All around us, the loudspeakers were still blaring the same message: "Everyone must come to Havana immediately. Come to the centre of Havana and await further instructions." They'd been saying the same thing for the last two days. We hadn't been able to wait any longer, but it hadn't been quite long enough. All around us, Infected were still flooding into the city, calmly walking into the flames which had already consumed thousands, tens of thousands, of lives. The fire wouldn't get all of them, there'd still be pockets of them in the furthest reaches of the island. But still, it would get enough.
So I was a mass murderer now. And in the end it had been so easy. All it needed was for Ingo to splice together audio tracks from a few of Ash's previous messages. The words didn't sound quite right, the emphasis in the wrong places, elision between syllables which didn't belong together. But the Infected didn't seem to care. It was their master's voice, and they had no choice but to obey it. The cameras were put on a loop, so Ash wouldn't be able to see what we'd done, while his own audio feed had been cut. We'd left him no way to save this terrible experiment of his, we were putting the Petri-dishes in the furnace and burning the cultures away for good.
After that, it was just a few cans of petrol over some central buildings, a hot day and a strong wind. Fire is endlessly hungry - it doesn't need much of an invitation to consume everything. I leaned against the cab of the truck and looked back, like Lott's wife, knowing there was a price to pay but helpless to avoid seeing for myself what we were leaving behind.
There's a Pink Floyd album cover: a burning man shaking hands with another, oblivious to the fire which is eating him alive. It's almost funny, the way he just doesn't seem to care. There were hordes of them, all walking into the furnace, on and on as their flesh blistered and burned, red fissures opening in skin like the cracks in the surface of a volcano that tell you another eruption is due. The smell was overwhelming. The meaty, porky smell of human beings burning.
I saw a girl no older than eight walk calmly down the narrow alley between two buildings. The doorways of the buildings belched yellow fire at her, little sparks of it drifting ahead of the body of the flame. Her hair caught first, burning a bright orange against her skull, but she kept on walking. She kept walking until her legs gave way, the bones snapping in the heat.
Finally, when the girl's body was lost to sight and the crowds on the streets had begun to thin and the flames receded into the distance, I looked away.
Kelis caught my eye. "We had no choice," she told me in a voice that said even she didn't believe it.
"It's done now," I said. "They won't be going out recruiting for a while. And they won't be trying to stop us from leaving."
"So now we find the dear Leader and stop him doing anything worse," Kelis said, offering a sort of comfort.
I looked ahead in my mind to the ocean fast approaching, and beyond to our destination, across the waters and most of the way across a continent. All the way to Las Vegas where, one day soon, I'd look Ash in the eye and make him pay. Not so much for what he'd done, but for what he'd turned me into.
CHAPTER SIX
It was ninety miles to Miami by boat. We'd found a light aircraft on the island but since none of us could fly it, it looked like we'd be going to Vegas the long way. I didn't look at Cuba as it receded into the distance behind us, just took the wheel and looked forward over the calm seas. As we'd sat on the shore and waited for the world to turn and the sun to rise, I'd decided that I was done with regrets.
The journey was peaceful, no one in pursuit, nothing but us and the seagulls hovering over the waves. After an hour or so I handed the wheel to Ingo and went to the sundeck of the small pleasure craft we'd commandeered, the fastest we could find. The others were all lying there, lazing in the sunlight, stripped down to shorts and t-shirts.
We looked, I realised, like a bunch of American university students on Spring break. For the first time since I'd left the base, for the first time in five years in fact, I felt myself begin to relax. Haru was pissing over the side of the boat, watching the spray blow away in the wind, and for some reason that made me smile. There was something so young and male about it. Ingo always used the privy, carefully locking the door, and that made me smile too. Modesty seemed so redundant in this new world.
"You look a million miles away," Kelis said, and I realised she'd been studying me for a while.
I shrugged. "Just thinking."
She smiled. "Yeah, that can be tough sometimes."
"It's strange for me, you know, being back among people. I don't think I'm quite used to it." I didn't know why I told her that. She was hardly the poster child for opening up and sharing. Except that it was strange, being around other human beings again after so long, and I suddenly wanted to know them, really know them. To connect, to bond - all those terrible, psychobabble words. But humans are social animals, and I knew I'd lost something essential in the years I'd spent alone. The person who'd gone into the base would never have done the things that the person who came out of it did.
I wanted to blame the Voice, but I wasn't sure I could.
"It was strange for me too," Soren said unexpectedly. "When I was recruited. That was the hardest thing, being back in such a crowd."
"Harder than the things she made you do?" I asked. "The killing?" I think there was more curiosity than accusation in my voice and Soren didn't seem offended.
"For me, yes. I was home in Sweden, the village I'd lived my whole adult life. Tiny, cold, a fishing place on the north coast where the sea was always icy, even in midsummer." The focus of his eyes pushed out as his attention pulled in, looking at memories I suspected he'd kept hidden away for years. Then he smiled self-consciously. "Sorry, I forget what I was trying to say."
"No," I said, "Don't stop. I'd like to know what it was like for you, before Queen M. I want to remember the world before the Cull."
"Before the Cull?" He looked from me to Kelis. Something in her expression must have persuaded him to carry on because he suddenly shifted position, pulling his legs beneath him to get comfortable. I suppose somewhere inside we all want to be known. How else would therapists stay in business?
"Sweden was a very orderly country, you know? We weren't a nation that liked to get too excited about anything - we left that to the Danes. Orderly and neat and prosperous. I'd grown up in Malmö, down in the south, but as soon as I'd finished my degree I moved away. There were too many people in Malmö, too many tourists. It was too noisy, always full of traffic and the fog horns of the boats in the harbour. What's the point of living in a large country with a small population if you can't enjoy the peace?
"So I went north, away from everyone, where the winter nights were so long you barely saw the sun rise. I went as far north as I could until I was on the edge of the arctic circle, where I could watch the Northern Lights at midnight and listen to the never-ending sound of the sea. I bought myself a log house out in the forest, a fishing boat and an axe. And then I got myself a broadband connection and every day I worked with people I never had to see. Once a week I went into the shop, and that was the only time I saw another person, except maybe a few other fishing boats, far out at sea. People are much easier to enjoy, I think, if you don't have to actually talk to them. Out there I started liking my fellow country folk for the first time.
"Then the Cull struck and everyone was - well, you know how it was. But I thought, less people in this overcrowded world, why is that a bad thing? I suppose people died in the village but I hadn't known them before the Cull and I couldn't pretend that I cared. The shop emptied after a while but it was no big problem. I knew how to hunt and fish, and planting simple crops wasn't difficult. I had an axe and finding trees to use it on wasn't a problem either. There was only myself to feed. After three weeks, maybe four, the radio that I kept went silent and that was the end of it, I thought. Civilisation had collapsed, somewhere off-screen. But for me nothing really changed.
"It was so beautiful there. The trees are evergreen, a
ll year round they look the same. Very dark, impenetrable as soon as you're away from the coast. The cliffs are grey rock, almost the same colour as the sea. I read a guidebook once. It called our coast forbidding, but I never understood that. What was forbidden there? It seems to me that it's only in a place like that you're allowed to be yourself, without other people telling you what you should be.
"And then Queen M came." He shrugged, his face losing its faraway look. "I guess you know the rest. Back to join the rest of humanity."
"Or what was left of it," Haru said, and I was sure the double meaning was deliberate. The remnants of humanity, and the remnants of their humanity.
Kelis looked at him through narrowed eyes. "It's easy for you to be smug. Japan dodged the bullet while everyone else was bleeding out. It wasn't just the O-negs who were spared there, was it?"
"No," Haru said, "something in our genes saved most of us, in the good old Land of the Rising Sun." He looked at Kelis, questioning, and she shrugged - meaning, why not? We've got ten hours to kill and what else is there to fill the time?
"OK," he said. "You want to hear my story? The thing you have to know about Japan is, we're a little like Soren. We don't really need anyone else. For years we were this closed island kingdom. Then along came the Western empires and we thought we might like to get an empire of our own. Everyone knows how that ended for us. So we went back to doing what we do best - minding our own business. I suppose you'd say we're the ultimate voyeurs. We like looking at other people and sometimes we like imitating them, but we don't want any actual contact.
"So when the Cull came and spared us, but took everyone else, it seemed like a sign. Shut yourselves in. Shut yourselves off. There wasn't much protest when the government locked the borders down tight. The economy was in a mess, of course - we relied on high-tech exports to buy low-tech imports. But China was just sitting there, no longer in any kind of position to fight us off, so we went in uninvited and got everything we needed. Then we just... carried on. You know the thing I noticed most? That there were no new Hollywood films. Nothing new from Spielberg, no big dumb action movies, no more X-Men. I stopped going to the cinema and that was the biggest way my life changed.
"Oh, there were deaths of course. A lot of them. But we buried them and we moved on. Only for me, I kept imagining the rest of the world. All my life I've been drawing the apocalypse. Giant robots... mutants and now here was a real apocalypse - the genuine article - and I was still a wage slave in a grey suit.
"So when there was a movement for colonisation, I joined - to go back out in the world. I took my son away from the security of Tokyo to New Zealand, where the government in its wisdom had voted to set up New Kyoto. I had to fight to take him, he was - well, he wasn't well. But they had trouble recruiting enough colonists and in the end they let us go. I remember how I felt on the flight, how excited I was. I watched the sea scrolling away beneath us and I thought that this was a real new beginning. I didn't imagine for a moment that I could be making a mistake."
He smiled thinly and trailed off and I remembered what he'd told me about the son he left behind. "And then Queen M took you and not him," I said.
"Yeah." He ran a hand back through his hair, messing up the spikes, already stiff with salt spray. "I took him away from safety for no goddamn reason and then I just left him there, on his own."
"He would have been looked after," I said, "by the other colonists."
Haru just shrugged and looked away. I guess we all had our own burdens of guilt to carry, and no one to share them with.
When I looked at Ingo he stared back, blank and maybe a little challenging. "You hope to know about my home?" he said and I realised I didn't even know where that was. He smiled mockingly and I could see that he knew that too.
"The Congo," he told me. "The Democratic Republic of Congo. For twenty years the West wanted to know nothing about my land. Four million people died in a war that no one noticed, and now you ask me for our history?"
"Listen friend," Soren said. "We're not the West. We're us. But please yourself - I'll probably survive the disappointment if you don't feel like sharing."
"There is no story," Ingo said. "There is nothing as neat as a story to tell about my country. First the Belgians robbed us and sometimes they murdered us, and when they finally left we put our own men in charge - and they robbed and killed us too. Our neighbours abused us and the refugees of Rwanda came and made everything worse, bringing the terrible ghosts of their past with them. There was war, and where there was not war there was disease, and everywhere there was hatred and greed. The women were raped and then they were driven from their villages because they had been raped - because of the shame. Mothers killed their own sons and daughters for witchcraft. But why did we need witches when we already had men? The warlords fought over blood and diamonds. The West held concerts for the starving of Ethiopia but they turned away from us, and do you know why?"
"I know why," Haru said quietly. We looked at him and he twisted his mouth into an expression that was somewhere between amusement and shame. "Video games."
For the first time since I'd known him, Ingo really smiled. It wasn't a good sight. "Yes," he said, "coltan from our mines made the games machines of the West. Our children died in slavery so yours could have just one more toy. I have seen you, Jasmine, looking at my fingers and I think you assume this happened when Queen M found me. No. They were broken long ago, when I was seven and a man stood on my hand when I reached for a knife to stop his friends from violating my sister. You ask how it was when the Cull came? I will tell you - it was exactly the same as it had always been. My land was drenched in blood, and nobody cared."
There was a silence after that, deep and uncomfortable. Finally, it was Ingo who turned to Kelis. "You still have a story to tell."
"Anyone want to hear it now?" Kelis asked self-mockingly, but I nodded and so did Haru.
"We showed you ours..." he said.
She paused a moment, then nodded and leaned back so that she was looking up at the pale blue sky rather than at us. "New York. Who'd have thought that one day a real rain really would come and wash the streets clean? Only it wasn't the dirt that was washed away - sometimes it seems like the filth was the only thing left. But mierda never stays smooth. It clumps and congeals and that's what it did in the city. First just little groups, the old street gangs, and then new ones came. It was quite funny really, to see Manhattan lawyers walking the mean streets with guns. Funny until they started shooting at you.
"After a while it got more formal. The gangs turned into Klans and you were either in one or you were left to beg for scraps - no middle ground. That's what the Cull took away - the safe centre. And all my life I'd been begging for scraps, working as a secretary in some crappy little law firm that made your average ambulance chaser look classy, getting spat at and worse, guarding prisoners who thought they were something because they ran crack on their little corner. So I decided - enough, you know? Why shouldn't I start over? Why shouldn't I be better than I was?
"I joined the Midtown Men and I found that I was good at it. My daddy, he'd taught me to shoot before he... yeah, back before the Cull. So I could handle a gun and I found that I could handle myself too. I made myself useful and I was completely loyal; pretty soon I was one of the elite. People were eating my scraps - and it felt good.
"But it doesn't matter how high you climb, there's always someone above you. And if you're looking out for number one you can be damn fucking sure that everyone else around you is doing the same. We had a lot of things in New York, but we didn't have high-tech. And the gangs, they had an arms race going on - doesn't take much to get one of those started. You get handguns, I get semi-automatics, you get rocket launchers, and I get myself an Apache helicopter. Leave it long enough and they'll go nuclear, I'm not kidding.
"So when Queen M came and offered the kind of tech we were never going to find for ourselves... we were racing to say yes before anyone else could. The only thing s
he wanted in return was a few soldiers. New York, soldiers are easy to find - ten waiting to fill the place of each fallen man. We said yes. I said yes, when we voted in council. Didn't think for a minute they were gonna pick me."
She looked over at me and smiled. "I guess right about now you're thinking that I got pretty much what I deserved. But I was only trying to survive. I remember learning about Darwin back in school, when it was still OK to teach evolution. He said we're all the children of survivors. Every ancestor we've got won some kind of fight. I don't think it's any surprise we're killers - the surprise is how we sometimes manage not to."
She was still looking at me, her expression more uncertain than her words, and I realised that she was looking for some kind of forgiveness, or at least for acceptance. I smiled back, awkwardly. "I'm not going to judge you. Hell, I'm long past judging anyone."
"Yeah?" Her expression lightened. "Shame my girlfriend didn't feel the same. When I told her I was gonna have to leave her behind... well, let's just say I don't think she's keeping my bed warm back in Washington Square."
Her girlfriend? Oh. Oh. I saw the way she was looking at me, as if she wanted me to understand something without having to explain it. And I saw the way that Soren was looking at her, then the darkening of his face as he followed her eyes to mine. I knew immediately that I'd been right - there was no way this was going to end well.
"What is your deal?" Haru said, turning to me. "You were a scientist, you said, trying to find a cure for the Cull. What happened?"
"Well," Soren said dryly, an edge of hostility in his voice that hadn't been there before. "I'm only taking a guess, but I'd say she failed."
"Not entirely," I said and only as I said the words did I realise that I was finally going to have to tell them the truth. Because they'd opened up to me? Not really. More because lying is tiring and I was using all my energy trying to keep the Voice inside me down to a murmur. I didn't have energy left over for anything else. And maybe because I'd done so many wrong things over the last few weeks, I wanted to finally do something right.
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