Rebecca Levene - Kill or Cure

The nearest scientists, a harried looking woman in her forties, shrugged. "He's all yours. I'm an agronomist, corpses aren't my thing."

"We're both electrical engineers," the man beside her said, nodding over at a third man who was peering through a microscope at some kind of circuit board. "You're the crew's first pathologist."

"Yeah," I said. "Except I'm not. I'm a doctor and a biochemist, but I haven't performed an autopsy since medical school."

"At least you've done one," the first woman said. "I wouldn't have a clue where to start."

Kelis hovered at my elbow, peering over at the body with open curiosity. "First one you've seen close up?" I guessed.

"Yup," she said. "Queen M always told us to steer clear, leave them be. Only recently they started getting aggressive, coming after us."

I looked down at the boy's body, the vacancy where his left eye had been, and lower, were something had cut into his chest. Now that he was naked I could see other wounds too: a chunk out of his left thigh, two toes hanging off and another two broken and sticking upwards at an impossible angle. It was easy enough to tell which injuries were the result of the confrontation on the boat and which had been around a while. The new ones weren't running with puss, oozing yellow and green into the surrounding flesh.

I decided to take a look at the chunks missing from his legs and stomach first. The edges of the cuts had been blurred by swelling and infection, but on the leg there was one little area that had remained relatively unscathed and it told me everything I needed to know. "Teeth marks," I said to Kelis, pulling back on the flesh and standing aside so that she could get a clear view.

She turned her head aside and made a face. Funny, you wouldn't think a woman doing her job could be squeamish. "Joder! You're saying they eat each other?"

I shook my head. "Not human. Shark, I think, though I've never treated a shark attack victim, so I can't be one -hundred per cent sure."

She held a hand over her nose in a futile attempt to ward off the smell of corruption and leaned a little closer. "Doesn't look like they did anything to it after the attack. There's no stitches, nothing. Why would anyone let an injury like that go untreated?"

"Yeah." I looked at his stomach, sure now that the flesh had been torn in the same incident. The level of infection was consistent too, both injuries dating back a couple of weeks. "It's like the shark bit him; he fought it off, climbed out of the water and then carried on like nothing had happened."

"But that's not possible, is it?"

I shrugged. "Short term, sure, it's amazing what a flood of adrenaline can do for you. Long term – no, it shouldn't be. He should have been in agony."

"Any sign of brain damage maybe?" She peered at the boy's head, what was left of it. "Something that might explain why he can't feel any pain?"

She was quick. I needed to remember that, in my plans. I sawed the boy's skull open but the damage from the bullet was too extensive to make out any subtler trauma around it. "Brain damage might explain what happened to him, but not the rest of them. It's too much of a coincidence for them all to have suffered the same condition."

After the brain I went for the other organs, cracking open the ribs to get at them, wincing as blood splashed back at me from the corpse. The gown and mask caught it all and the examination didn't tell me anything I could use. The state of his liver would suggest too much drinking, but alcoholism just wasn't going to explain the things I'd seen on that boat. I used a scalpel to slice off a sliver of it anyway, along with the heart and the lungs, but I wasn't really expecting to find anything. I thought Kelis was probably at least partly right: whatever was wrong with these people was wrong with their brains.

After I was done with the body, hauling a sheet over it because I didn't want to look at the ruin of that young man a second longer, I took the samples over to one of the microscopes. And yes, I'd been right – they told me nothing. Normal. Which left only… but I'd been putting that off since I came into the room, almost as if I'd known from the beginning what I was going to find.

"What about his blood?" Kelis said, watching it soak through the thin white sheet covering his body like a guilty secret that wanted to be known. "Aren't most infectious diseases blood-borne?"

"They can be air-borne too, transmitted by touch…" But I was just talking, the words didn't mean anything because she was right. I had to look at the blood. My fingers trembled as I prepared the slide, and I wondered if Kelis had noticed. And then I wasn't thinking about anything at all because what I could see in front of me was what I'd somehow feared without even knowing it, and the memories washed back over me, too strong to resist.

Most of all I remembered the excitement, a taste in the back of my throat that was very much like fear. My heart pounding, loud in my ears and heavy in my chest. And maybe it was fear, a little, because what if we were wrong? If we doled out hope and then took it back again, would anyone there forgive us? With the way nerves were on edge, tempers frayed – it would only take one spark, and that might be it. But…

"I really think this is it," Ash said, and there was an edge of excitement in his normally cool voice.

I looked at the slide again, at the lab work, the electron microscope images and grainy NMR scans, but they were all telling us the same thing. "This is… you know how fucking dangerous this is, right?"

But Ash was grinning now, that smile I remembered from college but hadn't seen in a while, when he knew he'd done something clever and was planning on being insufferable about it. "Yeah, because dying in agony while your brains slide out of your ears isn't dangerous at all." The lab felt too small to contain the force of his personality when he was in a mood like this.

I ignored him and took one final look at the slide, the papers. As if the facts might have changed while I wasn't looking. But of course they hadn't. "It really is O-neg."

"Yeah," Ashok said, "and before that, it really was AB. This is it, Jasmine. Stop second guessing and start celebrating!"

"Shit," I exclaimed. "Shit. We are geniuses!"

He swept me up into a hug. "Yeah, babe, we really are."

"Twisted geniuses."

He gave me a last squeeze, and then let me go. "The best kind."

"Because what we did here is mental. You know that, don't you? I mean, we're generally in the business of curing retro-viruses, not creating them."

"Not to mention the military tech in there that would make Al Qaeda's eyes light up. If they weren't, you know, dying in agony along with everyone else."

"And the stem cells – don't want to forget them."

"How can I, when they're so untested the FDA isn't even within five years of issuing a licence?"

Our jubilation had tipped over into near hysteria, and we must have been shouting pretty damn loud because Abuke poked his head round the door and frowned. Then he saw our faces and his frown slipped into another expression, harder to define.

"You did it?" he said. "You've found it?"

I smiled. "Yeah, I really think we have."

But a vaccine that turns a rat's blood from one type to another isn't necessarily the same as a Cure that does the same thing for humans. In any normal medical research there'd be years of testing to go before we moved on to live subjects. Fat chance. It was live testing or nothing, and there weren't a whole lot of subjects to choose from.

The five of us lay in identical beds wearing hospital gowns, tubes in our arms, expressions of unease on our faces. I guess it was flattering in a way, that the other three were prepared to put so much trust in mine and Ash's work. Or more likely it was just desperation.