Rebecca Levene - Kill or Cure

I felt like a creature composed of pure adrenaline. My senses were hyped, the smell of the invaders almost making me gag, only made bearable by the background salt smell of sea water that seeped through everything. Like a vague buzzing in the back of my mind, a half-recalled memory, I felt the pain of the bruises on my side, and my dislocated shoulder, but they weren't enough to distract me.

Later, I'd wonder if that was what my husband felt when he went on those missions he could never tell me anything about. He'd always said danger was a high and I'd thought yeah, that's the cliche, but really isn't danger just frightening? In that instant I understood that it was absolutely both. And this, this moment when my actions would decide whether I lived or died, was the purest of my life.

The thing was smiling at me as she walked forward, not a sneer or a grimace of anger but a real grin. Up close I suddenly saw that her cheekbones had the same angles, her eyes the same tilt as the dead boy's. Her son, I thought, but she didn't seem to care that he was dead. She just seemed… happy.

Her split tongue flickered out, lizard-like, through the open lips of her smile.

I didn't have any weapons, not even a knife. The boom was over the other side of the boat now. Even if it swung back, it would hit me and not her. And if I let her touch me, it was all over. She walked forward and I walked back, a pace at a time. One step from her. One step from me. Two. Then three. I was nearly at the railing and after that there was nowhere else to go but into the water.

"What do you want?" I said to her again. "I'm a doctor. I can help you with… whatever the hell it is that's wrong with you."

That made her stop, just for a second. She held up the jagged stump of her right hand, eying the protruding bone as if she hadn't really noticed it before. Then she looked back at me. "But why would I want to change?" she asked in the sort of warm Jamaican accent that made you feel as if the words were hugging you. "Everything's perfect just the way it is."

And then she took one last step forward, and instead of stepping back I stepped forward too. I put my hands on the lapels of her denim jacket and I dropped back, foot out and into her stomach. It had been years since I'd learnt this. Since he'd made me go to self-defence classes, then made me practice with him at home, again and again, because London's a dangerous place and he couldn't bear it if anything happened to me. But I guess he was right, that once you've learnt it you never forget. It seemed to take no effort at all to pull her over my head and then kick off with my heel and flip her over the railing. Less than a second later, I heard the splash as she hit the water.

I lay there for a second, shaking. She hadn't touched me. No part of her had touched me, I was sure of it. But the adrenaline had burnt itself out, purpose served, and all I could feel now was the desperate, paralysing fear I should have been feeling earlier.

It took us another forty-five minutes to reach the flagship. There was a radio on the boat but a rebounding bullet had taken it out and there was no way for us to let anyone else know what had happened.

Haru and I spent the time keeping watch, peering uselessly into the dense night for signs of any more pursuers. The sailors had wanted to tip the infected boy's body overboard but I'd persuaded them not to. When we got back I needed to study it, figure out just what the hell was wrong. Grumbling, they complied. The neat routines of their work broken up by the wide detour they took around his body and the pool of blood spilling out of it.

When we got back to the flagship I asked to be taken straight to Queen M, but it was near midnight and the only person I could find was Kelis, back from whatever mission she'd been out on. She told me that it could wait till morning. I needed to sleep or I'd be making no sense to anyone anyway.

I let her lead me back to my room because I was exhausted – my whole body was one big ache – and also because she just hadn't seemed that surprised when I told her about the people who attacked us and what seemed to be wrong with them. I needed some time to think about what that meant.

The morning dawned bright but cooler. I shivered when I went out on deck in my shorts and tank-top, squinting against the piercing light of the rising sun. The blue sky, the blue seas, the distant palm trees suddenly looked a whole lot less reassuring than they had when I'd first arrived. Trouble in paradise, and then some.

Queen M was already on her throne in the empty pool, lounging back with one leg slung over an arm, looking like she hadn't a care in the world. She stood and smiled when I approached, and I guessed she'd been waiting for me. Only a few people were out at that time of the morning and they drifted away when they saw me.

"They come from Cuba," she said when I was ten paces from her. "My people call them the Infected."

That stopped me in my tracks. "Cuba?" I don't know why it surprised me, but there was something too known, too package-holiday about Cuba for it to be the source of that terrible affliction.

But she nodded. "They don't make any effort to disguise it, their boats are easy enough to track."

"And has anyone gone there to find out what's going on?"

Her bright eyes narrowed. "Would you go?"

I felt the throb of the deep bruises covering my legs and chest and I shook my head.

"I sent some people, back when they first showed up," Queen M said. "Twenty-four went, five returned. Back then it wasn't the whole of the island. Now as far as we can tell it's everyone. And it's started to spread. They say there have been cases on Haiti, some of the other Greater Antilles. As for what causes it…" She shrugged.

"But you're sure it's infectious?"

"How else could it be spreading?" Her eyes were still staring into mine, weighing everything up. She knows I want out, I thought. And this is her way of getting me to stay.

I sighed because, yeah, she might be manipulating me, but whatever it was that was coming out of Cuba was more important than my anger at her, or my desire to escape. The world just couldn't take another Cull. It would be the end of us. "I'm not just a doctor," I reminded her. "I'm a researcher. I was part of the team investigating the Cull, so I've picked up a thing or two. We brought one of the Infected back. I can do an autopsy on him if you like, get some blood work done, whatever you've got the equipment for. See what I can find out."

She smiled like a cat that had just been given detailed directions to the creamery. It occurred to me then that I'd never been told why the flagship had moved while I'd been on St Kitt's, or why she'd so unexpectedly decided to give me the day off.

What I knew now was that she was the kind of person who was more than happy to kill a sailor or two if it got her what she wanted.

The lab was in the bow of the ship, tucked away behind the casino in one of those areas that Kelis and Soren had steered me carefully away from. I thought it might once have been a crew kitchen, the gleaming metal surfaces and sinks obviously original but the pipettes, Bunsen burners and centrifuges were more recent additions. As was the autopsy table right in the centre of the room.

I had a sudden flash of it being used by Queen M for other purposes, living subjects, the runnels to carry away the blood at the sides a convenience when you were trying to extract information from someone you didn't want to die quite yet.

The current occupant of the table was very definitely dead though. Now I could see him under the bright, halogen lights I realised he was even younger than I'd first thought, barely into his teens. There were three others in the room when Kelis and I arrived, white-coated and bending intently over their workstations, test-tubes and Petri dishes spread out in front of them like a particularly unappetising meal. I gestured at the corpse of the Infected. "Mind if I take a look?"