Kill or Cure

by Rebecca Levene

  I could see the entrance we were aiming for, five feet away now but still impossibly out of reach. There were six people, ten, between us and the entrance and not one of them was going to move out of our way. Just for a second, I thought about the gun jammed into the waistband of my trousers. But no, not that.

  In the end, I was a pace past the door by the time I'd managed to make it to the left-hand wall. Only Haru saved me, grabbing my arm this time and pulling me back and sideways, abruptly out of the crowd and into a dark, silent room.

  "Well," I said brightly, "who wants to go first?"

  "It would be better for me to go last," Ingo said, with his usual blank seriousness. "Since I will be the one administering the shock."

  "Hey," Haru said, waving a hand at me in a gesture that would have looked more suave if he hadn't been visibly shaking. "Ladies first."

  I wanted to say that maybe I should be last, since I was the doctor who would treat whatever injuries this insane process was going to leave us with. But the truth was we'd either live through it or we wouldn't, and no amount of medical training was going to change that.

  "Fine," I said. "Do it." I held my bare arm out towards Ingo and tried not to shake too visibly. It almost made me laugh, the way the wire was spitting sparks, like something out of a Frankenstein movie. But I thought if I opened my mouth the thing most likely to come out would be a sob of fear, so I pressed my lips together and turned my eyes away.

  Strange, isn't it, how anticipated pain is so much worse than pain you aren't expecting? It felt as if every cell in my body was on fire, the fire sparking into my brain, nerve endings forgetting that they were designed to do anything other than tell me how much they hurt. My muscles contracted, agonisingly, then slackened uncontrollably. I was glad I'd known to empty myself in preparation. If there'd been anything in my bladder or my bowels, it wouldn't have stayed inside.

  A second later as I lay on the floor twitching, I heard a harsh, high scream and then Haru was beside me, spine arched so sharply that only the back of his head and his heels were touching the floor.

  It occurred to me that maybe I should have told him not to eat or drink because there was the sudden stench of urine and shit combined, and I could see the dark puddle of liquid spreading out beneath him a second before his convulsion ended and his buttocks felt right back down into it.

  But, gasping and gagging, he was still alive and so was I. His hand scrabbled along the deck beside him and I wondered what he was searching for, until his fingers fumbled then clasped the metal lump of his watch. Of course. He must have put it aside before the current went through him, because flesh can be healed but the delicate mechanism of the watch was irreplaceable. Machines were more valuable than people now.

  Finally there was Ingo, his round, placid face showing no fear. He hesitated a moment, then jammed the wires into his own bare skin. The shock of it pushed him backwards like a giant hand, thumping him into the far wall with a musical clang.

  Feeling even weaker than when I'd been going cold turkey and wishing I could die, I dragged myself to my knees. My head hung low as I fought a sudden, intense nausea. I took a moment more to gather myself, to convince myself that motion really was still possible, and then I pushed myself to my feet.

  Soon, you'll be stronger than ever, the Voice told me, louder than a whisper now, as if it had drawn some weird mental energy from the current which had coursed through me. I laughed at the idea that I'd ever be strong again. Then I saw Haru looking at me, puzzled, and I remembered that the Voice was something only I could hear.

  But I just laughed louder. His hair looked exactly like a cartoon character who'd stuck his finger into an electric socket, a wilder caricature of his normal gelled spikes.

  "I'm glad that you're enjoying yourself," he said, the words rasping through a throat scoured raw by his earlier scream.

  I shrugged and offered a hand to pull him to his feet, though I had to lean my full weight backwards to give him any kind of leverage. I bent down to do the same for Ingo and realised for the first time that he hadn't moved since the shock. I couldn't see his chest moving.

  "Shit!" I said. I knelt hurriedly beside him and fumbled for his pulse with fingers which were still only half under my control. After a moment I felt it beating, inconsistently, faintly. The corridor was dark, but I thought I could see his eyeballs rolling beneath the closed lids. It was impossible to say what this meant: that he was about to wake up? That he'd never wake up? With that kind of current the damage could be permanent.

  "He's unconscious," I told Haru.

  He shrugged, hair still a wild shock, but not looking so funny now. "He's done his part - we don't need him any more."

  I reached down and shook Ingo's shoulders gently.

  "Come on," Haru said. "We're running out of time. Two out of three making it is better than we could have hoped for."

  He was right, but looking down at Ingo's soft, boyish face - at the crooked fingers of his hand, resting outstretched against the metal floor --- I didn't feel ready to make that kind of calculation just yet.

  "One more minute," I said to Haru.

  I thought he wouldn't wait for me, but after a second and a sour twist of his mouth he turned back, eyes fixed impatiently on Ingo's.

  Another second and Ingo's eyes flicked open. I could almost see the knowledge seeping back into them, and with it an expression of pain so profound that I found myself leaning away from it. A moment more and it was gone, and Ingo's eyes were as dark and untroubled as ever.

  I offered him my hand, surprised at how big and warm his palm felt in mine. His youth had somehow tricked me into thinking he was smaller than he was, more helpless. Jesus, I realised, I'm feeling maternal towards him - just the kind of sentimental shit I didn't need right now.

  Ingo nodded at me, the most thanks I'd get, and then we were running into the corridor that led to the boats and back into the crowd. Except that the crowd was gone, the flood of people had thinned to a trickle. When we emerged into the larger space of the launch deck, our footsteps echoed hollowly in the emptiness.

  Panicking now, I sprinted to the first launch bay. The boat was gone. Then the second and that boat had gone too. Same story with the third. I hoped, prayed, that the one boat had been left. This had been the only part of our plan that relied on luck as much as planning and now I was cursing my decision to leave this final, crucial stage to chance. If it didn't work, it would all have been for nothing. Less than nothing. I thought about the autopsy table, the blood, Queen M's cold, calculating eyes. The beginnings of despair set in.

  Don't give up, the Voice told me, your plan hasn't failed yet.

  It was right. There in the fifth bay was a small motorboat. As we approached, five others pushed past us, walking away. "It isn't working," one of them said. "No key."

  I nodded and shrugged and carried on walking with Ingo and Haru beside me. When we got into the boat, Haru pulled the key out of his pocket and put it into the ignition. We were pulling away from the side of the ship before anyone on board had begun to realise what was happening.

  As soon as they did I heard a roar of fury and then every person left on that deck was heading our way. There was five foot of water between us and the ship when a huge white man with brown hair and a vivid red scar running the length of his face reached the side of the ship and launched himself straight off. His dive brought his fingers into contact with the side of our boat.

  Haru swung the boat hard to starboard but it didn't dislodge the man. I saw the fingers tense and whiten and then he was pulling himself up by sheer force of will. A few more seconds and he'd be on board. I had a sudden clear memory of my own panicked attempt to drag myself on board the schooner when the Infected attacked. Not letting myself think about it I pulled my gun and aimed. But I couldn't shoot him, not when I'd been the one who told him to escape in the first place. Not when all he wanted was exactly the same thing I did - to get away.

  I'd set out to free every
one, and now all I seemed to care about was freeing myself. The Voice told me to do it, that he didn't matter, but it was still quiet enough that I could ignore it. I'd left five, maybe ten, corpses behind me already and I suddenly found that I couldn't add another. I grasped the barrel of the gun instead and used it to slam the butt hard against his fingers. Index finger first, then the ring finger - two slams to dislodge that - and finally the last two. He let out a roar of rage and pain, and disappeared into the waves.

  I fell back into the boat, allowing the penetrating ache in my joints to sweep through me as the rush of adrenaline swept out. I felt as if every bone in my body had been broken and reset, sparks of electric pain still firing off randomly in the neurons of my brain.

  Around us, the sea was choppy and restless, waves in ragged white-tipped ranks. The sky was just pinking with the first light of dawn at the distant horizon. The other ships were dark blots in the water around us, some already lost to distance. Ahead of us, a larger, darker blot.

  Cuba.

  I'd always assumed that Queen M would be able to get her ship back under control before it ran aground on the Cuban coast. Now I wondered. The island couldn't have been more than a mile ahead of us, maybe less. The humps and mounds of its mountains looked enticing in the growing morning sunshine, glints of gold catching off patches of sand on its beaches. Like pretty much everything seen from a distance, it seemed harmless. But it wasn't.

  The rest of Queen M's fleet was heading out to open water, fleeing the island with all the speed the wind offered. Most of them were sailing boats and they could go where the wind went. None of us knew how to sail and we'd been forced to steal ourselves a motor boat. There was enough fuel in it to take us to Cuba - or to leave us stranded in open waters. No other land was in reach.

  Another problem we'd anticipated but hadn't been able to avoid.

  I was so focussed on looking at the shoreline that it took me a moment to register that there were four figures standing behind me where there should have been two. The first thing I saw as I turned was Haru, his face frozen with fear. To the other side of him was Ingo, looking startled and a little annoyed, that anything could have interfered with his neat little plan.

  Between them were Kelis and Soren. They were each holding a large gun, and both of them were aimed at me. Soren smiled, an expression that was more like a snarl. Behind him, the tarp they'd been hiding under was flung carelessly aside, so obvious now it was too late.

  "So," Kelis said. "I guess you weren't expecting us."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Kelis looked hurt, as if everything we'd just done had been a personal slight. "Yeah," I said. "This is certainly a surprise." I tried edging a little closer to her, a millimetre shuffle forward of each foot, but a quick twitch of her gun stopped me in my tracks.

  "We told you not to do this," Soren said in a dull, heavy voice. For the first time, in the bright morning sunlight, I noticed the strands of grey in the ash blond of his hair and the fine wrinkles raying out from his mouth. There was something a little off-centre in his pale eyes. We'd broken something he never thought could break and now he wasn't sure about anything.

  I shrugged. "You told me I wouldn't be able to. Not the same thing."

  Kelis stepped forward until the barrel of her gun was pressed into the thin material of my t-shirt.

  I carefully didn't look at it, only into her eyes. "As a matter of academic interest, how exactly did you find us?"

  "A boat with no keys and a full fuel tank. You're not that subtle."

  "No, I guess not. But you're free too now, you know. That's a good thing, isn't it?"

  Soren frowned. "Maybe we didn't want to be free."

  "The sea round here is full of people who did," I said. "So are the islands. I wanted to be free, and I'll die before I let you make me a slave again." With a confidence I didn't feel, I pushed my fingers against the barrel of the gun pressing into my chest. There was a moment of resistance, then Kelis let me brush it aside. Soren shot her a look and didn't let his own barrel drop. I ignored him and turned back to the wheel of the boat.

  "And how many people did you kill to get free?" Kelis asked. "How many of my friends?"

  That hurt more than I thought it would. I was sure she could see the sudden tension in my shoulders, but I kept my voice light. "I don't know, I didn't keep count. Did you?"

  I felt Haru's sharp intake of breath, but I thought I knew Kelis now. She didn't need things sugar-coated. She didn't like them that way.

  "You could come with us, of course," I said when there'd been a moment without either a reply or a gunshot. "We've got the brains covered, but now we're out we could do with some muscle."

  "That's one of the least flattering offers I've ever received." I risked a look at Kelis and saw that she was almost smiling. "What makes you think that we won't just take this boat ourselves and push the rest of you overboard?"

  "I don't know. Maybe the fact that you haven't already?"

  "No, they cannot come" Ingo said suddenly. He seemed completely unconcerned that two very large guns being held by two pretty pissed off people were now being pointed right at him. He just frowned, as if mildly annoyed that they couldn't see it for themselves. "Their tracking devices are still functional. Once the computers are back on-line, Queen M will be able to find them."

  "Yeah?" I said, before Kelis could actually shoot him. "And how is Queen M going to get the network back up now her entire crew has fled?"

  "Fled from the ship," Ingo said. "The islands are still hers. And there is nothing to say that the loyal will not return to her once the danger of Cuba is passed. It is that, not freedom, which drove many away."

  In the time we'd been talking, the prow of the boat set on a straight course, the island had grown larger, the details of its coastline clearer. I could see individual palm trees now - and there were people, streaming towards the golden beach. To starboard and slowly drawing ahead of us was another vast bulk between us and the sun: the flagship, still on a collision course.

  "If the danger of Cuba does pass," I said.

  "But taking them remains an unnecessary risk," Ingo said stubbornly, and I wanted to punch him.

  To my surprise, Soren just laughed. "Yeah, well, it's a risk you're going to have to take."

  Ingo opened his mouth to protest some more and this time I did stop him, grabbing his arm hard. "They're with us. Accept when you've lost and move on. Besides, they'll be useful. I hear it's a dangerous world out there."

  There was a moment of peace as Kelis, but not Soren, holstered her gun. A warm salt breeze blew up and the boats all around us bobbed on the waves, and it almost felt like we were pleasure cruising, somewhere where nothing could harm us. But plenty of things could and some of them were heading right towards us.

  "Those aren't our boats," Kelis said, eyes straining against the brilliance of the Caribbean sun.

  Haru squinted short-sightedly. "How can you tell?"

  Kelis gave him a look of contempt. "How about because they're heading straight from Cuba?"

  They were. The sea ahead of us was suddenly dark with vessels, small and fast, darting across the waters towards the refugee fleet. The other boats were beginning to realise the danger. The fleet began to split, no longer a unified shoal, now just a series of individuals, happy to leave everyone else behind if it saved them from the predators. Soren put his beefy hands on the wheel, ready to swing us around and join the panicked flight.

  The swarm of Infected was gaining fast, five hundred meters and closing. The wind was in their sails, working with them and against us. Even if we turned we had little chance of outrunning them.

  I held Soren's hand firm against the wheel. "No. Keep course - straight for the shore."

  He looked at me like I was going crazy and he wasn't the only one. Maybe I was, but I didn't need the Voice to tell me that this was the right thing to do. "They're all in the water," I said. "They'd have to turn into the wind to follow us - and why would they, w
hen all the other ships are straight ahead?"

  "She's right!" Kelis said. "Straight on, full throttle."

  Soren obeyed her without question. We powered forward and now we were three hundred meters from the Infected.

  "Head for Cuba - are you crazy?" Haru screamed. "So what if their boats are all at sea? Who's to say there aren't twenty more of them on the island? There could be thousands of them, just waiting on the beach for us to arrive."

  "No, this is a good plan," Ingo said firmly.

  Haru sagged, realising that he was outnumbered.

  "We don't need to land, we can skirt the island," I said. "All we need to do is get past the Infected."

  They were barely a hundred meters away now - too close to change our minds. We were the nearest of all Queen M's fleet to them, the most obvious target. I could see the crew of their leading ship, leaning forward in the prow as if they couldn't wait to get at us.

  Behind the yacht were five jet skis, with two Infected clinging on to each. Fuck. The yacht would never turn in time, but the jet skis... I turned to Soren, thinking maybe it wasn't too late to turn back.

  He read my expression and shook his head. No time.

  "Then give me a fucking gun. A big one. Take one yourself and give Haru the tiller."

  "Hey!" Haru said, at the implication that he'd be useless in an actual fight. Then he glanced up and saw the Infected. Closer now, close enough that we could see their faces - the festering cuts and sores. He took the wheel without protest.

  I scrabbled in the stern of the boat, hauling aside the tarpaulin that Soren and Kelis had hidden themselves under, revealing the cache of arms and ammo I just knew they'd have brought with them. I picked up a semi-automatic rifle that made my small pistol look like a toy and handed out the rest. Soren took two, one for each meaty arm. Kelis gave a very small smile as she saw him do it.

  To starboard, the great hulk of Queen M's flagship was finally beginning to turn, as unwieldy as a cow on a race track. I gave it even odds whether it would run aground or skim the shore and make it back out to sea. Whatever happened, it couldn't outpace the Infected. Their ships were swarming around it, little insect-figures of people already beginning to scale the hull.