to change our minds. We were the nearest of all Queen M’s fleet to them, the most obvious target. I could see the crew of their leading ship, leaning forward in the prow as if they couldn’t wait to get at us.

Behind the yacht were five jet skis, with two Infected clinging on to each. Fuck. The yacht would never turn in time, but the jet skis... I turned to Soren, thinking maybe it wasn’t too late to turn back.

He read my expression and shook his head. No time.

“Then give me a fucking gun. A big one. Take one yourself and give Haru the tiller.”

“Hey!” Haru said, at the implication that he’d be useless in an actual fight. Then he glanced up and saw the Infected. Closer now, close enough that we could see their faces – the festering cuts and sores. He took the wheel without protest.

Soren hauled aside the tarpaulin that he and Kelis had hidden themselves under, revealing a cache of arms and ammo. He tossed me a semi-automatic rifle that made my small pistol look like a toy and handed out the rest, taking two for himself. Kelis gave a very small smile as he did.

To starboard, the great hulk of Queen M’s flagship was finally beginning to turn, as unwieldy as a cow on a race track. I gave it even odds whether it would run aground or skim the shore and make it back out to sea. Whatever happened, it couldn’t outpace the Infected. Their ships were swarming around it, little insect-figures of people already beginning to scale the hull.

Not my problem if the people I’d once thought to rescue had instead been brought here to their deaths.

Ahead, the Infected yacht was heading straight for us, prow sharp as a knife, ready to cut through our little tub. It was a game of chicken which we could only lose, playing against a ship full of people with no fear of pain or death.

“Hang on!” Haru shouted, his voice high with terror. Almost before he’d finished speaking he pulled the tiller hard around, flinging us desperately out of the path of the approaching ship.

I grabbed a thick metal ring set in the floor as my body was flung against the starboard railing. I heard a crack that might have been the boat or might have been a rib but I held on grimly, splashed by an arc of seawater as we tipped at nearly ninety degrees.

A second later there was another crack that was neither the boat nor a rib. A neat little chip appeared in the deck five inches from my face, and I realised we were being fired on.

Somehow I’d managed to keep my grip on the rifle. But I’d need two hands to fire it, and one of them was still desperately clinging on to the metal ring that was keeping me out of the water. The boat tipped a little further, so far that I could feel a salt sting in my eyes. A lurch, and suddenly we were tipping the other way, faster. I felt a fierce blow against my back as we hit the water and my jaw slammed shut on my tongue. There was a trickle of coppery blood down my throat. And all around me now, the insect whine of bullets.

My back clenched, protested, but I fought against the agony and dragged myself to my knees. One quick glance to the side and I saw that Haru had done it. The Infected yacht was beside us for one moment and then past, drawn helplessly onwards by the wind. I swivelled to fire off a brief burst. I thought that maybe one figure in the stern dropped the rifle it was holding. But then we were past and the hail of bullets eased, and for just a second our path looked clear to Cuba’s golden shore.

Then the jet skis were all around us. The odds were still against us.

The worst thing was the way the riders were smiling, a polite little social smile, as if none of this mattered very much. Their hands on their guns were relaxed, fingers engorged with blood, not white with tension like mine were around the trigger of the rifle. Nothing about them said they cared – about anything.

The stream of bullets from my rifle took one of them right through that social smile. Teeth shattered, fragments of enamel sticking to her ruined cheeks.

Haru was screaming, a constant noise that might have contained words. Kelis let out a whoop at her own shot, straight through the heart of the grey-haired man on the leading jet ski. She was enjoying herself, high on the adrenaline. I understood it, but I couldn’t feel the same. The air was full of death, meaningless and sudden. I didn’t want to die. I wasn’t ready.

The people I’d killed weren’t ready either. But that didn’t stop me from firing again, missing my first target but winging the second. Another jet ski veered and faltered, and now there were just three. Suddenly the odds were favouring us.

The Infected seemed to realise that a frontal assault wasn’t working. Now they were hanging back, using the fronts of their skis as shields, heads bobbing around each time they let off a shot.

I fired back, a short, controlled burst. The bullets hit the water, sending up little geysers of crystal. I jerked the rifle up, over-correcting, and the bullets flew wildly high, arcing over the heads of the Infected. My finger was pressed hard against metal but nothing was happening, and I realised that I’d run out of ammo. Reflexively, my hand reached down to my belt for a spare clip, but of course I hadn’t thought to bring any.

The ammo I needed was five meters away, still hidden under the tarpaulin. It might as well have been five hundred meters. The Infected was coming straight for me, closing fast. The gun in his hand had plenty of ammo and all of it was headed in my direction.

I felt a sudden, fierce pain in my right calf as a bullet tore straight through my leg. Blood trickled hot into my sandals, mixing with the sweat between my toes. The Infected was nearer still and now his smile looked predatory; there was no longer any way he could miss.

My hand was still grappling uselessly at my belt. Except that now it had found metal and, of course, it wasn’t useless. My conscious mind, numb with fear, had forgotten. But my subconscious knew that there was another gun in my belt.

I smiled too. I didn’t remember bringing the gun up, but now there was no one guiding the jet ski. The Infected teetered for a moment on one leg, like a cut-rate circus performer. His eyes told me he was already dead, but his body didn’t want to recognise it and, for just a second, it looked like he might leap off the ski and drag me down with him.

He fell, and I saw his body sink through the clear waters. He didn’t go far. We were over coral reefs now and there he was, like a cancerous growth on the rock, something for the multi-coloured fish to eat. I laughed, crazily, because every second from now on was a second when I hadn’t thought I’d be alive.

Except, fuck, why was the water so clear, the sand so golden beneath it? And suddenly everything Haru was screaming became clear, like a radio that had finally tuned in: “– we’re going to hit land!” And the Infected’s plan became clear too, the way the jet skis had surrounded us, herding us like cattle. They hadn’t needed to kill us, just to get us somewhere someone else could do it for them.

The bottom of the boat scraped against coral. The vibrations shot through the soles of my feet, a gentle, almost tickling sensation. Then rougher, more violent. I saw Haru try to wrench the tiller around. The boat bucked and swerved but kept on moving forward, momentum carrying it now because the engine was out of the water. And, finally, like a crippled animal, it dragged itself onto land to die.

The Infected were everywhere. Haru had been right after all – the beach was crawling with them. They’d been climbing into boats, joining the swarm attacking the flagship. But unlike us it had somehow managed to stay at sea, picking up speed as it headed back out into open waters.

I almost felt it physically, the moment when two hundred pairs of eyes turned from the flagship to us. The beach was blank, a few desiccated palm trees above the tide line. This was a tourist beach, a cheap one. Behind the sand I could see the plain concrete blocks of hotels, little parasols with cracked tables and chairs that weren’t even comfortable when they were new. The harsh midday sun shone down on it all, unmoved.

Soren and Kelis flanked me and raised their guns. Ingo too, looking just a little startled, as if he’d discovered one too many zeroes in a complex calculation. Haru cowered in the cockpit, like a child who thought that if he couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see him. There was no way that we could survive this, there were just too many of them.

“Fuck!” Soren shouted. “What the fuck do we do now?”

Kelis dropped one hand from her gun and I thought that she was going to reach across to offer him some sort of comfort – but it was my arm she grabbed instead.

The moment seemed frozen in time: the sand, the sun, her arm, the barest whisper of a breeze. The oily smell of our burst fuel tank. The Infected, their guns. A story with only one ending.

“Jasmine,” Kelis started. Her eyes were wide and wild. I didn’t know what she wanted to say to me, but it seemed somehow right that the last words I ever heard would be hers.

“Stop,” a voice said, resonant, male and unexpected – and all around us, the Infected did just that. They cocked their heads to the side, each of them the exact same angle, and they waited.

Haru lifted his head a little above the dip of the cockpit, searching for the source of the voice. After a second he found it – a loudspeaker high on a pole at the far end of the beach.

I lifted my gun. Beside me, Kelis and Soren did the same. The muzzles wavered as we each picked out one target among the many. We didn’t fire, though, because a bullet might have woken them from this sudden strange stillness.

“The invasion is over,” the voice crackled again from the loudspeaker. “Leave the coast and go back to your homes. Enjoy yourselves.”

There was an abrupt hubbub and I jumped, nerves still on a knife edge. But it was just chatter, two hundred people suddenly behaving like people again and not like zombies. All around us the Infected were sauntering and running and breaking up into social little knots and groups as they left the beach. The only odd thing about them now was the way they completely ignored us.

I stood and watched in startled silence and then, almost helplessly, I started to walk after them. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe to convince myself that they were really going and this wasn’t just some cruel joke. After a moment’s hesitation, the others started walking too.

When the Infected reached the road that ran in front of the beachfront hotels, they separated, veering off to left and right. Heading home, I guessed – just like they’d been told to do. We walked a little further, between two of the hotels and into the beginnings of the city behind.

The first thing that caught my eye was a poster, fresh and bright where the plaster on the building was peeling and faded. For one second I thought it must be Castro, a holdover from the times before the Cull.

It wasn’t Castro, but it was a face I recognised. Just like I’d unconsciously recognised the voice that the Infected had obeyed so unquestioningly.

The voice belonged with the face – both of which belonged to a person I’d never expected to see again. Or maybe I had, and hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself. But now the memories wouldn’t be held back.

 

I looked down at the body of Andy, an eighteen year-old soldier whose neck had snapped in my hands like a piece of balsa wood. For just a second I felt a twinge of guilt. Hadn’t he once helped me to carry some equipment into the lab? I’d thought then that he might have a little crush on me. But no, there was no need to think like that. The person he’d flirted with was gone, and the person I was now had more important things to worry about. That was what the Voice told me.

A last vestigial flicker of something – my humanity maybe – made me reach over and press the lids down over Andy’s blank blue eyes. Then I took the gun out of his slack fingers, chambered another round, and headed for the door.

Get out of the base, the Voice told me. It isn’t safe for you here anymore.

In the distance I could hear gunshots and the cries of people in pain. The base was tearing itself apart, a microcosm of the world. People turning savagely on each other, as if the Cull had infected everyone in some way, loosing something primal and cold within them which had been waiting all these years to get out.

You’re different, the Voice told me. You’re Cured.

The door opened before I could reach it, easing cautiously back as if the person on the other side wasn’t quite sure what he’d find inside.

And he, the Voice told me, is Cured too.

I didn’t need the Voice to tell me that, I could see it in his eyes. They’d always been distinctive, so brown they were almost black and sparkling with an inner life that was the most attractive thing about him. Now they were burning, and nothing about the smile he showed me was human.

“Hi, Jasmine,” he said and I heard the Voice echoing through his words. I saw it in his face, the same ruthless certainty that was in mine. There was a knife in his hands, sharp and clinical. Its blade was smeared with blood, more blood smeared across his hand, up the length of his arm. He reached out to brush a lock of brown hair out of his eyes and left a streak of red there too, like a tribal mark across his cheek.

“Hi, Ash,” I said as I studied his face.

 

The same face I saw now. The face staring back at me from a poster on the streets of Havana.