I'd finally managed to discover the location of the camera in my room, hidden in the handle of my wardrobe where it had a perfect view of the bed. I hoped whoever watched the footage enjoyed the view. I hadn't changed anything about my routine when I discovered it, not even giving in to the temptation to start undressing in the bathroom. Couldn't let them know I knew. Besides, there was probably a camera in the bathroom too, but that one didn't matter.
I couldn't set my alarm, not sure if there was sound recording in the room as well. It wasn't essential to my plan. Since my medical student days I'd always been able to wake when I wanted.
At exactly ten past four in the morning my eyes blinked uselessly open in the absolute darkness.
I'd spent five days learning my way around the cabin by touch. Subtly brushing a hand along the dresser, counting the paces from door to bed, feeling the rough patch in the carpet with my toes. I let my eyes slide shut as I felt in the wardrobe for my clothes, twisted the clasp on my blouse shut, slid my sandals over my feet.
There's something about the dead of night that seems to amplify sound, every rustle of cotton, metallic grate of zipper echoing in the seemingly cavernous room.
That night my fingers fumbled at my shoes, fingernails scraping against a buckle, and I froze for a second, my heart pounding.
Nothing. No sound of my shadows waiting outside my door. When I was dressed, I slid my feet over the carpet to the door, counting footsteps. One, two, three, four, five. The handle was right there and I turned it. The lip salve I'd casually smeared last night from my lips to my finger to the latch seemed to have done the trick and the door eased open without a sound.
The night lights in the corridor seemed momentarily far too bright and I had to fight the urge to flinch back. I knew where the camera here was too, ten feet away from my door. Fixed, no rotation. Nobody would see me leaving. But whoever was watching would see me walk past.
Not a problem. Like any tribe, the soldiers here liked to find ways to distinguish themselves from the common herd. They always wore red, somewhere on them, when they weren't out on a mission, boots rather than sandals, dog tags scavenged from god knows where. Those had been the hardest to get, but it's amazing what you'll find lying around in places where 93 per cent of the population didn't get to leave any kind of last will and testament.
They'd know my face, of course, if they were really looking. But why would they be, if I walked with confidence and looked like I knew where I was going? Stupidly, like someone picking at a scab on their finger when their whole leg needs amputating, that was the part of the plan I was most worried about. He'd always joked that I had no sense of direction and I'd quoted him psychological research about how men found their way using maps and women did it with landmarks; but both were equally good. Then he'd challenge me to find my way from Leicester Square to Covent Garden – and he was right. I couldn't navigate for shit.
There'd only be so long I could stand, looking at one of those wall-mounted plans of the ship, without it looking suspicious. I thought I knew where I was going. I thought I did. So I worried about that rather than worrying about the camera, after camera, after camera I was passing with my face visible for God and everyone to see. Or the fact that I had only the vaguest idea how to pilot a boat, even if I could get to one. I particularly didn't think about what Queen M would do if she caught me. About that autopsy table in the lab, and the runnels up the side to carry away the blood.
The ship felt haunted at night, by all the people who'd been so happy right before they died. I walked through the endless, bland, carpeted corridors; down the marble stairs and through the empty galleries with blank bare windows that used to hold things the dead people had wanted to buy. Soldiers passed me now and then, glanced once and then looked away. They had the white, weary look of people who were missing their beds. They didn't want trouble, anything that would force them to act. I made myself easy to ignore.
And I went steadily down, towards the water line. On deck 4 I took a wrong turn, left rather than right. I realised it two strides too late. No turning back. That would be too noticeable, too much the act of someone who didn't belong. All I could do was carry on, to the next staircase, down to the next deck, hoping it was built on the same plan as the previous one as I turned right this time and, yes, it was. Because suddenly the stairs were metal, the walls a dull institutional brown.
I was out of the guest quarters and into the parts of the ship only the crew were meant to see. My feet echoed loudly on the metal treads but I didn't care. I was nearly there.
So what was I going to do about that little fragment of metal in my leg? I was going to get clear of the ship, get to one of the islands Queen M had only recently begun to colonise, Isla Marguerita, or St Thomas, somewhere there weren't too many people around, and then I was going to operate on myself and remove it.
I'd only be using a local anaesthetic, obviously, and I'd be digging deep through muscle and into bone. I'd probably be breaking the bone. There was a chance I wouldn't survive the procedure and every possibility I couldn't walk away from it. But I was desperate and willing to try.
One more flight of metal stairs and I was on the Tender Deck. Little detachable jetties led from here into the water only a few feet below. I could hear the slap of it against the hull of the ship, always more violent than you expected after you'd seen it from the sundeck far above, so tranquil and blue. Sometimes the tender boats stayed overnight. Sometimes they went back to the islands when they'd unloaded their cargoes. But so many came and went, there had to be one still here, right?
And there was. Right at the far end, an open hatch in the side of the ship. The waft of salt air and the audible bounce and crash of a small boat moored outside drifted through the hole as it hopped on the rough waves.
I was only ten feet away from it when I realised that the floor beneath my boots was covered in a thin rubber sheath, good grip for when the water washed in. The floor was rubber, but I could still hear the echo of footsteps on metal. Two sets of them.
I turned round to face Soren and Kelis. "So," I said. "I guess this doesn't look good."
Soren huffed out what might have been a laugh.
Kelis looked… almost upset. Like I'd let her down somehow. "You were thinking you could operate on yourself, take it out, right?"
I shrugged. "Or maybe I just wanted to stretch my legs."
"It wouldn't have done you any good." She came closer, but her hand was empty. She wasn't pointing a gun at me, just yet. "The tracker system's more sophisticated than you realise. There's a roam-zone programmed for every individual. An alarm goes off when anyone breaches it."
"And I just breached mine," I guessed, but she shook her head.
"Twenty meters out in that boat and you would have. We thought we'd stop you before that happened." She glanced at Soren and he stared straight back at her. For the first time I registered the way he leant subtly towards her whenever she was near, like a plant responding to the sun. He doesn't care about me, I thought. He came because she asked him to. Another piece of information I could file away for later use – if there was a later.
Their hands were still nowhere near their guns. They weren't looking like they thought I was any kind of threat. Tackle Kelis, a voice inside me said, surprise her, take her gun. Shoot Soren. Possible, maybe. But I wasn't going to do it.
"So… how exactly did you find me?"
Kelis shrugged. "I knew what you were planning – you'd been twitchy all day. Acting too casual. I was a corrections officer, back before. You learn to read the signs." That startled me. Not so much the information, because it wasn't that hard to imagine, but the fact that I'd spent so many hours with her and I'd never asked about her previous life, hadn't even really wondered.
The Cull was like a big black wall cutting across the past. You couldn't climb it, so why would you want to know what was behind it?
"So you came down here and waited, right?" It was dispiriting to realise I'd been that transparent. "Why?"
She shifted and, for the first time since I'd met her, looked unsure of herself. It was Soren who answered. "Queen M would kill you if she knew what you were planning."
"And you didn't want that?"
He shrugged and looked at Kelis. "She didn't."
"You're here to stay," Kelis said. "Accept it."
"And what if I can't?"
She looked away, out into the dark void of the open hatch and didn't bother to answer me.
Next day I was back in the lab, researching a problem whose answer I already knew. Still, the source of the infection might be obvious, but how it had metamorphosed remained a mystery. A couple of years as a research assistant had taught me to perfect the art of looking busy while remaining essentially idle and I didn't think the other scientists in the room had any idea that the tissue cultures I was taking, and the slides I was carefully preparing were entirely meaningless. The only thing I managed to establish for sure was that the virus was transmitted though blood and not an air-borne contagion. That at least was something I could tell Queen M.
Kelis and Soren were back, shadowing me from the moment I woke up. Their decision, I guessed. I wanted to believe that Kelis hadn't told Queen M what happened the night before. My eyes twitched briefly, involuntarily, to the autopsy table in the centre of the room. To the convenient little grooves to carry away the blood.
I felt the tension in the lab before I saw her. I felt it most of all from Kelis, and when I looked up to see Queen M standing in the doorway of the room, I didn't know if it was because she'd betrayed me or because she hadn't.
Queen M smiled and I still didn't know, her expression as un-giving as an investment banker. "Come and walk with me," she said, nodding at Kelis and Soren in a way that let them know that they weren't included in the invitation.
A little trickle of ice-water seeped down my spine.
"We haven't really spoken properly since you arrived," she said when we were out of the lab, heading up the stairs which would take us to the sun deck and the empty pool.
"I'm sure you've been very busy." I injected a note of irony into the words. She knew I didn't like her and she'd get suspicious if I started pretending that I did.
"I used to be an academic, did you know that? Reader in evolutionary psychology at the LSE."
My head snapped round to look at her: cornrows, beaded braids, wide, thoughtful eyes. It wasn't that difficult to believe. "You've come up in the world."
"Down is what you mean," she said, then held up her hand, stopping my protest almost as soon as it had formed on my lips. "No, it's OK. I know exactly what you think of me. You hold me responsible for those deaths you witnessed, you're imagining many more and you're completely right. I am responsible, and there were more. You think I'm a monster."
I looked away from her again because I didn't want her to see exactly how true that was.
"But you're in a unique position," she said softly. "You're the only person in the world who didn't see what happened after the Cull. You can still go on thinking all those cuddly things about human nature that four thousand years of civilisation allowed us to believe. Have you heard of Hobbes' Leviathan?"
I shook my head.
"But you've heard about life being nasty, brutish and short, right? That was Hobbes, telling it like it is – when there isn't a state around, an all-powerful Leviathan, to force people to listen only to their better angels."
"So – what? You knew how bad people could be and you decided to be worse? Becoming a monster was inevitable so you decided to embrace it rather than fight it?"
She smiled at me, the small patronising grin of a professor who's about to score points from a first-year undergraduate. "Hobbes saw, and the Cull showed, what human beings become in the absence of a state monopoly on violence. You think I'm bad, that this society is bad, but that's only because you haven't seen the rest of the world. I have to be a dictator, or someone has to, because the only other option is chaos."
"Those people in Paris seemed to be doing OK, till we came along." My words were marinated in two weeks of bitterness.
"No, they really weren't. Three quarters of them were already dead. Half the women had been raped – and not always by rival gangs. That baby, the one you left behind? Her mother didn't know who the father was – it could have been any one of the men who caught her out after dark one night and spent the next seventeen hours doing exactly what they wanted with her. You think this is bad, Jasmine, you think I'm a monster, but that's only because you haven't seen the alternatives."
It was the first real passion I'd heard in her voice. Her eyes were finally alight with something other than a cold amusement. "They don't just stay because of the tags in their legs," she said finally. "However much you might want to believe that."
"And why are you telling me this?" I asked eventually. We'd reached the top of the ship. The sun, the distant sand, even the sky was white and fierce. Unyielding.
She was looking out over the ocean rather than at me. When she turned back, her face was closed again. And though I knew the earlier openness had been real, I also knew it had been calculated. "You are only staying because of that tracker in your leg, and that isn't healthy. I want you to believe in what we're doing here. I'm not looking for slaves, I'm looking for followers – committed ones. And I never want you to try again what you did last night. Because the next time you do, I'll kill you. And it won't be anything like as quick and pretty as the deaths you saw in Ireland."
I smiled bitterly and didn't say anything. What was I going to say? I believed her threat absolutely. I nodded to her, not sure what I meant by it or what she'd think I meant. Then I walked quietly back inside, away from the punishing sun.
Haru was still where I'd seen him that morning, hunched over a vivid line drawing of a young girl being ripped apart by zombies. The deck 10 children's pool beside him was filled with a thin slurry of pond scum.
"OK," I said. "Why should I trust you?"
He looked surprised only for a moment. Then he smiled. "Because I want to get out too, and I think you can help me. You know we've got a much better chance together."
"Your life here isn't so bad. Why would you want to change it?"
He opened the leather portfolio that was always with him, and for a moment I thought he was going to show me another drawing. But the thing he pulled out was a photo, a little dog-eared around the edges: a young boy, maybe ten, sitting hunched in a wheelchair, frail legs twisted like pipe cleaners in front of him.
"My son," Haru said. "Back in Japan. Not at all the sort of person Queen M wanted in this 'Brave New World'"
"Then," I said, "let's talk about what we need to do."
The day after Queen M gave me her strange little pep talk, Haru introduced me to Ingo: blue-black skin, soft, deep African accent. A boyish face that was probably older than it looked.
"I run the network," he told me, taking my hand in a firm, enveloping shake. He had long artist's fingers, but I could see that most of the bones in them had been broken some time in the past, and reset crooked. I didn't need to ask why he wanted to escape.
"The computer network?"
He nodded.
"And I'm guessing your job involves more than telling people to switch it off and then switch it back on again?"
He didn't smile. His face was so unlined that I wondered if he ever did. "I take care of it all," he said. "Including the tracker system."
"You can disable it?"
"Of course." And he did smile then, but it was little more than an upward twitch of his lip.
"Permanently?"
He shook his head. "She had me set up the central core so it was password protected, and she has hard copies of all the information."
"But it was you who set up the password, so…"
"She is not stupid. There were four of us who worked on this. I was the project leader, but each of us oversaw the other's work. And she told us – if one of us saw something and did not report it, we would be punished just as if we had done it ourselves. There is no backdoor. The system is unbreakable."
"OK then." I looked down, disappointed. "But you can take it down, at least for a little while."
"Yes," he said. "That I can do."
After I spoke to Ingo I waited until, a week later, I got what I needed: a fresh corpse from the plantations and an excuse to perform an autopsy on it. Twenty years old, fit as a fiddle, and dead for no reason. I caught myself almost smiling at the family when they told me what had happened; how he'd been talking about the weather one minute, dead the next. Their numb, tear-streaked faces looked back at me, hoping I'd have some explanation for their sudden wrenching loss, and the smile faded into nothing.
I radioed the ship, asking for the lab to be cleared so I could perform an autopsy on a potentially infectious vector. "I'm sure it's nothing, just a weak heart," I told Queen M. "If you prefer I can cut it open out here, take a quick look. Then the family can have him back and buried by the end of the day."
"No," she said. "better to be safe. The equipment you've got out there isn't sophisticated enough to pick up anything important. Bring the boy in – and keep yourself in quarantine until you can give me the all clear. I don't want anyone but you coming into contact with that body."
"Fine," I told her, "but you'll need to keep the family in isolation too." The smile was back again and this time there was nothing I could do to suppress it. I ended the call before Queen M could hear it in my voice.
I didn't look at the man's face as I cut him open. I was sure I'd read an accusation there, that I was desecrating the only thing left of him in this world for no real reason. Chest first and yes, I could see it, the hole in his heart that had killed him. But there was no one in the lab to share the find with me, the spectre of an infectious agent that much more terrifying in a post-Cull world. I carried on cutting, as if I was still searching for something more elusive.
Getting the chip out should have been easy – cut into the thigh, through to the bone, and that's it. Except that Queen M would only have to take one look at the body and she'd know exactly what I'd done. And I was damn sure that she'd look at the body.
But the organs – those I had a good reason to poke around in. I took out the liver and the pancreas, the coiled crimson length of the gut, releasing the stench of half-fermented shit into the antiseptic atmosphere of the lab. The human body really is like an overstuffed suitcase. You look at everything that comes out of it and can't believe biology ever fitted it all in there.
I took tissue slides of each organ and looked at each of them under the microscope – his liver was like a sixty-year olds; he must have moved straight from breast milk to rum. Nothing of note in the kidneys or the testes, but then I hadn't expected there to be. Finally, I went back to the whole point of the exercise: burrowing down through the now conveniently empty chest cavity to drill a small plug out of the pelvic girdle. I took the bone, slick with blood and worse, and slid it into the pocket of my slacks, into the little zip lock bag I'd hidden there earlier.
Then I burrowed deeper still, through the flesh along the edge of the bone. I had unwelcome flashbacks to cooking for him, carving the raw meat as he looked away, pretending he was too squeamish to watch. Letting us keep up the fiction that his job wasn't the inverse of mine, making death out of life. You're better off without him, a voice said inside me, and I wasn't sure if it was the Voice, waking up from the drugged haze I'd put it in those last few weeks or just the voice of reason I was never able to hear when he was near. Love isn't blind, that's the trouble. You see all the faults and all the insurmountable problems – you just don't care.
I still didn't. That, in the end, was why I needed to get out of there. I could tell myself all kinds of comfortable lies about freeing myself from despotism, but in the end it was all about him. While I was there, I would never see him again. Out in the world, maybe – and that was just about enough.
And there, at last, it was. The chip, inserted tight into the bone but not tight enough that I couldn't pry it out. It went into my other pocket and then all I had to do was stuff all those organs back into the body and sew it up, stitches as neat as I could make them because this was the body his family would be burying, the last sight they'd have of someone they'd once loved. Not much recompense but the best that I could offer.
Then I went to see Ingo.
"Magnetism," he told me. The chip looked tiny in the pink cradle of his palm. "If it is strong enough, you will degauss it."
"Great," I said. "Because a giant magnet is just the kind of thing we're going to find lying around on a ship."
"No," Ingo said, entirely seriously. "I think you are mistaken. It is highly unlikely that there will be a magnet of sufficient size anywhere in the fleet."
Behind his back Haru rolled his eyes and I had to suppress a smile, but it wasn't really very funny. If we couldn't solve this problem then the plan was dead. The chips had to be deactivated.
We'd met in a little room to the side of the main lab, home to the centrifuge and a collection of embryo-filled specimen jars which gave Haru an excuse to be there. He was sketching as we spoke, some kind of squid monster emerging from the machine in the centre of the room. One of its tentacles was about to grab, or possibly indecently assault, the most humourless of my lab mates. Ingo was inspecting my laptop, which I'd reported as broken. I reckoned we had another five minutes of talk before our little gathering started to look suspicious. Then we'd be back to using Haru as our go-between.
My eyes drifted back down to my own work, a fruitless tissue culture I was growing from the now half-decayed Infected. I was no closer to finding out how the hell the Cure had turned from a vaccine to a virus, and my lack of results was starting to seriously piss Queen M off. Yet another reason we had to figure out a way past the chips.
"What about electricity?" I said. "Could we fry the things?"
"Yes," Haru said, his hand busy sketching lightning bolts around the squid monster. "And fry us in the process."
"It's possible for the human body to survive a lightning strike. A current that would kill the chip might leave us alive. Right?" I said to Ingo.
He tilted his head, considering this with his usual infuriating slowness. Then he nodded. "Yes, that is possible."
"'Might'?" Haru said. "'Possible'? These aren't the words you want to hear when you're talking about putting twelve thousand volts down your spinal column. How about words like 'definitely' and 'entirely safe'?"
"What about that kind of electricity?" I asked Ingo. "Can we find that anywhere on the ship."
"The engine room. Maybe." He shrugged. "I cannot say for sure. My work uses currents considerably lower."
"You'll need to search then," I told Haru. "See what you can find."
"Sure, why not? Maybe it will give us superpowers, turn us into Team Electro – if, you know, it doesn't kill us all first."
Then Barbados, and Haru was showing me his sketchbook again. The pictures were getting wilder, more fantastical, as if the approaching escape was firing his imagination, or maybe just letting the darker recesses of his subconscious peek through. I wondered what Queen M would make of it all.
I wondered if he showed them to her at all, now that there was something else there – hidden in the logo of a t-shirt, the pattern of the carpet. For the last two weeks he'd been painstakingly compiling plans of the ship: each deck a different drawing. And here, in the seemingly random leaves of a tree, the outlines of the islands, each military base picked out in darker green. The waves on the ocean in another drawing were a complex circuit diagram, a wiring plan for the ship. And in each night-time picture the stars were the charts we'd need to navigate our way to freedom.
"This is everything?" I asked him.
"I've been everywhere on the ship. Even into Queen M's quarters. It's all here."
"And nobody suspected anything?"
"Do I look suspicious?" He grinned boyishly, flashing the gap between his front teeth and, no, he didn't. He looked like the likeable nerd who didn't get the girl at the end of a John Hughes movie. Which, given how much of this plan depended on him, didn't exactly fill me with confidence.
"So we're ready to go," he said.
"Yes," I said. "I guess we are."
When I woke up at four that morning it was to find that the Voice had returned, sliding through the thoughts at the back of my mind. You need to be careful, it told me. You can't trust anyone.
But I knew that already. I took my morning dose of anti-psychotics, a lower dose than I really needed, but it was the only way I'd been able to horde enough to last me for the journey, until I could find an abandoned pharmacy somewhere on land. If I could find a pharmacy. The Voice, so blessedly absent from my mind since my rescue, had become a restless whisper at the edge of my consciousness. The panicky knowledge of its presence was like a threat that one day would be made good.
Perhaps this whole escape plan, the desperate need to leave, was itself coming from the Voice. Madness feeling like sanity.
Fuck it – I'd worry about that once I was away.
There was no need to keep the lights off this time. Thanks to Ingo the cameras in my room would be feeding back a constant loop of my sleeping form. So I've watched a few heist movies in my time – if an idea works, it works.
Haru met me outside the door. He gave me a tense, uncomfortable smile. Then he gave me a gun, a hefty Magnum with a silencer already clutching the end of its barrel. Haru flicked through his sketches, navigating our way through the ship. We had to follow the exact route we'd agreed with Ingo, otherwise his little trick with the looping tape wouldn't work. We'd timed it to the second, stopping at the end of each corridor and the bottom of each stairwell to check it off against the timetable Haru had hidden in a picture of Queen M's braids.
Ingo had memorised the timetable. Eidetic memory, he told us. Asperger's I would have said, but not to his face.
The ship was as quiet as the night of that first aborted escape attempt. So quiet that our footsteps, the gentle rustle of them in the threadbare carpet, felt like an offence. The ship wanted to rest, and here we were waking it up.
Empty too. We'd chosen to do this when two different grab teams were out on missions, and another batch of soldiers was on St Martaan for R amp;R. As we walked down a flight of stairs, across a deck, through the echoing emptiness of the casino, down more stairs, I thought that perhaps we wouldn't see anyone at all.
Not possible, of course.
I recognised the woman's face as we rounded the corner to see her leaning up against the closed lift door, sneaking a fag that she must have been hording for weeks until she could enjoy it away from the grasping hands of her colleagues.
She looked up at us, startled but not afraid, and I remembered suddenly that her name was Jeannine. I'd heard someone shouting it across the mess, maybe two weeks ago. For one paralysed moment I just stood there. But then her eyes began to narrow in suspicion, her hand inched towards her gun, and as soon as it became her or me the choice was that much simpler.
A harsh exhalation, muffled by the silencer, and the bullet took her through the throat. Not where I'd been aiming, but it did the job. The jet of arterial blood splashed the lift door, droplets of it landing on my cheek and in my hair. Her hands came up to cover her throat, uselessly. She had that look of shock young people sometimes get when they're dying. Disbelief that their lives really can be ending this way.
I felt Haru's hand pulling at my arm and I realised that I was standing frozen, wondering how I could possibly treat her. If I could cure her.
Once a doctor, always… but not really. I couldn't call myself a doctor now.
I let Haru drag me away, down another flight of stairs and through the dim, endless corridors, like players of a particularly lacklustre first-person shooter. We were running now. Once the first body was found it was game over.
The next person I shot I didn't stay to watch die. The bullet struck him in the head this time, and there wasn't enough left of his face for me to recognise anyway.
With the third person the bullet went wide, and the sound it made as it hit the bulkhead was too damn loud. The next shot took him in the chest, his own gun still tucked into the waistband of his shorts, but the damage was done. Anyone in earshot would have known exactly what that sound was. I could already hear raised voices, the first inkling that an alarm might be raised.
We were just ten paces from the door when they got to us. They were expecting resistance this time and they knew that I was armed. There were no silencers on their guns and they roared as they spat their bullets at us. The one that missed my head by two inches deafened me, ringing in my ear long after we'd dived through the open bulkhead and slammed it shut behind us, spinning the wheel that would lock us in one of the few rooms on the ship that was designed to be defended from the inside.
The server room looked like something out of a seventies sci-fi movie: big silver boxes and lots of flashing lights. There were six dull thuds against the door as someone unloaded their gun into it. Tough shit. That thing was designed to resist pretty much anything bar heavy duty explosives.
Haru was flicking frantically through his sketchbook. "Shit. Shit! Where is it?"
"It's in that picture of the giant robot – the New York skyline."
"I know what it is!" he shouted. I realised that he was terrified. His face was dripping with sweat, his breath was panting and ragged.
Seeing his fear made me notice my own for the first time. "It was the last sketch," I told Haru, my voice suddenly shaky and weak. But I was right. The skyscrapers on the skyline had a careful pattern of light and dark, an exactly blueprint of which cables we needed to pull and which needed to be left. My hands were shaking as well as my voice. Everything inside me was saying for fuck's sake hurry, they're right outside, but I clenched down hard on the panic and continued to slowly, methodically work my way down the side of each server, each router.
We couldn't afford to disable the wrong equipment. We'd need it later.
Outside, the banging had stopped, but I could hear the muted sound of more voices. They probably would bring some explosives, pretty soon. But they'd think a while before they used them, because the servers in here were pretty much irreplaceable. Besides, they knew that we'd have to come out eventually.
Only we wouldn't. When you put a whole load of delicate computer equipment in the bowels of a ship you'd better be pretty damn sure that you can cool it – and the ducts that let the air in were just big enough to let people out. The hatch was in the far corner of the room, just above head level. It took a minute to unscrew and then we were out.
Jesus, the tube was narrow. I tried to force my body through a space that was only meant to take air, my face pressed up against Haru's thighs as he forced his way through ahead of me. I felt the walls pressing in around me, squeezing the air out of my lungs. I tried not to think about the fact that Haru was bigger than me. If he got jammed there'd be no way forward and no way back.
Behind me I heard the sudden sharp sound of an explosion and a second later felt a wash of painfully hot air rocket through the shaft. I'd managed to prop the cover shut behind us, but it wouldn't take them long to figure out where we'd gone.
I hoped they didn't have the schematics anywhere to hand. If they did they'd know exactly where we'd be emerging and we'd be sure to meet a welcoming committee on our exit. I saw the autopsy table again, the neat little grooves carrying the blood away.
But maybe we wouldn't be getting out at all. In front of me, Haru had stopped cold. I could hear the harsh sound of his breathing and I could smell the acrid tang of his sweat. He was panicking, on the point of losing it.
"Keep moving!" I shouted, the sound muffled by our bodies, almost lost in the short distance from my mouth to his ears. "They're right behind us."
"It goes up," he shouted back. "I can't… I don't think I can get up there."
"Well try!" I shouted back. Behind me, louder than our voices, I'd heard the screech of the cover being moved. The duct had run straight, up to that point. As soon as they pointed a torch in they'd be able to see us.
Haru just wasn't moving. Frantic, I reached my arms out in front of me, pressed my hands against the soles of Haru's shoes, and pushed.
Instead of moving him forward, the pressure moved me back. Laws of physics I'd known since I was ten. Behind me, only a few feet behind me, someone else was starting to climb into the duct.
"Fucking move!" I screamed at Haru. And finally, somehow, he did, bending his back at an impossible angle and pushing himself forward with his toes. I slithered after him, desperately. But when I reached the kink in the pipe, almost forty-five degrees up and then only a foot later forty-five degrees back to flat again, I instantly knew why he'd found it so hard. My shoulders jammed in tight against the roof of the passage, my knees pressing agonisingly against the metal floor. My head twisted at an angle one degree away from snapping my neck. And now I wasn't moving. Ahead of me, Haru was opening up a gap, moving faster now, body flattened to the metal. Behind someone was closing on us fast. A voice I recognised as Curtis' shouting "Stop! Come back!" but there was no way in hell that was happening. I didn't really know how I did it, but suddenly I was up and over the bend and the shot that rang out through the duct behind me took the last of the hearing from my good ear but the bullet passed harmlessly beneath me. Curtis was a big guy too and there was no way he was getting round that bend after us.
When we spilled out of the exit on the deck above, Ingo was waiting for us.
"So, everything went smoothly?" he said.
I looked at Haru and we both laughed, a tinge of hysteria in it. His trousers were ripped and my chest was marked with long, parallel cuts where my t-shirt had rucked up and allowed the floor of the duct to skin me like a cheese grater.
"Is the tracker down?" Haru asked him when we'd got our breath back, already heading off down the corridor. We were all carrying guns now, no need for careful timing any longer, only speed. There were three of us against a crew of four-hundred and thirty-seven. We needed them to make the obvious assumption, that with the tracker down we'd be making for the tender boats.
But we weren't going down, we were going up.
"The whole computer network has crashed," Ingo told us. "It will take them at least twelve hours to repair. I think more likely a day."
We turned a corner, then another. Two soldiers, and Ingo took them out without blinking, without even seeming to notice. The next turn and the woman came at us from a side corridor, looking startled. She hadn't been hunting for us but I shot her anyway, finger twitch on the trigger a mindless reflex in the fog of battle. The first bullet went clean through her shoulder, embedding shards of bone in the insipid watercolour on the wall behind her. White lumps in the white clouds over Botany Bay. I recognised her too late. A kitchen worker, just a cook, nothing to do with the soldiers chasing us. Collateral damage, I told myself bleakly, moving on. You couldn't stay and think about these things because it only got you killed, and then that was two dead bodies without one good reason.
He'd taught me that, too, on one of those rare times he talked to me about what he really did.
We killed seven more, moving on before their bodies even hit the deck. They don't matter, the Voice whispered to me, and I really wanted to believe it. Beside me Haru's eyes looked wild, Ingo's just blank. Then, at last, we were there. And no one was waiting for us, not one single guard, because the one ship they would never have expected us to take was the one we were already on.
I slammed the door shut behind us and twisted the wheel to lock it. This was another room designed to be secure. This'll show you, you self-satisfied bitch, I thought. You're not quite as clever as you think you are.
There were only two men at the controls, eyes heavy with tiredness, and they spun to face us just a second too late. Ingo's bullet took the one on the left and mine the one on the right, almost as if we'd rehearsed it. And then we had the bridge all to ourselves.
Stealing an ocean liner is much, much easier than you might expect. Ingo took one look at the controls and nodded, satisfied.
"You're sure?" I said.
He gave me that peculiar almost-smile of his. "Definitely."
Ingo's hands glided over the controls like a musician's, the crooked bones of them looking almost elegant as he worked. Far beneath us, a deep base roar began, the sound of the ship waking from its sleep. My stomach turned over in time to the engine. As soon as she heard that, Queen M would know exactly what we were doing and then every last soldier on the ship would be heading straight for us.
"Set a course and lock it," I said to Ingo then, to Haru, "Show me how to work the PA."
Haru's hands shook as he worked the dials, as if they'd be more comfortable holding a pencil and drawing things which weren't real. But after a second he nodded and mouthed ready at me.
"I need it to be everywhere and I need it to be loud," I whispered back, my hand over the mic. He nodded again and I took my hand away and began to speak. "Wake up," I said. "Wake up!" I waited a second, and then, "OK, I hope you have because there are two very important things I need to tell you. Firstly, the entire tracking system's been disabled. So if any of you have been thinking of taking a short – or indeed permanent – vacation, now would be the time to do it."
I could see Ingo looking across at me from the controls. His expression was mild but his actions were more violent, smashing his fist into the console, snapping leavers and twisting knobs until they detached entirely.
"The other thing you need to know," I told everyone on the ship able to hear, "is that we're currently on course for Cuba. The controls are locked and by my estimation we're going to make landfall in the not too distant future. Have a nice day." As soon as I'd switched off the mic I smashed it. No need to leave Queen M the means to tell everyone that I'm lying.
Besides, I wasn't. In two hours the Infected would be swarming all over us.
The instant Ingo was finished we bolted for the door and swung it open. If there were soldiers outside, we were finished. I was betting that pretty much no one was going to be obeying orders right now.
I was almost right. Soldiers had been waiting outside, two dozen of them. For a second, I was staring down the barrels of twenty different guns. Military and precise – exactly like a firing squad. Except that unlike a firing squad, these guys were looking us in the eye. They looked just about as frightened as we were. One of them said, "Is it true?"
I swallowed past a bone-dry throat and said, "Take a look for yourselves," but they didn't bother because something in my expression told them that yeah, it was the truth, and the twenty seconds they wasted checking it out could be the difference between making it out alive or getting up close and personal with one of the Infected.
The next instant they ran, all military cohesion gone. Now they were just individuals worried about their individual lives.
The ship was full of them. They weren't trying to stop us any more, now they were just in our way, clogging up the stairwells and corridors, feet heavy on the threadbare carpet. I smelt their rank, night-time breath as they pressed past me. Their faces looked pinched, almost yellow in the pale lighting, rodent-like. The ship wasn't sinking, exactly, but the rats weren't taking any chances.
They knew that there weren't enough tender boats for all the people on board. That was the biggest gamble of all, that we'd make it down there quick enough to get one. It had to be this way, everyone else knowing that same stark fact.
I saw Haru grabbed by a woman who was half his size but twice as desperate. She flung him aside and sprinted past him, then vaulted over the stair rail to drop two decks below. I heard the scream as her ankle buckled and broke but she didn't stop running. I thought I could see a jagged shard of bone poking through blue-black skin.
I hesitated for just a second, but I didn't stop. I knew Haru wouldn't have stopped for me. We weren't friends, just useful to each other. And if I got to the boat first maybe I could hold the others off long enough for Haru to reach it. Or maybe I'd head straight out.
I didn't get the chance to find out. Two more decks down and Haru had caught back up with me. He grabbed my hand as soon as he was in reach and I didn't snatch it away. There was a sort of comfort in it, this contact with a virtual stranger – even one I'd been quite willing to leave to die just a few seconds before.
Shots were ringing out above us and the second body that came falling down the staircase wasn't alive any more. I touched my own gun, pushed roughly into the waistband of my trousers, but I didn't pull it. In the crush of people as we plunged deeper and deeper into the ship it would have been useful as a cudgel and nothing else.
The noise level ratcheted up and for a moment I thought it was just the same old din of voices, and frantic breathing, and the occasional scream, but then I realised that it was also footsteps, hundreds of them, ringing out on metal stairs. We were almost there.
There was one final thing we had to do before we could get out. I'd told myself that it had to be left to the last minute because afterwards, we weren't going to be in a state to do much running around. The truth was I'd left it till the end because it scared the shit out of me, and I wanted to put it off as long as possible.
Ingo had found the place for us, near the engine rooms and the tender boats, where the electric wires that channelled the current that fed the ship were thickest and most accessible. He'd said a lot of other things, but I hadn't really listened. Only the words ten-thousand volts had really registered, along with the words I'd mentally added: potentially fatal. But Ingo had said that that was the current we needed to guarantee burning out the chips.
"It's here," Ingo shouted, voice barely audible above the screams of the crowd.
We began to shoulder our way towards a narrow corridor that snaked off to the left. But a horde of people in a panic have a force to them like a river in full spate – and like the salmon that swim upstream to spawn, we almost didn't make it. I got an elbow in the ribs, another in the eye. Behind me I heard Haru shout as someone snagged his t-shirt and pulled him roughly out of the way. He stumbled and I grabbed his arm a second before he could fall. He gasped out a thank you, lost in the din. A fall would be fatal. This crowd wasn't stopping for anyone. Their feet echoed against the metal floor, filling the lower decks of the ship with a sound like an army on the march.
I could see the entrance we were aiming for, five feet away now but still impossibly out of reach. There were six people, ten, between us and the entrance and not one of them was going to move out of our way. Just for a second, I thought about the gun jammed into the waistband of my trousers. But no, not that.
In the end, I was a pace past the door by the time I'd managed to make it to the left-hand wall. Only Haru saved me, grabbing my arm this time and pulling me back and sideways, abruptly out of the crowd and into a dark, silent room.
"Well," I said brightly, "who wants to go first?"
"It would be better for me to go last," Ingo said, with his usual blank seriousness. "Since I will be the one administering the shock."
"Hey," Haru said, waving a hand at me in a gesture that would have looked more suave if he hadn't been visibly shaking. "Ladies first."
I wanted to say that maybe I should be last, since I was the doctor who would treat whatever injuries this insane process was going to leave us with. But the truth was we'd either live through it or we wouldn't, and no amount of medical training was going to change that.
"Fine," I said. "Do it." I held my bare arm out towards Ingo and tried not to shake too visibly. It almost made me laugh, the way the wire was spitting sparks, like something out of a Frankenstein movie. But I thought if I opened my mouth the thing most likely to come out would be a sob of fear, so I pressed my lips together and turned my eyes away.
Strange, isn't it, how anticipated pain is so much worse than pain you aren't expecting? It felt as if every cell in my body was on fire, the fire sparking into my brain, nerve endings forgetting that they were designed to do anything other than tell me how much they hurt. My muscles contracted, agonisingly, then slackened uncontrollably. I was glad I'd known to empty myself in preparation. If there'd been anything in my bladder or my bowels, it wouldn't have stayed inside.
A second later as I lay on the floor twitching, I heard a harsh, high scream and then Haru was beside me, spine arched so sharply that only the back of his head and his heels were touching the floor.
It occurred to me that maybe I should have told him not to eat or drink because there was the sudden stench of urine and shit combined, and I could see the dark puddle of liquid spreading out beneath him a second before his convulsion ended and his buttocks felt right back down into it.
But, gasping and gagging, he was still alive and so was I. His hand scrabbled along the deck beside him and I wondered what he was searching for, until his fingers fumbled then clasped the metal lump of his watch. Of course. He must have put it aside before the current went through him, because flesh can be healed but the delicate mechanism of the watch was irreplaceable. Machines were more valuable than people now.
Finally there was Ingo, his round, placid face showing no fear. He hesitated a moment, then jammed the wires into his own bare skin. The shock of it pushed him backwards like a giant hand, thumping him into the far wall with a musical clang.
Feeling even weaker than when I'd been going cold turkey and wishing I could die, I dragged myself to my knees. My head hung low as I fought a sudden, intense nausea. I took a moment more to gather myself, to convince myself that motion really was still possible, and then I pushed myself to my feet.
Soon, you'll be stronger than ever, the Voice told me, louder than a whisper now, as if it had drawn some weird mental energy from the current which had coursed through me. I laughed at the idea that I'd ever be strong again. Then I saw Haru looking at me, puzzled, and I remembered that the Voice was something only I could hear.
But I just laughed louder. His hair looked exactly like a cartoon character who'd stuck his finger into an electric socket, a wilder caricature of his normal gelled spikes.
"I'm glad that you're enjoying yourself," he said, the words rasping through a throat scoured raw by his earlier scream.
I shrugged and offered a hand to pull him to his feet, though I had to lean my full weight backwards to give him any kind of leverage. I bent down to do the same for Ingo and realised for the first time that he hadn't moved since the shock. I couldn't see his chest moving.
"Shit!" I said. I knelt hurriedly beside him and fumbled for his pulse with fingers which were still only half under my control. After a moment I felt it beating, inconsistently, faintly. The corridor was dark, but I thought I could see his eyeballs rolling beneath the closed lids. It was impossible to say what this meant: that he was about to wake up? That he'd never wake up? With that kind of current the damage could be permanent.
"He's unconscious," I told Haru.
He shrugged, hair still a wild shock, but not looking so funny now. "He's done his part – we don't need him any more."
I reached down and shook Ingo's shoulders gently.
"Come on," Haru said. "We're running out of time. Two out of three making it is better than we could have hoped for."
He was right, but looking down at Ingo's soft, boyish face – at the crooked fingers of his hand, resting outstretched against the metal floor -- I didn't feel ready to make that kind of calculation just yet.
"One more minute," I said to Haru.
I thought he wouldn't wait for me, but after a second and a sour twist of his mouth he turned back, eyes fixed impatiently on Ingo's.
Another second and Ingo's eyes flicked open. I could almost see the knowledge seeping back into them, and with it an expression of pain so profound that I found myself leaning away from it. A moment more and it was gone, and Ingo's eyes were as dark and untroubled as ever.
I offered him my hand, surprised at how big and warm his palm felt in mine. His youth had somehow tricked me into thinking he was smaller than he was, more helpless. Jesus, I realised, I'm feeling maternal towards him – just the kind of sentimental shit I didn't need right now.
Ingo nodded at me, the most thanks I'd get, and then we were running into the corridor that led to the boats and back into the crowd. Except that the crowd was gone, the flood of people had thinned to a trickle. When we emerged into the larger space of the launch deck, our footsteps echoed hollowly in the emptiness.
Panicking now, I sprinted to the first launch bay. The boat was gone. Then the second and that boat had gone too. Same story with the third. I hoped, prayed, that the one boat had been left. This had been the only part of our plan that relied on luck as much as planning and now I was cursing my decision to leave this final, crucial stage to chance. If it didn't work, it would all have been for nothing. Less than nothing. I thought about the autopsy table, the blood, Queen M's cold, calculating eyes. The beginnings of despair set in.
Don't give up, the Voice told me, your plan hasn't failed yet.
It was right. There in the fifth bay was a small motorboat. As we approached, five others pushed past us, walking away. "It isn't working," one of them said. "No key."
I nodded and shrugged and carried on walking with Ingo and Haru beside me. When we got into the boat, Haru pulled the key out of his pocket and put it into the ignition. We were pulling away from the side of the ship before anyone on board had begun to realise what was happening.
As soon as they did I heard a roar of fury and then every person left on that deck was heading our way. There was five foot of water between us and the ship when a huge white man with brown hair and a vivid red scar running the length of his face reached the side of the ship and launched himself straight off. His dive brought his fingers into contact with the side of our boat.
Haru swung the boat hard to starboard but it didn't dislodge the man. I saw the fingers tense and whiten and then he was pulling himself up by sheer force of will. A few more seconds and he'd be on board. I had a sudden clear memory of my own panicked attempt to drag myself on board the schooner when the Infected attacked. Not letting myself think about it I pulled my gun and aimed. But I couldn't shoot him, not when I'd been the one who told him to escape in the first place. Not when all he wanted was exactly the same thing I did – to get away.
I'd set out to free everyone, and now all I seemed to care about was freeing myself. The Voice told me to do it, that he didn't matter, but it was still quiet enough that I could ignore it. I'd left five, maybe ten, corpses behind me already and I suddenly found that I couldn't add another. I grasped the barrel of the gun instead and used it to slam the butt hard against his fingers. Index finger first, then the ring finger – two slams to dislodge that – and finally the last two. He let out a roar of rage and pain, and disappeared into the waves.
I fell back into the boat, allowing the penetrating ache in my joints to sweep through me as the rush of adrenaline swept out. I felt as if every bone in my body had been broken and reset, sparks of electric pain still firing off randomly in the neurons of my brain.
Around us, the sea was choppy and restless, waves in ragged white-tipped ranks. The sky was just pinking with the first light of dawn at the distant horizon. The other ships were dark blots in the water around us, some already lost to distance. Ahead of us, a larger, darker blot.
Cuba.
I'd always assumed that Queen M would be able to get her ship back under control before it ran aground on the Cuban coast. Now I wondered. The island couldn't have been more than a mile ahead of us, maybe less. The humps and mounds of its mountains looked enticing in the growing morning sunshine, glints of gold catching off patches of sand on its beaches. Like pretty much everything seen from a distance, it seemed harmless. But it wasn't.
The rest of Queen M's fleet was heading out to open water, fleeing the island with all the speed the wind offered. Most of them were sailing boats and they could go where the wind went. None of us knew how to sail and we'd been forced to steal ourselves a motor boat. There was enough fuel in it to take us to Cuba – or to leave us stranded in open waters. No other land was in reach.
Another problem we'd anticipated but hadn't been able to avoid.
I was so focussed on looking at the shoreline that it took me a moment to register that there were four figures standing behind me where there should have been two. The first thing I saw as I turned was Haru, his face frozen with fear. To the other side of him was Ingo, looking startled and a little annoyed, that anything could have interfered with his neat little plan.
Between them were Kelis and Soren. They were each holding a large gun, and both of them were aimed at me. Soren smiled, an expression that was more like a snarl. Behind him, the tarp they'd been hiding under was flung carelessly aside, so obvious now it was too late.
"So," Kelis said. "I guess you weren't expecting us."