Kill or Cure Read online

  Queen M took me on the tour herself. The flagship was just what I'd thought: a luxury cruise liner which had been stranded off the coast of St Martin when the Cull struck and its crew were too sick to think about anything but dying.

  "We threw off the corpses, scrubbed down the decks and took her over," Queen M told me. She was standing at the prow of the small catamaran they'd launched from the belly of the cruise ship, the wind rattling through the beads in her hair.

  "Where do you get the fuel to move her?" I asked.

  Queen M looked at me, judging the question. Why did I want to know? Was I figuring out their weaknesses? "We don't very often," she told me eventually. "But it's useful to know that we can if we need to."

  The catamaran circled the prow of the boat and I got my first view of the rest of the fleet. Hundreds of vessels, almost all of them sailboats, some big enough to carry a crew of fifty, others barely big enough for one. There were fishing boats as well as luxury yachts, and somewhere in the middle I saw the flying boat which had taken me from the compound. After a second I noticed that all the vessels were all flying the same flag: a stylised drawing of a red blood cell - the outline of the platelet picked out on red against a white background. A survivor's celebration. And also a subtle sort of warning.

  "All following you?" I asked, watching one ship hove away from the fleet, the wind billowing its sails.

  "I brought them together," she said, a non-answer.

  "And the rest of the world?" In the back of my mind, always, were the thoughts of him. Of what had happened back in London and whether there was any chance he might have survived it.

  She looked at me almost with pity. "You don't know?"

  I looked away, not liking what I was reading in her eyes. "I can guess, but..."

  "Yes," she said. "Everything you've guessed, and worse. There's no government left in Europe or America. The Cull took most people, but other illnesses and fighting and just outright stupidity took an awful lot more. Infrastructure broke down. The rule of law. There are crops rotting on the plains of America while the people of New York starve. You wouldn't believe, would you, that civilization could fall apart so quickly?"

  I shook my head. But I saw in her face that she'd believed it - and prepared for it.

  After that, the catamaran headed for one of the more distant islands, a small hump on the horizon. We passed more ships as we travelled, some with long thin lines stretching into the water from their bows, trawling the deep waters for fish.

  "Yours too?" I asked.

  She nodded at me and then at the dark-skinned fishermen on the boat as they shouted a greeting. Nearer in to the island I saw something stretching across the waves, barring our way. "Fishing net?" I guessed.

  "Wave farm." The turbines stretched entirely around the shore, ringing the small island in steel. They must have generated enough power to supply everyone on board the flagship and then some. Civilisation might have collapsed elsewhere, but it seemed to be alive and kicking here.

  "Food?" I asked. She didn't answer, just waved an instruction to our skipper. The catamaran veered sharply to starboard, throwing up a cliff of water as it turned, and we headed for yet another island.

  At first I thought a massive fire had scorched this island's soil, but as we drew nearer I realised that it was just black, volcanic sand. The interior was flat, stretching off to a distant horizon, but it was vibrantly green. Closer still and I could see the pattern to it, a patchwork of fields with flourishing crops. There were people there; slowly working their way up the lines of crops, planting or weeding, whatever the hell you did when you were a farmer.

  "Food," I said.

  "The Caribbean's a fertile place," she replied.

  "And that's why you came here?"

  "One of the reasons. My mother was Trinidadian you know. We used to come here on family holidays when I was a child." Her face had a faraway look for a moment, drifting in memory.

  "It must have taken a while to set this up, though. Time to gather resources..."

  She smiled. "The scarce resource these days is people. And all you really need to do to gather them is offer a tiny bit of hope."

  I looked over at the island again, the crops thriving in the region's benign climate as field workers sweated under the tropical sun. Maybe she was right.

  After the tour they took me back to the flagship, to a different room from the one I'd detoxed in, bigger and cleaner. I had the impression that I'd passed some kind of test. But the instant I stepped onboard my two shadows joined me; Soren and Kelis, falling into step behind me as naturally as if they'd been doing it for weeks. I kinked an eyebrow at Kelis - figuring she'd be the more communicative of the two - and she seemed to understand the question.

  "Bodyguards," she said. "For you protection." She had a Latin - American accent. A pleasant, light voice with an air of lethal competence about her. Kelis looked like she could kill without even raising a sweat.

  "And what exactly am I going to need protecting from?"

  Kelis smiled slightly. "Oh, I didn't say we were going to be protecting you."

  I shut the door of my cabin on her smile and Soren's frown and heard the key turn in the lock. As soon as I was alone I realised how exhausted I was, almost on the point of collapse. There was so much I should be doing, so many things I needed to find out about my rescuers, but there wasn't an ounce of energy left inside me to do it. I lay on the bed, closed my eyes and that was all I knew.

  When I woke it was dark. I had no idea what time it was but it felt late. I realised that I needed a watch and ridiculously, it was that, more than anything, that made me realise I was back among people. I wondered if I should try sleeping again, but I knew it wouldn't come. It would take some time to get my body clock back in sync with the normal, sunlit world.

  There was a small bathroom attached to the cabin with hot and cold running water. Someone had even left me towels, soap and shampoo. And when I emerged, naked and still a little damp, revelling in the sensation of finally, finally feeling clean, I found that the wardrobes had been filled with clothes, the same colourful silk and leather as I'd seen everyone else wearing. I understood the pirate theme, obviously, but I didn't quite get it. Just because you hung around on boats didn't make you a buccaneer. What wasn't I being told?

  Something else had been left for me too. A vial of a strong anti-psychotic with a new, sterile syringe. Just one vial. There was something about that I didn't like, the implication that the drug was to be rationed, the threat of its withdrawal used as a way to control me.

  Still, I pushed the dose into my arm, and slipped on a loose pair of maroon trousers and a tight-fighting white blouse. When I looked in the mirror I saw that I was still far too thin and far too pale, but washed and dressed I could at least pass for heroin - chic rather than straight-out junkie. My eyes were still ringed with black circles. I wondered if those would ever fade, the knowledge that had drawn them there was not something I could unlearn.

  I opened my door and Kelis and Soren were there waiting, looking as if they might never have moved from where I'd left them hours ago. I nodded a wary greeting to Kelis, then Soren. Only she bothered to return it. His eyes looked almost as shadowed as mine.

  "It's three o'clock," Kelis told me when she saw me surreptitiously glancing towards her wrist. "We saw you were awake." So that meant a hidden camera, shit!

  "Sorry," I said, though really why should I apologise?

  "Let's go for a walk," Soren said. "You can explore the rest of the ship." So maybe I wasn't a prisoner anymore. It seemed that Queen M trusted me now. We set off along another of those endless, intestinal corridors which seemed to fill the entire vessel. The cabin doors were all shut but it was impossible to tell if they were occupied.

  "Are these all used?" I asked Kelis, but it was Soren who answered.

  "They will be, eventually."

  "By new recruits?" I asked, but that seemed to be it for him, conversationally.

  At
the end of the corridor was a larger room with marble stairs leading up and down from it and glass-fronted shops lining the walls, long-emptied of their goods. No money economy here, I guessed. At the foot of the stairs was what I'd been looking for, one of those cross-sectional maps of the ship that long-ago voyagers had used to orient themselves.

  Jesus, it was huge. The ship must have carried a good thousand or more passengers when it was a cruise liner. I had a sudden, unwelcome vision of the way it must have been for them when the Cull struck. No time to make it to shore. A ship of the dying. Suddenly desperate for homes and families they never realised they'd said good-bye to for the last time. Queen M's crew must have had a strong stomach to clean all that out. The decks would have been literally running with blood.

  But maybe Queen M's crew didn't mind the sight of blood too much.

  We drifted along the corridors and decks of the ship like ghosts, my two shadows wafting along behind me. The whole place was eerily quiet. If I'd been a superstitious type, I might have thought it felt haunted.

  I found the casino next, still fully stocked, piles of chips on green baize tables.

  "Queen M opens this every Friday night," Kelis told me. "People come from all the ships."

  I picked up a blue hundred-unit chip and spun it in my fingers. "And what do they gamble for?"

  "Duties," Soren said. "Jobs no one wants."

  "Like body-guarding cleaned-up junkies?" I asked, but only Kelis smiled.

  I wandered for a while among the tables, threw some dice on the craps board, spun the roulette wheel. It seemed appropriate, somehow, that it landed on double zero. Everything you'd gambled lost.

  But perhaps not everything of mine was. Somewhere, maybe, I had a husband. Did I want to tell them that? He was - well, he was a useful man in anyone's army. If I told them about him, there was a chance I could talk them into looking for him, bringing him back here.

  I opened my mouth to tell Kelis - then slowly closed it again. No. I still knew too little about what was going on here.

  After the casino I found the ship's kitchens, deserted at this time of night but still obviously in use. Kelis and Soren watched impassively as I pulled open store cupboards and refrigerators, poked my nose into spice racks and big bowls of dried herbs. They didn't go hungry here, that was for sure. A walk-in cool room was hung with animal corpses; tiny rabbits, birds, and something so big that I thought it could only be a horse.

  I found four separate dining rooms, six bars, a theatre and a cinema. There was an indoor pool and a gym that looked like it still got plenty of use.

  After a while, Kelis and Soren seemed to get into the spirit of it. When we hit a corridor we knew was unoccupied we went into the cabins, saw what was in the wardrobes, the dressing tables. They'd cleaned the corpses out when they'd taken the ship, but left the possessions behind. All these relics of unfinished lives. In one room there was a digital camera, the battery still miraculously charged. Morbidly, unable to stop myself, I flicked through the pictures in its memory. Almost all shots of an older woman, standing on a series of interchangeable beaches, sometimes with a chubby, grey-haired man beside her. In the last photo the two of them looked scared, but I didn't think they knew yet exactly what lay in store for them. I put the camera down and we didn't go into any more rooms after that.

  Instead I headed down, below the water line, into the bowels of the ship. For the first time I sensed reluctance from my two guards, but neither of them said anything until I'd bottomed out into a drab metal corridor that looked like it belonged on a submarine, not a cruise liner.

  "Time we went back," Kelis said.

  I ignored her and walked further down this corridor that seemed to lead nowhere.

  Her hand clamped on my arm like a vice. "Far enough."

  I turned to look at her, but there was no humour in her face now. "Why?"

  Soren shifted, just a little, and for the first time since we'd set out that night I got a glimpse of the gun he kept tucked in the waistband of his trousers. "No reason," he said. "I want to go back to sleep."

  "So go," I said. "I can find my way back."

  Kelis slowly released my arm, but she didn't look away from me. "Believe me Dr Kirik, there's nothing down there you want to know about."

  After a second I shook my head and smiled as if it was no big deal. But I tried to memorise the route to that forbidden corridor as we wound our way back to my cabin.

  Not that I was given much chance to use it. It seemed like the entire crew of the ship had something wrong with them and had just been waiting for a doctor to show up and fix it. Another day passed, and then another, and then a week and I still hadn't been allowed a single second in the ship without my two bodyguards doggedly following at my heels.

  Then, on the eighth day, everything changed. I woke to the sound of pounding on my cabin door. They didn't wait for me to answer and a second later I opened my eyes, disoriented, to find Soren's blue ones looking down at me. His very blond lashes blinked three times over them without either of us saying anything.

  "So, I guess you want me to get up," I said eventually.

  He nodded, taciturn as ever. I wondered suddenly what he did when he wasn't traipsing around after me. He was one of those people you couldn't really imagine relaxing, knocking back a few drinks with his friends or sunbathing with a good book. He didn't look like a man who ever really enjoyed himself.

  "Why?" I asked him. "Has something happened?"

  "No," Kelis said. I realised for the first time that she'd been hovering by the door all this time, brown skin almost the same colour as the mahogany panelling on the wall behind her. "It's time for you to really earn your keep."

  A catamaran took us to the island and from there a car drove us to the airport, just two strips of tarmac cut through the trees. There were twenty others with us, and this time there were none of the bright colours, the play-acting at pirates. This time it was clear that I was travelling with a regiment from someone's private army.

  Soren was dressed all in black. There were ammunition belts slung over both his shoulders and he was carrying more guns than he had limbs. It was almost absurd, but I could see the way one of his thumbs was tapping a jittery rhythm against the barrel of the largest rifle and the small drop of blood forming on his lip where he couldn't seem to stop chewing it. Anything that made Soren nervous made me very nervous.

  Kelis' face was as calm as ever, her body entirely motionless. Only two spots of colour, high in her cheeks, told me anything about what was going on inside her. I'd been given combats to wear, an ugly olive green that clashed horribly with my red hair. I felt ridiculous, a little girl playing at being a soldier.

  They'd given me a medical kit but they hadn't given me a gun.

  The small jet took off from the runway, wheels bumping alarmingly along the pock-marked surface, without anyone having said a word to me about where we were going. After an hour though, as the sea crawled on endlessly beneath us, I was sure that we were travelling east, crossing the Atlantic.

  "May as well sleep," Kelis told me. "We'll be nine hours yet."

  Going all the way to Europe then. Bringing me closer to my husband, a small, hopeful voice said in my head.

  But not, in the end, close enough. I woke up seven hours later to a rising sun and the approaching coastline of a country that I knew wasn't England.

  "France," Kelis said.

  "OK," I answered. "Why?"

  "Recruitment drive," one of the others told me, a middle-aged white man with leathery skin and a thin, mean face. He'd introduced himself as Curtis, though whether this was his first or his last name I never found out.

  I remembered what Queen M had told me, that people were the scarce resource now. I thought about pirates and the British navy of old, and the weapons that everyone but me was carrying - and I began to guess what we were. A press gang.

  Paris approached. More golden than I'd remembered it; like a vast human honeycomb. There were blots of
darkness in the gold, relics of a recent burning. As the plane sank lower I saw that whole streets and neighbourhoods had been reduced to rubble. Strange, how people can face a disease that wants to kill them all and still have the energy to kill each other.

  The plane sank lower still, low enough that I could make out the insect forms of people on the city's streets. Never alone, always in crowds of ten, or twenty, or greater. Safety in numbers.

  Soon, the plane was low enough that I could see individual faces. I could also see the Eiffel Tower, prodding the sky above the heart of the city. I began to wonder where, exactly, they were planning on landing.

  A few minutes later and we were a hundred meters or so above the roofs of the buildings and a few hundred meters away from the start of the Champs Élysées. "You have got to be fucking kidding me!" I said.

  Kelis grinned, making her look like a little kid for about a tenth of a second. "What's the matter?"

  The list that sprung into my head was too long to recite in the few seconds before we ploughed towards the ground at several hundred miles an hour. I settled for, "What about the cars?" I'd seen news broadcasts in the bunker, the streets of every major city choked with vehicles abandoned when their owners sickened and died.

  "Cleared them the last time we were here," Soren said.

  And when was that? I wanted to shout. How do you know people haven't been piling the road high with broken-down cars and trucks since you left?

  No time left for that. The plane had started its final, fatal plummet to the ground. Now I could feel the breakfast I'd eaten four hours ago rising up to choke me and I think I might have screamed for real, because roads are narrow and aeroplanes are wide and no one in their right mind tries to set one down on top of the other in the middle of one of Europe's biggest cities.

  The golden blur of buildings rushed by on either side. I looked across at Soren but he was just frowning faintly, like a man wondering whether there was a chance he'd forgotten to buy milk that morning. Kelis was still smiling, the expression more feral than happy.