Kill or Cure

by Rebecca Levene

  Not my problem if the people I'd once thought to rescue had instead been brought here to their deaths.

  Ahead the Infected yacht was heading straight for us, prow sharp as a knife ready to cut through our little tub. It was a game of chicken which we could only lose, playing against a ship full of people with no fear of pain or death.

  "Hang on!" Haru shouted, his voice high with terror. Almost before he'd finished speaking he pulled the tiller hard round, flinging us desperately out of the path of the approaching ship.

  I grabbed a thick metal ring set in the floor as my body was flung against the starboard railing. I heard a crack that might have been the boat, might have been a rib but I held on grimly, splashed by an arc of seawater as we tipped at nearly ninety degrees.

  A second later there was another crack that was neither the boat nor a rib. A neat little nick of wood chipped up from the deck five inches from my face and I knew that we were being fired on.

  Somehow I'd managed to keep my grip on the rifle. But I'd need two hands to fire it, and one of them was still desperately clinging on to the metal ring which was the only thing keeping me out of the water. The boat tipped a little further, so far that I could feel the salt sting in my eyes from the upward spit of the waves. A lurch, and suddenly we were tipping the other way, faster. And then finally a fierce blow against my back as we hit the water. My jaw slammed shut, trapping my tongue between my teeth. There was a trickle of blood down my throat, copper. And all around me now, the insect whine of bullets.

  My back clenched, protested, but I fought against the agony and dragged myself to my knees. One quick glance to the side and I saw that Haru had done it. The Infected yacht was beside us for one moment and then passed, drawn helplessly onwards by the wind. I swivelled to fire off a brief burst. I thought that maybe one figure in the stern dropped the rifle it was holding to clutch at its shoulder. But then we were past and the hail of bullets eased, and for just a second our path looked clear to Cuba's golden shore.

  Then the jet skis were all around us. The odds were still against us.

  The worst thing was the way the riders were smiling, a polite little social smile, as if none of this mattered very much. Their hands on their guns were relaxed, fingers engorged with blood, not white with tension like mine were around the trigger of the rifle. Nothing about them said they cared - about anything.

  The stream of bullets from my rifle took one of them right through that social smile. Teeth shattered, fragments of enamel sticking to her ruined cheeks.

  Haru was screaming, a constant noise that might have contained words. Kelis let out a whoop at her own shot, straight through the heart of the grey-haired man on the leading jet ski. She was enjoying herself, high on the adrenaline. I understood it, but I couldn't feel the same. The air was full of death, meaningless and sudden. I didn't want to die. I wasn't ready.

  The people I'd killed weren't ready either. But that didn't stop me from firing again, missing my first target but winging the second. Another jet ski veered and faltered, and now there were just three. Suddenly the odds were favouring us.

  The Infected seemed to realise that a frontal assault wasn't working. Now they were hanging back, using the fronts of their skis as shields, heads bobbing round for just fractions of a second each time they let off a shot.

  I fired back, a short, controlled burst. The bullets hit the water, sending up little geysers of crystal. I jerked the rifle up, over-correcting, and the bullets flew wildly high, arcing over the heads of the Infected. My finger was pressed hard against metal but nothing was happening, and I realised that I'd run out of ammo. Reflexively, my hand reached down to my belt for a spare clip, but of course I hadn't thought to bring any.

  The ammo I needed was five meters away, still hidden under the tarpaulin. It might as well have been five hundred meters because the Infected realised what was happening. He was coming straight for me, closing fast. The gun in his hand had plenty of ammo and all of it was headed in my direction.

  I felt a sudden, fierce pain in my right calf as a bullet tore straight through the meat of my leg. Blood trickled hot into my sandals, congealing with the sweat between my toes. The Infected was nearer still and now his smile looked predatory, because he knew that there was no longer any way he could miss.

  My hand was still grappling uselessly at my belt. Except that now it had found metal and, of course, it wasn't useless. My conscious mind, numb with fear, had forgotten. But my subconscious knew that there was another gun in my belt.

  I smiled too. I didn't remember bringing the gun up. Somehow I did though, because the jet ski was still coming, heading straight for us, only now there was no one guiding it. The Infected teetered for a moment on one leg, like a cut-rate circus performer. His eyes told me he was already dead, but his body didn't want to recognise it and, for just a second, it looked like he might leap off the ski and drag me down with him.

  Then he fell and I saw his body sink through the clear waters. He didn't go far. We were over coral reefs now and there he was, like a cancerous growth on the rock, something for the multi-coloured fish to eat. I laughed, crazily, because every second from now on was a second when I didn't think I'd be alive.

  Except, fuck, why was the water so clear, the sand so golden beneath it? And suddenly everything Haru was screaming became clear, like a radio that had finally moved from noise to signal. "We're going to hit land!" And the Infected's plan became clear too, the way the jet skis had surrounded us, herding us like cattle. They hadn't needed to kill us, just to get us somewhere someone else could do it for them.

  The bottom of the boat scraped against coral. The vibrations shot through the soles of my feet, a gentle almost tickling sensation. Then rougher, more violent. I saw Haru try to wrench the tiller around. The boat bucked and swerved but kept on moving forward, momentum carrying it now because the engine was out of the water. And, finally, like a crippled animal, it dragged itself onto land to die.

  The Infected were everywhere. Haru had been right after all - the beach was crawling with them. They'd been climbing into boats, joining the swarm trying to bring down the flagship. But unlike us it had somehow managed to stay at sea, picking up speed as it headed back out into open waters.

  I almost felt it physically, the moment when two hundred pairs of eyes turned from the flagship to us. The beach was blank, a few desiccated palm trees above the tide line. This was a tourist beach, a cheap one. Behind the sand I could see the plain concrete blocks of hotels, little parasols with cracked tables and chairs that would never have been comfortable, not even when they were new. The harsh midday sun shone down on it all, unmoved.

  Soren and Kelis flanked me and raised their guns. Ingo too, looking just a little startled, as if he'd discovered one too many zeroes in a complex calculation. Haru cowered in the cockpit, like a child who thought that if he couldn't see them, they couldn't see him. There was no way that we could survive this, there were just too many of them.

  "Fuck!" Soren shouted. "What the fuck do we do now?"

  Kelis dropped one hand from her gun and I thought that she was going to reach across to offer him some sort of comfort - but it was my arm she grabbed instead.

  The moment seemed frozen in time: the sand, the sun, her arm, the barest whisper of a breeze. The oily smell of our burst fuel tank. The Infected, their guns. A story with only one ending.

  "Jasmine," Kelis started. Her eyes were wide and wild. I didn't know what she wanted to say to me, but it seemed somehow right that the last words I ever heard would be hers.

  "Stop," a voice said, resonant, male and unexpected - and all around us the Infected did just that. They cocked their heads to the side, each of them the exact same angle, and they waited.

  Haru lifted his head a little above the dip of the cockpit, searching for the source of the voice. After a second he found it - a loudspeaker high on a pole at the far end of the beach.

  I lifted my gun. Beside me, Kelis and Soren did the same. Th
e muzzles wavered as we each picked out one target among the many. We didn't fire, though, because a bullet might have woken them from this sudden strange stillness.

  "The invasion is over," the voice crackled again from the loudspeaker. "Leave the coast and go back to your homes. Enjoy yourselves."

  There was an abrupt hubbub and I jumped, nerves still on a knife edge. But it was just chatter, two hundred people suddenly behaving like people again and not like zombies. All around us the Infected were sauntering and running and breaking up into social little knots and groups as they left the beach. The only odd thing about them now was the way they completely ignored us.

  I stood and watched in startled silence and then, almost helplessly, I started to walk after them. I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe to convince myself that they were really going and this wasn't just some cruel joke. I sensed the others hesitating behind me, but after a moment they started walking too.

  When the Infected reached the road that ran in front of the beachfront hotels they separated, veering off to left and right. Heading home, I guessed - just like they'd been told to do. We walked a little further, between two of the hotels and into the beginnings of the city behind.

  The first thing that caught my eye was a poster, fresh and bright where the plaster on the building was peeling and faded. For one second I thought it must be Castro, a holdover from the times before the Cull.

  It wasn't Castro, though. But it was a face I recognised. Just like I'd unconsciously recognised the voice that the Infected had obeyed so unquestioningly.

  The voice belonged with the face - both of which belonged to a person I'd never expected to see again. Or maybe I had, and hadn't wanted to admit it to myself. But now the memories wouldn't be held back.

  I looked down at the body of Andy, an eighteen year-old soldier whose neck had snapped in my hands like a piece of balsa wood. For just a second I felt a twinge of guilt. Hadn't he once helped me to carry some equipment into the lab? I'd thought then that he might have a little crush on me. But no, there was no need to think like that. The person he'd flirted with was gone, and the person I was now had more important things to worry about. That was what the Voice told me.

  A last vestigial flicker of something - my humanity maybe - made me reach over and press the lids down over Andy's blank blue eyes. Then I took the gun out of his slack fingers, chambered another round, and headed for the door.

  Get out of the base, the Voice told me. It isn't safe for you here anymore.

  In the distance I could hear gunshots and the cries of people in pain. The base was tearing itself apart, a microcosm of the world. People turning savagely on each other as if the Cull had infected everyone in some way, loosing something primal and cold within them which had been waiting all these years to get out.

  You're different, the Voice told me. You're Cured.

  The door opened before I could reach it, easing cautiously back as if the person on the other side wasn't quite sure what he'd find inside.

  And he, the Voice told me, is Cured too.

  I didn't need the Voice to tell me that, I could see it in his eyes. They'd always been distinctive, so brown they were almost black and sparkling with an inner life that was the most attractive thing about him. Now they were burning and nothing about the smile he showed me was human.

  "Hi, Jasmine," he said and I heard the Voice echoing through his words. I saw it in his face, the same ruthless certainty that was in mine. There was a knife in his hands, sharp and clinical. Its blade was smeared with blood, more blood smeared across his hand, up the length of his arm. He reached out to brush a lock of brown hair out of his eyes and left a streak of red there too, like a tribal mark across his cheek.

  "Hi, Ash," I said as I studied his face.

  The same face I saw now. The face staring back at me from a poster on the streets of Havana.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  We'd been in the town-centre apartment for three days now. There'd been one excursion to scavenge food. Pointless. The stores in the crumbling heart of the city had been picked clean long ago. I guessed the Infected must have been getting food from somewhere but wherever it was we hadn't been able to find it. We found a chemist's though, virtually untouched, and among the bottles of prescription medicines a week's supply of anti-psychotic pills. I took one gladly, then forced myself to put the rest back in my pack. It wasn't enough to kill the Voice entirely but it would have to do. God knew when I'd be able to find any more. There were clothes shops too, windows smashed and wares dragged out over the pavement, but enough left for us to find a few changes of clothing.

  Ingo was looking very dashing now in a pair of black trousers and a garish purple shirt. He seemed fond of it. I'd see him stroking the material sometimes, a far off look on his face. Haru had managed to put together a leather outfit that made him look like an extra in Mad Max. It must have been hot as hell in the stifling Cuban heat, but he sweated it out, a triumph of style over good sense.

  I didn't ask where Kelis and Soren found their khaki combats. Stripped off one of the decayed corpses that littered the street, I suspected.

  Clothes and drugs that first day, then back to the apartment with its peeling plaster and non-functioning taps, and there we stayed.

  The Infected were everywhere. Queen M must have been right that whatever ailed them was contagious, because the population of Cuba alone couldn't have accounted for the numbers of them. They must have been recruiting.

  They walked around in little family groups, in pairs, on their own, as if nothing about the world had changed in the last five years. To see them here, on their home ground, you couldn't imagine what they'd been, the berserker rage when they'd attacked us. But then...

  ... then you saw them up close: the suppurating sores on their faces; the fingers hanging from hands by ragged threads of skin. The missing eyes, ears, noses; white bones poking through gangrenous flesh. That first day, as we carried our findings back towards the centre of the city, I saw a toddler trip and fall over a jagged chunk of masonry. Her mother didn't seem to care; she didn't even notice. And the child just got up and carried on. No tears, no screams no nothing. Her little brown ringlets bounced as she followed her mother down the street.

  But I saw her leg, the place where a broken-off nail in the concrete had caught her as she fell: the four-inch cut, the torn muscle of her calf and the greasy yellow fat above. Blood streamed down her leg, pooling in her little trainers as she ran, but it wasn't enough to wash away the brown clots of dirt and rust which the nail had gouged into her flesh. It would be gangrenous within a day, beyond saving in three.

  "Shit," Kelis said, watching them trot away along the narrow alley ahead of us. "What the fuck is wrong with these people." It was just a whisper, but she might as well have been shouting. The Infected acted like we were invisible. I guess they hadn't been told to see us.

  There were loudspeakers everywhere on the island. Loudspeakers and cameras - Ash's eyes and ears. And his face on posters everywhere, watching us. Four times a day or more, his voice would ring out, issuing instructions. Sometimes they were just for one person, some name we didn't know being ordered to go somewhere we'd never heard of. Sometimes he'd order boats out to sea, maybe to recruit more Infected. His presence was everywhere, in total control of the island.

  That was why, after that first day, we stayed in the apartment. Between us we had enough food to last a week, and we'd managed to get a few bottles of clean water from a river on our way up. We were safe inside for the moment, out of sight of the cameras. But we knew that one day Ash's voice might be issuing instructions about us, and suddenly we wouldn't be invisible and there'd be nowhere to run to.

  The others wanted to leave the island. "Our boat's toast," I told them on the second day in the apartment. "There's no way we can salvage it, we'd need to steal another - one of the Infected's. How much do you want to bet that as soon as we get close to one of them they'll start paying us some attention?"

  "I'd be
t a few dollars," Haru muttered sourly. He'd been twitchy and ill at ease ever since we'd arrived.

  "Do you want to bet your life?" Kelis asked dryly and he scowled at her and shook his head.

  "Can I just say that if Haru wants to risk his life, I have absolutely no objection," Soren said. "Why don't you go steal a boat on your own, and if it works we'll all join you?" For some reason, the big Swede had taken an intense dislike to the artist.

  "We need to figure out what's going on here," I said. "Work out who's controlling them and how we can stop them."

  A lie, of course. I knew damn well who was controlling them. What I wanted to find out was why. That was why I'd chosen this apartment, right here in the centre of Havana on one of the city's small hills. It had a clear line of sight to the biggest building in the district: Castro's old headquarters. I was sure that was where Ash would be holed up. He'd replaced the old dictator's cult of personality with his own, torn down Castro's posters and put his own face all over the island. Why wouldn't he take the old man's home too?

  So I made sure that we stayed in the apartment, out of sight of the cameras, and watched. I had to find out what Ash up to, how he was spreading a Cure that was no longer needed and why it had turned the Infected into whatever they were. Most of all, I needed to know what his long-term plan was. Because if I knew one thing, I knew that he had one. I'd silenced the Voice in my head, but Ash had embraced it, and the Voice had always had a plan. I'd just never listened to it long enough to figure out what it was.

  So we waited, and we ate as little as possible, and we sweltered in the humid air. But day after day, no vehicle came or went from Castro's palace. I didn't see a single person walk through its gates. Nothing happened, nothing changed. The Infected carried on walking the streets, slowly rotting away, and I learnt absolutely nothing.