Finally, I opened myself to the part of it I'd let through - knowing that there was a risk that I'd already surrendered too much.
The feeling was amazing, my mind clearer, more focussed, than it had ever been. I felt strength flowing through me, a tide of well-being stronger than any opiate rush. I felt absolutely certain that I knew what to do. A part of me questioned this new certainty the dangerous lure of it, but I pushed that down too. I had to do this.
I banged on the door five times before the guard answered it. She was small and dark-skinned with wide-set eyes. Her fingers were a little tentative on her gun as she turned it on me. "It's OK," I said, holding my hands carefully in front of me, "I'm not going to try anything." Although a part of me felt that if I did, I could take her on - I could take them all on.
"What do you want?" she asked after a moment. I looked in her eyes and read everything I needed there. These people weren't like the zombies of Cuba. They could listen to reason.
"I want to talk to you," I told her. "I've got something to say that you're going to want to hear." My voice resonated with my conviction. She would want to hear what I had to say.
"I'm not supposed to talk to you."
"Did Ash tell you that?"
She hesitated a moment before answering, and I knew that she hadn't received any orders directly from him. "No," she said eventually. "But you're to be kept locked up. You're a prisoner."
"And did Ash tell you why I'm a prisoner?"
She looked away, I already knew the answer. "Seems like he doesn't tell you very much, does he?"
"He tells me enough." She set her mouth into a thin, determined line. I was only a few words away from being pushed back into the room and having the door locked on me.
"Did he tell you I'm Cured, too?"
She tried to hide it, but I saw the slight flutter of the pulse at her throat, the nearly imperceptible tightening of the muscle in her jaw.
"It's true," I told her. "I knew Ash years ago, back before the Cull. We studied together, worked together - and developed the Cure together. Then we tested it on ourselves."
"That... that can't be true," she said. "He told us he was the only one."
I nodded. "Yeah, that's what he thought. He thought I was dead and so he came here and set about breeding this race of half-Cured children. Like the one you're carrying inside you. How many months gone?"
"Five," she said, the words dragged reluctantly out of her. "Five months."
"Four more till he's born. That's pretty amazing - carrying one of the first of a new race." Her smile was cautious. "Although not really an entirely new race, I suppose. He'll be more of a half-breed, won't he?"
And the smile was entirely gone.
I ploughed on relentlessly. My voice was soft, persuasive. "All the children here, they're only half of what Ash wanted. You can guess why he wants me here, can't you? Maybe you've seen the women downstairs, the ones he's keeping in a coma. He doesn't need their minds - all he's interested in are their wombs. I think you know what he's planning to plant in them."
Her face told me that she did.
"Our children, mine and Ash's, now they'll be the real thing," I continued relentlessly. "The first of a new race. The culmination of all Ash's work, ready to start creating his brave new world. I wonder what place your child will have in that world."
"Ash would never..." Her voice was too loud and I saw her make an effort to quiet it. "This is his son too, he'd never do anything to hurt him, or us. He loves us."
"Yes," I said. "Yes he does. It's just that he loves me and what I can give him more."
"I could..." she swallowed. Her hand was shaking. The barrel of the gun she'd raised to point straight at my heart was shaking too. I could feel it brushing up and down against the material of my t-shirt. "I could make sure there are no full-breeds."
I should have felt afraid. The tightrope I was walking had no net beneath it. I'd locked my fear away along with the Voice, and that alone made the bargain worthwhile. Everything you used to be and value isn't that high a price to pay not to have to live in fear anymore. Queen M's press gangs, the zombies of Cuba, the new serfs of Oklahoma, the Party People - they could all tell you that.
"He'd never forgive you," I told her. "And he'll know it was you. Who else could it be? But if you let me go he'll never find me - then you and your sisters can have him and his children all to yourselves."
"Why would you do that?"
"Because if I stayed they'd be his children, not mine. I'm nothing but a brood-mare to him. But I won't be subordinate to anyone, not even Ash."
She must have heard my absolute conviction because she finally lowered the gun and stepped back. "He'll know this was me too. He'll punish me anyway."
I shook my head - then, before she could react, I swung my fist straight into her face, twisting my hips to put the full weight of my body into the blow. She crumpled with only a small whimper of pain. I'd broken her jaw and my knuckles were bloody and torn from where they'd broken her teeth.
Nothing in me cared. I pulled the gun from her slack fingers and walked away, down the long, quiet casino corridor. My footsteps were muffled by the red carpet which was the exact same colour as her blood.
One objective achieved, my mind was straight onto the next: find and release Kelis and Haru. There wasn't any kind of warmth about the thought, just cold calculation. I knew I needed allies.
I looked around, but there were no cameras up here at the apex of the casino. Ash wanted to watch, not be watched, and in his arrogance it would never have occurred to him that anyone could challenge him at the pinnacle of his power.
I walked through the corridors confident and certain, and nobody challenged me. I didn't know where I was going, but that didn't matter as long as it looked as if I did. I let my eyes drift casually over the women I passed, as if I had nothing to fear from them. Twice, I saw women who had been there when Mike's people had betrayed us to Ash. Before I had listened to the Voice I would have tensed and given myself away. Now I walked past them without a twitch and, even though one of them looked right at my face, they didn't see me. This confident woman, one of their own, was nothing like the frightened prisoner they'd dragged here only an hour ago.
People see exactly what they want to see. Six years ago I'd looked at a world where children were sold into slavery before they could talk, where girls were genitally mutilated so that they'd never have a reason to betray their future husbands, where millions died in floods and famines that never had to happen, and I'd seen somewhere that was just fine.
It seemed likely that Ash would be using the casino's old control centre as his command base. The place where they'd once watched the gamblers and tried to see who was cheating and who was just card-counting. The lift was silver and gold and mirrored, vulgar and loud. My eyes stared back at me as I travelled down. There were no questions in them now, just certainty. I barely recognised myself.
The ground floor was more crowded, but it was easy to slip unnoticed through the ranks of fruit machines, between the green baize of the game tables. I came to a service door marked 'staff only' and walked right through. I turned left, then right, then headed down a long, dingy stretch of corridor, no attempt to prettify the place for people who'd never be spending their money here. And then I arrived.
The banks of screens stared back at me as I walked in, images of neon and night from all over the city. There were three men manning the monitors, scrawny types who might once have been accountants. They looked up at me with wide startled eyes, but I wasn't even looking at them, as if they didn't matter in the slightest. After a second I sensed them looking back down at their screens. Ash, then the women, then the men. That was the order of things here.
And there on a screen at the far right of the room was Kelis, pacing the confines of a small room in a tight, angry circle. "Where is that?" I asked one of the men.
He startled, then bent forward intently, as if to prove how seriously he was taking my q
uestion. "Room 597," he said. "She's waiting to be processed." I didn't have to ask what 'processed' meant. I'd seen its end product laid out on silver slabs, waiting for little pieces of me to be planted inside them.
Her room was in one of the poorer parts of the casino, where the tourists from Wisconsin, Ohio and Leeds would have stayed. There was only one guard outside her door but there was a camera eyeing me from the far end of the corridor. Once this started we'd have no time. They'd know and we'd be running. I paused a moment to calculate whether rescuing her was really worth it. Benefits, costs. A second more and I decided that the former outweighed the latter.
The woman struggled when I put my arm around her neck, arms and legs thrashing back at me. But her windpipe was crushed, her carotid artery blocked, and a second later she dropped to the floor unconscious. I didn't waste a bullet finishing her off.
Kelis must have heard something through the door. She was waiting for me, when I entered, with a roundhouse kick launched at my head. At the last minute she saw who I was and tried to pull back, and I tried to duck, and her foot ended up grazing the edge of my ear and she ended up on her backside staring up at me.
"We have to go," I told her. "They know you're free." I threw her the semi-automatic I'd taken from the guard outside.
She caught it easily, then pushed herself to her feet with her usual catlike grace. Her eyes, brown and deep, stared into mine for a long second. Then she pulled me into a rough embrace, hard enough to push the breath out of me. "I thought you were dead," she said. Her voice sounded choked, as if there were tears in it, but when she released me a moment later her face was as mask-like as when I'd first met her.
But just for a second, when she'd held me in her arms, the Voice had separated itself from me, and I'd known that here was something I did care about. Then the first guard came for us and I thought that maybe I had to let that part of me go, because it would only get me killed. But without it I was dead anyway and I chose to keep on caring. The Voice shouted at me but it was safely locked away again, behind the barriers in my mind, where I could ignore it.
The guards weren't able to come at us en masse. They'd had no contingency plan for this escape and so they came one at a time and that's how we took them down. The first people to find us were men, running towards us down the long red corridor that led to the lifts, and them I shot easily. They'd let Ash cut away the most vital part of them. I didn't feel anything about their death.
At the end of the corridor we made it into the lifts, and headed down, with a few seconds to breathe before it started again.
"Where's Haru?" I asked Kelis.
She shrugged. "I don't now. They just took me."
"Back to that hospital, then," I said. The Voice told me to leave him, that it was too late anyway. It was almost certainly right, but I refused to listen.
Then we were out on the ground floor and here I knew that we'd be facing the women. I knew now that every single one had a new life inside her and that I'd be taking two lives each time I killed. A screaming, blonde-haired woman came at us from a side corridor and my shot went wild, taking her in the stomach when I meant to aim for the head. Kelis was already running on and I knew that I should too, but I looked at the blonde hair splashed with blood and the face beneath, mouth set in a rictus of agony. I knew that somewhere inside that body a little life was feeling the same pain.
It only took a few seconds to throw up everything that had been in my stomach, then I was running after Kelis. Her own face was pale and I knew that even she couldn't be indifferent to the lives we were taking.
Still, we took plenty more as we fought our way to the back doors, then spilled out onto the neon-brightness of the Strip. There were announcements over the loudspeakers now, Ash's voice a horrible echo of Cuba. The blood was pounding too hard in my ears to hear what he was saying, but I was sure it was about us. More and more people were heading towards us, gunfire spitting sparks from the pavement, the neon cowboy waving down at it all.
There was a jeep right outside the casino, keys still in the ignition, maybe the one that had brought Kelis here. Too convenient? No, probably just arrogance again, the certainty that no one would oppose him here, right in the heart of things.
I took the wheel and gunned the engine hard enough that the wheels screeched and skidded, leaving a layer of rubber on the road before they got traction and took us away. Kelis straddled the seat to fire behind her. Her semi-automatic was close enough to my left ear that the sound was deafening. If I looked in the mirror I would have seen the people she was shooting at, but I didn't want to.
I concentrated on driving down the straight deserted roads. Every second I expected more cars, a fleet of them, the full force of Ash's army to range itself against us. It never came, which left me wondering whether it was all an elaborate trap, yet another layer to his scheme that I'd have to peel away.
Listen to me and I'll tell you, the Voice said. The temptation was stronger than the junkie draw of heroin, but I'd learnt to fight that in the last month, and I fought the Voice too.
I don't know how I found my way back to the hospital. I hadn't thought I was paying attention when I'd made the trip the other way, but fifteen minutes later we were there, the building looming big and blocky against the night sky ahead.
No cars had followed us. "What in hell's going on?" Kelis said. "Don't they care that they've just lost their prize prisoner?"
But no, for some reason they didn't. One guard met us at the entrance to the hospital, a sixty-year-old man with the wide innocent eyes of a baby. I shot him through the left one and we ran inside.
The doctors in the hospital were unarmed. They watched us run past and didn't try to stop us. "Where is he?" I screamed at one of them, but they weren't going to help us either.
We banged open doors to operating theatres - empty - to private rooms and to wards where a few patients lay in beds with broken legs and who-knew-what other injuries. A maternity ward, eerie and empty in the darkness, waited for the flood of occupants who would soon come.
We didn't find him until we came to the recovery room, and by then I already knew that it was too late. The room was small, only fifteen feet square, with two beds and a window high up on one wall showing nothing but darkness. One bed was empty. Haru looked very small lying in the centre of the other, as if he'd shrunk since we last saw him. "Sweet baby Jesus," Kelis said. Her brown skin looked a little green.
There was a thin sheet resting over his legs and midriff, but when I pulled it back I could see the bandages swathing him from the middle of his thighs to just below his belly. They looked clean and fresh, just one small spot of blood in the centre of them.
Haru's eyes flickered open as I leant over him. I knew the moment that full consciousness returned because that was when he started screaming. He was still screaming when Kelis threw me her gun and scooped him up in her arms, flinging him over her shoulder. The scream increased in pitch, a sound of pure agony now, but she ignored him. We were running for the stairs, bounding down them, passing the same expressionless doctors we'd seen on the way in.
My finger itched to pull the trigger on them for what they'd done to Haru. But they'd done it to themselves, too, and they weren't the ones to blame.
No one tried to stop us leaving the building. They stood and watched us in silence, our panting breaths the only sound in the deserted wards and sterile white corridors. Then we were through the front doors and out. Kelis put Haru down on his feet to walk the few paces to the car.
He'd only taken one of them, face crumpled with agony, when they came. There were a few faces I recognised, many I didn't, but I'd only spent a few weeks on the boat and Queen M must have called in every reserve she had for this. She was right in the forefront of them, hair still in the same braids, wearing the same carefully studied pastiche of a pirate's outfit.
Haru's face twisted into an expression it took me a minute to recognise as pure hate. "You cunt!" he screamed. "You're too late - look
what they've done to me!"
Because of course Haru was her man. Of course he'd been hers all along. I remembered with sudden clarity, the way he'd removed his watch before letting Ingo pass the current through him that killed the tracker. A spare chip hidden in the workings of the timepiece, where none of us would ever have thought to look for it. It was the final betrayal which made everything else make sense.
I think I would have killed him then, except letting him live now seemed that much crueller. And anyway, someone I hated far more was standing just a few feet in front of him, smiling that infuriatingly patronising smile of hers.
CHAPTER TEN
There was a moment when I was facing Queen M across the tarmac, only ten feet between us, and it would have taken less than a second to kill her. Then the moment passed and her gun, and the guns of all her men, were pointed right at me. As soon as I drew mine I'd be dead, but I was going to do it anyway. I was furious, a red mist behind every thought, but I wasn't sure if I was angrier with her or myself. "I've really been a fool," I said.
She smiled. "A useful one."
Kelis stood beside me, the muscles in her arms knotted with tension, a fierce, unforgiving hate on her face. I thought she was remembering Soren's death and here, finally, was someone she could blame. "Why?" she asked, her voice tight with fury.
"She knew about my connection to Ash," I told her, but my eyes stayed on the other woman, watching for the slightest signal that the dying was about to begin. "That's why she came to the bunker. And that's why she let me go. She was hoping I'd lead her to him, the only person who was challenging her power in her little corner of the world. Someone whose slaves were even more obedient than hers."
"And here you are," Queen M said. "Doing exactly as I intended. Who'd have thought that someone so crazy could be so... predictable."
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