The next day Jeannine took us to see the other collection, a warehouse full of army-issue small and not-so-small arms. Kelis smiled for the first time since Soren had died. "Yeah," she said, wandering through the aisles of weaponry, handling a rifle here, a rocket launcher there, "this is more like it."
"He's still going to cream your asses," Jeannine said. "No amount of guns are going to change that."
"So why are you giving us any?" I asked.
She shrugged. "Because you might do some damage while he takes you down, and that's worth a small investment."
"Gee, thanks," I said dryly, but in truth I was grateful to the Collector. Without his help we would have stood no chance at all. He was giving us food too, water for the long drive across the desert and a new vehicle to make it in. The truck was big and green and ugly as hell but it looked like it could get into an argument with a rhino and win. I'd seen tanks which were less heavily armoured. We loaded it with the guns, grenades and rockets Kelis had chosen, then gathered round to plan our attack.
The Collector had given us maps of Vegas too. Haru spread one of them out on the hood of the truck, peering at the network of roads and houses fading into the emptiness of the desert. "It's a big place," Haru said. "Do you really think he fortified it all?"
I looked at the tangle of roads and tried to figure out where I'd have put the bulk of my forces. Everywhere, the Voice told me. You will never defeat him – you can only join him. I didn't want to believe it but I knew it was right, at least about one thing. "He won't have taken any chances," I said. "He'll have surveillance, like he did in Cuba, and he'll have his forces deployed so they can respond to any point of attack as quickly as possible."
"No weak spots?" Kelis said doubtfully.
"So then, stealth would be better." Ingo suggested.
"Maybe," I said. "But this is a city in the middle of a desert. Sneaking in unnoticed isn't really an option."
"OK," Kelis said. "So what's the plan?"
I shrugged. "Try not to get killed too quickly."
Santa Fe receded into the distance behind us, lost in the dust. Far ahead and to our right, the plain gave way to hills and then mountains, the scattered remnants of the Rockies. Out here, it was easy to forget the Cull had ever happened. People had always shunned this barren land, ghost towns already lost in the sand long before the deaths started, places where the young no longer saw any reason to stay. It was impossible to say how old the corpses of the cars and lorries that littered the roadside were. Some looked like they came from the Nineteen-Fifties. They had probably been rusting down to zero for decades.
It's hard to grasp the endless vastness of America, its landscapes which just go on and on. We drove for two hours and the mountains didn't seem to get any nearer. Maybe I'd died during the gun battle in Oklahoma, or on the beach at Miami, even back at the base, and this was the afterlife I'd been condemned to, this endless journey. Punishment for taking that young soldier's life.
The scenery was hypnotic in its monotony. I'd chosen to drive, glad of anything that used up cognitive space and stopped me thinking about anything else, like how the hell I thought I was going to face up to Ash. Or whether, when it came to it, I'd even want to. I was down to two doses of anti-psychotics now. In two days time, if I didn't find more, I'd be Ash.
At first the dust cloud was just a distraction at the edge of my vision. A micro-storm, I thought, a dust devil weaving a solitary path across the desert. Except, no natural storm ever kept going in a line that straight. A line that ran entirely parallel to ours, and had done for at least fifteen miles now.
Kelis followed the direction of my gaze and tensed. "Convoy," she said. "Off-road vehicles out in the desert."
She was right. I could see the glint of metal and something brighter in the heart of the dust cloud now. Another minute and I could make out the individual vehicles, bigger than cars or even trucks. Winnebagos maybe, sturdy enough to travel over sand and rock.
"They're heading towards us," Haru said.
Ingo nodded. "Our paths will converge in approximately ten minutes" Despite the cold jolt of alarm in my stomach I smiled. There was something reassuring about his inability to react in a normal human way to anything.
"Stop and fortify or try to outrun them?" Kelis asked.
My hands tightened on the wheel. "How do we know they're hostile?"
"How do we know they're not?"
We opted to stop, in the end. There was no telling what the maximum speed was on their vehicles. And even if we could outrun them, did we really want to be heading into Vegas with another batch of enemies on our tail?
The desert was eerily silent when we switched off our engine. The air shivered with heat, foxing my eyes as I strained into the distance, trying to see if our shadows were turning to face us or continuing on their original course.
"Why did I ever leave Japan?" Haru said suddenly. "I'm so tired of this. I thought danger would be exciting. Isn't that what the stories tell you? But all it does is wear you down."
"You're welcome to leave," Kelis said. She hooked a thumb back over her shoulder. "Santa Fe's three hundred miles in that direction."
Haru grimaced and looked away, but I knew just what he meant. I was tired too, of the constant fights, particularly the one going on inside me. Surrender seemed to be an increasingly attractive option. Just… giving up.
The convoy was definitely heading towards us. The dust cloud's shape had shifted, seeming to shorten as the vehicles turned and sped towards us straight on. I could hear them now, the rattle of wheels over rocks, the grind of motors – and something else. After a few moments I realised that it was music. The deep bass beat of it seemed to resonate through the rocks beneath us and up into our bodies.
The closer they came, the odder the convoy looked. I could see now what the bright flash I'd seen earlier had been – solar panels on the roof of each of the dozen or so vehicles, iridescent and delicate as butterfly wings. The vehicles themselves seemed to be buses. But they were definitely home-made because no factory could possibly turn out machines that crazy looking; sides meeting at every angle except ninety degrees, paint covering every inch of them, and each inch a different colour.
The first of them swerved to a halt a hundred yards ahead of us, and I saw that there was a big yellow smiley face painted on its side, grinning out at us from beneath a painting of a dove. I felt the barrel of my gun slowly drooping from horizontal to vertical.
Kelis frowned at me. "Could be trying to lull us into a false sense of security."
"It's working," I told her. Up close, I'd finally recognised the music: it was Hello by the Beloved. Either there was some very complex psychological warfare going on, or these people were no sort of threat.
Five of them came out of the first bus as the others begun to pull up behind it. They were all young, twenties to thirties, and the kind of dishevelled that took some effort to achieve. I stared at them, disbelieving, because I thought that kind of studied cool had disappeared from the world along with ninety-three per cent of its population. None of them was armed which meant either that there were more people hidden behind the mirrored windows of the bus pointing something lethal at us, or they were suicidally stupid. Looking at their dazed, slightly vacant faces, I was going to opt for the latter.
"Hey," the leader said, a tanned, sandy haired boy who wouldn't have looked out of place on a surfboard.
"Hello," I said cautiously. My hand was still on my gun and so was Kelis', but he didn't seem to mind.
"We're not looking for a fight," another of them said. She was tall and stringy with features that were okay individually but didn't quite match up on her face.
"Us neither," I said. "On the other hand, we weren't following you, so I think we've got less explaining to do."
Surfer boy laughed and so did the others, and for the first time I realised why they were so relaxed: they were stoned. I holstered my gun, the jittery adrenaline rush easing off.
"Who are you people?" Haru said.
"We're the party at the end of the world," surfer boy said. "Want to have some fun?"
"You know what," I said, "I think I've already had about as much fun as I can handle."
He shrugged. "Also, we're going to Vegas, and the Collector thought you might be looking for an escort."
"So, is Las Vegas a big party town these days?" I asked later, when we'd driven in convoy with the party people till a few hours past sunset. We all stuck to the road this time, finally leaving it only to park up on a camping spot they told us they'd used before.
There were stockpiles of wood here, twisted and bleached like bones, and they'd lit fires, several smaller cooking fires and one huge central bonfire whose heat radiated out into the night, chasing away the creeping cold. The flames were bright, although above us the stars seemed brighter, a perfect spread of them across the sky, pin-sharp. There wasn't a flicker of light pollution from horizon to horizon, probably not even back before the Cull.
Mike, the surfer-boy leader of the group, shrugged. "Everyone needs to relax now and again."
"You've been to Vegas?" I pressed. "Recently?"
The young black-haired Goth who'd twined herself around his arm the moment he sat down, laughed. "Yeah, but wherever we go there's a party – that's, like, the point."
I looked across the cooking fire to Haru, clutching a metal bowl of soup between his hands. He rolled his eyes. These guys were worse than useless as a source of information, but if they could slip us into Vegas under the radar they'd be worth their weight in gold.
There were a lot of them – more than I'd realised; at least a hundred. They were sitting around their own small cooking fires in huddles of three or four. The flames of the central bonfire shot thirty, forty feet into the air, advertising our presence to anyone with their eyes open – but they didn't seem to care. They seemed supremely confident that nothing in the world would hurt them. Could be the drugs – could be something else. And if we were hooking up with these people I wanted to know for sure.
When the meal was done I turned to Mike and asked as casually as possible if it would be OK to take a look at the buses. "We're running low on fuel ourselves – solar power's got to be the way forward."
"Sure," he said, waving a lazy arm towards the distant, misshapen silhouettes of the vehicles. "Just be back in time for the burning – it's kind of a bonding ritual." His other hand was in the young Goth's hair, gently running the strands through his fingers, and I noticed for the first time that she was pregnant. Only a few months gone, the little creature inside her was adding just a slight roundness to her belly. For a second I couldn't take my eyes off them: the tenderness of his gesture, the blind hopefulness of bringing another life into this world. With an effort I blinked and looked away.
Kelis was out on the periphery of the group, a darker blot against the night sky. I didn't like sitting with the vast emptiness of the desert behind me, but I knew she'd rather have that at her back than these strangers. When she saw me heading for the buses she drifted to her feet and joined me. A moment later and Ingo was with us too, silent and thoughtful. Haru looked up and then back at his sketch, a delicate line drawing of the Goth girl that hinted at the body beneath her baggy black clothes. He kept the page carefully tipped up towards him, so Mike wouldn't see it. I shrugged and turned back to the others as we mounted the steps to the first of the buses.
"Are these guys for real?" Kelis asked.
I looked back at them, lounging contentedly around their small camp fires. "They didn't seem too bothered about us poking around. They haven't searched us, or asked for our weapons."
"Or asked us who we are or why we're going to Vegas," Kelis said. "Don't you think that's odd?"
I shrugged. "With anyone else, yeah. With these guys…"
And then we were inside the bus and I felt a sick lurch in my stomach. It was a lab, low-tech but unmistakeable. Fuck! Why the hell did I still trust anyone? I backed away, gun out of its holster, ready to make a run if it wasn't already too late. I looked to Kelis, expecting her usual hair-trigger reaction to threat, but she was still looking at the lab. Looking and laughing.
I relaxed, just a little, though my heartbeat was still pulsing in my ears. "There's something I'm not getting here, right?"
Kelis took in my expression, my hand clawed around the handle of the Magnum. "It's OK, its fine,' she said, hand gently resting against mine, prying my fingers loose. Her tone was almost crooning, the voice you used with a hysteric. I must have seemed close to the edge, teetering on it. I guess I was. The Voice was constant now, chipping away at my calm and sanity.
"This is not the same as Ashok's laboratory in Cuba," Ingo said. He had a beaker in his hand, squinting at its thick brown-yellow contents.
"It's a meth lab," Kelis said. "Primitive, but it doesn't take much. Look." She gestured at a side table, which I saw now was piled high with opened boxes of prescription cold medicine. The ephedrine, I suddenly remembered – extract it and you were halfway to having yourself a batch of crystal meth.
Finally, I laughed too. "Tweakers. OK."
Not just tweakers, it turned out. The next bus had a lab set-up that looked a lot more complex but by then I wasn't too worried. Beside, they'd left a convenient pile of their end product on one table, little off-white pills with the rough imprint of a dove on them. Old school. "Ecstasy," I said.
Kelis was inspecting a heap of white powder. She took a small dab on her finger and licked it before I could stop her. "Speed too, I think. Or it could be ketamine." She grinned, suddenly. "Give me five minutes – if I start fighting its speed, if I just lie there staring at my fingers, it's K."
"You have not taken enough for either effect," Ingo said. Kelis' eyes met mine, amused. A second later we looked away, the momentary closeness between us a reminder of things we didn't want to think about.
The third bus was a living quarter, crowded bunk beds and a filthy bathroom. The walls were draped with tie-died fabric and bad art. It looked like a squat I'd lived in for a week back when I was a medical student.
"How do these people survive?" Kelis asked as we walked into the fourth bus. "They're sitting targets." Here was something I'd seen in the squat, too: growing tanks, heat lamps, and a profusion of green. The unmistakeable harsh greasy smell of dope.
"Like the farmers," I said. "They've got the expertise to make this stuff, why would anyone want to interfere with that? And my guess is they give it away for free."
"We do," Mike said, a dark shape in the doorway of the bus. "We don't have the tech to make anything high grade, but it's good enough to get rolling."
"It's a fair trade, drugs for food and safe passage."
He smiled, lopsided. "But the drugs are just a means to an end. It's the party we're about – the good time."
"Yes," Ingo said, "because a party is precisely what people need in this world."
Mike shook his head, taking Ingo's flat tone for sarcasm. But I knew that Ingo didn't do irony, and I thought that he was probably right. Mike and his people offered an escape, and that was more valuable than any pill, powder or plant.
Later, they had a party for us. I hadn't intended to join in, but when they dragged out the effigy, a huge figure of wood and paper that must have been hidden away somewhere behind the buses, I decided that I'd stay to watch that at least. I was flooded with childhood memories of Guy Fawkes Night, innocent memories too painful to look at and too precious to ignore.
It took twenty of them to carry the figure to the fire. They used a pulley to lever it upright and for a moment it teetered, a stain on the starscape, before it tipped over and burnt. As the flames licked up the wooden struts of its legs, turning them to ash, I felt other more unwelcome memories. The people of Cuba, burnt to death for a deal they'd made years before, whose terms they probably hadn't understood.
I turned away, sickened, to find Mike behind me, holding out a tray of pills. The doves mocked me, symbols of a peace none of us would know again. But I wanted to. Suddenly, I really wanted to. So I took one and put it in my mouth, quickly swallowing away the bitter chemical taste of it. I could feel Kelis' eyes burning into my face, but I wouldn't meet them.
Half an hour later, the drug began to kick in, first a rush that was almost a panic, then the panic transforming into an energy that was also the most profound relaxation I'd ever felt. There was music playing somewhere, a haunting melody and a heavy beat. I let my body move to it, the movement no effort at all.
Off to one side, I could see Haru with a joint hanging from his mouth, his eyes narrow and bloodshot but content. I smiled at him and he smiled back. I knew what I really thought of him, his cowardice and the moral vacuum where his heart should have been, but for just that moment I didn't care. The love I felt was big enough to include him, to include everyone. To my new eyes everyone looked like an echo of the Goth girl, a young life curling and growing inside them, pregnant with hope.
I joined a circle of people dancing around the bonfire. My hand was taken by a thin brown one on one side, a blunt white one on the other. The family of man, I thought, and laughed.
The hours stretched and warped and the night lasted both forever and no time at all. I took another pill, and then some of the powder which made me feel higher, or clearer, or happier; by then I could barely tell. The high couldn't last though – it was fighting against too much. The melancholy was lurking just underneath it. A moment's inattention and it crept back in and grabbed me.
I walked away, out from the others into the wide desert around us. Someone called out to me, but I ignored them and they didn't follow. The joy the drugs brought felt like a joining, but there was a profound selfishness at the heart of it, an attention only to one's own pleasure. I walked until the fire was a distant blur of orange and the stars were the brightest thing in the night. I could just walk forever, I thought. Ash needed to be stopped, but it didn't have to be me. For one moment I let myself entertain the fantasy. Going back, across the continent and then the ocean. Finding him and pretending that I was still the person he loved. He'd never know all the things I'd done, and I'd never have to tell him.
He's long dead, the Voice told me, and you can't go back to being who you were. It's too late. I sighed and took one last look around me at the stark solitude of the desert, then walked back to the light and the people.
When I woke up the next morning I felt the lingering remnants of the drugs, a quiet echo of the absolute contentment I'd felt last night. Kelis wordlessly brought me a mug of coffee. I didn't know where she'd spent the night. She hadn't been in the truck when I'd returned to sleep there, curling myself in the back seat.
"Vegas in five hours," she told me. There was an edge of accusation in her tone – do you really think that was the best time to get wrecked? – but she didn't voice it.
The desert looked bleaker in the early morning light, or maybe that was the beginning of the vicious come-down I was due any time now. I sighed and started the engine.
Three hours of driving later we hit the Colorado river, wide and powerful down here in the plains. We drove along its high banks for ten miles and then, suddenly, there was the concrete sweep of the Hoover dam, so vast you almost couldn't believe that it was man made. I wondered how long it would be before we were ready to make anything that astonishing again.
The tarmac in the road over the bridge was crazed and broken causing the convoy to slow almost to a stop. I felt a crawling sense of unease as we crossed, the sense that we were being watched.
"Cameras," Kelis said, pointing. She was right. There were two of them, high on the struts at each end of the dam, swivelling sleekly to follow us as we passed. I had the sudden, suffocating certainty that we were back in Ash's kingdom. I was sure the broken road surface was his doing, a way of slowing everyone down to let him examine them and decide whether to let them in. There were blocky buildings at each end of the bridge which I thought had once housed museums and tourist shops. Now they would be filled with his people, ready to push undesirables off the narrow road and far, far down to the waters below.
I turned my face away, keeping it as much in shadow as I could. My fingers itched to be holding a weapon although I was sure that was just the sort of thing the invisible observers would be watching for.
The minutes seem to pass agonisingly slowly as the convoy inched its way over the bridge. My head began to throb with the tension. Even Ingo seemed uneasy, the dark skin on his round face looking stretched and old.
"Come on, come one," Haru muttered. He was rocking backwards and forwards in his seat, little jerky motions which I don't think he knew he was making. Ingo reached out a hand and pressed him back firmly into his seat. Trying to calm him.
But no one stopped us, because fifteen minutes later we were driving past the last buildings and away from the bridge. Haru let out a gasp of relief that was almost a sob and we drove on, an ugly green minnow in a school of gaudy angel fish.
There were five more checkpoints in the next sixty miles and they waved us through each one. As we passed I saw people lean out of the windows of the buses, throwing little parcels to the guardsmen, the price of passage. I look at them out of the corner of my eye, trying not to let them know that I was watching. There was nothing about them that resembled the Infected in Cuba: just bored-looking men in khaki, smoking cigarettes and now the joints that the Party People had thrown them.
"They look OK," Kelis said. "Like regular people."
"Yeah," I said. "And so do I. The Infected only look the way they do because Ash got it wrong. Maybe he's perfected it."
Haru scowled. "A city of lunatics."
"Or worse," I said, and we carried on driving in silence.
Finally we could see Vegas ahead of us, a dark stain on the sand that slowly resolved itself into a network of roads and then into trees, cars, individual houses. There was a burst of gold at the centre of it, bright in the midday sun, and I realised that the lights of Glitter Gulch were still blazing. That was just like Ash, I thought, who despite being a scientist had always been a showman.
The city blended out into the desert and we were driving into the suburbs before I'd even realised. There was no obvious check-point but I knew that the unseen watchers were here too. Cameras were everywhere and people too. Some of them stopped and stared as we passed, none of the zombie-like inattention of the Cubans here. The women were wearing floral dresses, the men jeans and t-shirts. Different faces, different bodies, yet so alike in some way I couldn't quite identify. If I didn't know better they could have been clones, the same few individuals repeated over and over.
"Is it just me," Haru said, "or are all the women here pregnant?"
As soon as he said it I knew that I'd noticed it from the start but my conscious mind hadn't quite processed it.
"Yeah, they are," Kelis said. "That's… creepy."
"Rebirth is the only way to repopulate," Ingo said. I hoped that it was as simple as that, but I absolutely knew that it wasn't.
Deeper into the city, but not quite at its heart, the buses finally stopped and we dismounted. Kelis looked a question at me and I nodded. The party people had bought us safe passage so far and we had nothing to gain by ditching them yet. I looked around. There didn't seem to be anything special about the place we'd stopped: tract housing to one side, the concrete cubes of a hospital the other.
My nerves had been humming with tension, the vibration rising in pitch the nearer we came to Ash. I could sense his presence everywhere, and in my head the Voice was telling me that I should go to him. "Any reason we've stopped here?" I asked Mike as casually as I could.
He smiled and pointed at the hospital. "Medical check-up. No one's allowed in without one." Justified paranoia in a post-Cull world, to check that newcomers weren't bringing new diseases with them – except I knew Ash and I didn't believe this was the real reason. The rest of Mike's people had dismounted the buses as we spoke. As I tried to back away I realised that we were surrounded, ten of Mike's people around each of us, subtly isolating us. I reached for my gun but they were so close there was no room to draw it, and even if I could take some of them before they overpowered me, I couldn't take them all.
I tried to catch Kelis' eye, or Ingo's, but we'd been separated quite efficiently and now the party people were moving towards the hospital entrance, pressing us along with them. "What's this about?" I asked Mike, trying to swim uselessly against the tide of people carrying me forward.
"It's just routine," he said. He was still smiling but the smile looked like something frozen now. Fake.
Helplessly, I was pushed through the hospital doors. I drew my gun finally, however useless it might be, because I knew this was where the storm I'd been sensing all day was going to break.
A hand grabbed my arm and the gun was taken from me before I could even think of using it. I snapped my head round but the woman had already backed away from me. She was big, armed and unsmiling. She was also pregnant. I heard a cry of pain to my left and saw Kelis drop to her knees. I knew that she'd been disarmed too. There were twenty or more women waiting in the room, all armed and all of them pregnant. As soon as they had our weapons they stepped in front of the doors behind us, blocking our escape.
I looked at Mike, leaning relaxed against one wall. "You didn't get any message from the Collector," I said. "It was Ash who sent you to pick us up."
He smiled and shrugged, as if none of it really mattered. "It's OK. They won't hurt you if you co-operate."
There were doctors in the room, men in white coats with friendly reassuring faces, and it almost could have been just a routine physical. Except I remembered Paris and there was something about the set-up here, about the way they herded the women to the right and men to the left, that sent a spike of unease through my nerves.
"It's OK," said one of the girls, the young Goth with the black hair. "They'll do the men first. And you're not… you know… are you?"
"I'm not what?" I asked, my voice a dry rasp. And then, before she could answer, a horrible suspicion began to form. "I'm not pregnant?"
"Right," she said and I tried to back away but there was nowhere to go and about twenty guns pointed right at me. I didn't think they'd hesitate to shoot through the girl to get at me.
"You'll need to strip," the doctor said to the men. Exactly like Paris, I thought, as the men from the buses stripped while Ingo and Haru watched, motionless. It was almost comedic, the sight of all that tanned, naked flesh and the two clothed figures in the middle of it, upright and tense. I was so focussed on Ingo and Haru that it took me a moment to work out what was wrong. It was only when Mike turned his dazed, not-all-there smile on me that I saw it.
Mike's stomach was flat, abs perfectly sculpted, a thin line of hair leading down from the middle of his belly to… nothing. There was nothing there, not even a stump, nothing left of his genitals but a healed over white scar. I felt a rush of bile to the back of my throat and pressed a hand against my mouth to hold it in.
I looked past Mike at the other men. All of them were the same. Some of the scars were angry and red, recent. Some were clumsier than others, the mark of a more amateur surgeon. But every one of them was a eunuch. Worse than eunuchs – geldings. No longer men in the way that really mattered.
I saw Haru's face, frozen with horror, as he took it in. Beside him Ingo was utterly impassive. Mike turned his smile on them both. "It's really all right," he told them. "They'll give you an anaesthetic, you won't feel anything. And you can take hormones, if you want them, to replace what's lost."
"To replace..?" Haru said, voice high and incredulous. And then his paralysis suddenly broke and he was running towards the entrance. The men reached out for him but their hands slid away as Haru's desperate flight carried him past. He was only ten feet from the door when they finally brought him to the ground, five of them piling themselves on top of him. I could hear Haru's ragged, half-sobbing breaths from beneath the pile of naked men. When they slowly let him up, arms locked behind him, he was crying.
Throughout it all, Ingo had remained entirely still. He might have used the distraction to make his own escape, but he didn't. When Haru was finally subdued, Ingo calmly shucked first his own loose green t-shirt, and then the khaki trousers he was wearing underneath. When he was entirely naked, he turned to face me.
I don't know why I was so shocked to see the same angry red scar on Ingo's groin, the same absence beneath. I should have worked it out long before.
"You were working for him all along," I said.
"Yes," Ash said. "He was."