Kill or Cure

by Rebecca Levene

They took me to the Luxor, a monstrous pyramid squatting in the heart of the Strip. Inside, plastic mummies stared impassively at Egyptian-themed fruit machines that no one was using - row after row of them, unlit and silent. We walked past roulette wheels, backgammon tables, long abandoned games of craps. My escorts and I were the only people inside and the silence was more sinister for its contrast with the Disneyland tackiness of it all.

  Dim, emergency lighting led us through the vast gambling floor. There were no windows and no clocks; this hadn't been a place where they wanted you to tell time - and I guess Ash didn't much care about it either. The lift took us right to the top, where the high rollers had once lived. He was waiting for me in the penthouse suite, leaning on the railing of a balcony that gave him a view over all of Vegas. This, I thought, was why he'd left the lights of the Strip burning, a crazy extravagance just to make him feel even more like a king.

  "Come up in the world, I see," I said when he turned to face me.

  He shrugged and smiled, looking so much like the friend I'd once known that it was painful. But I could see the light of madness shining in his dark eyes, and I knew that that was all the explanation I needed for what he'd done.

  "You know," he said, "when Ingo told me you were alive, I couldn't believe it. I was sure you'd died in the explosion. If I'd known, I would have returned for you - I hope you realise that."

  I looked away. A part of me remembered the five years of terrible solitude and wished that he had come for me. "Don't beat yourself up about it."

  He laughed at little, but there was something studied about it, as if normal human responses were something he now had to fake. "Still you're here now, that's what matters."

  "Thanks to Ingo. Tell me, if you thought I was dead, how did he manage to find me?"

  "He wasn't looking. Ingo's job was to watch Queen M, when we were no longer neighbours. I wanted to know what she made of my Cuban... subjects. You were just a very unexpected bonus. A coincidence I suppose, though in time one of my agents was bound to have found you."

  He leaned over the balcony, staring across his kingdom. After a second I joined him. Las Vegas was a spider's web of light in the darkness of the desert. "You sent the Infected against her deliberately," I said, seeing it all suddenly. "You wanted her scientists to investigate them, and then for Ingo to report back what they found."

  He was still looking out over the city. It felt almost comfortable, a distant echo of the companionship we'd once enjoyed. I remembered with sudden clarity the one time he'd come on to me, after we'd been in the bunker three weeks and it was all starting to seem hopeless. He'd pushed me up against a bench in the lab at three in the morning and kissed me with a sort of desperation.

  I'd pushed him away and tried to laugh it off.

  He hadn't let me, though. "I know you've got a husband," he'd said. "But you're never going to see him again. Can't I be the last man you ever fuck?"

  I'd just shaken my head and gone back to work and he hadn't tried it again. I wondered if he remembered that too, or if the Voice took away all memories of failure, if you let it.

  "Why would I want to do that?" he asked now.

  I shrugged, not very interested in playing his games. "Because you needed all the help you could get. I'd thought - I don't know why, I guess I just assumed - that you'd taken the Cure with you when you left. But of course, you didn't plan the explosion and what wasn't buried beneath it was trapped with me." I looked at him, a slight frown on his handsome dark-skinned face, and I knew that I was right. "You recreated it, I suppose, from its remnants in your own blood. But you got it wrong. The Infected of Cuba weren't at all what you intended, and you were hoping Queen M would be able to tell you why."

  There was a long silence and I thought that he was angry. He must be unused to challenges to his authority after all this time surrounded by his worshippers, people who gave themselves to the Voice that spoke through his mouth. "Yes," he said finally. "That's true. But here, at least, I've got it right."

  "I don't believe you. If you had, why would you need me?"

  "Who says I do?"

  "Ingo, and the trouble you went to get me here. Tell me just one thing, Ash. Was this planned all along - the Cull and the Cure?"

  For the first time, I saw just a flicker of uncertainty in his face. "I don't remember. I've let go of that part of my life. But Jasmine, I want you to be a part of the new life I'm making here."

  "If you think I'm going to help you spread the Cure, you've forgotten who I am."

  "I could never forget you. And I don't need your help - not in the way you think."

  "I'm not giving you any help."

  He shrugged, dismissing my objections. "The thing is, I spent all that time, wasted it, trying to recreate the Cure - when I should have realised all along that it was unnecessary. The Cure's already inside me, perfect. The answer isn't to spread it, I know that now."

  "A little too late for the people of Cuba," I said bitterly.

  "They wanted what I gave them - I didn't force it on them. And I wasn't the one who burnt them to death."

  A helpless shudder passed through me at the memory. "You left me no choice, Ash. Better a quick death than rotting away, piece by piece."

  "Did you ask them that?" He waved a hand to silence me when I would have objected. "It doesn't matter. I realised that if I wanted to spread the Cure, I didn't need to infect people with it. There's a simpler and older method than that." He turned to face me fully, arms crossed over his chest. The moon was only a sliver of light above us and his face was in darkness.

  But I didn't need to read his expression to know what he meant. I looked over at the two silent guards standing just inside the doors to the balcony. I looked at the round swells of their stomachs, pulling the material of their t-shirts tight. "Children. No wonder you wanted all the men castrated. Will every single child born in this city be yours?"

  He nodded. "The Cure was an extreme form of gene therapy, you know that. It changed us. It rewrote our DNA and turned it into something more... eloquent."

  "And that change will be passed along to your children," I said flatly, forcing the words out past the sudden nauseous tightness in my throat.

  "Like all genes, the Cure only cares about reproducing itself. Given the biological raw materials, it can build the meat machines to carry itself, to propagate itself further."

  "And they say romance is dead."

  He didn't even smile. "Procreation has nothing to do with love. It's more basic than that, the replication of something older and greater than us. Genes are immortal, you know that. They're the only part of us we can truly send into the future."

  "Well, I can certainly see the appeal of this little arrangement for you. What I'm finding harder to grasp is why anyone else would agree to it."

  He spread his arms, a theatrical gesture playing to an audience of one. "They believe in me, Jasmine. When Jim Jones told his followers to drink poison and feed it to their children, they did it gladly. Suicide bombers turned their own bodies into shrapnel, back in that wonderful world we all remember before the Cull. People will do anything if they only believe, and I'm asking them for so much less than that."

  "No," I said, "not so many, not that." And then, clear and unpleasant, I saw the whole picture. "But if you gave them a watered down version of the poison you gave the people of Cuba - then they might agree. Tell me, Ash, just what is in those pills your travelling circus is handing out like sweets?"

  He smiled, almost pleased that I'd understood. "Only a little something to make them more... open to suggestion. I learnt from my mistakes in Cuba. The latest version doesn't leave any lasting damage."

  "I don't think Haru would agree with you." For a moment I let myself imagine him and the terrible thing that might already have been done to him, all because he'd been foolish enough to listen to me.

  "Your companion?" He shrugged. "In time he'll come to understand. That's the other thing I've found. Take someone's freedom, m
utilate and brutalise them, and if you offer them a way to keep their pride, to tell themselves that it was all for a purpose, they'll take it. Humans have always lived a delusional life. I'm just giving them a different dream." He paused a moment, and when he carried on his tone was more fervent, almost fevered. I could hear the Voice, resonating through every syllable. "An incomplete dream, until now. But with you..."

  "I won't join you. I don't believe, and I never will."

  He shook his head. "You misunderstand. I don't need your co-operation, not in the way you mean. Your value lies elsewhere - in the Cure you're also carrying. All these children I've fathered with my wives here are only half-breeds. But our children, Jasmine - they could be the first of a new race."

  I shook my head, horrified. The friend I'd once known had taken my rejection and accepted it. This Ash, the servant of the crazy Voice that I knew all too well, would never take no for an answer. I backed away, hands held out in front of me to push him away.

  His own lashed out, fast as a striking snake, and grasped my wrist. I tried to twist away, to break his grip but he was too strong for me. Stronger than any human should be. I didn't stop struggling though, because this was something I would never surrender to. The balcony was a hundred feet above the city. I could throw myself over it, maybe even take him with me. Anything, anything, to stop this happening.

  Another step, and now I felt other arms pin me, holding me immobile.

  "No," Ashok said. "No, Jasmine, I would never do that to you."

  I looked him in the eye, but there was no human compassion there. For the first time I accepted that every last trace of my friend was gone. "Yes you would."

  "Then let me rephrase. I don't need to do that. I have something else entirely in mind." He nodded at the women behind me and they began to drag me towards the door of the suite. I dug my heels into the thick carpet, resisting with everything that was left in me, but it was futile. They had some of Ash's crazy strength about them. I wondered if it came from the warped new life growing deep inside them.

  After five minutes, I gave up the struggle. All I was doing was wearing myself out. I needed to keep my strength for whatever came next - wherever they were taking me. I knew, of course I did, that resistance would be as futile then as it was now, but I needed to cling on to a fragment of hope.

  They took me from the top of the casino down to its basement, a vast room that must have run the full length of the building. The light there was neon bright and flat. I thought it might once have been the kitchen but the only remnants of its old use were the long silver tables which lined it from wall to wall. The meat which lay on them was still living, but unconscious. There must have been a hundred of them, maybe two hundred. All women, all attached to drips and heart monitors. All naked. None of them was older than thirty. The youngest might have been sixteen.

  "They're brain dead," Ash said. "It was easier that way."

  "Are these the people who wouldn't believe?" I asked, sickened. Was this what lay in store for me? My mind gone, just a body to lie here for Ash to use as he wanted. A part of me thought that might not be such a terrible end, if it meant that I could finally rest.

  There were more men here, doctors. One of them approached us now, a syringe in his hand. With my arms still pinned behind my back I was entirely powerless.

  "I wouldn't force myself on you," Ash said. "That way we could only make one baby every nine months. Inside you, you have the seeds of far, far more than that. All I need to do is harvest them and plant them somewhere else."

  I looked at him, then at the rows and rows of comatose women. They were nothing but bodies now - just fertile ground. "No, Ash," I said. "Don't do this." But I knew that there was no chance he wouldn't. He nodded to the doctor and the man reached out, hand almost gentle as he lifted my t-shirt up.

  The needle hurt like hell as it went in.

  "Just some hormones," Ash told me. "We need you to hyper-ovulate before we harvest. Ten or twenty times and we should have enough."

  "You'll kill me if you do that."

  "Maybe, but by then you'll have given me everything I need." Then he turned away, as if I was no longer of very much interest to him.

  Ingo was waiting in the room they took me to, one of the suites on the upper floors, smaller than Ash's penthouse but still plush and a little gaudy. I tensed when I saw him there, wondering what task of Ash's he was here to perform. He looked almost tentative and there didn't seem to be anything worse he could do to me. The hormones were already racing through my system, flushing my face and speeding my heart. The Voice was louder too, more and more difficult to ignore. They'd taken my anti-psychotics along with my gun. Maybe I should be glad that by the time they tore the ova out of my body I'd probably be a willing victim.

  The guard pushed me into the room and then it was just me and Ingo now. I thought briefly about trying to overpower him, but what was the point? I ignored him instead, moving to sit on the long sofa at one end of the room. I stared at the large blank screen of the television but it had nothing to tell me. Ingo didn't move, didn't say anything. Eventually I gave up and turned to look at him.

  "Why?" I asked him. "Why would you let him do that to you?"

  "Take away my manhood, is that what you mean?" His eyes were wide, face as open and guileless as ever.

  "Yes," I said, though I meant more than that. I'd liked Ingo. I wanted to believe that he'd once been a person who wouldn't let the things happen which happened here. Why had he let Ash change him into someone who would?

  "The priests of Isis, in ancient Rome, would cut off their own genitals with a scythe in honour of their goddess," he told me.

  "Ash isn't a god, Ingo. He isn't even really a man anymore."

  "I do not worship him, is that what you think? It is his ideas that have drawn me, right from the start."

  "To make everyone in the world as crazy as he is? As master-plans go, I'd say it's one of the more deranged."

  "Yes, I know that you believe this. But this is because you grew up in that one small corner of the world where reason ruled. I have seen the look in Westerners faces in this world after the Cull. They cannot believe that it has come to this - that mankind can behave in this way.

  "Look in the face of an African and you will see that they cannot believe that humanity could ever behave in any other way. I told you about my country and I think you felt some pity, but there is a part of you which will never really understand. I was five when I saw my first murder. Seven when they raped my sister in front of me. My father they killed, a bayonet to the belly so that it would be slow. I worked in the mines for four years, my lungs full of rock dust. It is there, still, murdering me too. I will not live another ten years. I saw children kill each other for scraps of food.

  "Someone once asked, 'Where was God at Auschwitz?' and the rabbi replied, 'Where was man?' Where was man in the Congo? Where was God? The Cull was cleaner than what my people did to each other, as casually as swatting flies."

  "I know I can't understand," I told him. "You've experienced terrible things - but why do you want to take a hand in more of them? Ash wants to replace humanity with the Cured. It's genocide. Worse than that - the destruction of an entire species. Your species. Why would you help him with that?"

  His eyes burned into mine, the first emotion I'd ever seen in them, a fierce certainty. "Because I lived twenty years, and I saw nothing in humanity that was worth saving." He left before I could say anything else, locking the door behind him, and I didn't know what it was I would have said anyway. That humanity was worth saving? I wasn't sure I really believed that any more.

  Except, damn it, humanity might not be worth saving, but I'd met individual humans who were. Kelis was worth saving, and she was somewhere in this town, or this hotel, having god knows what done to her.

  I paced the room, twenty paces along one wall, thirty another, weaving between the gaudy furniture. There was no balcony here. The windows were closed and locked. When I swung my f
ist in despair against the glass it bounced back harmlessly. I guess too many people came up here after a bad night at the tables and thought about ending it all - but dead people didn't pay bills. The only way out was through the door, and Ash's guards were outside.

  On a sudden impulse I switched on the television, knowing that the signal had died long ago. The dead static flickered into the dark room and I felt another flickering, deep inside my head; the edge of madness coming to claim me. This time I knew there was no defence against it. My medicines had been taken when I was brought here. I couldn't even dull it with a good strong dose of opiates. The craving for them was the strongest of all, the urge to just stop caring.

  Listen to me, the Voice said. Listen to me! I wanted to refuse it but I had no choice.

  I can help you, it said. I'm the only thing that can.

  And I didn't know if it was because I was already halfway down the slope that led to the place where Ash was, but I believed it. Listening to the Voice had brought Ash here, to this position of power. Letting the Voice speak through him had brought him his army of believers. If I wanted to fight him, I had to become him.

  Yes, the Voice said. Yes. Let me lead you.

  OK, I told it, with every ounce of strength left in my mind. But only on my terms. As cautiously as a bomb expert defusing a nuclear device, I took down the defences it had taken me five long years to build. I could feel the monumental weight of the madness, dark and unknowable, massing behind the barriers, but I wouldn't let it all through. Just enough. Only enough to do what needed to be done.

  No! the Voice screamed at me, a deafening roar now that I had given it a clear path through to my mind. Let me through! Let all of me through. It pushed its weight against my mind and I could feel my sanity bending, bending... With an effort of will more intense than anything I had ever experienced, I pushed back. There was a moment when everything was in perfect balance, the unstoppable force and the immovable object - until, millimetre by painful millimetre, I beat the Voice back. I could feel the sweat dripping from my body, every muscle in me corded with strain. But I wouldn't lose, I couldn't lose. I took what I needed, the knowledge and conviction that the Voice gave me - and then I slammed the door in my mind shut behind it.