Kill or Cure

by Rebecca Levene

  "Why not just take it all?" Haru asked. "You're talking gangs right, armed gangs, maybe out of the city? It's not like the people here would put up much of a fight against them."

  "But then who would grow the crops?" Ingo said quietly. "It is my experience that soldiers prefer fighting to farming. But it will not just be crops that they take when they come. They will have their pleasure in any way they wish, with anyone they want. I have seen it before."

  Kelis shrugs. "Yeah, well, it's the farmers" choice, isn't it? There's almost certainly more of them - all they need to do is get organised and get armed."

  "You think we should do a Magnificent Seven, train them up?" Haru asked.

  She shrugged and looked quickly at me and then away. I didn't think she was really angry with the people here, just with everyone who made the kind of choice that Soren had and ended up dying for it.

  "Maybe on the way back," I said, but it was just a salve to my conscience. I knew we'd never be back here. Even before the Cull the world had been full of injustice, and at least these people got to live and eat in relative peace. There were worse fates. I'd already seen them.

  I lingered over the last drops of the wine, suddenly unwilling to go to bed. The house we were in was big enough for us to have taken a bedroom each. Mine must have been the youngest son's, decorated with pictures of rappers and American football stars. The living room was still fully furnished, covered in thick layers of dust but otherwise untouched since whatever had happened to its occupants had happened. The mantelpiece was lined with ornaments - a picture of the Virgin Mary made out of seashells, a terracotta replica of the Basilica, an ashtray so thick and crooked it could only have been one of the children's pottery projects.

  How must it be, I wondered, for the townspeople to spend every day living beside the houses of the dead? At least I couldn't put a face to the ghosts here. These people had lost neighbours, family, friends. No wonder they took whatever dirty little compromise was offered to avoid the same fate.

  My imagination began to get darker as the wine hit a system which hadn't experienced alcohol for a long time. It jarred with the anti-psychotics and my thoughts started to twist. "I'm going upstairs," I said, getting abruptly to my feet. "We should get an early start tomorrow. Haru, why don't you take first watch, wake me after two hours."

  Haru nodded without looking up, still stuffing his face with the last of the bread and cheese. Kelis didn't respond at all, but her eyes followed me all the way up the stairs.

  The room and the bed were both small. I almost didn't have the energy to get undressed, tempted just to collapse straight onto the dusty blue bedspread with its little pictures of stars and planets hidden beneath the grime. But no, I needed a good night's sleep. With grim determination I made my fingers undo each button on my blouse, then the zipper on my khaki trousers. There was a full length mirror on the door of the wardrobe and I looked at myself in it once I was entirely naked.

  If anything, I was even thinner than when I'd first been taken from the base by Queen M, all the food I'd eaten burned off by nervous energy. There were fading bruises on my ribs, a cut on my arm, a bullet wound in my leg, darker bruises around my eyes and a neat row of teeth marks against the bridge of my nose. Still, looking in that mirror, at the flaming red hair and the high cheekbones, I almost recognised the woman I'd once been, the one who'd loved and married him. But then I looked into my own green eyes and thought, no, that woman is gone.

  I was still looking at myself when Kelis came through the door. Her eyes caught mine in the mirror, dark and haunted. I wondered if she thought about the girlfriend she'd left behind - if she ever judged herself so harshly by someone else's standards.

  I didn't turn round as she walked towards me, not even when her arms circled my waist and pulled me back against her. The material of her t-shirt felt rough against my naked back as she bent to kiss my neck.

  "He loved me," she said. "He knew I'd never love him. Even if I'd... I never would have."

  "Love is like that," I whispered, the sound trailing off into a moan as her lips hit the sensitive spot at the nape of my neck.

  "Blind, you mean?" She finally let go, allowing me to turn round and face her as she tugged her t-shirt over her head in one quick, efficient motion. Her breasts were bare beneath it, small, high and firm.

  "Hopeless," I said, leaning forward to take one of her tight brown nipples into my mouth. It felt less intimate than kissing her. Her skin was coffee brown and soft beneath my lips.

  "Is it hopeless?" she asked, and I knew she wasn't talking about Soren.

  "Yes," I said, moving my fingers down to the fly of her shorts, pushing them hurriedly away from her legs. "I've only ever loved one man and I keep telling myself he's half a world away, but the truth is he's probably dead."

  She stopped for a moment, then her hands reached out to cup my breasts, kneading the flesh then pinching the nipples hard enough to hurt. "You can always pretend he's watching us," she said and she almost carried off the light ironic tone. Almost.

  I didn't, though. I only thought about her and me as we fell onto the narrow bed. I wanted this, I needed it, and the least I owed her was to admit that for this one night it was all about her. I wanted human warmth, the warmth of her thighs around mine, her hand on me - in me. I wanted to feel connected to something in this world where death could come at any time.

  Afterwards I thought she'd get up and leave. I thought I'd want her to, but I didn't. I didn't want this to be that impersonal. I was glad when she pulled me against her, spooning her longer body around mine. It had been so very long since I'd been with another person this way that I found that I was crying. She didn't say anything, and I felt the wet heat of her own tears trickling down my neck. I closed my eyes as we drifted into sleep, and I let myself pretend that our tears were for Soren, because someone's should have been.

  Haru's warning cry didn't wake me, because the gun shots already had. The window exploded inward in a lethal shower of glass. Only the thick fabric of the comforter saved us from dying right then. Bullets continued to thunder through the darkness of the window but by then Kelis had snapped awake and rolled off the bed, dragging me with her.

  Our guns were in the discarded heap of our clothing, tangled at the foot of the bed. Kelis pulled out her semi-automatic and ammo clips while I fumbled for my Magnum. We didn't bother with the clothes - there wasn't time, and it wasn't like a t-shirt was going to stop bullets. The door was in the lee of the bed, shaded from the gunfire for the few minutes until it splintered into uselessness. We belly crawled across to it, the carpet rough against our naked stomachs. Ironic, really, that this was what would leave us with rug burn.

  The stairs were sheltered, the inner sanctum of the house. The part of me that wasn't a fighter, and had never wanted to be, told me to stay there safe and let the others fight this out. But I could still feel the imprint of Kelis' hands on my back, my hips, and I couldn't let her be just another corpse I'd left behind.

  Haru was cowering at the bottom of the stairs, flinching as splinters of wood flew past. His gun was in his hand but I knew that it was cold and unused. He didn't have any problem letting other people do his dying for him. He looked at my face first, and after a second his eyes drifted lower - then widened in shock.

  "Where the hell did they come from?" I screamed at him. He stopped looking at my breasts and looked back round the stairwell.

  "I don't know!" he shouted back. "But they knew we were here - they must have done. They would have come straight in if we hadn't locked the door."

  He was right and I could guess what was going on: the people of the town reporting the newcomers to their lords, like the well behaved peasants they were. No doubt whoever was out there thought we were planning on moving in on their property - taking the tithe that was their due. If they knew we were just passing through, they'd probably leave us alone, but I didn't see myself going outside and trying to explain that to them.

  "They've
got us surrounded," Kelis said. To me the gunfire was just white noise, source-less and ceaseless, but she sounded certain and I supposed she must be right. No point ambushing someone and leaving them an escape route.

  "Then we break out," I said. "We fight back. With any luck, they've forgotten what that feels like." Ingo had slipped through the shadows to join us. His eyes registered no surprise at my nakedness. It was possible he hadn't even noticed. "You too," I said to Haru. "We've got a better chance the more guns we can point at them - two out front, two out back."

  The air was heavy with the smell of brick dust and hot lead. The living room was at the front of the house and the thin sliver of it I could see round the edge of the stairwell looked like a war zone. The sea-shell Mary and the terracotta Basilica were gone from the mantel. Just dust now, like their owners.

  I didn't trust Haru to do as I told him, but Kelis took him by the scruff of his t-shirt and virtually threw him towards the front door. I could see the wide, terrified set of his eyes but I didn't wait to see any more because Ingo had my arm and we were both barrelling round the corner of the stairs, towards the kitchen.

  Bullets lanced through the air around us. There were fewer of them now, but it only took one. Maybe they thought we were already dead, or maybe they were just running short of ammo. We'd soon find out.

  I didn't give myself time to think before I ran out of the door, confident that Ingo would be right behind me. They must have thought we were dead because they had started to walk out of the cover of the derelict cars towards the house. They looked almost comically surprised to see us - a naked woman and a black man running towards them, guns spitting death.

  They were far, far younger than I'd expected. The first one I killed was barely into his teens and no one was out of them. They dived to the ground as soon as the first of them fell, and I realised that they didn't know what they were doing, not even slightly.

  I shot another in the gut and Ingo blew the heads off two more, fatty grey matter splattering the long grass. The four left were now holding their hands up and screaming at us to stop. Suddenly loud, the Voice said What are you going to do, take them to a prisoner of war camp? Leave them behind to come back and try again? I shot one in the heart, then looked away as Ingo took the rest.

  I tried to remind myself what Ingo had said, about the things people like this did to the people they ruled. I tried to imagine one of the young girls who'd laughed and waved as we entered the town screaming as these boys gang raped her. But it was no use, all I could think was how young they were and that young people were the only hope left after the Cull.

  There was nothing I wanted to say to Ingo when we were done. I walked silently through the back door and up the stairs. The house was a ruin. I put on a fresh set of clothes, then begun to shove my few possessions back into my bag. Kelis came in as I was doing it, her face lightly dusted with blood. I couldn't look her in the eye and she didn't seem to mind. I didn't need to ask if she'd left any alive. It wouldn't even have crossed her mind.

  "Amateurs," she said dismissively.

  "Yeah, neighbourhood kids gone bad." I could see their brutal little history as if I'd witnessed it. Children freed of all constraints, suddenly the strongest and the most powerful where once they'd been the weakest. Every town has a trench coat mafia waiting to happen.

  "Want to have a word with the good people of the town?" she asked after a few seconds of silent scrutiny during which I resolutely kept my gaze fixed on the bag I was packing. "It must have been them who tipped the kids off."

  "No," I said. "I think we've done enough already."

  Ten minutes later we drove away, through a few hundred more miles of cornfields and past a few dozen more small towns. We didn't stop. The Interstate, bland and featureless, took us out of Oklahoma almost as fast as I wanted. For mile after mile we saw nothing but vast billboards advertising products no one could buy. Then we were back in Texas, a little northern jut of it, heading towards the desert of New Mexico, scrubby and dry and mercifully free of people. Las Vegas was in reach of one long drive and I didn't need to ask to discover that none of us had the stomach for more human interaction. We didn't want to stop again.

  But fifty miles from Santa Fe we came to the first road block. On the straight desert road we could see it far ahead, slabs of concrete laid across the length of the road with the crouched figures of men behind them. "Should we go off-road, drive round?" I asked Kelis.

  She shrugged and I could see her preparing to twist the wheel, but Haru reached forward from his place on the back seat and put a hand on her arm. "We can't risk damaging the car," he said. "Not out here."

  He was right. Wreck our ride and we might not find another one before we dropped dead of dehydration and heat exhaustion. Kelis nodded and pulled the car to a halt twenty metres from the pile of concrete.

  There was a moment's stand-off as we crouched down, guns at the ready, and the men behind the block did the same.

  "Well, this is productive," I said eventually. My voice carried clearly in the still desert air.

  "We've got food and water back here," a husky female voice shouted back. "We can wait all day. How about you?"

  "We only want to pass through," Haru tried. "We're not looking for trouble."

  "But we're quite capable of being trouble if we need to be," I added.

  High overhead, vultures were circling. I guess they'd been having some good years.

  "Pass through on the way to where?" the woman asked after a beat.

  We glanced at each other but there didn't seem to be any reason to lie. "Las Vegas," I told her.

  My finger tightened on the trigger at a sudden movement, but it was just the woman poking her head above the parapet. Even from fifty feet away I could see the black surprised 'O' of her mouth. "Are you crazy?" she said.

  We drove to Santa Fe in convoy, our vehicle bracketed by two of theirs, strange solar-powered contraptions which looked like they'd been designed by a lunatic trying to recreate the moon unit from memory. They didn't top twenty miles an hour so the journey took a while, but we didn't try to break away. We might have outrun them before they shot us but I gave it even money. And besides, they had something we wanted: information.

  "We work for The Collector," the woman had said when we'd finally dismounted from the car and approached the barricade. She was African-American and about as wide as she was tall. I couldn't be sure that all of it wasn't muscle. She told us her name was Jeannine, but that her friends called her Jen.

  "Yeah?" I said cautiously. "And what does he collect?"

  "Oh," she said, "stuff." Then she squinted at us, heavy brows lowering over small eyes. She took in the red and black of Kelis' clothing, the military way she held herself. Her eyes skittered over me, then Haru and Ingo. "You're Queen M's, aren't you?"

  I twitched in surprise and then it was too late to lie. I shrugged. "We were... guests of hers for a while."

  "Yeah," Jeannine said, smiling. "We heard she misplaced quite a few of her guests last week. Don't worry - people are the last thing our boss is interested in. There are enough mouths to feed as it is."

  "Yeah, OK," Haru said. "Then what's with the road blocks?"

  She shrugged. "Human Intel. The most valuable currency there is."

  It took us three hours to reach the outskirts of the city, its pale adobe houses like an extension of the desert on which they sat. We were only a few metres past the sign welcoming us to the place when I saw it. I did an almost perfect double take, but at the second glance I knew I hadn't imagined it: Rodin's Kiss, sitting by the side of the road, a grubby patina of dirt over the white marble. Kelis had seen it too. Her hand reached out to grab mine in surprise, then just as quickly pulled back.

  Jeannine, sitting beside me in the back of our jeep, laughed at my expression. "We got a couple of copies of that, so he left that one as a kind of greeting. You know - make love not war."

  I looked at the AK-47 she had strapped to her back and didn't
mention that she seemed prepared for either contingency.

  We drove slower now, through the drab suburbs and into the picturesque heart of the city. The town was full of people, more than the survivors of the Cull could account for. The Collector must have been recruiting, whatever Jeannine said. They didn't stop to greet us but I knew that we were being assessed and that if we hadn't been with Jeannine and her crew we wouldn't have got very far. It was subtle, but the place had the feel of a fortress: slabs of concrete sitting by the sides of roads that they could easily be dragged out to block and nests that probably held machine guns, maybe even AA guns. This wasn't a place anyone would want to take by force.

  The drive through town took an hour and Jeannine seemed happy to act as tour guide, pointing out local landmarks as we passed. I guess she, at least, was a local. I tuned her out and concentrated on getting a read on the place, a sense of what went on here. The Voice had become a constant dull murmur in the last few days, clear enough to hear, and it was telling me to be careful. Warning me that the people here weren't my friends. I did my best to ignore it. Maybe there were no friends here, but I didn't get the sense that there were any enemies either. More like people from a parallel world, benignly indifferent to ours. We finally stopped, at a building that looked like a honeycomb, with a half-collapsed sign that told me it had once been a hotel.

  "Heart of the collection," Jeannine told me. "You'll usually find him here."

  The heat was searing, dry as my mouth, and I wondered why anyone would ever have chosen to live in a place like this. Then when we stepped through the big lobby doors of the honeycomb building, the cold hit us like a bucket of ice-water in the face. I guessed the air-con was solar powered which seemed like a needless extravagance.

  "Madre de Dios!" Kelis said. "Why not just move somewhere cooler?"

  I smiled, but the expression slipped from my face when I saw what was in front of me.

  "Holly hell," Haru said. "You've got the Elgin marbles in your hallway!"