Kill or Cure

by Rebecca Levene

  And then we were only twenty feet above the road. There were cars there, three of them right ahead of us, but there was absolutely no way we'd be pulling up now. The wind screamed past the wings and I screamed too, but it didn't matter because the back wheels had finally hit the ground with a noise louder than I could have believed possible. As they scraped along with the front wheels still stubbornly in the air, the plane jerked underneath us like a wild horse which had just been saddled for the first time. Suddenly I wasn't the only one screaming.

  I was buckled in, but the strap nearly broke around me as we swerved violently to the right. There was a hideous crunch beneath us, as if we'd just run over the world's largest cockroach and I knew that we'd passed the first of the cars. But there were still two more to go. For just a moment I wished that I hadn't taken the drugs which had killed the Voice inside me. That I could have heard it still, telling me that everything was going to be OK, that I was invincible. But maybe even the Voice would have had a few doubts right then.

  Another swerve, to the left this time. Another horrible crunch. A firework display spat gold past the windows. After a second of confusion I realised that it was the spark of the undercarriage dragging over metal. There were screams outside the plane too now. Our landing must have come out of the blue sky without warning for those on the ground. I wondered if anyone had been caught beneath it. If some of the crunch we'd heard had been bone, not metal. But I didn't wonder too hard. Other people's deaths don't count for much when you're facing your own.

  Then, almost incredibly, we were slowing down. The awful rasping sound of metal on tarmac was still shuddering the inside of the plane. I guessed that we were pulling one of the crushed cars along with us, the drag of the undercarriage fighting against our vast momentum. We were going no faster than a car on a motorway now, the buildings rushing past us on either side finally individual and recognisable. And then we stopped altogether.

  There was a second of one of the most profound silences I'd ever heard. Then one of the men beside me whooped and soon the rest of the crew joined in, and I did too because, Jesus, it felt good to be alive.

  When we got out, we saw that we'd stopped just ten feet shy of the Arc de Triomphe. I wasn't the only one who let out a jagged, slightly hysterical burst of laughter at the sight of the plane's nose, sniffing at the base of the world-famous landmark. The plane itself had seen better days: one of the wheels had torn off, and an engine was hanging loosely from the wing.

  Soren scratched at his short cropped hair. "Guess we're going to have to do some work on that." I couldn't see it being a quick job. But then I had no idea how long we were supposed to be here.

  "Philips, Mitchell," Curtis said. Two of the crew crouched to begin work, others standing close by to guard. "The rest of you - it's time to rock and roll."

  Every single person in the party save me was suddenly holding some very serious ordinance in a very serious way, and the few ragged people I'd seen melting out of the side streets around us were melting right back into them. There was a 'don't fuck with us' vibe going on that made me feel safe and uneasy at the same time.

  Paris was eerily quiet. This was the first time I'd been in a major city since the Cull. I'd known, intellectually of course, what it would be like. Less than two per cent of the population left alive by now - the place was bound to be a ghost town. But nothing prepares you for the sight of somewhere you've seen full of people, noise and motion suddenly so still. Worse because the buildings - the bones of the place - were mostly intact, with no visible reason for what had gone so wrong.

  Still, but not deserted. There were subliminal flickers of motion out the corner of my eye as we walked the narrow side streets in strict military formation: point man, scouts, rear guard. They'd placed me in the centre of their small arrow of personnel. For protection or to stop me escaping? I couldn't tell, it didn't make much difference. There was no way I'd be heading off into these mausoleum streets alone.

  We were being watched - everyone knew it - and not by friendly eyes.

  Still, the attack was unexpected when it came. Queen M's people were watching forward, sideways, behind. They were watching above, scanning the roofs of the buildings for snipers or spies.

  They weren't looking below.

  Being right in the middle is no protection at all when the attackers are coming at you out of the sewers. There was a quick, loud grate of metal as a cover was shoved aside. And then the whine of bullets and the crack of their impact as someone stuck his arm out and fired round a full 360 degrees. I felt a stinging graze on my right thigh and knew that one of the bullets had winged me.

  Not everyone got off so lightly. Kelis let out a grunt and I could see that a bullet had struck a rib, probably snapping it. Another of the men went down and didn't get up. More bullets thudded into his corpse, the blood now oozing slowly out without a functional heart to pump it.

  A second later, Soren had stepped in front of Kelis, pushing her to the ground behind the tree-trunk solidity of his body. His semi-automatic was firing round after round, and even over the noise of them, I heard the splash of our assailant's body falling into the filthy water below.

  But he wasn't alone. Drain covers were popping up all over the street, figures pulling themselves acrobatically out of the sewer. Our formation was shot to hell. Everyone had scattered after that first, shocking burst of gunfire. I felt horribly exposed, unarmed and unprepared. My first instinct was to fall to the ground, but that's where the threat was coming from. Instead I found myself kneeling beside the fallen, bloody body of our lost man. Up close I could see that he was young, maybe still a teenager. His eyes were open, blankly reflecting back the last daylight he'd ever seen.

  I didn't know exactly what I was doing there. My body seemed to be moving without my mind having to give it any instructions, as if it had realised that this was more than the conscious me could deal with. I wondered for a second if I'd meant to try to help him, but then my hands were reaching for the gun he'd never had a chance to fire, slicking the barrel back and forward to load a bullet into the chamber. Before I'd quite registered what I was doing I'd fired a round point-blank into the head just emerging from the dark hole of the sewer in-front of me.

  The force of the shot twisted the man round, giving me a perfect view of the exit wound ripped out of the back of his skull, the bloodied shards of bone and the white meat inside.

  I heard the ragged breath of someone behind me and twisted, firing at the same time. The shot was wild but good enough to take the man in the chest. He fell, gasping, with hands clutched against his body, trying to keep in everything that belonged inside. It was a battle he couldn't win, and after a few seconds his hands slackened and fell. I'd taken two lives.

  After that I made it to the side of the road, crouching in the lee of a small brick wall. I could taste the adrenaline in my mouth, a bitter tang. It had flooded my system the moment the fight had begun but already it was washing back out again, leaving fear and weakness in its wake. I saw my hand holding the gun begin to droop and then shake. I brought my other hand up to steady it but that one was shaking so hard now too that I was afraid I might pull the trigger by mistake.

  After a moment, I let it drop. Only three of our attackers were still alive and above ground. As I watched, Kelis kicked one of them in the knee, snapping the joint with a wet crack I could hear from fifteen feet away. When he was down she reached round and snapped his neck. The other two didn't last much longer, and as suddenly as it had begun, it was all over.

  Only then did I notice the uniform our attackers had been wearing, sashes draped round their shoulders in the old revolutionary Tricoleur. Old tribalism revived, I thought. And old instincts coming back, even in the most civilised of us. The cold ability to kill or be killed.

  I thought I might be sick but in the end I wasn't. Because they hadn't even spoken to us before they'd opened fire and I wasn't in any way sorry they were gone.

  "Hey, you OK?" Kelis asked,
crouching down beside me and staring at me in unexpected concern, as if her own body wasn't leaking blood onto the cobbled pavement.

  "I'm fine," I said. "Bullet grazed me, that's all. But let me take a look at that."

  She frowned for a moment, whether unsure if I really was all right or just not keen to let me treat her, I couldn't tell. But then, the heat of battle wearing off, her pain must have begun to register and she slid down the wall beside me and nodded.

  The wound wasn't as bad as I'd thought, though she hissed in pain as I probed it with my fingers. "I think one rib's cracked," I told her, "but the bullet's gone clean through and it hasn't nicked any major vessels."

  She looked down for a moment longer, as if mesmerised by the sight of my white fingers moving along her brown skin. I realised that I was closer to her than I'd ever been, and for the first time really registered her as another person, with thoughts and feelings inside her head which I couldn't know.

  Then she swatted my hand away impatiently and nodded over to the other side of the street. "Go see to Michaels. He took one in the leg and he doesn't look so good. I can bandage this up myself."

  It took me half an hour to patch us all together. Michaels needed something more major than the field surgery I could offer him, but he was safer with us than alone so I improvised a splint for his leg and shot him so full of opiates that he wouldn't care if it dropped off on the journey. For a moment, just a moment, I felt a fierce desire to turn the needle round and plunge it into my own arm, feed the hunger which would never quite die. I didn't though. Not this time.

  The constant, never-ending war of the addict. Not this time. Not the next. The one after that? Yeah, that one you're never quite sure about.

  I realised that one of our attackers was still alive. She was groaning quietly, body slumped half in, half out of the sewer. She looked to be middle aged and bald from some skin condition which left her looking like a medieval leper. The woman had taken a bullet to the gut but I probably could have saved her. Curtis spared me the effort though, not even wasting a bullet on her, just smashing the butt of his rifle hard against her head, driving it down into the pavement until the skull shattered.

  "Stupid fuckers," he said. "Try to get us every fucking time. Never fucking learn."

  We walked off east, one man light and even more cautious. But I guess news of the fight travelled because no one else challenged us and the pressure of unseen eyes against my back eased.

  The streets soon broadened again, into the grand, tree-lined boulevards of central Paris. I started to recognise the buildings we were passing from a romantic holiday he had taken me on. Palais de l'Elysée. La Madeleine. Our route led straight through La Place de la Concorde and I wondered again just where we were going. Who we were looking for.

  No one had taken the gun from me after the fight, and it hung limp and useless from my hand as we walked. I guessed it was a sign of trust, but I didn't feel particularly flattered.

  Kelis saw me looking down at it and gently pried it from my fingers. "Might want to reload that," she said, doing it for me. When she handed it back I tried to hold it in a firmer grip but it still felt alien in my hand.

  He'd taught me to shoot, back when we first met, said it was something everyone should know how to do - almost as if he'd seen all this coming. But I'd never learned to love guns the way he did. I didn't like the potential for death I could always feel curled up in their barrels.

  When we stopped at the huge glass pyramid, I thought for an insane moment that we'd come sightseeing, that this was what it had all been about. But the tense set of Kelis' shoulders and the sudden tight wariness around Soren's eyes, told me different. This, for whatever reason, was our target.

  "So we're what?" I said to Kelis. "Stealing artwork? Desperate to get our hands on the Mona Lisa? Unable to go another minute without looking at the Venus de Milo?"

  She flicked a quick, hard smile at me. "Long gone. We're here for something much more valuable."

  "Is it going to require the use of my gun?"

  "That's not the plan, but..." Kelis shrugged.

  Right, because when did anything ever go according to plan? My hand tightened on the trigger, so hard that I almost let loose a volley when the lone figure emerged from the glass pyramid. But he was unarmed. Hands held high.

  Curtis wasn't taking any chances. He waited until the figure walked right up to him and then grabbed him round the neck, pulling him into the shelter of an old magazine stand.

  The man didn't resist when Curtis frisked him, and he proved not to be armed. He was thin-faced, deep smile lines etched at the sides of a wide mouth, hair so brown it was almost black. When Curtis finally released him, the smile lines deepened as he grinned at us, as if he wasn't staring down the barrels of enough heavy ordinance to take on a small army.

  "My name is Jules," the man said, his French accent only faint. "Welcome to Paris."

  "Yeah, it's been real welcoming so far," Curtis said. "I'll be giving it a five star write-up in my travel guide."

  The man frowned. "Ah. I think perhaps you have met with the Revolutionary Guard. They see it as their duty to protect this great city against incursions from elsewhere."

  "No kidding," Kelis said. "And what about you? You planning to live up to the Parisian reputation for warm hospitality?"

  He turned to face her, hands lifted in a conciliatory gesture. "We are always keen to welcome newcomers." And then, for just a moment, the smile slipped from his face. "We also have twice as many armed men as your numbers, and not all of them are inside the pyramid. But this does not matter, I think, because you are not here to make war."

  Curtis' mouth pulled into a thin line. "No. That's not what we're here for at all."

  It surprised me how readily Curtis allowed his men to surrender their weapons, leaving half his force behind to guard them while the disarmed contingent - myself included - was led into the pyramid by Jules.

  Kelis hadn't been kidding. Everything of value was long gone, horded by some unknown collector for some unknown purpose. The bare walls of the gallery looked like an accusation, or a metaphor. The stripping away from this new life of everything that wasn't purely functional.

  Still, there was no denying it made a great base. There were fifty-six of them here, camped out in the shell of the museum, sitting on a stockpile of weapons and ammo they'd scavenged from who knew where. They weren't soldiers - there were families, children as young as two and a silver-haired old woman well past eighty - but they knew how to fight. Or they'd learnt, in those last five brutal years.

  They had food too, fresh food. After we'd toured the empty, dismal galleries of the museum and seen the homes they'd carved out for themselves in the shell, they took us to their farm. I smiled when I saw it. The Twilleries, the formal gardens long dug up, rows of lettuce, beets, potatoes, planted in place of the roses and neatly mowed lawns.

  "How can you defend all this?" Kelis asked.

  Jules shrugged. "We have guards."

  But she shook her head. "Not enough. Not for this."

  He looked at her narrowly, assessing. Then he nodded. "No, not for this. But without us it would not grow so well, nor the hydroponics underground. We have scientists among our number, agronomists, and biochemists. We make medicines too. They, the Revolutionary Guard, and others like them, let us make the things they need. They take what we give and we make sure that the price for taking it all would be too high."

  Curtis looked impressed. Or maybe he was just pissed off - he had the kind of face which made it hard to tell. "We want to trade," he told Jules. "Groups like yours and ours need to connect, share technology. Rebuild society from the bottom up."

  Jules nodded, a reflex gesture rather than an indication of agreement. "Trade requires the possession of something that another desires. And we have everything we need."

  "When was the last time you ate a pineapple?" Curtis asked.

  Jules smiled. "That wasn't tinned?"

  "Coco
nut, too. Peaches, lemons, oranges. Fresh fish, fresh meat. And that's just the basics." It was the most animated I'd seen Curtis. His face was filled with an almost evangelical fervour and for the first time I considered that Queen M's kingdom might be something her people believed in. "We have higher technologies too. Some manufacturing. We have access to oil fields."

  Jules looked suddenly wary. "You have all this, and yet you would cross an ocean to trade with us. What is it we have that you want?"

  Curtis's expression shifted, just a little, and I knew that whatever answer he was about to give, it wouldn't be the truth. But for the moment the conversation moved on, and soon they were bartering, figuring out exchange rates in a world without currency. They talked about technologies, the possibility of getting generators running again without enough people to staff them. There was drinking and eating too and after a while some chatting and bonding. It felt strangely ordinary. Just one group of people visiting another and chewing the fat. A little boy came to sit in my lap, his curly brown hair brushing against my chest as his head turned backwards and forwards, following a conversation he couldn't understand.

  Some time after midnight, it all began to wind down. Jules hesitated, then told us that we could sleep in the safety of the Louvre with them. I was the only one watching Curtis' face as he said it, and I knew instantly that he'd made a terrible mistake in his invitation.

  The attack came at precisely four in the morning. At the first sound my eyes snapped open, then snapped to the clock on the far wall - an instinct I'd picked up years ago when he and I had been living together, and there was no telling when he might get called away or where to. Four o'clock is the deepest part of the night - the time when most people who die in their sleep pass away.