"Yup," she said. "Queen M always told us to steer clear, leave them be. Only recently they started getting aggressive, coming after us."
I looked down at the boy's body, the vacancy where his left eye had been, and lower, were something had cut into his chest. Now that he was naked I could see other wounds too: a chunk out of his left thigh, two toes hanging off and another two broken and sticking upwards at an impossible angle. It was easy enough to tell which injuries were the result of the confrontation on the boat and which had been around a while. The new ones weren't running with puss, oozing yellow and green into the surrounding flesh.
I decided to take a look at the chunks missing from his legs and stomach first. The edges of the cuts had been blurred by swelling and infection, but on the leg there was one little area that had remained relatively unscathed and it told me everything I needed to know. "Teeth marks," I said to Kelis, pulling back on the flesh and standing aside so that she could get a clear view.
She turned her head aside and made a face. Funny, you wouldn't think a woman doing her job could be squeamish. "Joder! You're saying they eat each other?"
I shook my head. "Not human. Shark, I think, though I've never treated a shark attack victim, so I can't be one -hundred per cent sure."
She held a hand over her nose in a futile attempt to ward off the smell of corruption and leaned a little closer. "Doesn't look like they did anything to it after the attack. There's no stitches, nothing. Why would anyone let an injury like that go untreated?"
"Yeah." I looked at his stomach, sure now that the flesh had been torn in the same incident. The level of infection was consistent too, both injuries dating back a couple of weeks. "It's like the shark bit him; he fought it off, climbed out of the water and then carried on like nothing had happened."
"But that's not possible, is it?"
I shrugged. "Short term, sure, it's amazing what a flood of adrenaline can do for you. Long term - no, it shouldn't be. He should have been in agony."
"Any sign of brain damage maybe?" She peered at the boy's head, what was left of it. "Something that might explain why he can't feel any pain?"
She was quick. I needed to remember that, in my plans. I sawed the boy's skull open but the damage from the bullet was too extensive to make out any subtler trauma around it. "Brain damage might explain what happened to him, but not the rest of them. It's too much of a coincidence for them all to have suffered the same condition."
After the brain I went for the other organs, cracking open the ribs to get at them, wincing as blood splashed back at me from the corpse. The gown and mask caught it all and the examination didn't tell me anything I could use. The state of his liver would suggest too much drinking, but alcoholism just wasn't going to explain the things I'd seen on that boat. I used a scalpel to slice off a sliver of it anyway, along with the heart and the lungs, but I wasn't really expecting to find anything. I thought Kelis was probably at least partly right: whatever was wrong with these people was wrong with their brains.
After I was done with the body, hauling a sheet over it because I didn't want to look at the ruin of that young man a second longer, I took the samples over to one of the microscopes. And yes, I'd been right - they told me nothing. Normal. Which left only... but I'd been putting that off since I came into the room, almost as if I'd known from the beginning what I was going to find.
"What about his blood?" Kelis said, watching it soak through the thin white sheet covering his body like a guilty secret that wanted to be known. "Aren't most infectious diseases blood-borne?"
"They can be air-borne too, transmitted by touch..." But I was just talking, the words didn't mean anything because she was right. I had to look at the blood. My fingers trembled as I prepared the slide, and I wondered if Kelis had noticed. And then I wasn't thinking about anything at all because what I could see in front of me was what I'd somehow feared without even knowing it, and the memories washed back over me, too strong to resist.
Most of all I remembered the excitement, a taste in the back of my throat that was very much like fear. My heart pounding, loud in my ears and heavy in my chest. And maybe it was fear, a little, because what if we were wrong? If we doled out hope and then took it back again, would anyone there forgive us? With the way nerves were on edge, tempers frayed - it would only take one spark, and that might be it. But...
"I really think this is it," Ash said, and there was an edge of excitement in his normally cool voice.
I looked at the slide again, at the lab work, the electron microscope images and grainy NMR scans, but they were all telling us the same thing. "This is... you know how fucking dangerous this is, right?"
But Ash was grinning now, that smile I remembered from college but hadn't seen in a while, when he knew he'd done something clever and was planning on being insufferable about it. "Yeah, because dying in agony while your brains slide out of your ears isn't dangerous at all." The lab felt too small to contain the force of his personality when he was in a mood like this.
I ignored him and took one final look at the slide, the papers. As if the facts might have changed while I wasn't looking. But of course they hadn't. "It really is O-neg."
"Yeah," Ashok said, "and before that, it really was AB. This is it, Jasmine. Stop second guessing and start celebrating!"
"Shit," I exclaimed. "Shit. We are geniuses!"
He swept me up into a hug. "Yeah, babe, we really are."
"Twisted geniuses."
He gave me a last squeeze, and then let me go. "The best kind."
"Because what we did here is mental. You know that, don't you? I mean, we're generally in the business of curing retro-viruses, not creating them."
"Not to mention the military tech in there that would make Al Qaeda's eyes light up. If they weren't, you know, dying in agony along with everyone else."
"And the stem cells - don't want to forget them."
"How can I, when they're so untested the FDA isn't even within five years of issuing a licence?"
Our jubilation had tipped over into near hysteria, and we must have been shouting pretty damn loud because Abuke poked his head round the door and frowned. Then he saw our faces and his frown slipped into another expression, harder to define.
"You did it?" he said. "You've found it?"
I smiled. "Yeah, I really think we have."
But a vaccine that turns a rat's blood from one type to another isn't necessarily the same as a Cure that does the same thing for humans. In any normal medical research there'd be years of testing to go before we moved on to live subjects. Fat chance. It was live testing or nothing, and there weren't a whole lot of subjects to choose from.
The five of us lay in identical beds wearing hospital gowns, tubes in our arms, expressions of unease on our faces. I guess it was flattering in a way, that the other three were prepared to put so much trust in mine and Ash's work. Or more likely it was just desperation.
Yesterday, the base had seen its first Cull. The rest of us would follow, weeks or days later, who knew, but it would be soon.
On the bed beside me Ash smiled, but it was strained. The muscles in his cheeks tensing and releasing as his teeth ground, a nervous habit I'm not sure he knew he had. "Ready?" I asked him.
"Jasmine..." he said softly, and I realised suddenly that he was going to say something serious, probably about us - but I was married and in love with another man.
"We'll be fine," I said hurriedly. "I've got faith in us."
"Yeah." His eyes closed slowly, then opened again, and he knew I didn't want to hear whatever he wanted to say. "I'm glad I'm here with you," he said finally, "whatever happens."
And then we both took the needles nestling in the cannula in our arms, and pushed. A second's hesitation, then the other three did the same. The Cure, mainlined, spreading through our system like the virus it was. Taking our DNA and changing it. DNA transcribing to RNA, coalescing and knotting to form the templates for alien proteins inside us, closing off the so
urce of the AB blood cells that marked us for death. Telling our bodies that we'd been O-negs all the time, we just hadn't realised it yet.
Doing all of that - and something else too. A second after the small pain of the injection came a pain that was a thousand times worse. It felt as if something essential was being ripped loose right in the heart of us, and then again, and again, and again, until I couldn't imagine that it would ever end. Ash was the first to start screaming and once he'd started, he didn't stop. None of us did.
And now, here, as I looked at the slide, I knew exactly what I was seeing. Except, of course, that it shouldn't be possible. I turned to Kelis, hoping she couldn't see my shaking hands, that she wouldn't notice the way all the blood had drained from my face. Blood - ironic how everything comes back to that.
"Hey," I said, and tried not to wince at the fake casualness of it, my inability to seem normal when everything inside me was screaming as loud as it had when I first took the Cure. "Any chance you can scare up some food? I didn't have any breakfast earlier."
She looked at the boy's corpse, and then at me, eyebrows raised. "You're hungry - seriously?"
"Yeah, what can I say - I'm a doctor. Gore gives me an appetite."
She shrugged and headed out the door, maybe glad to get away from the gore herself. Strange to think of a killer being queasy at the sight of blood. But then killer didn't quite capture her. It implied a love of it, or a clinical efficiency. Soren was a killer. Kelis had gone about killing with a kind of weary resignation, like it had been her third-choice career while there was a kid at home with an out-of-work husband and she needed to bring in the dough.
I'd brought my medical bag with me. The sterile needle and syringe were right where they always were. I had to stop myself shooting edgy, guilty looks at the other scientists as I drew out my own blood from the crook of my elbow and carefully smeared it onto a slide. They wouldn't think there was anything odd about it. Why should they? I was just a fellow scientist, going about my scientific business.
The slide clicked into place beside the one I'd taken from the Infected boy. I already knew what I'd see, but like a lump of vomit stuck halfway up my throat, I was still reluctant to bring it all the way into the light of day. I took one deep shaking breath, a second, then put my eye against the microscope and focussed.
The slide of my blood was on the left. The boy's blood was on the right. I remembered that - but there was no other way to tell. The two slides were identical, the same sickly, deformed red blood cells, twisted into a shape that nature had never seen before Ash and I had had our bright idea, five years ago, when we'd believed we might be able to save the human race.
The cobbled-together, wing-and-a-prayer hybrid we'd engineered in a lab from cutting-edge medical tech and code black military wetware had driven me insane. Somehow, it had done something very different, but equally terrible, to the people of Cuba.
Ash and I had meant to cure one plague. Had we managed to start another? I guess I should have been feeling guilty, for letting loose this thing that could wipe out the last, ragged remnant of humanity. But that wasn't what I was thinking about right then. What I was thinking was that Queen M had been right: this thing was Infectious and I was a carrier. Hell, I was Patient Zero. And if she ever picked up even a hint of it, I'd be shark meat.
Suddenly escape was looking a whole lot more urgent. Fuck everyone else. I had to get out of there right now.
CHAPTER THREE
I'd finally managed to discover the location of the camera in my room, hidden in the handle of my wardrobe where it had a perfect view of the bed. I hoped whoever watched the footage enjoyed the view. I hadn't changed anything about my routine when I discovered it, not even giving in to the temptation to start undressing in the bathroom. Couldn't let them know I knew. Besides, there was probably a camera in the bathroom too, but that one didn't matter.
I couldn't set my alarm, not sure if there was sound recording in the room as well. It wasn't essential to my plan. Since my medical student days I'd always been able to wake when I wanted.
At exactly ten past four in the morning my eyes blinked uselessly open in the absolute darkness.
I'd spent five days learning my way around the cabin by touch. Subtly brushing a hand along the dresser, counting the paces from door to bed, feeling the rough patch in the carpet with my toes. I let my eyes slide shut as I felt in the wardrobe for my clothes, twisted the clasp on my blouse shut, slid my sandals over my feet.
There's something about the dead of night that seems to amplify sound, every rustle of cotton, metallic grate of zipper echoing in the seemingly cavernous room.
That night my fingers fumbled at my shoes, fingernails scraping against a buckle, and I froze for a second, my heart pounding.
Nothing. No sound of my shadows waiting outside my door. When I was dressed, I slid my feet over the carpet to the door, counting footsteps. One, two, three, four, five. The handle was right there and I turned it. The lip salve I'd casually smeared last night from my lips to my finger to the latch seemed to have done the trick and the door eased open without a sound.
The night lights in the corridor seemed momentarily far too bright and I had to fight the urge to flinch back. I knew where the camera here was too, ten feet away from my door. Fixed, no rotation. Nobody would see me leaving. But whoever was watching would see me walk past.
Not a problem. Like any tribe, the soldiers here liked to find ways to distinguish themselves from the common herd. They always wore red, somewhere on them, when they weren't out on a mission, boots rather than sandals, dog tags scavenged from god knows where. Those had been the hardest to get, but it's amazing what you'll find lying around in places where 93 per cent of the population didn't get to leave any kind of last will and testament.
They'd know my face, of course, if they were really looking. But why would they be, if I walked with confidence and looked like I knew where I was going? Stupidly, like someone picking at a scab on their finger when their whole leg needs amputating, that was the part of the plan I was most worried about. He'd always joked that I had no sense of direction and I'd quoted him psychological research about how men found their way using maps and women did it with landmarks; but both were equally good. Then he'd challenge me to find my way from Leicester Square to Covent Garden - and he was right. I couldn't navigate for shit.
There'd only be so long I could stand, looking at one of those wall-mounted plans of the ship, without it looking suspicious. I thought I knew where I was going. I thought I did. So I worried about that rather than worrying about the camera, after camera, after camera I was passing with my face visible for God and everyone to see. Or the fact that I had only the vaguest idea how to pilot a boat, even if I could get to one. I particularly didn't think about what Queen M would do if she caught me. About that autopsy table in the lab, and the runnels up the side to carry away the blood.
The ship felt haunted at night, by all the people who'd been so happy right before they died. I walked through the endless, bland, carpeted corridors; down the marble stairs and through the empty galleries with blank bare windows that used to hold things the dead people had wanted to buy. Soldiers passed me now and then, glanced once and then looked away. They had the white, weary look of people who were missing their beds. They didn't want trouble, anything that would force them to act. I made myself easy to ignore.
And I went steadily down, towards the water line. On deck 4 I took a wrong turn, left rather than right. I realised it two strides too late. No turning back. That would be too noticeable, too much the act of someone who didn't belong. All I could do was carry on, to the next staircase, down to the next deck, hoping it was built on the same plan as the previous one as I turned right this time and, yes, it was. Because suddenly the stairs were metal, the walls a dull institutional brown.
I was out of the guest quarters and into the parts of the ship only the crew were meant to see. My feet echoed loudly on the metal treads but I didn't care.
I was nearly there.
So what was I going to do about that little fragment of metal in my leg? I was going to get clear of the ship, get to one of the islands Queen M had only recently begun to colonise, Isla Marguerita, or St Thomas, somewhere there weren't too many people around, and then I was going to operate on myself and remove it.
I'd only be using a local anaesthetic, obviously, and I'd be digging deep through muscle and into bone. I'd probably be breaking the bone. There was a chance I wouldn't survive the procedure and every possibility I couldn't walk away from it. But I was desperate and willing to try.
One more flight of metal stairs and I was on the Tender Deck. Little detachable jetties led from here into the water only a few feet below. I could hear the slap of it against the hull of the ship, always more violent than you expected after you'd seen it from the sundeck far above, so tranquil and blue. Sometimes the tender boats stayed overnight. Sometimes they went back to the islands when they'd unloaded their cargoes. But so many came and went, there had to be one still here, right?
And there was. Right at the far end, an open hatch in the side of the ship. The waft of salt air and the audible bounce and crash of a small boat moored outside drifted through the hole as it hopped on the rough waves.
I was only ten feet away from it when I realised that the floor beneath my boots was covered in a thin rubber sheath, good grip for when the water washed in. The floor was rubber, but I could still hear the echo of footsteps on metal. Two sets of them.
I turned round to face Soren and Kelis. "So," I said. "I guess this doesn't look good."
Soren huffed out what might have been a laugh.
Kelis looked... almost upset. Like I'd let her down somehow. "You were thinking you could operate on yourself, take it out, right?"
I shrugged. "Or maybe I just wanted to stretch my legs."
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