Kill or Cure

by Rebecca Levene

  When I woke up at four that morning it was to find that the Voice had returned, sliding through the thoughts at the back of my mind. You need to be careful, it told me. You can't trust anyone.

  But I knew that already. I took my morning dose of anti-psychotics, a lower dose than I really needed, but it was the only way I'd been able to horde enough to last me for the journey, until I could find an abandoned pharmacy somewhere on land. If I could find a pharmacy. The Voice, so blessedly absent from my mind since my rescue, had become a restless whisper at the edge of my consciousness. The panicky knowledge of its presence was like a threat that one day would be made good.

  Perhaps this whole escape plan, the desperate need to leave, was itself coming from the Voice. Madness feeling like sanity.

  Fuck it - I'd worry about that once I was away.

  There was no need to keep the lights off this time. Thanks to Ingo the cameras in my room would be feeding back a constant loop of my sleeping form. So I've watched a few heist movies in my time - if an idea works, it works.

  Haru met me outside the door. He gave me a tense, uncomfortable smile. Then he gave me a gun, a hefty Magnum with a silencer already clutching the end of its barrel. Haru flicked through his sketches, navigating our way through the ship. We had to follow the exact route we'd agreed with Ingo, otherwise his little trick with the looping tape wouldn't work. We'd timed it to the second, stopping at the end of each corridor and the bottom of each stairwell to check it off against the timetable Haru had hidden in a picture of Queen M's braids.

  Ingo had memorised the timetable. Eidetic memory, he told us. Asperger's I would have said, but not to his face.

  The ship was as quiet as the night of that first aborted escape attempt. So quiet that our footsteps, the gentle rustle of them in the threadbare carpet, felt like an offence. The ship wanted to rest, and here we were waking it up.

  Empty too. We'd chosen to do this when two different grab teams were out on missions, and another batch of soldiers was on St Martaan for R&R. As we walked down a flight of stairs, across a deck, through the echoing emptiness of the casino, down more stairs, I thought that perhaps we wouldn't see anyone at all.

  Not possible, of course.

  I recognised the woman's face as we rounded the corner to see her leaning up against the closed lift door, sneaking a fag that she must have been hording for weeks until she could enjoy it away from the grasping hands of her colleagues.

  She looked up at us, startled but not afraid, and I remembered suddenly that her name was Jeannine. I'd heard someone shouting it across the mess, maybe two weeks ago. For one paralysed moment I just stood there. But then her eyes began to narrow in suspicion, her hand inched towards her gun, and as soon as it became her or me the choice was that much simpler.

  A harsh exhalation, muffled by the silencer, and the bullet took her through the throat. Not where I'd been aiming, but it did the job. The jet of arterial blood splashed the lift door, droplets of it landing on my cheek and in my hair. Her hands came up to cover her throat, uselessly. She had that look of shock young people sometimes get when they're dying. Disbelief that their lives really can be ending this way.

  I felt Haru's hand pulling at my arm and I realised that I was standing frozen, wondering how I could possibly treat her. If I could cure her.

  Once a doctor, always... but not really. I couldn't call myself a doctor now.

  I let Haru drag me away, down another flight of stairs and through the dim, endless corridors, like players of a particularly lacklustre first-person shooter. We were running now. Once the first body was found it was game over.

  The next person I shot I didn't stay to watch die. The bullet struck him in the head this time, and there wasn't enough left of his face for me to recognise anyway.

  With the third person the bullet went wide, and the sound it made as it hit the bulkhead was too damn loud. The next shot took him in the chest, his own gun still tucked into the waistband of his shorts, but the damage was done. Anyone in earshot would have known exactly what that sound was. I could already hear raised voices, the first inkling that an alarm might be raised.

  We were just ten paces from the door when they got to us. They were expecting resistance this time and they knew that I was armed. There were no silencers on their guns and they roared as they spat their bullets at us. The one that missed my head by two inches deafened me, ringing in my ear long after we'd dived through the open bulkhead and slammed it shut behind us, spinning the wheel that would lock us in one of the few rooms on the ship that was designed to be defended from the inside.

  The server room looked like something out of a seventies sci-fi movie: big silver boxes and lots of flashing lights. There were six dull thuds against the door as someone unloaded their gun into it. Tough shit. That thing was designed to resist pretty much anything bar heavy duty explosives.

  Haru was flicking frantically through his sketchbook. "Shit. Shit! Where is it?"

  "It's in that picture of the giant robot - the New York skyline."

  "I know what it is!" he shouted. I realised that he was terrified. His face was dripping with sweat, his breath was panting and ragged.

  Seeing his fear made me notice my own for the first time. "It was the last sketch," I told Haru, my voice suddenly shaky and weak. But I was right. The skyscrapers on the skyline had a careful pattern of light and dark, an exactly blueprint of which cables we needed to pull and which needed to be left. My hands were shaking as well as my voice. Everything inside me was saying for fuck's sake hurry, they're right outside, but I clenched down hard on the panic and continued to slowly, methodically work my way down the side of each server, each router.

  We couldn't afford to disable the wrong equipment. We'd need it later.

  Outside, the banging had stopped, but I could hear the muted sound of more voices. They probably would bring some explosives, pretty soon. But they'd think a while before they used them, because the servers in here were pretty much irreplaceable. Besides, they knew that we'd have to come out eventually.

  Only we wouldn't. When you put a whole load of delicate computer equipment in the bowels of a ship you'd better be pretty damn sure that you can cool it - and the ducts that let the air in were just big enough to let people out. The hatch was in the far corner of the room, just above head level. It took a minute to unscrew and then we were out.

  Jesus, the tube was narrow. I tried to force my body through a space that was only meant to take air, my face pressed up against Haru's thighs as he forced his way through ahead of me. I felt the walls pressing in around me, squeezing the air out of my lungs. I tried not to think about the fact that Haru was bigger than me. If he got jammed there'd be no way forward and no way back.

  Behind me I heard the sudden sharp sound of an explosion and a second later felt a wash of painfully hot air rocket through the shaft. I'd managed to prop the cover shut behind us, but it wouldn't take them long to figure out where we'd gone.

  I hoped they didn't have the schematics anywhere to hand. If they did they'd know exactly where we'd be emerging and we'd be sure to meet a welcoming committee on our exit. I saw the autopsy table again, the neat little grooves carrying the blood away.

  But maybe we wouldn't be getting out at all. In front of me, Haru had stopped cold. I could hear the harsh sound of his breathing and I could smell the acrid tang of his sweat. He was panicking, on the point of losing it.

  "Keep moving!" I shouted, the sound muffled by our bodies, almost lost in the short distance from my mouth to his ears. "They're right behind us."

  "It goes up," he shouted back. "I can't... I don't think I can get up there."

  "Well try!" I shouted back. Behind me, louder than our voices, I'd heard the screech of the cover being moved. The duct had run straight, up to that point. As soon as they pointed a torch in they'd be able to see us.

  Haru just wasn't moving. Frantic, I reached my arms out in front of me, pressed my hands against the soles of Haru's shoes,
and pushed.

  Instead of moving him forward, the pressure moved me back. Laws of physics I'd known since I was ten. Behind me, only a few feet behind me, someone else was starting to climb into the duct.

  "Fucking move!" I screamed at Haru. And finally, somehow, he did, bending his back at an impossible angle and pushing himself forward with his toes. I slithered after him, desperately. But when I reached the kink in the pipe, almost forty-five degrees up and then only a foot later forty-five degrees back to flat again, I instantly knew why he'd found it so hard. My shoulders jammed in tight against the roof of the passage, my knees pressing agonisingly against the metal floor. My head twisted at an angle one degree away from snapping my neck. And now I wasn't moving. Ahead of me, Haru was opening up a gap, moving faster now, body flattened to the metal. Behind someone was closing on us fast. A voice I recognised as Curtis' shouting "Stop! Come back!" but there was no way in hell that was happening. I didn't really know how I did it, but suddenly I was up and over the bend and the shot that rang out through the duct behind me took the last of the hearing from my good ear but the bullet passed harmlessly beneath me. Curtis was a big guy too and there was no way he was getting round that bend after us.

  When we spilled out of the exit on the deck above, Ingo was waiting for us.

  "So, everything went smoothly?" he said.

  I looked at Haru and we both laughed, a tinge of hysteria in it. His trousers were ripped and my chest was marked with long, parallel cuts where my t-shirt had rucked up and allowed the floor of the duct to skin me like a cheese grater.

  "Is the tracker down?" Haru asked him when we'd got our breath back, already heading off down the corridor. We were all carrying guns now, no need for careful timing any longer, only speed. There were three of us against a crew of four-hundred and thirty-seven. We needed them to make the obvious assumption, that with the tracker down we'd be making for the tender boats.

  But we weren't going down, we were going up.

  "The whole computer network has crashed," Ingo told us. "It will take them at least twelve hours to repair. I think more likely a day."

  We turned a corner, then another. Two soldiers, and Ingo took them out without blinking, without even seeming to notice. The next turn and the woman came at us from a side corridor, looking startled. She hadn't been hunting for us but I shot her anyway, finger twitch on the trigger a mindless reflex in the fog of battle. The first bullet went clean through her shoulder, embedding shards of bone in the insipid watercolour on the wall behind her. White lumps in the white clouds over Botany Bay. I recognised her too late. A kitchen worker, just a cook, nothing to do with the soldiers chasing us. Collateral damage, I told myself bleakly, moving on. You couldn't stay and think about these things because it only got you killed, and then that was two dead bodies without one good reason.

  He'd taught me that, too, on one of those rare times he talked to me about what he really did.

  We killed seven more, moving on before their bodies even hit the deck. They don't matter, the Voice whispered to me, and I really wanted to believe it. Beside me Haru's eyes looked wild, Ingo's just blank. Then, at last, we were there. And no one was waiting for us, not one single guard, because the one ship they would never have expected us to take was the one we were already on.

  I slammed the door shut behind us and twisted the wheel to lock it. This was another room designed to be secure. This'll show you, you self-satisfied bitch, I thought. You're not quite as clever as you think you are.

  There were only two men at the controls, eyes heavy with tiredness, and they spun to face us just a second too late. Ingo's bullet took the one on the left and mine the one on the right, almost as if we'd rehearsed it. And then we had the bridge all to ourselves.

  Stealing an ocean liner is much, much easier than you might expect. Ingo took one look at the controls and nodded, satisfied.

  "You're sure?" I said.

  He gave me that peculiar almost-smile of his. "Definitely."

  Ingo's hands glided over the controls like a musician's, the crooked bones of them looking almost elegant as he worked. Far beneath us, a deep base roar began, the sound of the ship waking from its sleep. My stomach turned over in time to the engine. As soon as she heard that, Queen M would know exactly what we were doing and then every last soldier on the ship would be heading straight for us.

  "Set a course and lock it," I said to Ingo then, to Haru, "Show me how to work the PA."

  Haru's hands shook as he worked the dials, as if they'd be more comfortable holding a pencil and drawing things which weren't real. But after a second he nodded and mouthed ready at me.

  "I need it to be everywhere and I need it to be loud," I whispered back, my hand over the mic. He nodded again and I took my hand away and began to speak. "Wake up," I said. "Wake up!" I waited a second, and then, "OK, I hope you have because there are two very important things I need to tell you. Firstly, the entire tracking system's been disabled. So if any of you have been thinking of taking a short - or indeed permanent - vacation, now would be the time to do it."

  I could see Ingo looking across at me from the controls. His expression was mild but his actions were more violent, smashing his fist into the console, snapping leavers and twisting knobs until they detached entirely.

  "The other thing you need to know," I told everyone on the ship able to hear, "is that we're currently on course for Cuba. The controls are locked and by my estimation we're going to make landfall in the not too distant future. Have a nice day." As soon as I'd switched off the mic I smashed it. No need to leave Queen M the means to tell everyone that I'm lying.

  Besides, I wasn't. In two hours the Infected would be swarming all over us.

  The instant Ingo was finished we bolted for the door and swung it open. If there were soldiers outside, we were finished. I was betting that pretty much no one was going to be obeying orders right now.

  I was almost right. Soldiers had been waiting outside, two dozen of them. For a second, I was staring down the barrels of twenty different guns. Military and precise - exactly like a firing squad. Except that unlike a firing squad, these guys were looking us in the eye. They looked just about as frightened as we were. One of them said, "Is it true?"

  I swallowed past a bone-dry throat and said, "Take a look for yourselves," but they didn't bother because something in my expression told them that yeah, it was the truth, and the twenty seconds they wasted checking it out could be the difference between making it out alive or getting up close and personal with one of the Infected.

  The next instant they ran, all military cohesion gone. Now they were just individuals worried about their individual lives.

  The ship was full of them. They weren't trying to stop us any more, now they were just in our way, clogging up the stairwells and corridors, feet heavy on the threadbare carpet. I smelt their rank, night-time breath as they pressed past me. Their faces looked pinched, almost yellow in the pale lighting, rodent-like. The ship wasn't sinking, exactly, but the rats weren't taking any chances.

  They knew that there weren't enough tender boats for all the people on board. That was the biggest gamble of all, that we'd make it down there quick enough to get one. It had to be this way, everyone else knowing that same stark fact.

  I saw Haru grabbed by a woman who was half his size but twice as desperate. She flung him aside and sprinted past him, then vaulted over the stair rail to drop two decks below. I heard the scream as her ankle buckled and broke but she didn't stop running. I thought I could see a jagged shard of bone poking through blue-black skin.

  I hesitated for just a second, but I didn't stop. I knew Haru wouldn't have stopped for me. We weren't friends, just useful to each other. And if I got to the boat first maybe I could hold the others off long enough for Haru to reach it. Or maybe I'd head straight out.

  I didn't get the chance to find out. Two more decks down and Haru had caught back up with me. He grabbed my hand as soon as he was in reach and I didn't snatc
h it away. There was a sort of comfort in it, this contact with a virtual stranger - even one I'd been quite willing to leave to die just a few seconds before.

  Shots were ringing out above us and the second body that came falling down the staircase wasn't alive any more. I touched my own gun, pushed roughly into the waistband of my trousers, but I didn't pull it. In the crush of people as we plunged deeper and deeper into the ship it would have been useful as a cudgel and nothing else.

  The noise level ratcheted up and for a moment I thought it was just the same old din of voices, and frantic breathing, and the occasional scream, but then I realised that it was also footsteps, hundreds of them, ringing out on metal stairs. We were almost there.

  There was one final thing we had to do before we could get out. I'd told myself that it had to be left to the last minute because afterwards, we weren't going to be in a state to do much running around. The truth was I'd left it till the end because it scared the shit out of me, and I wanted to put it off as long as possible.

  Ingo had found the place for us, near the engine rooms and the tender boats, where the electric wires that channelled the current that fed the ship were thickest and most accessible. He'd said a lot of other things, but I hadn't really listened. Only the words ten-thousand volts had really registered, along with the words I'd mentally added: potentially fatal. But Ingo had said that that was the current we needed to guarantee burning out the chips.

  "It's here," Ingo shouted, voice barely audible above the screams of the crowd.

  We began to shoulder our way towards a narrow corridor that snaked off to the left. But a horde of people in a panic have a force to them like a river in full spate - and like the salmon that swim upstream to spawn, we almost didn't make it. I got an elbow in the ribs, another in the eye. Behind me I heard Haru shout as someone snagged his t-shirt and pulled him roughly out of the way. He stumbled and I grabbed his arm a second before he could fall. He gasped out a thank you, lost in the din. A fall would be fatal. This crowd wasn't stopping for anyone. Their feet echoed against the metal floor, filling the lower decks of the ship with a sound like an army on the march.