We'd been in the town-centre apartment for three days now. There'd been one excursion to scavenge food. Pointless. The stores in the crumbling heart of the city had been picked clean long ago. I guessed the Infected must have been getting food from somewhere but wherever it was we hadn't been able to find it. We found a chemist's though, virtually untouched, and among the bottles of prescription medicines a week's supply of anti-psychotic pills. I took one gladly, then forced myself to put the rest back in my pack. It wasn't enough to kill the Voice entirely but it would have to do. God knew when I'd be able to find any more. There were clothes shops too, windows smashed and wares dragged out over the pavement, but enough left for us to find a few changes of clothing.
Ingo was looking very dashing now in a pair of black trousers and a garish purple shirt. He seemed fond of it. I'd see him stroking the material sometimes, a far off look on his face. Haru had managed to put together a leather outfit that made him look like an extra in Mad Max. It must have been hot as hell in the stifling Cuban heat, but he sweated it out, a triumph of style over good sense.
I didn't ask where Kelis and Soren found their khaki combats. Stripped off one of the decayed corpses that littered the street, I suspected.
Clothes and drugs that first day, then back to the apartment with its peeling plaster and non-functioning taps, and there we stayed.
The Infected were everywhere. Queen M must have been right that whatever ailed them was contagious, because the population of Cuba alone couldn't have accounted for the numbers of them. They must have been recruiting.
They walked around in little family groups, in pairs, on their own, as if nothing about the world had changed in the last five years. To see them here, on their home ground, you couldn't imagine what they'd been, the berserker rage when they'd attacked us. But then…
… then you saw them up close: the suppurating sores on their faces; the fingers hanging from hands by ragged threads of skin. The missing eyes, ears, noses; white bones poking through gangrenous flesh. That first day, as we carried our findings back towards the centre of the city, I saw a toddler trip and fall over a jagged chunk of masonry. Her mother didn't seem to care; she didn't even notice. And the child just got up and carried on. No tears, no screams no nothing. Her little brown ringlets bounced as she followed her mother down the street.
But I saw her leg, the place where a broken-off nail in the concrete had caught her as she fell: the four-inch cut, the torn muscle of her calf and the greasy yellow fat above. Blood streamed down her leg, pooling in her little trainers as she ran, but it wasn't enough to wash away the brown clots of dirt and rust which the nail had gouged into her flesh. It would be gangrenous within a day, beyond saving in three.
"Shit," Kelis said, watching them trot away along the narrow alley ahead of us. "What the fuck is wrong with these people." It was just a whisper, but she might as well have been shouting. The Infected acted like we were invisible. I guess they hadn't been told to see us.
There were loudspeakers everywhere on the island. Loudspeakers and cameras – Ash's eyes and ears. And his face on posters everywhere, watching us. Four times a day or more, his voice would ring out, issuing instructions. Sometimes they were just for one person, some name we didn't know being ordered to go somewhere we'd never heard of. Sometimes he'd order boats out to sea, maybe to recruit more Infected. His presence was everywhere, in total control of the island.
That was why, after that first day, we stayed in the apartment. Between us we had enough food to last a week, and we'd managed to get a few bottles of clean water from a river on our way up. We were safe inside for the moment, out of sight of the cameras. But we knew that one day Ash's voice might be issuing instructions about us, and suddenly we wouldn't be invisible and there'd be nowhere to run to.
The others wanted to leave the island. "Our boat's toast," I told them on the second day in the apartment. "There's no way we can salvage it, we'd need to steal another – one of the Infected's. How much do you want to bet that as soon as we get close to one of them they'll start paying us some attention?"
"I'd bet a few dollars," Haru muttered sourly. He'd been twitchy and ill at ease ever since we'd arrived.
"Do you want to bet your life?" Kelis asked dryly and he scowled at her and shook his head.
"Can I just say that if Haru wants to risk his life, I have absolutely no objection," Soren said. "Why don't you go steal a boat on your own, and if it works we'll all join you?" For some reason, the big Swede had taken an intense dislike to the artist.
"We need to figure out what's going on here," I said. "Work out who's controlling them and how we can stop them."
A lie, of course. I knew damn well who was controlling them. What I wanted to find out was why. That was why I'd chosen this apartment, right here in the centre of Havana on one of the city's small hills. It had a clear line of sight to the biggest building in the district: Castro's old headquarters. I was sure that was where Ash would be holed up. He'd replaced the old dictator's cult of personality with his own, torn down Castro's posters and put his own face all over the island. Why wouldn't he take the old man's home too?
So I made sure that we stayed in the apartment, out of sight of the cameras, and watched. I had to find out what Ash up to, how he was spreading a Cure that was no longer needed and why it had turned the Infected into whatever they were. Most of all, I needed to know what his long-term plan was. Because if I knew one thing, I knew that he had one. I'd silenced the Voice in my head, but Ash had embraced it, and the Voice had always had a plan. I'd just never listened to it long enough to figure out what it was.
So we waited, and we ate as little as possible, and we sweltered in the humid air. But day after day, no vehicle came or went from Castro's palace. I didn't see a single person walk through its gates. Nothing happened, nothing changed. The Infected carried on walking the streets, slowly rotting away, and I learnt absolutely nothing.
And after six days, we were short of water and even shorter of patience.
"This cannot carry on," Ingo said on the sixth night. Our stock of candles was running low. Just one was flickering on the table now, casting everyone's faces in a dim, devilish light. Ingo's eyes were entirely shadowed, his face unreadable.
"The boy's right," Soren said. "If we wait here any longer we'll have to start eating each other." His eyes strayed to Haru.
"We can't stay, we can't leave – what can we do?" Haru said.
"We need to understand," I insisted. "We can't risk going out there till we know what we're up against. I need to study one of the Infected, up close."
Kelis frowned. "But you've already done that. And you told me you found nothing."
I felt a quick twinge of guilt, swiftly suppressed. What was the point of telling the truth about the Cure? It wouldn't get them off Cuba any quicker. "I'm talking about a live specimen," I told her.
Haru laughed. He stopped quickly enough when he saw I wasn't joking. "Are you crazy? I thought the whole reason we'd been hiding out here was not do draw any unwanted attention."
I stared him down. "They wander off on their own plenty of the time. And the cameras aren't everywhere. There aren't any in the street behind this apartment – that was why we chose it. All we have to do is wait until one of them goes down there alone."
"And then?" Soren said. He was sitting in the furthest corner of the small room, a congealed lump of darkness. But I could hear the click-click-click as he compulsively disassembled then reassembled his rifle, a nervous habit that had become almost constant in the last few days. "What do we do then?"
I shrugged. "Capture them."
I wasn't winning the crowd over, I could tell. Even Kelis looked sceptical. "How do you catch something alive when it doesn't feel any pain? That's the thing about them, isn't it – no fear and no pain?"
I nodded. "There's something wrong with their nervous system – I could figure out that much from the corpse. But they've still got one, and anything with a nervous system can be anaesthetised." I held out the ampoules of Suxamethonium I'd liberated from the chemist along with the anti-psychotics. "This paralyses all voluntary muscles. Put enough of that into anyone, even one of the Infected, and they'll drop like a stone."
"Yeah?" Soren said. "And did you get a tranq gun along with the drug?"
"No," I told him, smiling slightly. "I thought this way it would be more of a challenge for you. Remember,' I added more seriously, 'the infection's blood-borne only – touch can't transmit it."
He stared at me blankly for a long second, leaning forward into the candlelit so that it caught highlights in his blond hair. Then he leaned back and laughed. "Why the hell not? It's not like I've got anything better to do. But I've never given an injection – you'll need to get up close and personal yourself if you want to put that stuff into them." I noticed he didn't mention that the person giving the jab would also be the one most likely to get sprayed with any blood.
"Yes," I said. "Won't that be fun?"
Nothing on earth would persuade Haru to join in our little adventure. Besides, I'd seen him in a crisis already – I'd feel safer if he was nowhere near us. Ingo came though, as impassive as ever. He was almost like one of the Infected himself, all his emotions dialled down near zero.
Ingo took up position in a first floor apartment in the same block as ours. The window gave him a clear sight line up and down the alley and we left him with the nearest thing we had to a sniper rifle. Insurance policy. If something went wrong, he could take out the Infected before it did us any damage.
Yeah, right. Still, I felt better for knowing he was up there.
Kelis was crouching in the shadows at the far end of the alley, where it opened up into one of those big, nondescript squares that might once have been pretty before Communism had turned it into something proletarian and bland. Once the Infected was through she had to make sure it couldn't turn back. Her gun was holstered. Instead she had opted for a pool cue, something that could incapacitate without killing. She was holding it like she'd used one before, and not for potting the black.
Soren and I were halfway down the alley, standing in doorways to either side. If more than one Infected came through we'd let them pass and hope that they didn't see us, or that if they did they'd treat us with their usual indifference.
But if one came down alone, we were ready. Soren had his usual two guns in the waistband of his jeans. In his hands he was holding a fishing net. We'd had to chance a trip out to the harbour to get it, just me and Kelis, clinging to the shadows and shrinking back from the Infected whenever they passed us. A big risk, but probably worth it. It was our best chance of subduing one of them without doing permanent damage.
Then it was just me and the Suxamethonium. I looked at the needle in my hand, a fragile little spike, and thought that as plans went it lacked a certain finesse. I carried on looking at it, and sometimes at Soren, who was as patient as a rock, or at Kelis, fading into the distant shadows, as hour after hour passed with no sign of the Infected.
Could they know what we had planned? Was there any way they could have overheard us? I had the sudden, nasty thought that the apartment might be bugged and Ash could know everything that we said and did. My mind worried at the thought, teasing it apart, finding it more and more convincing as the morning brightened into noon. The sun arcing to blaze down directly over the alley.
When it finally happened, it happened fast. She was an old woman, hair entirely grey, body bent and frail, but she moved like greased lightning. She was past Kelis before we even noticed she was there. From the startled expression on Kelis' face I thought she might have fallen asleep leaning against the wall at the end of the alley, but with a soldier's quick reflexes she snapped out of it and took up her position blocking any escape.
No need. The old woman showed no intention of turning back. God knows what she was running to, or from. She was thirty feet from us now and I could already smell her, the heavy, putrid stink of gangrene. I wondered what part of her she was about to lose.
Fifteen feet and I knew the answer. There was a cavity where her ovaries should have been – just two deep holes, black in the centre and yellow-green around the edges. I gagged, holding the nausea in with a fierce effort of will. That wasn't a random, neglected injury. That had been done to her.
No time to worry about it now. Five feet and Soren was on her. The net caught in her grey hair, dragging it against her face as he pulled it down over her shoulders, down to her waist. Instantly she was struggling and screaming, a high sound like the distant cries of the seabirds. I could see that she was strong though, stronger than a woman her age should have been. Soren had clamped his fists around her arms, but her leg lashed out and caught him squarely between his. He bent over in pain, bringing his head closer to hers. Instantly, her mouth snapped at him through the netting, missing his cheek by millimetres.
"Now would be good!" he shouted at me, eyes glaring, angry and afraid.
I squirted a needle of liquid from the syringe in my hand. No point putting an air bubble in her veins and killing her before we could talk to her. Soren had both arms clamped around hers now. Her mouth continued snapping, uselessly, at the empty air in front of her. The animal rage radiated from her like a physical force. She kicked him again between the legs, and again. Soren's face, covered with sweat, grimaced in pain. Another kick and I saw his arms loosen a little, his body jerking involuntarily away.
He gritted his teeth and tightened his arms again, spinning round so that the old woman was facing me. Her eyes blazed into mine, bright with madness. One of her shoulders was twisted at an unnatural angle and I realised that she must have dislocated it as she struggled. She writhed and I heard a crack that might have been a bone breaking.
The needle slipped easily into the loose flesh of her bicep. But she twisted at the last minute and I felt a jar as the point bottomed out against bone. She pushed further forward and I realised what she was trying to do, to snap the point before the syringe could deliver its load. It was too dangerously easy to think of the Infected as mindless animals. But it was their feelings which were numbed, not their intellects.
I pulled back, just enough to move the needle away from bone, and depressed the plunger, shooting the anaesthetic straight into muscle.
Now I just had to hope that her circulatory system was still functioning in something like a normal way – that her brain and body would respond to drugs the way a normal person's would. I was so intent on watching her eyes, waiting for them to glaze over into sleep, that I didn't see the movement coming until it was too late. Her head jerked violently towards me and her teeth clamped over my nose with a vicious strength.
Soren made a sound that was halfway between a grunt and a laugh. Yeah, I might have found time to think it was funny too, if I hadn't been in sudden agony. He made an attempt to pull her back and I grabbed desperately at his arms as her teeth tugged at my nose. I knew that she wouldn't let go, no matter how hard he pulled. The only thing that could give was my nose.
Somewhere on the periphery of my attention I was aware that Kelis was running towards us. I saw Soren looking over my head helplessly, hoping his partner would know what to do.
"Pull her jaw apart!" I gritted out through a throat that only really wanted to scream.
"I can't!" he said. "If I let her go…"
Then Kelis was there, and she had her hands round the woman's mouth, circling me from behind. I could see blood slicking down over her wrists and I knew that it was coming from me. The word Infected was ringing in my head like a mantra. Infected. Infectious. Her saliva in my blood. My mouth was filling with a coppery taste as the blood from my nose dripped into it and I thought that I was probably swallowing her saliva too. I'd already had the Cure, but did that mean I was immune to this twisted new strain of it?
Kelis' fingers were white with strain on the other woman's face, digging in to her skin so hard each nail had torn the flesh, leaving a perfect semi-circle of red in the wrinkled old skin. Other than that, she was achieving nothing.
I could feel the teeth sinking further into me. I felt the rasp of enamel against cartilage and the pain intensified. Her legs kicked and kicked, forward into my shins and backwards into the junction of Soren's legs. The discomfort of that was lost in the larger pain, like a whisper drowned out by shouting.
The syringe was still in my hand, braced between my body and the old woman's. Use it! my mind was screaming at me. Straight in her heart. That will stop the pain. Or maybe it was the Voice, released by the rush of adrenaline through my body. But using the syringe that way would kill her, and then this would have been for nothing. So we stayed there: her teeth in my nose; Kelis' hands on her face; Soren's arms around her. Stalemate.
The pain was almost unbearable. I realised that my hand was creeping up despite myself, the needle a glitter of silver pointed straight at the old woman's heart. That instinct to survive was stronger than anything, even my own conscious will. I watched, mesmerised as inch by inch my hand moved towards her. I wanted to stop it but I wanted to live, damn it. I wanted the agony to end. A few seconds now and the needle would be in her chest and this would all be over.
My nose was still a burn of agony, but the pressure had let up. Her jaws had relaxed. In front of me, her eyelids were flickering, the muscles in her face slackening. Blood rushed back red into Kelis' fingers as they relaxed too. Soren's arms loosened, supporting the old woman rather than restraining her.
A second more and she was entirely off me. Her jaw flapped open, strings of bloody red saliva hanging from her teeth and dribbling down her chin. I staggered back, the syringe dropping from my hand as I clasped it over my nose. "Jesus fucking Christ!"
Kelis rested a hand against my shoulder. My eyes caught hers and I saw that she was uncertain how to help me. I managed a shrug. Nothing she could do. Then both our heads snapped round as we heard the rumbling sound of Soren laughing. "Well," he said, "you sure have a strange idea of fun."
We secured her to the heavy wooden table in the kitchen before I let her come out of the anaesthesia. We'd put strong wire bindings at her wrist, elbow, ankle and thigh, wound over strips of cloth to stop her tearing her own flesh if she struggled. Not that we were worried about hurting her. I wanted to hurt her after I'd caught sight of my nose in the apartment's one cracked mirror. Her teeth had scored deep marks on either side, marks that would leave permanent scars. The nose itself was swollen and bulbous. I wanted to hurt her but I didn't want her to get loose and I was afraid that, given the chance, she'd happily saw off her own limbs to escape. She was struggling even before her eyes had opened, letting out soft little moans of complaint when she found that she couldn't move.
"Give her the anti-psychotics now, before she wakes up," Haru said nervously. Even with the woman securely bound he refused to come within five feet of her. I'd noticed that he was leaving five foot of clear space around me too, and he wasn't the only one. Soren hadn't come within spitting distance of me since he'd seen the old woman's blood mingling with mine.
I'd swabbed the wound on my nose with antiseptic when I got back, injected myself with antibiotics and anti-virals and told the others that that would take care of anything. They didn't look convinced, and why should they? The truth was if there was something to catch I'd got it, and the only defence I could count on was that my bloodstream was overloaded with the same infection already.
"I don't want to give her anything till she's conscious," I told Haru now. "Seeing what effect it has on her will tell me something about what's wrong. Besides, there's no saying how long it will have an effect. Supply's limited and I can't afford to waste any on a sleeping subject."
A moot point anyway. Her eyes were wide open now and flicking round, sizing us up.
"Habla Ingles?" I asked her when her gaze caught mine. Something in the set of her face told me she'd understood, but she didn't reply.
"We need you to answer some questions," Kelis said in Spanish. "We won't hurt you if you cooperate." But she looked at me as she said it and I shrugged. We both knew it was an empty threat and sure enough the old woman didn't bother to respond. Up close, I had a grandstand view of the gaping wounds in her abdomen where her reproductive organs had once been. What could we possibly threaten her with that was worse than that?
"OK," I said, as Kelis translated into Spanish for me. "I'm going to give you an injection that might clear your head a little. It's just a standard anti-psychotic – there won't be any long-term effects." I didn't know why I was bothering to explain it to her, but it seemed very important to me to keep up the pretence of being a doctor now that I had so much blood on my hands.
I thought the old lady might have shrugged, but her movement was too restricted by her bonds to be sure. It was as much permission as I was likely to get, and I yanked down the edge of her rough black skirt and pushed the needle into the sagging flesh of her buttocks. I nodded at the others that they could leave us in peace. Intra-muscular drugs took some time to diffuse through the system, particularly ones that have to cross the blood-brain barrier. Ingo seemed happy enough to go, and Haru couldn't get out of the door fast enough, but Kelis and Soren both stayed.
"Could be at least an hour before we'll know if it's worked," I told them.
"But you're staying," Kelis said.
I shrugged. "Someone needs to."
"Then we'll keep you company," Soren said, looking at Kelis and not me.
"You really think this will work?" Kelis asked.
I shrugged again. "I think it might. And if it doesn't, that will tell us something as well."
"Yeah, but what? What exactly is it we're waiting here to find out?"
I looked at her, casually picking her teeth with a fingernail, leg slung over one arm of the chair. The posture looked deceptively relaxed, but I could see that it kept the holster of her gun right next to her hand.
"I want to find out what's made these people sick," I said. "I think we need to find out, before it's too late. Because otherwise there might be nowhere in the world that's far enough to run to."
She stopped picking at her teeth and sat a little more upright in her chair. "You think we're looking at another Cull?"
Soren was watching me too, out of the corner of his eye, as interested in my answer as she was.
"Yeah, I think that's exactly what we might be looking at," I told them, and it was pretty much the truth.
After that she lapsed back into silence, and I was free to study our captured Infected as the anti-psychotic spread slowly through her system. I looked at her eyes most of all. She was studying the room, looking for escape routes. Everything a normal person would be doing in her situation. That wasn't what interested me though. I was looking for something else, something I'd seen in my own eyes for the last five years.
There's a little game they make medical students play when they teach you about mental illnesses: Hearing Voices. One student interviews another – but the whole time a third student is talking in the interviewee's ear, just a stream of nonsense. It's supposed to give you an idea of what it's like to experience auditory hallucinations, and I guess it kind of does. But the most interesting thing is the expression on the person's face. Once you've seen it, you never forget it: the momentary distraction, the subtle blankness, the focus pushing to the horizon as the attention turns inward.
I studied the old woman but I just didn't see it. If the Infected was hearing voices, hearing the Voice, there was nothing on her face to show it. Still, because I was studying her so closely, I was able to see the moment when the anti-psychotic began to take effect. It wasn't difficult, because the moment the madness went, the pain came.
I'd been prepared for that. "Does it hurt?" I asked her in my own broken Spanish.
"Si, senora," she said, her voice little more than a whimper. "Me duele mucho."
I didn't need Kelis to translate that for me. The painkiller was lying ready and I injected that too. The relief washed over her face like a wave and I felt an intense stab of envy. I knew what that felt like, that wash of contentment, and not a day went by when a part of me didn't want it back.
"Better?" I asked, and this time Kelis translated for me.
The old woman nodded. She pulled feebly against the bonds, seeming puzzled by their presence. They looked cruel, now that she was just an old helpless woman with a wound in her body that would shortly kill her. But the anti-psychotics wouldn't last long and my nose was still sending regular throbs of pain to every nerve ending in my body. She stayed roped up.
"Do you remember how you came to be here?" I asked her.
I could see her thinking, her eyes clearing as memory returned. "You captured me," she said and Kelis translated.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"We wanted to find out what was wrong with you," I told her, "and then see if we could cure you."
"But I'm already cured."
I shook my head. "I've given you anti-psychotics but I'm afraid their effect is only temporary."
Her face cleared, looking suddenly relieved. "So… my mind will be better soon? This… feeling will be gone?"
Kelis and I exchanged a look over her head. "You're saying you felt better before we captured you?"
"Of course." Her eyes drifted out of focus for a moment. "I was cured."
"If you were cured, why were you acting the way you were? Why wouldn't you speak to us?" I gestured at my swollen nose. "Why did you do this to me?"
She laughed. "You were trying to stop me from doing what I had to do. I didn't ask you to attack me."
"And now?"
"I don't…" She looked momentarily lost. "I don't know what it is I'm supposed to do. And I… feel."
"But you didn't feel before, did you?" I said. "You felt no pain."
"No pain," she said. "No guilt, no fear, no loneliness. That was the cure we were promised. The cure you can have too, if you want it."
Ingo and Haru had re-entered the room as she spoke. I looked at their faces. There was a flash of something on Ingo's, I wasn't sure what, but I thought that maybe it was temptation. The death of feeling held some appeal for him. Haru just looked appalled.
"Who cured you?" I asked her. "Who is it that can cure us?"
"The Leader. He plans to cure everyone." And though I knew the anti-psychotics hadn't worn off, the mad light was burning in her eyes again, the bright light of absolute conviction.
"Where can we find the Leader?" I pressed. "If we want the cure for ourselves."
"The palace, of course," she said. "The Leader has always been in his palace. And he finds you – there is no need to seek him out. He speaks to anyone who wants to listen. Please, senora, I have told you everything I can. Please release me." She was sweating, trickles of it running off her forehead and into her straggly grey hair. I thought for a moment that the painkillers were wearing off, but it wasn't that.
"Oh god," she said. "I remember. I don't want to remember. Jorge!" And then she was screaming, louder and longer than when we'd captured her outside.
"Jesus," Haru said. "What have you done to her?"
"Allowed her to feel again." I said flatly. "Who's Jorge?" I asked the woman, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to know what it was that had happened, that was pulling the terrible sound out of her. There was no reply anyway, just more piercing screams. Haru scurried out of the room as fast as he'd entered it, but Ingo stayed, staring at her. I wondered if there was anything hidden away inside him, some secret that made him want to scream the same way. There sure as hell was inside me.
I turned to Kelis, meaning to tell her to put the old woman out of her misery. But I closed my mouth as soon as I'd opened it. What, so I could keep my hands clean and keep kidding myself that I was someone who saved lives and didn't take them? No. I pulled out my own gun, turned my face away and put a bullet through the old woman's skull. There was only a very little blood.
We set out for the palace three hours later. The Leader wanted to cure everyone? That wasn't something even Haru thought we could ignore.
The walk through the streets of Havana was nerve-wracking. One of us might have hoped to slip through the shadows and side-streets unnoticed. Five of us? No chance. So we walked, calmly and quietly, as if we had every right to be there and knew exactly where we were going.
The first time we passed a cluster of the Infected I expected it all to fall apart. Surely they'd found out what we'd done to the old woman? But they just passed us by, not even sparing us a glance. Kelis let out a little huff or relief. Haru shuddered and wrapped his arms protectively around himself.
Next were the cameras, silent silver eyes on every street corner. All it would take was some simple face-recognition software. Soren ducked self-consciously as we walked past but I yanked on his arm and forced him to face forward. Conspicuously hiding from the cameras – there was software that could pick that up too. Either they'd recognise us or they wouldn't. My hand drifted down to the gun hidden beneath my baggy t-shirt.
All we could be was ready.
But all around us, the world carried on as if we weren't in it. The streets were dusty with ragged fragments of cloth and paper blowing down them in the hot wind. The Infected seemed to be in no hurry, walking slowly down the narrow streets to nowhere in particular. Bloody remnants of wounds stood out stark red on their faces, hands and legs; but no one seemed to care. Once, as we walked past, a man with a seeping sore over his left eye fell down on the pavement and didn't get back up. No one reacted, they just adjusted their paths round his body and carried on walking.
For the first time, I realised that some of the piles of cloth on the pavement had once been people, worn away by time. Dead and left to rot where they fell. Why bother to bury your dead when you just don't care that they're gone?
After thirty minutes walking the scruffy residential streets gave way to broader, bleaker roads with the concrete hulks of government buildings squatting on either side. Barbed wire lined the tops of tall fences but there was nothing to keep out any longer. The streets were deserted, none of the Infected in sight. The buildings too had the unmistakeable look of desertion about them. Only the every-present cameras peered out from their walls. Within there was an echoing emptiness which was evident even fifty feet away.
We walked on. The sky was hazy above us, caught between sunshine and rain. No shadows anywhere, just a pervasive muted light. Another fifteen minutes and we were there.
The street outside was entirely empty. There was a tall fence, security gates, cameras, guard towers. But again, that air of desertion.
"You're sure he's here?" Kelis asked.
I shrugged. "That's what the old woman said."
"Yeah," Soren said dryly. "And why would she ever want to lie to us?"
I saw Haru swallow hard, then square his shoulders. "Well, we're here now. And look…" he pointed over the gate, deep inside the palace complex. "There's light in there. There must be power. Why would they waste electricity on a place that was empty?"
The cameras to each side watched us blankly. There was no question that whoever was inside knew we were there.
"So…" Kelis said. "Do we go in?"
I looked at the cameras again. "Nothing to lose now. I guess we climb."
Kelis boosted each of us over the high fence, using that deceptive strength of hers. Soren went last, pulling her up and over as if she weighed nothing at all. His hand lingered on hers before he let it go. I saw her notice it, the slight unease as she finally pulled her fingers free. That was never going to end well.
Inside we all paused a moment – waiting for the other shoe to drop, I guess. But no guards came pouring out, no sirens started blaring and after a moment we got moving deeper into the silent concrete complex.
When I was a kid, no older than nine or ten, I read The Day of the Triffids. I remember having to sneak it past my parents, because they would have thought it was too scary for me. But it didn't scare me at all. The image that stuck in my mind, the one I absolutely loved, was of the hero wandering through a deserted London, where everybody else was dead.
I remember finding that an incredibly seductive idea. To be able to wander into everybody's houses, see what went on behind doors that were usually closed. To have it all to yourself. Maybe it was a legacy of that time I'd spent in hospital when I was very young and I had no privacy at all: even the inside of my body became public property then. Maybe that was why I could imagine being so alone without finding it lonely.
Wandering through those echoing, empty rooms made me think of that with a sudden sharp stab of nostalgia for a childhood that could never be relived, not even through children of my own. There wasn't a soul in the place. No bodies, even. Nothing. We passed through living quarters, utilitarian barracks, plush sleeping chambers, impersonal guest rooms, through offices and eventually through labs. Three of them, fully equipped but not purpose built. These had been offices once, I guessed, before Ash put them to better use. There was no sign that they'd been left in a hurry, or during any kind of emergency. No signs of flight, or disaster. The people who'd once occupied them were just… gone.
"OK," Kelis said as we looked around at the benches, Bunsen burners, pipettes and all the usual apparatus of a working lab, "I guess this is just a front. He must have his real base somewhere else."
"It could be anywhere," Haru said. "How will we ever find it?"
"But you were right to begin with," I told him, "the power's still on. Something's still happening here." Halogen light shone down from the ceiling, flattening our features.
"A relay station," Ingo said. His voice was soft but startling, because it was always so easy to forget that he was there. "Remote control. There were satellite dishes on the roof, transmitters. The feed from the cameras goes out, the signal for the loudspeakers comes in."
"Goes out where?" Soren said. "Comes in from where?"
"Off the island," I said with sudden certainty.
Kelis raised an eyebrow. "You think?"
I gestured around me, at the carefully abandoned lab. "This was his headquarters. He was doing whatever he was doing here. Why would he bother to pack it all up just to shift somewhere else on Cuba? The only reason to leave would be to go somewhere else entirely."
"OK, I buy that," Kelis said. "So what was he doing in this place? This lab – it's not original is it? He built it, just like Queen M built hers."
"Yeah," I said. Only he built it better, because Ash was a real scientist, not a social one. I walked away from the others, along the length of the benches, scavenging for any clues. They weren't hard to find. I don't think when he'd left here he'd meant to erase his traces. He'd just taken what he still needed and left the rest behind.
It was all very familiar looking, and no wonder. The same set-up we'd had back at the base. I recognised the Petri dishes with carefully cultivated cultures, left to die or breed alone. In the furthest corner of the room there was a laptop, plugged in but switched off.
"Paydirt," I told the others as I booted it up.
"Why did they leave it behind if it's still working?" Haru said dubiously.
I shrugged. "Because they didn't need it anymore and they didn't expect anyone to find it."
I was right, though a part of me knew that Haru was right as well. This was all just too convenient. Did Ash want me to find it? Why? But even if he'd meant me to have this information, for whatever twisted game he was playing, it didn't mean it wasn't worth having.
"Anything?" Kelis asked.
I nodded as I skimmed through the directory before I delved deeper, because you'd be amazed how much people give away just in the way they name things. "Definitely something."
Thirty minutes later I could tell her exactly what. It wasn't a surprise, not after everything else I'd seen, but the certainty still sat like a sour lump in my gut. Guilt too, because a part of me had suspected all along, even back when there was still something I could have done to prevent it. Memory again, sharper than pain.
Ash out of the lab, taking one of the few sleeps we allowed ourselves back in those frantic days when it still seemed possible that we could stop it all, if only we could do it in time.
I was feeling wired that night, I remembered that. I wasn't sure why, maybe it was the message I'd had from him, a quick email which had taken three days to reach me. It must be getting bad out there, I knew, if information itself was beginning to sicken and slow. He hadn't been able to say much, with the security checks at his end and ours. But I could hear his voice saying every line and it had left me itchy to see him, to hear his voice for real. I knew that I probably never would again and it was almost unbearable. When you love someone like that it seems impossible that the love itself can't overcome every obstacle between you. If love can't do that, then what's the point of it?
So I was restless and unhappy and, as I usually did, I chose to sublimate it in work. My computer was slow to boot, some bug the techies hadn't been able to fix, so I switched on Ash's instead, unthinkingly using the password he'd told me long ago when we were students together and the only thing he had to hide was the fact that he'd been cheating on his girlfriend for the last three months.
I was planning on logging onto the shared drive, not even looking at his private files. I didn't expect there to be any private files. When would he have time to do anything but work?
Except there were private files – and they were to do with work. Not our work, the job I thought he'd left behind him when he came here. I knew, of course, that for the last few years he'd been employed by the Department of Defence. There hadn't seemed anything sinister about it, there were plenty of reasons why the DoD might want to employ a virologist. Defensive reasons.
I'd known, too, that some of the ingredients we'd been mixing into this 'Cure' we were creating came from classified sources. The cutting edge gene therapies, the more esoteric retroviruses, borderline unethical stem cell research. These weren't things available to the general public. But here they were in Ash's files, files with dates going back months, years; long before he knew we were going to use them. This was the stuff Ash had been working on before the Cull struck. Wasn't it just the mother of all coincidences that it turned out to be exactly what we needed to make the Cure?
No, I told myself, as my heart raced. It was just Goldilocks Syndrome. We live in the only possible universe that can support human life because if it couldn't, we wouldn't be here to marvel at it. And Ash had been recruited into the project precisely because his experience was so exactly what we needed.
Except. Except… here was a file on gene-therapy for sickle cell anaemia. There was another on the use of stem cells in adult neural rewriting. It was now obvious to me that the RNA we were carefully sculpting to change A and B to O-neg was a mash-up of both of these. But why the second? As far as we knew, the Cull wasn't neuro-active.
"What are you doing?" Ash asked from right over my shoulder.
"Snooping through your files," I told him, because he and I had never been able to lie to each other. Or at least I hadn't. For the first time, I was beginning to wonder about him.
"Find anything interesting?" he asked, so nonchalantly that I instantly relaxed.
"Yeah, highly classified defence department files. It said something about killing anyone who read them – but they were just kidding, right?"
He smiled and we got back to work and I never did ask him what exactly that research had been about, and why exactly it had fitted our needs so precisely. I never asked – but sometimes, late at night, I wondered.
"Find anything interesting?" Kelis asked me now, and I knew that I was pale when I turned from the laptop's screen to face her.
"Yeah, I guess interesting is one word for it."
"And what would be another word?" Ingo asked, as literal as ever.
"Terrifying."
"It's the Infected, isn't it?" Haru ran a hand nervously through the dark spikes of his hair. "This was done deliberately. The Infection – it was designed, not accidental."
I nodded and Haru grimaced and turned away.
Kelis was still studying me carefully, her intense brown eyes narrowed. "That's not everything, is it?"
"No, it isn't. The thing is, he did create the Infection deliberately." A perversion of the Cure I was carrying in my own blood, but I wasn't ready to tell her that yet. "He deliberately made it contagious. Blood-borne at the moment."
"At the moment?" Haru's eyebrows were so high they were lost in his hairline.
"That was the best he could do to begin with. But he was researching other forms of transmission."
"Airborne?" Ingo asked, and even he sounded hushed. Everyone knew that the Cull had been airborne too. It couldn't have done what it did otherwise.
"Maybe. But the trail here had reached a dead end, and he abandoned it about six months ago. That's the date of the last update to any of the files." And that really was as much as I could tell from the fragments of half-finished research on the abandoned laptop.
"We need to find him, wherever he is now," Kelis said and I felt a warm rush of relief because I didn't want to be the one who had to suggest this.
"How?" Haru asked.
Ingo held up his hand, like a child in class asking for permission to speak. "Somewhere in here there must be a central computer co-ordinating the information going in and out. If we can find that, I can tell you where the transmission is being sent."
"Good," I said. "When you find it, there's one other thing I need you to do."
Have you ever watched a whole city burn? There's a wild kind of pleasure in it, giving free reign to a force of nature that we're more often trying to contain. The truck we'd commandeered raced over the cracked tarmac of the road, but the heat travelled faster, clasping at our throats as we tried to outrun what we'd done.
All around us, the loudspeakers were still blaring the same message: "Everyone must come to Havana immediately. Come to the centre of Havana and await further instructions." They'd been saying the same thing for the last two days. We hadn't been able to wait any longer, but it hadn't been quite long enough. All around us, Infected were still flooding into the city, calmly walking into the flames which had already consumed thousands, tens of thousands, of lives. The fire wouldn't get all of them, there'd still be pockets of them in the furthest reaches of the island. But still, it would get enough.
So I was a mass murderer now. And in the end it had been so easy. All it needed was for Ingo to splice together audio tracks from a few of Ash's previous messages. The words didn't sound quite right, the emphasis in the wrong places, elision between syllables which didn't belong together. But the Infected didn't seem to care. It was their master's voice, and they had no choice but to obey it. The cameras were put on a loop, so Ash wouldn't be able to see what we'd done, while his own audio feed had been cut. We'd left him no way to save this terrible experiment of his, we were putting the Petri-dishes in the furnace and burning the cultures away for good.
After that, it was just a few cans of petrol over some central buildings, a hot day and a strong wind. Fire is endlessly hungry – it doesn't need much of an invitation to consume everything. I leaned against the cab of the truck and looked back, like Lott's wife, knowing there was a price to pay but helpless to avoid seeing for myself what we were leaving behind.
There's a Pink Floyd album cover: a burning man shaking hands with another, oblivious to the fire which is eating him alive. It's almost funny, the way he just doesn't seem to care. There were hordes of them, all walking into the furnace, on and on as their flesh blistered and burned, red fissures opening in skin like the cracks in the surface of a volcano that tell you another eruption is due. The smell was overwhelming. The meaty, porky smell of human beings burning.
I saw a girl no older than eight walk calmly down the narrow alley between two buildings. The doorways of the buildings belched yellow fire at her, little sparks of it drifting ahead of the body of the flame. Her hair caught first, burning a bright orange against her skull, but she kept on walking. She kept walking until her legs gave way, the bones snapping in the heat.
Finally, when the girl's body was lost to sight and the crowds on the streets had begun to thin and the flames receded into the distance, I looked away.
Kelis caught my eye. "We had no choice," she told me in a voice that said even she didn't believe it.
"It's done now," I said. "They won't be going out recruiting for a while. And they won't be trying to stop us from leaving."
"So now we find the dear Leader and stop him doing anything worse," Kelis said, offering a sort of comfort.
I looked ahead in my mind to the ocean fast approaching, and beyond to our destination, across the waters and most of the way across a continent. All the way to Las Vegas where, one day soon, I'd look Ash in the eye and make him pay. Not so much for what he'd done, but for what he'd turned me into.