CHAPTER SEVEN

 

 

I TOOK OUT my gun again. The weight of it had begun to feel very comfortable in my hand. I wondered if this was how it had been for my man: first a burden, then a useful tool and finally an end in itself. The adrenaline was already surging through my body and that was addictive too, the rush of it, even the bitter taste it brought to the back of my throat.

Haru had taken the wheel from me. I could see the white of his knuckles as he gripped it and I knew that he was forcing himself not to turn aside. I guess he knew that Queen M’s men might kill him, but Kelis would shoot him for sure if he didn’t do as she’d ordered.

The coastline ahead of us looked like a cleaned-up version of Havana: white sand and smart resort hotels. Like in one of those old make-over shows; Havana was the before and Miami the after. The people had been made-over too, not shambling wrecks but whole and tooled-up, and lethal.

The front of the boat didn’t offer much protection, not if there was any heavy artillery facing us. We were gambling that Queen M wanted to ask questions first and shoot later. There must be a reason she’d followed Kelis and Soren specifically – to find me, I was guessing – and she wasn’t the type to waste resources on petty revenge. She wanted something from us other than our corpses.

On the other hand, if our corpses were all she could get, I was sure she’d settle for that. Fifty feet from the coast now and I could recognise some of the faces. The hardcore loyalists who hadn’t fled the flagship when everyone had their chance. It was no surprise to see Curtis among them, Queen M’s top recruitment agent.

“Hold your fire,” Soren said.

Kelis shot him a look and I think for a moment she suspected he was changing his mind. But he was right. The longer we delayed opening fire, the better our chances. If they wanted us alive, they wouldn’t shoot first.

Twenty feet from the shore and we weren’t slowing down. Kelis had clasped her hands over Haru’s, forcing him to stay his course. His face was sweating and desperate. The boat began to judder and shake, jarring over the rocks in the sand, rising higher and higher above the water line. I clung on hard, knowing that if I fell that would be the end. The boat was the only protection we had.

There was a heart-stopping moment as the boat’s keel scraped against a sand shelf beneath us and I thought we’d be grounded, still too far from dry land. But then the boat jerked over the ridge and suddenly I could see that we weren’t going to stop at all.

The people on the shore could see it too. Their tight little formation began to fragment and then it was a free for all. Half a dozen ran to the left, another five to the right. Two morons tried to outrun the boat straight back, sprinting towards the regimented line of hotels. The boat shot onto the sand, bumping twice as it went over their bodies. I didn’t hear their screams because by then the first shot had been fired.

I staggered to my knees as the boat finally ground to a halt. Haru was flung forward against the hard wood of the cabin. I saw a spray of blood and a shard of something white that might have been his tooth. His howl of pain was lost in the din of gunfire.

The boat splintered beneath the hail of bullets. The splintering wood was as dangerous as shrapnel, a threat to flesh and eyes. All I could think about was escape. I’d run twenty paces before I’d even thought about firing my gun.

The fighting was too close, too intense, for any kind of game plan. The only thing that saved us was numbers. The boat had scattered Queen M’s troops in a wide circle and they couldn’t fire at us without firing at their own. Instead they pulled out knives. The fighting would be brutal, bloody and personal, but it was better that way. I wanted to see the faces of the people I was killing – punish myself with reality.

Another five paces away from the sea and the first of Queen M’s men was on me. It was Curtis, as stony-faced as ever, even as he swung a machete straight for my throat. I didn’t feel a moment’s remorse as I put a bullet through his chest. His eyes glared all the way into the dark. The last thing he saw was me smiling. I thought about the ghosts of Ireland and was glad.

I could hear a fierce whooping somewhere to my left: Kelis, filled with the berserker rage of battle. There was a whimpering too, and that had to be Haru. I think maybe I was laughing, but I didn’t know why, except that there’s a certain exhilaration in facing death. Another face and another bullet, but this one got his own blow in. I saw a thin line of red bloom and widen on my forearm, the flesh parting with surgical precision.

The agony followed a second later. I gritted my teeth against it and kept on fighting. I knew where I was heading now, towards the hotels that lined the beach and the grid of roads behind that offered the only possibility of escape. Not fucking much of one, but any hope will do.

Two more bullets, then a pause to reload. It left time for one of Queen M’s men to duck right in and shove something bright and sharp into my chest. But the blade glanced off a rib, tearing through skin and flying away to the left. There was no time for a bullet before the next killing blow. I jammed the handle of the Magnum hard into his nose. A crack and a fountain of blood. I grinned ferally.

All I initially saw of the grizzled, grey woman now attacking me was a flash of silver as her knife swung for my back. But Kelis was there, sliding a blade between the woman’s vertebrae. Kelis took down another one after that, as did I. But there were always more, and how could we possibly kill them all?

I looked at Kelis and her brown eyes stared back at me and we both knew that there was no chance.

Except we weren’t the only people coming in from the sea. I didn’t realise what they were at first, the ragged, blackened figures falling on Queen M’s men from their rear flank. For a crazy second I thought it must be some kind of mutiny, an uprising that we’d somehow sparked.

But the newcomers had never served Queen M. They only served one leader and he must have ordered them to come here, to follow us in from the sea. Their skin was red and crazed, untreated third degree burns. It was astonishing they were even standing. They were barely fighting. It didn’t matter, though. The presence of the Infected, like an old-fashioned zombie horde, routed the others. Half the people who should have been following us turned to face the new threat. The rest kept fighting, but there was a hesitation to their actions now. They knew what was coming up behind them, and something was screaming at them to turn and face it.

I only took a second to watch the new reality unfold. Then I kept on running, using the time the Infected had bought us. The others must have had the same idea, because suddenly we were at the road and astoundingly it was all five of us. Haru’s mouth was a bloody mess, and there were droplets all over Ingo’s face that might have been blood or might have been sweat. Nothing in his expression told me which.

We were almost clear, but much more vulnerable. Up here we were a tight little target and Queen M’s people were all behind us. There was nothing to stop them using their guns. Concrete sprayed out from the sea-wall of the hotel as I dived for shelter behind it, but it was only five feet high and there was no way I could stay there. I lifted my head above the wall and emptied my clip at my pursuers. They dived for cover too, but for them there was nothing but sand. Soren’s semi-automatic blazed beside my Magnum. A few moments of that and the sand was more red than gold.

I knew I had to get up and run. We’d bought ourselves only a few seconds. But my back itched at the thought of turning it on all those weapons. Soren got up and turned to go.

I don’t know how he knew that I wasn’t moving. Maybe all those years away from people had made him hyper-sensitive to them. He spun round, grabbed my arm and pulled me to my feet, then flung me in front of him. Kelis was already running, Haru and Ingo trailing her by only a few paces. Ingo was somehow managing to run backwards as fast as the others ran forward. There were two guns in his hands and he wasn’t even breathing hard.

I sprinted. I couldn’t believe that I still had the energy when my legs felt like they were made of over-cooked pasta. My stomach was churning and loose, wanting to spill out everything inside it. There was a grunt from behind me, hard and bitten off, but I didn’t turn to look. The bullets were streaming all around us. Every moment could be my last, and call me selfish, but all I wanted to think about was me.

I almost laughed when we came through the narrow road between the low-rise hotels and into the main road behind. Queen M was smart, but boy was she cocky. I guess it never occurred to her that we might break through the line of men she’d left on the beach. Her people had left their rides right where we could get them, the keys still in the ignition. We took the nearest vehicle, a big red jeep with silver spoilers and paint that hadn’t seen water or polish since the Cull. The back was stacked high with barrels of petrol. More guns and more ammo too. There was no food, but that we’d be able to find on the journey.

Kelis took the wheel and I took shotgun, while Haru and Ingo piled into the rear, both facing back and firing. She’d turned the key and started the engine before I even realised that Soren hadn’t climbed in with us.

The second bullet took him in the shoulder as we watched, but that wasn’t the one that was going to kill him. That one had gone in through his stomach, exiting raggedly through his back. There was no return from a wound like that.

“Mierda!” Kelis said. “Soren – get in here!”

He gritted his teeth at her, more a grimace than a smile, but we all knew what he meant. “Go!” he shouted. “I’ll hold them off and disable the other vehicles.” He’d already dived behind one; collapsed, really, onto his knees. But he didn’t let go of his gun and I knew that he wouldn’t until we were clear.

“No way,” Kelis said. “No fucking way are we leaving you behind!” Her hand released the key and reached for the door.

I grabbed her wrist, hard, wrenching her round to face me. “He’s dead already, Kelis,” I told her. “His body just doesn’t know it yet.”

She wanted to argue with me, but she knew I was telling the truth. She looked back at Soren, face twisted in grief. Maybe she hadn’t felt about him the way he’d wanted but she’d sure as hell felt something. Her eyes locked with his for a moment. His mouth opened but the only thing that came out was a gush of blood. He wasn’t even going to get any parting words.

Kelis twisted the key and slammed her foot down hard. A bullet hit the back or the jeep, then another, but they were too far away to get a bead on us. Then we were gone.

None of us got to see Soren die. But we saw the explosion, the bloom of fire that must’ve taken out most of Queen M’s men, along with any vehicles that the rest of them could have followed us in. A grenade, I guessed. He must have been holding it back, waiting for just the right moment. I wished I could find a tear for him, but I’d only known him a few weeks and the truth was, he wasn’t a very likeable guy. I saved my pity for Kelis. The numb expression on her face and the emptiness in her eyes were all I could see as we headed out of Miami and away.

 

 

IT SHOULD HAVE taken us two days to reach Las Vegas, but nothing ever goes according to plan. All those weeks I’d been wondering what the world looked like after the Cull and now I could see it for myself I was suddenly grateful for all those years I’d spent hidden away from it.

Florida was a breeze, a straight drive along what was essentially a reclaimed sand-pit. We saw people, ragged bunches of them guarding their orange groves and their fields. They didn’t bother us and we saw no reason to bother them. We just held our guns out, high and obvious over the side of the jeep, and kept on driving.

Orlando was dreamlike in its weirdness, the city a ruin, but Disneyworld itself was entirely untouched. And there were people there, more than you would have thought. The only word I could seem to find for them was ‘pilgrims.’ Some of them had trekked by foot all the way down the Eastern Seaboard to get there, because vehicles were hard to come by and petrol harder still. There were whole families of them, starvation-thin parents with their skeletal kids, like the ghosts of the bloated coach potatoes who used to visit before the Cull.

I don’t know why they came. When we asked they just looked blank, as if they hadn’t thought about it themselves. I guess the place was a symbol of something important. Of normality itself, I suppose. They sat on the silent rides, frozen in place among half-wrecked animatronic pirates, or waiting in vain for It’s a Small World to start playing and the little puppet children to dance.

We hadn’t wanted to stop there, but we needed electricity, a strong current, and this seemed like the best place to find it. We walked past the shambling tourists and into the workings of the rides, the machinery that made it all run. As I walked past the animatronic cowboys, bears and twirling teapots I felt obscurely guilty, like a kid who’d sneaked downstairs on Christmas Eve to confirm that yeah, Santa was just mum and dad. It all looked so shabby and second-rate.

It took Ingo five hours, before he finally got one of the generators working, jump-starting it with cables running from the car. Kelis didn’t even flinch as he put the spitting cable against her leg. The force knocked her into the frayed, fungal wreck of what had once been a Mickey Mouse costume. She sneezed out spores when she finally came round, but didn’t let out a murmur of pain or complaint. There’d be no more tracking by Queen M. All we had to worry about was every other damn thing on this continent.

The Gulf coast never had much in the way of a population, and it had even less now. We drove past deserted wind-swept beaches and wooden houses half-blown away by hurricanes that no one could any longer predict. There was oil still out there, under the choppy waves, but no one had the means to find it. Queen M maybe, before she’d met me.

Biloxi had a population. We had a real good scrap there. It was entirely one-sided, small sidearms against semi-automatics and Kelis’s cool, trained aim. It could only have been desperation that sent them out against us, but I didn’t have time for pity. Kelis’s face was blank and cold as she shot them all dead and I wondered if she was thinking about Soren as she did it. Probably not. She’d been a killer long before he died.

Then we drove onwards, and even a road trip through Hell can take on a kind of monotony. The lowlands of Mississippi scrolled past us like the scenery for a video game that had run out of budget. We seemed to have talked ourselves out on the boat, because we couldn’t find anything to say in all those hours. I drove for a while, then Ingo. The rest leaned over the side, guns drawn, trying to stay tense and ready for action when really we were just bored. You can only live in fear of your life for so long before you lose the energy to keep caring.

 

 

WE’D TALKED ABOUT skirting around New Orleans, avoiding the trouble that was bound to be found there, but we needed fuel and food, and we were reckless with tiredness by then.

The outskirts of the city were like a third-world slum. It was hard to say if that was the work of the Cull or the aftermath of Katrina, still unhealed after all these years. Vacant-eyed people came out of their hovels to stare at us. We ignored them and drove on past.

After a few miles we were into the older parts of town. We saw more people and, floating above them, the harsh scrape of live bluegrass. Then somehow, without even noticing it, we’d driven into the heart of a carnival. I didn’t know what date it was, not exactly, but I knew for sure that this wasn’t Mardi Gras.

“Join the party!” a tall black man in a bright red bird mask shouted out as we drove past. Others walked along beside the jeep, like they were following some kind of carnival float. A few tried to climb on board, but we pushed them back and they didn’t seem to mind. There was a hallucinogenic quality to the whole thing that might have been a product of sleep deprivation, but I didn’t think so.

I don’t think that the party ever stopped here. I guess in a city surrounded by sugar cane fields rum is pretty easy to distil, and after the Cull they probably couldn’t see much reason for doing anything than drinking it. Everyone we saw there was at that stage of drunkenness where you’re a heart-beat away from doing something extreme, but you can’t be entirely sure what. Would they fuck, fight, vomit, kill? We didn’t stick around to find out, just kept on driving. It was frantic but joyless. No one there was having fun, not even close, but they kept on doggedly going, like partying had become some kind of onerous duty.

Finally we found ourselves in the heart of it all, the old French quarter. Everywhere there was cast iron, brick facades and unlit neon signs for clubs and bars that hadn’t been open in years. There were food stalls here, people barbecuing meat that was probably rat, but we took it anyway. We gave them bullets in exchange, one for each chunk of meat. It was red raw on the inside, but I didn’t care as I tore it away from the bone and swallowed without chewing. For the first time I appreciated what Queen M had done, saving her people from this. A man came up and kissed me as I ate, grabbing my cheeks and driving his tongue deep into my mouth. I pulled away and Kelis slapped him savagely back, but when he was gone he’d taken half the meat with him.

“Guess he didn’t love you for yourself,” Haru said. I realised it was the first joke any of us had made since Soren died, and managed a tired smile.

Then we drove on. Ahead of us a pile of naked bodies writhed, fucking openly in the street. The men around them had their cocks in their hands, stroking them in time to the heaving pile of flesh. It looked vicious and unsafe, about something more primal than lust. Further down there was another crude ceremony, but this one had a victim.

The boy could only have been about five. When they slit his throat the blood jetted into the crowd and they lifted their faces, swallowing it down. I looked away as Ingo pressed down on the accelerator, face as impassive as ever. I wondered if he’d even seen it, or if he’d retreated far into his mind; contemplating numbers, equations and algorithms, because they were so much cleaner than people.

Another hour passed before we’d driven our way clear of New Orleans and its human ugliness. After that we cut through a corner of Louisiana and then we were into Texas. Flat, hot and endless. We avoided the big towns by unspoken consent, which meant, most of the time, all we had for company were cattle.

We’d taken it in turns trying to sleep but there was no rest in it. We were all pale and drawn. Our fingers tapped restlessly on our guns and I knew that if we didn’t get some sleep soon we’d regret it.

After Texas we were into the corn fields of Oklahoma and finally we knew we had to stop. It was absurd really, caring about state boundaries in a world where they’d become meaningless. Except that when we crossed over that border something did seem to change. We drove through small towns and the people in them didn’t run away from us. Some of them even stopped and smiled. The fields were tended and the people looked well-fed. There was a tightness around their eyes that spoke of a fear that never really went away, but that was hardly surprising.

“It’s like we’ve driven into Stepford,” Haru said the second time a crowd of children waved and laughed as we drove past.

“We should stop,” I said.

“Why?” Haru said. “So they can take us away and replace us with identical robots?”

But Kelis was already slowing the jeep down on the outskirts of a bland, cookie-cutter town. Lower-middle class; no white picket fences but lots of square, clapboard houses with square, grassy yards around them. It wasn’t a big place – I doubted the population was a thousand, even before the Cull. Now there was an air of neglect about the whole town. The grass was knee-high and choked with weeds. Children’s swing sets rusted in the middle of unkempt lawns and unused cars rusted in the roads.

“We need to get some sleep,” I said. “There’s bound to be empty houses here and if we post a guard we can see trouble coming long before it reaches us.” You could see anything coming here, across the endless expanse of the corn fields. In the distance I could make out the grey twist of a dust devil, sweeping across the great, empty landscape.

“Yeah, and what if the trouble’s already here?” Haru asked. He nodded to the left, where a group of ten or more adults was sauntering towards us. There were no weapons on display, nothing to indicate that they were a threat, but my hand drifted towards my gun all the same. I’d been out in the Culled world long enough now to know that trusting the goodwill of strangers got you nothing but an early grave.

I saw the same distrust mirrored in their eyes, but there was fear there too and that made me feel a little safer. If they were afraid of us, maybe we didn’t need to be afraid of them.

“We tithe already,” one of them said as soon as he was within earshot. He was a big, red-faced bear of a man, but his shoulders were hunched and his gaze slipped away from mine. He reminded me of the Alsatian our neighbour had kept when I was a child, the one we’d heard yelping in the night when he’d beaten it. He had the same whipped expression. All these people had it.

“We’re not after a tithe,” I told him. I pointedly moved my hand away from my side, palm out and open, then frowned at Kelis until she did the same. “We just want a bed for the night. And if you’ve got any food to spare we’ll trade you some ammo for it.”

“We don’t need ammo,” a small blonde woman said quickly. “We’re not looking to fight.”

“Well, that’s good then,” Haru said, “because neither are we.”

There was a small, awkward silence after that.

“So...” I said eventually. “How about that house over there? Anyone object if we camp out in it for the night?”

Finally they seemed to decide that we really meant what we said. The slump left their shoulders and the smile came back to their faces. “How long you looking to stay for?” the bear man asked.

“Just one night,” I told him. “And we really would appreciate any food you’ve got going spare. We’ll happily do some work in return.” Haru frowned at that but I stamped on his foot and he quickly schooled his expression. We could take whatever we wanted from these people – which was exactly why we weren’t going to do it.

 

 

“A TITHE?” INGO said later, when they’d left us alone in the big, run-down house with enough bread and cheese to feed a small army, along with a bottle of old, and probably precious, wine. They’d refused payment for it and in the end I’d given up trying to make them take it. Maybe the knowledge that we weren’t planning to stay was payment enough.

I swigged back the wine. “Back to feudalism, I guess,” I said. “The peasants till the land and the lords take a portion in return for not taking it all.” My mind felt scraped raw, tiredness and a delayed reaction to the tension of the last few days. Even speaking was an effort.

“Why not just take it all?” Haru asked. “You’re talking gangs right, armed gangs, maybe out of the city? It’s not like the people here would put up much of a fight against them.”

“But then who would grow the crops?” Ingo said quietly. “It is my experience that soldiers prefer fighting to farming. But it will not just be crops that they take when they come. They will have their pleasure in any way they wish, with anyone they want. I have seen it before.”

Kelis shrugs. “Yeah, well, it’s the farmers’ choice, isn’t it? There’s almost certainly more of them – all they need to do is get organised and get armed.”

“You think we should do a Magnificent Seven, train them up?” Haru asked.

She shrugged and looked quickly at me and then away. I didn’t think she was really angry with the people here, just with everyone who made the kind of choice that Soren had and ended up dying for it.

“Maybe on the way back,” I said, but it was just a salve to my conscience. I knew we’d never be back here. Even before the Cull, the world had been full of injustice, and at least these people got to live and eat in relative peace. There were worse fates. I’d already seen them.

I lingered over the last drops of the wine, suddenly unwilling to go to bed. The house we were in was big enough for us to have taken a bedroom each. Mine must have been the youngest son’s, decorated with pictures of rappers and American football stars. The living room was still fully furnished, covered in thick layers of dust but otherwise untouched since whatever had happened to its occupants had happened. The mantelpiece was lined with ornaments – a picture of the Virgin Mary made out of seashells, a terracotta replica of the Basilica, an ashtray so thick and crooked it could only have been one of the children’s pottery projects.

How must it be, I wondered, for the townspeople to spend every day living beside the houses of the dead? At least I couldn’t put a face to the ghosts here. These people had lost neighbours, family, friends. No wonder they took whatever dirty little compromise was offered to avoid the same fate.

My imagination began to get darker as the wine hit a system which hadn’t experienced alcohol for a long time. It jarred with the anti-psychotics and my thoughts started to twist. “I’m going upstairs,” I said, getting abruptly to my feet. “We should get an early start tomorrow. Haru, why don’t you take first watch, wake me after two hours.”

Haru nodded without looking up, still stuffing his face with the last of the bread and cheese. Kelis didn’t respond at all, but her eyes followed me all the way up the stairs.

The room and the bed were both small. I almost didn’t have the energy to get undressed, tempted just to collapse straight onto the dusty blue bedspread with its little pictures of stars and planets hidden beneath the grime. But no, I needed a good night’s sleep. With grim determination I made my fingers undo each button on my blouse, then the zipper on my khaki trousers. There was a full length mirror on the door of the wardrobe and I looked at myself in it once I was entirely naked.

If anything, I was even thinner than when I’d first been taken from the base by Queen M, all the food I’d eaten burned off by nervous energy. There were fading bruises on my ribs, a cut on my arm, a bullet wound in my leg, darker bruises around my eyes and a neat row of teeth marks against the bridge of my nose. Still, looking in that mirror, I almost recognised the woman I’d once been, the one who’d loved him. But then I looked into my eyes and thought, no, that woman is gone.

I was still looking at myself when Kelis came through the door. Her eyes caught mine in the mirror, dark and haunted. I wondered if she thought about the girlfriend she’d left behind – if she ever judged herself so harshly by someone else’s standards.

I didn’t turn round as she walked towards me, not even when her arms circled my waist and pulled me back against her. Her t-shirt felt rough against my naked back as she bent to kiss my neck.

“He loved me,” she said. “He knew I’d never love him. Even if I’d... I never would have.”

“Love is like that,” I whispered, the sound trailing off into a moan as her lips found the nape of my neck.

“Blind, you mean?” She finally let go, allowing me to turn around and face her as she tugged her t-shirt over her head in one quick motion. Her breasts were bare beneath it, small, high and firm.

“Hopeless,” I said, leaning forward to take one of her tight brown nipples into my mouth. It felt less intimate than kissing her. Her skin was lighter than mine, and soft beneath my lips.

“Is it hopeless?” she asked, and I knew she wasn’t talking about Soren.

“Yes,” I said, moving my fingers to the fly of her shorts, pushing them hurriedly down. “I’ve only ever loved one man and I keep telling myself he’s half a world away, but the truth is he’s probably dead.”

She stopped for a moment, then her hands reached out to cup my breasts, kneading the flesh and pinching the nipples hard enough to hurt. “You can always pretend he’s watching us,” she said and she almost carried off the light ironic tone. Almost.

I didn’t, though. I only thought about her and me as we fell onto the narrow bed. I wanted this, I needed it, and the least I owed her was to admit that for this one night it was all about her. I wanted human warmth, the warmth of her thighs around mine, her hand on me – in me. I wanted to feel connected to something in this world, where death could come at any time.

Afterwards I thought she’d get up and leave. I thought I’d want her to, but I didn’t. I didn’t want this to be that impersonal. I was glad when she pulled me against her, spooning her longer body around mine. It had been so very long since I’d been with another person this way that I found that I was crying. She didn’t say anything, and I felt the wet heat of her own tears trickling down my neck. I closed my eyes as we drifted into sleep, and I let myself pretend that our tears were for Soren, because someone’s should have been.

 

 

HARU’S WARNING CRY didn’t wake me, because the gun shots already had. The window exploded inward in a lethal shower of glass. Only the thick comforter saved us from being cut to shreds. Bullets continued to thunder through the darkness, but by then Kelis had snapped awake and rolled off the bed, dragging me with her.

Our guns were in the discarded heap of our clothing, tangled at the foot of the bed. Kelis pulled out her semi-automatic and ammo clips while I fumbled for my Magnum. We didn’t bother with the clothes – there wasn’t time, and it wasn’t like a t-shirt was going to stop bullets. The bed was between the window and thr door, shading us from the gunfire for the time being. We belly-crawled across the floor, the carpet rough against our naked stomachs. Ironic, really, that this was what would leave us with rug burn.

The stairs were sheltered, the inner sanctum of the house. The part of me that wasn’t a fighter, and had never wanted to be, told me to stay there, safe, and let the others fight this out. But I could still feel Kelis’s hands on my back, my hips, and I couldn’t let her be just another corpse I’d left behind.

Haru was cowering at the bottom of the stairs, flinching as splinters of wood flew past. His gun was in his hand but I knew that it was cold and unused. He didn’t have any problem letting other people do his dying for him. He looked at my face first, and after a second his eyes drifted lower – then widened in shock.

“Where the hell did they come from?” I screamed at him. He stopped looking at my breasts and looked back around the stairwell.

“I don’t know!” he shouted back. “But they knew we were here – they must have done. They would have come straight in if we hadn’t locked the door.”

I could guess what was going on: the people of the town reporting the newcomers to their lords, like the well behaved peasants they were. No doubt whoever was out there thought we were planning on moving in on their property – taking the tithe that was their due. If they knew we were just passing through, they’d probably leave us alone, but I didn’t see myself going outside and trying to explain that to them.

“They’ve got us surrounded,” Kelis said. To me the gunfire was just white noise, sourceless and ceaseless, but she sounded certain and I supposed she must be right. No point ambushing someone and leaving them an escape route.

“Then we break out,” I said. “We fight back. With any luck, they’ve forgotten what that feels like.” Ingo had slipped through the shadows to join us. His eyes registered no surprise at my nakedness. It was possible he hadn’t even noticed. “You too,” I said to Haru. “We’ve got a better chance the more guns we can point at them – two out front, two out back.”

The air was heavy with the smell of brick dust and hot lead. The living room was at the front of the house and what I could see of it, around the edge of the stairwell, looked like a war zone. The seashell Mary and the terracotta Basilica were gone from the mantel. Just dust now, like their owners.

I didn’t trust Haru to do as I told him, but Kelis took him by the scruff of his t-shirt and virtually threw him towards the front door. I could his wide, terrified eyes but I didn’t wait to see any more because Ingo had my arm and we were both barrelling around the corner of the stairs, towards the kitchen.

Bullets lanced through the air around us. There were fewer of them now, but it only took one. Maybe they thought we were already dead, or maybe they were just running short of ammo. We’d soon find out.

I didn’t give myself time to think before I ran out of the door, confident that Ingo would be right behind me. They must have thought we were dead because they had started to walk out of the cover of the derelict cars towards the house. They looked almost comically surprised to see me – a naked woman running towards them, gun spitting death.

They were far, far younger than I’d expected. The first one I killed was barely into his teens and not one was out of them. They dived to the ground as soon as the first of them fell, and I realised that they didn’t know what they were doing, not even slightly.

I shot another in the gut and Ingo blew the heads off two more, fatty grey matter splattering the long grass. The four left were now holding their hands up and screaming at us to stop. Suddenly loud, the Voice said, What are you going to do, take them to a prisoner of war camp? Leave them behind to come back and try again? I shot one in the heart, then looked away as Ingo took the rest.

I tried to remind myself what Ingo had said, about the things people like this did to the people they ruled. I tried to imagine one of the young girls who’d laughed and waved as we entered the town, screaming as these boys gang-raped her. But it was no use, all I could think was how young they were and that young people were the only hope left after the Cull.

There was nothing I wanted to say to Ingo when we were done. I walked silently through the back door and up the stairs. The house was a ruin. I put on a fresh set of clothes, then begun to shove my few possessions back into my bag. Kelis came in as I was doing it, her face lightly dusted with blood. I couldn’t look her in the eye and she didn’t seem to mind. I didn’t need to ask if she’d left any alive. It wouldn’t even have crossed her mind.

“Amateurs,” she said dismissively.

“Yeah, neighbourhood kids gone bad.” I could see their brutal little history as if I’d witnessed it. Children freed of all constraints, suddenly the strongest and the most powerful where once they’d been the weakest. Every town has a Trenchcoat Mafia waiting to happen.

“Want to have a word with the good people of the town?” she asked, after a few seconds of silent scrutiny during which I resolutely kept my gaze fixed on the bag I was packing. “It must have been them who tipped the kids off.”

“No,” I said. “I think we’ve done enough already.”

 

 

TEN MINUTES LATER we drove away, through a few hundred more miles of cornfields and past a few dozen more small towns. We didn’t stop. The Interstate, bland and featureless, took us out of Oklahoma almost as fast as I wanted. For mile after mile we saw nothing but vast billboards advertising products no one could buy. Then we were back in Texas, a little northern jut of it, heading towards the desert of New Mexico, scrubby and dry and mercifully free of people. Las Vegas was in reach of one long drive and I didn’t need to ask to discover that none of us had the stomach for more human interaction. We didn’t want to stop again.

But fifty miles from Santa Fe we came to the first road block. On the straight desert road we could see it far ahead, slabs of concrete laid across the length of the road, with the crouched figures of men behind them. “Should we go off-road, drive round?” I asked Kelis.

She shrugged and I could see her preparing to twist the wheel, but Haru reached forward from his place on the back seat and put a hand on her arm. “We can’t risk damaging the car,” he said. “Not out here.”

He was right. Wreck our ride and we might not find another one before we dropped dead of dehydration and heat exhaustion. Kelis nodded and pulled the car to a halt twenty metres from the pile of concrete.

There was a moment’s stand-off as we crouched, guns at the ready, and the men behind the block did the same.

“Well, this is productive,” I said eventually. My voice carried clearly in the still desert air.

“We’ve got food and water back here,” a husky female voice shouted back. “We can wait all day. How about you?”

“We only want to pass through,” Haru tried. “We’re not looking for trouble.”

“But we’re quite capable of being trouble if we need to be,” I added.

High overhead, vultures were circling. I guess they’d been having some good years.

“Pass through on the way to where?” the woman asked after a beat.

We glanced at each other but there didn’t seem to be any reason to lie. “Las Vegas,” I told her.

My finger tightened on the trigger at a sudden movement, but it was just the woman poking her head above the parapet. Even from fifty feet away I could see the black, surprised ‘O’ of her mouth. “Are you crazy?” she said.

 

 

WE DROVE TO Santa Fe in convoy, our vehicle bracketed by two of theirs, strange solar-powered contraptions which looked like they’d been designed by a lunatic trying to recreate the moon unit from memory. They didn’t top twenty miles an hour so the journey took a while, but we didn’t try to break away. We might have been able to outrun them before they shot us, but I gave it even money. And besides, they had something we wanted: information.

“We work for The Collector,” the woman had said when we’d finally dismounted from the car and approached the barricade. She was African-American and about as wide as she was tall. I couldn’t be sure that all of it wasn’t muscle. She told us her name was Jeannine, but that her friends called her Jen.

“Yeah?” I said cautiously. “And what does he collect?”

“Oh,” she said, “stuff.” Then she squinted at us, heavy brows lowering over small eyes. She took in the red and black of Kelis’s clothing, the military way she held herself. Her eyes skittered over me, then Haru and Ingo. “You’re Queen M’s, aren’t you?”

I twitched in surprise and then it was too late to lie. I shrugged. “We were... guests of hers for a while.”

“Yeah,” Jeannine said, smiling. “We heard she misplaced quite a few of her guests last week. Don’t worry – people are the last thing our boss is interested in. There are enough mouths to feed as it is.”

“Yeah, okay,” Haru said. “Then what’s with the road blocks?”

She shrugged. “Human intel. The most valuable currency there is.”

It took us three hours to reach the outskirts of the city, its pale adobe houses like an extension of the desert on which they sat. We were only a few metres past the sign welcoming us to the place when I saw it. I did a double-take, but at the second glance I knew I hadn’t imagined it: Rodin’s Kiss, sitting by the side of the road, a grubby patina of dirt over the white marble. Kelis had seen it too. Her hand reached out to grab mine in surprise, then just as quickly pulled back.

Jeannine, sitting beside me in the back of our jeep, laughed at my expression. “We got a couple of copies of that, so he left that one as a kind of greeting. You know – make love not war.”

I looked at the AK-47 she had strapped to her back and didn’t mention that she seemed prepared for either contingency.

We drove more slowly now, through the drab suburbs and into the picturesque heart of the city. The town was full of people, more than the survivors of the Cull could account for. The Collector must have been recruiting, whatever Jeannine said. They didn’t stop to greet us but I knew that we were being assessed and that if we hadn’t been with Jeannine and her crew we wouldn’t have got very far. The place had the feel of a fortress: slabs of concrete sitting by the sides of roads where they could be dragged out to block them, and nests that probably held machine guns, maybe even AA guns. This wasn’t a place anyone would want to take by force.

The drive through town took an hour and Jeannine seemed happy to act as tour guide, pointing out local landmarks as we passed. I guess she, at least, was a local. I tuned her out and concentrated on getting a read on the place, a sense of what went on here. The Voice had become a constant dull murmur in the last few days, clear enough to hear, and it was telling me to be careful. Warning me that the people here weren’t my friends. I did my best to ignore it. Maybe there were no friends here, but I didn’t get the sense that there were any enemies either. More like people from a parallel world, benignly indifferent to ours. We finally stopped, at a building that looked like a honeycomb, with a half-collapsed sign that told me it had once been a hotel.

“Heart of the collection,” Jeannine told me. “You’ll usually find him here.”

The heat was searing, dry as my mouth, and I wondered why anyone would ever have chosen to live in a place like this. Then, when we stepped through the big lobby doors of the honeycomb building, the cold hit us like a bucket of ice-water in the face. I guessed the air-con was solar powered, but it seemed like a needless extravagance.

“Madre de Dios!” Kelis said. “Why not just move somewhere cooler?”

I smiled, but the expression slipped from my face when I saw what was in front of me.

“Holy hell,” Haru said. “You’ve got the Elgin marbles in your hallway!”

They had all of them, by the look of it. The delicate friezes of gods, heroes and monsters that I had last seen six years ago in the British Museum.

I looked across at Jeannine and she grinned back, looking amazingly impish for such a vast woman. “Like I said, he collects stuff. And the cold is good – helps preserve them, the paintings especially.”

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You were an art historian in a previous life.”

“Curator,” she told me. “He’s very particular about who he recruits. Want the tour?”

They’d pretty much gutted the British Museum. The dining room was filled, floor to ceiling, with totem poles, leering animal faces staring out at walls covered in African tribal masks, which glared blankly back at them. The bar was filled with mummies, standing around in conversational huddles. A giant stone scarab sat in the middle of it all, impassive.

“No Rosetta Stone?” I asked.

Jeannine shook her head. “He’s interested in art, not history.”

The paintings were in the guest rooms, carefully preserved behind glass. Hanging on walls above beds and dressers, where once there would have been cheap hotel art. I saw Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe and Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Haru brought out his sketchbook, the first time I’d seen it since Cuba, and drew neat little pencil sketches of the works we passed. I glanced at one and saw the subtle way he’d changed it: the Madonna’s eyes just a little rounder, her mouth a little smaller, the baby in her arms with a wild look in its eyes, as if what made him more than human wasn’t entirely safe.

The grounds of the hotel were filled with sculptures. I stopped for a long time in front of Epstein’s vast, chunky statue of Jacob wrestling the angel. The dusty pink of the marble blended with the red-gold desert sand. It made me think, suddenly, of the voice in my head, my own struggle with it. But was the Voice Jacob or the angel? I used to be quite certain of the answer, but the louder the Voice got, the less sure I became.

“That’s always been a favourite of mine, too.” said a man so slender he was little more than bone. His skin and hair were as pale as each other, as if one had been entirely bleached by the sun while the other was always hidden from it.

“Well, I guess no one from Tate Britain will likely miss it too much.”

He smiled, open and friendly. “No one’s voiced any complaints so far.”

 

 

THEY COOKED A meal for us out on one of the hotel’s patios, a barbecue. The warmth of the flame was welcome in the abrupt chill of a desert night. He ate delicately, picking at the chicken wings and beef steaks with his fingers as if testing their consistency. We ate ravenously, tearing at the meat with our teeth like animals. He watched us with wry amusement.

“This is what you’ve been doing, ever since the Cull?” I asked him.

He nodded. “From the moment the Cull started, once we could see where it was all heading.”

“But why all the way out here?” Kelis asked. “Why not just take over the Smithsonian, somewhere you’ve got a head start and don’t have to transport a million tonnes of rock over ten-million fucking acres of desert?”

“Because it’s all the way out here,” he said. “We don’t get many visitors, and that’s just the way I like it. And because this is my home, and why the hell shouldn’t Santa Fe be the new cultural capital of the world?”

“There’s more though, isn’t there?” Haru squinted at him under lowered brows. “Being far away isn’t a guarantee of safety on its own.”

I remembered the Irish farmers, out in their lonely hills, and knew that he was right. The Collector looked at him a long time, and beside me I felt Jeannine tense. But then he smiled again, a cadaverous grin in his wasted face. “You’re a clever boy. Yes, you’re right, there’s more to being safe than enough sand between you and your enemies. Like the good ol’ boys in our neighbouring state used to say, an armed society is a polite one.”

“Machine gun nests, AA emplacements. I’d say manners around here must be pretty damn good,” I said.

He laughed. “Oh, those things are just gravy. What keeps the scavengers away is the stuff that used to lie buried beneath the earth, not many miles from here.”

“You are talking of nuclear weapons,” Ingo said calmly.

I wanted to laugh, because that would have made it a joke, but it clearly wasn’t. “You’ve got nukes?”

“Just the two,” the Collector said demurely.

“Nukes are a weapon of deterrence, not a weapon of use,” Ingo said. “Will anyone believe that you would detonate them, simply to protect this?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, his tight smile bringing out the subtle networks of wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. I realised he was much older than I had originally thought. “They know I will.”

“Really?” Kelis said. “You’d really nuke anyone who tried to take your collection?”

“It’s not mine. It’s ours – humanity’s. The things I have here, these are the best of us. They’re the only part of us left that’s worth killing for.”

I remembered all the people I’d killed and the reasons for it, and I thought that maybe he was right.

 

 

LATER, WHEN HE’D opened a bottle of cognac and we were lounging on cushions in a room whose walls were guarded by the Terracotta Army, he said, “I hear you want to go to Vegas?”

“Yeah,” Kelis said. “That’s the plan. Know anything about what’s going on there?”

He shrugged. “More than you, probably. Less than I’d like.”

“Did...” I hesitated, but really, if this man was in league with Ash, it was already too late. “Did anything change there, recently, maybe around six months ago?”

His eyes narrowed. “You know something about this new guy who’s taken over there?”

“Yeah, we do,” I said. “And I can tell you one thing, this is not someone you want as a neighbour. Have there been any... have you noticed anything odd about his followers? He does have followers, right? An army of them.”

The Collector shrugged. “He’s got people working for him, that’s for sure. Beyond that, no one knows anything. Soon as he arrived he sealed Vegas up so tight it’s a wonder air can get in there. He closed it and he fortified it, and if you think we’ve got a few guns lying around this place, you should see Sin City. Rumours are he’s got as much ordinance in that place as a small country.”

“Rumours?” Kelis said. “So no one knows for sure?”

“No,” Jeannine said, “on account of the fact that no one we sent in there ever came out again.”