CHAPTER SIX

 

 

IT WAS NINETY miles to Miami by boat. We’d found a light aircraft on the island, but since none of us could fly it, it looked like we’d be going to Vegas the long way. I didn’t look at Cuba as it receded into the distance behind us; just took the wheel of the small pleasure craft we’d commandeered – the fastest we could find – and looked forward over the calm seas. As we’d sat on the shore and waited for the world to turn and the sun to rise, I’d decided that I was done with regrets.

The journey was peaceful, no one in pursuit, nothing but us and the seagulls hovering over the waves. After an hour or so I handed the wheel to Ingo and went to the sundeck. The others were all lying there, lazing in the sunlight, stripped down to shorts and t-shirts.

We looked, I realised, like a bunch of American university students on Spring break. For the first time since I’d left the base, for the first time in five years in fact, I felt myself begin to relax. Haru was pissing over the side of the boat, watching the spray blow away in the wind, and for some reason that made me smile. There was something so young and male about it. Ingo always used the privy, carefully locking the door, and that made me smile too. Modesty seemed so redundant in the new world.

“You look a million miles away,” Kelis said, and I realised she’d been studying me for a while.

I shrugged. “Just thinking.”

She smiled. “Yeah, that can be tough sometimes.”

“It’s strange for me, you know, being back among people. I don’t think I’m quite used to it.” I didn’t know why I told her that. She was hardly the poster child for opening up and sharing. Except that it was strange, being around other human beings again after so long, and I suddenly wanted to know them, really know them. To connect, to bond – all those terrible, psychobabble words. But humans are social animals, and I knew I’d lost something essential in the years I’d spent alone. The person who’d gone into the base would never have done the things that the person who came out of it did.

I wanted to blame the Voice, but I wasn’t sure I could.

“It was strange for me too,” Soren said unexpectedly. “When I was recruited. That was the hardest thing, being back in such a crowd.”

“Harder than the things she made you do?” I asked. “The killing?” I think there was more curiosity than accusation in my voice, and Soren didn’t seem offended.

“For me, yes. I was home in Sweden, the fishing village I’d lived my whole adult life. A tiny, cold place on the north coast where the sea was always icy, even in midsummer.” The focus of his eyes pushed out as his attention pulled in, looking at memories I suspected he’d kept hidden away for years. Then he smiled self-consciously. “Sorry, I forget what I was trying to say.”

“No,” I said, “Don’t stop. I’d like to know what it was like for you, before Queen M. I want to remember the world before the Cull.”

“Before the Cull?” He looked from me to Kelis. Something in her expression must have persuaded him to carry on, because he suddenly shifted position, pulling his legs beneath him to get comfortable. I suppose somewhere inside we all want to be known. How else would therapists stay in business?

“Sweden was an orderly country, you know? We weren’t a nation that liked to get too excited about anything; we left that to the Danes. Orderly and neat and prosperous. I’d grown up in Malmö, down in the south, but as soon as I’d finished my degree I moved away. There were too many people in Malmö, too many tourists. It was too noisy, always full of traffic and the fog horns of the boats in the harbour. What’s the point of living in a large country with a small population if you can’t enjoy the peace?

“So I went north, away from everyone, where the winter nights were so long you barely saw the sun rise. I went as far north as I could until I was on the edge of the arctic circle, where I could watch the Northern Lights at midnight and listen to the never-ending sound of the sea. I bought myself a log house out in the forest, a fishing boat and an axe. And then I got myself a broadband connection and every day I worked with people I never had to see. Once a week I went into the shop, and that was the only time I saw another person, except maybe a few other fishing boats, far out at sea. People are much easier to enjoy, I think, if you don’t have to actually talk to them. Out there I started liking my fellow country folk for the first time.

“Then the Cull struck and everyone was – well, you know how it was. But I thought, less people in this overcrowded world, why is that a bad thing? I suppose people died in the village but I hadn’t known them before the Cull and I couldn’t pretend that I cared. The shop emptied after a while but it was no big problem. I knew how to hunt and fish, and planting simple crops wasn’t difficult. I had an axe and finding trees to use it on wasn’t a problem either. There was only myself to feed. After three weeks, maybe four, the radio that I kept went silent and that was the end of it, I thought. Civilisation had collapsed, somewhere off-screen. But for me nothing really changed.

“It was so beautiful there. The trees are evergreen, all year round they look the same. Very dark, impenetrable as soon as you’re away from the coast. The cliffs are grey rock, almost the same colour as the sea. I read a guidebook once. It called our coast ‘forbidding,’ but I never understood that. What was forbidden there? It seems to me that it’s only in a place like that you’re allowed to be yourself, without other people telling you what you should be.

“And then Queen M came.” He shrugged, his face losing its faraway look. “I guess you know the rest. Back to join the rest of humanity.”

“Or what was left of it,” Haru said, and I was sure the double meaning was deliberate. The remnants of humanity, and the remnants of their humanity.

Kelis looked at him through narrowed eyes. “It’s easy for you to be smug. Japan dodged the bullet while everyone else was bleeding out. It wasn’t just the O-negs who were spared there, was it?”

“No,” Haru said, “something in our genes saved most of us, in the good old Land of the Rising Sun.” He looked at Kelis, questioning, and she shrugged – meaning, why not? We’ve got ten hours to kill and what else is there to fill the time?

“Okay,” he said. “You want to hear my story? The thing you have to know about Japan is, we’re a little like Soren, here. We don’t really need anyone else. For years we were this closed island kingdom. Then along came the Western empires and we thought we might like to get an empire of our own. Everyone knows how that ended for us. So we went back to doing what we do best – minding our own business. I suppose you’d say we’re the ultimate voyeurs. We like looking at other people and sometimes we like imitating them, but we don’t want any actual contact.

“So when the Cull came and spared us, but took everyone else, it seemed like a sign. Shut yourselves in. Shut yourselves off. There wasn’t much protest when the government locked the borders down. The economy was in a mess, of course – we relied on high-tech exports to buy low-tech imports. But China was just sitting there, no longer in any kind of position to fight us off, so we went in uninvited and got everything we needed. Then we just... carried on. You know the thing I noticed most? That there were no new Hollywood films. Nothing new from Spielberg, no big dumb action movies, no more X-Men. I stopped going to the cinema and that was the biggest way my life changed.

“Oh, there were deaths, of course. A lot of them. But we buried them and we moved on. Only for me, I kept imagining the rest of the world. All my life I’ve been drawing the apocalypse. Giant robots, mutants... and now here was a real apocalypse – the genuine article – and I was still a wage slave in a grey suit.

“So when there was a movement for colonisation, I joined – to go back out in the world. I took my son away from the security of Tokyo to New Zealand, where the government in its wisdom had voted to set up New Kyoto. I had to fight to take him; he was... well, he wasn’t well. But they had trouble recruiting enough colonists and in the end they let us go. I remember how I felt on the flight, how excited I was. I watched the sea scrolling away beneath us and I thought that this was a real new beginning. I didn’t imagine for a moment that I could be making a mistake.”

He smiled thinly and trailed off and I remembered what he’d told me about the son he left behind. “And then Queen M took you and not him,” I said.

“Yeah.” He ran a hand back through his hair, messing up the spikes, already stiff with salt spray. “I took him away from safety for no goddamn reason and then I just left him there, on his own.”

“He would have been looked after,” I said, “by the other colonists.”

Haru just shrugged and looked away. I guess we all had our own burdens of guilt to carry, and no one to share them with.

When I looked at Ingo he stared back, blank and maybe a little challenging. “You hope to know about my home?” he asked, and I realised I didn’t even know where that was. He smiled mockingly and I could see that he knew that too.

“The Congo,” he told me. “The Democratic Republic of Congo. For twenty years the West wanted to know nothing about my land. Four million people died in a war that no one noticed, and now you ask me for our history?”

“Listen, friend,” Soren said. “We’re not the West. We’re us. But please yourself – I’ll survive the disappointment if you don’t feel like sharing.”

“There is no story,” Ingo said. “There is nothing as neat as a story to tell about my country. First the Belgians robbed us and sometimes they murdered us, and when they finally left we put our own men in charge – and they robbed and killed us too. Our neighbours abused us and the refugees of Rwanda came and made everything worse, bringing the terrible ghosts of their past with them. There was war, and where there was not war there was disease, and everywhere there was hatred and greed. The women were raped and then they were driven from their villages because they had been raped, because of the shame. Mothers killed their own sons and daughters for witchcraft. But why did we need witches when we already had men? The warlords fought over blood and diamonds. The West held concerts for the starving of Ethiopia but they turned away from us, and do you know why?”

“I know why,” Haru said quietly. We looked at him and he twisted his mouth into an expression of wry amusement and shame. “Video games.”

For the first time since I’d known him, Ingo really smiled. It wasn’t a good sight. “Yes,” he said. “Coltan from our mines made the games machines of the West. Our children died in slavery so yours could have just one more toy. I have seen you, Jasmine, looking at my fingers and I think you assume this happened when Queen M found me. No. They were broken long ago, when I was seven and a man stood on my hand when I reached for a knife to stop his friends from violating my sister. You ask how it was when the Cull came? I will tell you – it was exactly the same as it had always been. My land was drenched in blood, and nobody cared.”

There was a silence after that, deep and uncomfortable. Finally, it was Ingo who turned to Kelis. “You still have a story to tell.”

“Anyone want to hear it now?” Kelis asked self-mockingly, but I nodded and so did Haru.

“We showed you ours...” he said.

She paused a moment, then nodded and leaned back so that she was looking up at the pale blue sky rather than at us. “New York. Who’d have thought that one day a rain really would come and wash the streets clean? Only it wasn’t the dirt that was washed away – sometimes it seems like the filth was the only thing left. But mierda never stays smooth. It clumps and congeals and that’s what it did in the city. First just little groups, the old street gangs, and then new ones came. It was quite funny really, to see Manhattan lawyers walking the mean streets with guns. Funny until they started shooting at you.

“After a while it got more formal. The gangs turned into Klans and you were either in one or you were left to beg for scraps – no middle ground. That’s what the Cull took away – the safe centre. And all my life I’d been begging for scraps, working as a secretary in some crappy little law firm that made your average ambulance chaser look classy, getting spat at and worse, guarding prisoners who thought they were something because they ran crack on their little corner. So I decided – enough, you know? Why shouldn’t I start over? Why shouldn’t I be better than I was?

“I joined the Midtown Men and I found that I was good at it. My daddy, he’d taught me to shoot before he... yeah, back before the Cull. So I could handle a gun and I found that I could handle myself too. I made myself useful and I was completely loyal; pretty soon I was one of the elite. People were eating my scraps – and it felt good.

“But it doesn’t matter how high you climb, there’s always someone above you. And if you’re looking out for number one you can be damn fucking sure that everyone else around you is doing the same. We had a lot of things in New York, but we didn’t have high tech. And the gangs, they had an arms race going on – doesn’t take much to get one of those started. You get handguns, I get semi-automatics, you get rocket launchers, and I get myself an Apache helicopter. Leave it long enough and they’ll go nuclear, I’m not kidding.

“So when Queen M came and offered the kind of tech we were never going to find for ourselves... we were racing to say ‘yes’ before anyone else could. The only thing she wanted in return was a few soldiers. New York, soldiers are easy to find – ten waiting to fill the place of each fallen man. We said yes. I said yes, when we voted on it. Didn’t think for a minute they were gonna pick me.”

She looked over at me and smiled. “I guess right about now you’re thinking that I got pretty much what I deserved. But I was only trying to survive. I remember learning about Darwin back in school, when it was still okay to teach evolution. He said we’re all the children of survivors. Every ancestor we’ve got won some kind of fight. I don’t think it’s any surprise we’re killers – the surprise is how we sometimes manage not to be.”

She was still looking at me, her expression more uncertain than her words, and I realised that she was looking for some kind of forgiveness, or at least for acceptance. I smiled back, awkwardly. “I’m not going to judge you. Hell, I’m long past judging anyone.”

“Yeah?” Her expression lightened. “Shame my girlfriend didn’t feel the same. When I told her I was gonna have to leave her behind... well, let’s just say I don’t think she’s keeping my bed warm back in Washington Square.”

Her girlfriend? Oh. Oh. I saw the way she was looking at me, as if she wanted me to understand something without having to explain it. And I saw the way that Soren was looking at her, and how his face darkened as he followed her eyes to mine. There was no way this was going to end well.

“What is your deal?” Haru said, turning to me. “You were a scientist, you said, trying to find a cure for the Cull. What happened?”

“Well,” Soren said dryly, an edge of hostility in his voice that hadn’t been there before. “I’m only taking a guess, but I’d say she failed.”

“Not entirely,” I said and only as I said the words did I realise that I was finally going to have to tell them the truth. Because they’d opened up to me? Not really. More because lying is tiring and I was using all my energy trying to keep the Voice inside me down to a murmur. I didn’t have energy left over for anything else. And maybe because I’d done so many wrong things over the last few weeks, I wanted to finally do something right.

“Not entirely,” I said again. “We did find a cure, but we found it too late.”

“I never heard that,” Kelis said with wonder. “That’s... I don’t know, that makes everything so much worse, somehow. To know that someone got so close to stopping it all.”

I shook my head. “No, not really, you see...” I laughed harshly, because this was harder to do than I’d imagined. “You see, I haven’t been entirely honest with you.”

At that I felt four different people stiffen around me and I remembered suddenly that all of them had guns. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, but I could see their faces, closed and untrusting, and I knew that it was too late to back down now.

“The Infected, on Cuba – I knew exactly what was wrong with them. I knew it because I recognised it. Jesus, I helped to design it.”

“They’d been given the cure?” Kelis said slowly.

I nodded. “Yeah. A version of it. The Cure stopped the Cull, you see, but it didn’t leave the people we gave it to unchanged. It caused auditory hallucinations, delusions, the whole schizophrenic works.”

“You were cured,” Haru said in amazement, and one by one I saw the others understanding.

I smiled with unexpected relief. It felt great not to have to hide myself any longer. “Yes. We tested it on ourselves, me and Ash, and on a few of the others.”

“That’s why you need those drugs,” Kelis said. “The ones we went hunting for in Havana.”

“Yes,” I said again.

“And what exactly happens,” Haru asked, “if you stop taking them?”

Like Kelis, earlier, I leaned back, looking up at the sky rather than across at my companions. “Bad things. Worse things than even I imagined. You see Ash – he was another scientist, a bio-weapons expert – he took the Cure too. We were both sick for a long time, days of pain when we didn’t think we’d survive. When we finally woke up, there was... the Voice.” I could hear it now, on the edge of my consciousness, hissing at me to keep quiet, to go on keeping its secret. But I found that with these not-quite-friends around me it was possible to ignore it.

“It spoke to me, inside my head. It still does. It’s not my voice – it’s not the voice of anyone I know. And it’s not – I don’t know how to describe this, to someone who hasn’t felt it. The Voice doesn’t make me obey it. There’s no compulsion about it. It’s just that when it speaks, everything it says seems to make such perfect sense that there’s really no question of not listening to it.”

“Yeah?” Haru said uneasily. “And what kind of thing does this Voice say? Are we talking along the lines of ‘kill them, kill them all’? Because speaking as an objective observer, that sort of thing really doesn’t make sense.”

“Sometimes it says that kind of thing,” I admitted, feeling the atmosphere thicken around me. “But it’s not...” I laughed. “It feels absurd to talk about the Voice as a person, but in a way it seems to be, or that’s how I experience it: as something independent that has its own agenda. And that’s what it’s about, when it tells me to do terrible things. It doesn’t want them because it enjoys seeing people suffer. It’s not psychotic – except in the clinical sense. It just wants what it wants and it doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process.”

“So,” Kelis said, “not so much psychotic as sociopathic.”

“Yeah. Yeah. It doesn’t care about anything, except maybe me, and even then I think it just sees me as a means to an end.”

“You realise this is crazy, right?” Haru said. “This voice isn’t real. It doesn’t want anything. It’s just, I don’t know, repressed urges inside you getting out, right? The things you don’t want to admit to wanting.”

His pale cheeks were flushed and I thought that he really was only a few seconds away from shooting me where I sat. “I thought that too,” I told him. “I mean, it’s the only thing that makes sense, isn’t it? Except how could I have gone my whole life without even beginning to guess that I wanted to do those things? And if the Voice really is just my subconscious, why does it seem to be working to a plan that I’m not privy to?”

“You keep talking about a plan,” Kelis said softly. Her face was a closed book again. Before, she’d been trying to tell me something about the way she felt about me, but I knew looking at her that whatever that was it wouldn’t save me if she decided I was a threat. It was like she’d said – everyone there had survived for a reason, and one of those reasons must have been that they didn’t let sentiment get in the way of necessity.

She held my gaze for only a moment, then looked away. Best not to look in the eyes of a woman you might be about to kill. “What is the plan? What is it that you think this Voice inside you wants?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t want to know, that was why I started taking the drugs to silence it – first the opiates, then the anti-psychotics. I never let myself hear the Voice clearly enough to find out what it wanted.”

“I still do not see the connection to the Infected of Cuba,” Ingo said. “You are not telling us, are you, that it was you who infected them?”

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t me. It was Ash.”

“The face on all the posters, the Leader,” and Kelis was there again, too quickly for comfort. “That was the other scientist you worked with?”

I nodded. “The thing about Ash was, he liked the Voice. When I first woke up, after the Cure had run its course, I... killed a young soldier. The Voice told me to do it. And I think that’s probably how I was able to resist the Voice long enough to suppress it. Because however much the Voice told me to, I couldn’t forget the look in the soldier’s eyes just before I snapped his neck. But Ash... he found me just after I’d done it, and I could tell that he didn’t feel any guilt at all, even though I found out later that he had a lot more blood on his hands than that.

“He’d woken up before me, you see. I don’t know why – maybe just a faster metabolism. So he’d had time to speak to some of the others on the base. I didn’t see it at the time but I read the accounts of it later in the logs. There was videotape too, from the security cameras. Ash was like a messiah. He had this incredible self-belief when he spoke, and it made other people believe him too – even when he told them to do terrible things.”

“What sort of terrible things?” Kelis asked.

“Turning people against each other, soldiers against scientists, soldiers against soldiers. People who’d once been friends. Ash sowed doubt in everyone’s minds and in the end the only person they trusted was him. I guess it didn’t work on me because the Voice in my own head gave me a kind of immunity. When Ash wasn’t watching me I sneaked away and found some opiates and I injected enough into my veins to make sure I didn’t give a damn what the Voice wanted me to do.

“The trouble was, the opiates stopped me caring about anything – including trying to stop Ash.” I swallowed as I realised that maybe this was the real reason I hadn’t wanted to tell them the story. Not because I was afraid of their anger, but of their disdain. Old guilt is like wine. It doesn’t lose its strength, it just turns to vinegar – sour and corrosive. “He was trying to get everyone else to take the Cure, you see. Even back then. I’d almost forgotten it – I guess I’d just dismissed it as a part of his madness. But now... now that I’ve seen what he did in Cuba, I know that it wasn’t incidental to what he wanted. It was central to it.”

“And was that where the first Infected came from?” Kelis asked. “Those soldiers and scientists on the base?”

I shook my head. “They would have been, I suppose, but Ash wasn’t the only crazy person there. There was a soldier – Sergeant Miller, I think? – I remember that he started some kind of fight, a stand-off between Ash’s men and his. I just tried to get away from it all, hiding deeper in the base. Then there was an explosion and I was left on one side of it with them on the other. And that’s where the story ends.”

“Not Ash’s story though,” Soren said. “Seems like his story has quite a long epilogue.”

“Yeah.” I took the wheel again and looked out over the waves ahead of us, where the American coast was finally approaching. “I can only guess what happened next. He must have made it away from the base with his followers. I suppose he tried to give them the Cure like he’d been intending, but my guess is that it didn’t work. It was designed specifically for non-O-negs. I don’t know what it would have done in its original form to anyone who was O-neg, but I suspect it might have been fatal. So he would have had to do more research, refine it. If he took what he needed from the base when he left, that would have been possible.” Now I thought about it, some of the equipment in that laboratory in Havana had looked familiar. I shrugged. “Then at some point he came to Cuba and tested it out.”

“But why?” Soren asked. “What exactly was he hoping to achieve?”

“I don’t know, but I know it’s nothing good. When I heard the Voice, something inside me knew that it was the voice of madness, and I rejected it. But Ash embraced it, and I think maybe he wants everyone else to embrace it too. Cuba was just the start. It was a failed experiment – that’s why he abandoned it. But there’s no question in my mind that he’s going to try again.”

“And you intend to find him,” Kelis said. It wasn’t a question.

“I have to,” I said. “I’m the only one who can possibly understand what it is he’s trying to do. Which means I’m the only one who’s got a chance of stopping him.”

“Okay,” Haru said. “And why exactly should we help you do that?”

“Because Cuba was only the beginning. You can leave me if you like. That’s why I told you the truth – so you can make a real choice. All I ask is that you don’t make mine for me. Leave me free to follow Ash. Because you all might regret it if I don’t.”

I got up to take the wheel after that, leaving them free to make their decisions without me around. But the truth was, without them I was sunk. There was no way I’d be able to make it all the way to Las Vegas on my own. Even with them to back me up it was a long-shot.

“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” Kelis asked. If there was anyone who might follow me, I knew it was her. For all the wrong reasons, though, and wasn’t it wrong of me to exploit that? I shot her a quick look, but she was watching the waves, not me.

“I was afraid of what you’d do if you knew I was Infected too.”

“Are you infectious?” she asked me.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. That’s what Ash’s research was all about, you see – making the Cure transmittable, because that wasn’t how we originally designed it.”

“Its weapons tech, isn’t it? The Cure.” Kelis said.

“Ash’s contribution was, yeah. We put stuff in there that we didn’t fully understand – or at least I didn’t. We were desperate enough to try anything.”

“Do you think someone somewhere planned this all?” she asked me. “The Cull and the Cure?”

“That’s another reason to find Ash, isn’t it?” I said. “To answer that question.”

She nodded and I thought that maybe she was going to tell me that she’d made her decision and she would come with me. But instead her hand reached out to clasp mine over the wheel. Her eyes strained towards the distant coastline of Florida.

“What is it?” I said. There were black dots on the shore that might have been people, but that wasn’t unexpected. Miami was a big place and there was no reason to think it would be entirely deserted after the Cull.

She didn’t answer me, just called out for Soren. He leapt up to join her, Haru and Ingo hanging behind. Ingo’s dark face was sweating lightly, drops of crystal on mahogany, no clue there about what decision he’d made. Haru would go where the group went, I knew that, seeking safety in numbers. And Soren, I supposed, would follow Kelis. But that was something else I shouldn’t be taking advantage of.

“Shit!” Soren said. “You’re right.”

“Right about what, exactly?” Haru asked. Kelis’s hand was still over mine on the wheel but she wasn’t moving it and I kept on steering a straight course towards whatever was waiting for us on the shore. We were close enough now that I could make out little figures, flashes of red and brighter colours on their clothing. I felt the first stirrings of unease.

“Are those..?” I said.

“Yeah,” Kelis said. “I recognise the formation. Standard when facing a sea attack. All the island garrisons practised it.”

“Those are Queen M’s men?” Haru said, finally cottoning on.

“I think so,” I said.

“I know so,” Kelis said impatiently.

“This is no surprise,” Ingo said calmly. “The tracking devices were never removed from Soren and Kelis.”

Of course he was right. Haru turned an unloving look on the two of them and I remembered that he’d been all for leaving them behind. “Okay,” I said, “it’s not a problem. I’ll just turn and we’ll make landfall somewhere else.” I tried to shift my grip on the wheel to do just that, but Kelis held my hand firm.

“No point,” she said. “While the trackers are in us, she can just follow us along the shore. We’ll run out of fuel before she runs out of patience. Besides – she’ll have boats of her own. Faster than this, probably.”

“There are only two options,” Soren said. “Fight or surrender.”

“There’s a third option,” Haru said sourly. I knew he meant to throw Soren and Kelis overboard, and they knew it too. Soren half turned to him and Haru backed away.

“Then I guess we fight,” I said.