Rebecca Levene - Kill or Cure

Yesterday, the base had seen its first Cull. The rest of us would follow, weeks or days later, who knew, but it would be soon.

On the bed beside me Ash smiled, but it was strained. The muscles in his cheeks tensing and releasing as his teeth ground, a nervous habit I'm not sure he knew he had. "Ready?" I asked him.

"Jasmine…" he said softly, and I realised suddenly that he was going to say something serious, probably about us – but I was married and in love with another man.

"We'll be fine," I said hurriedly. "I've got faith in us."

"Yeah." His eyes closed slowly, then opened again, and he knew I didn't want to hear whatever he wanted to say. "I'm glad I'm here with you," he said finally, "whatever happens."

And then we both took the needles nestling in the cannula in our arms, and pushed. A second's hesitation, then the other three did the same. The Cure, mainlined, spreading through our system like the virus it was. Taking our DNA and changing it. DNA transcribing to RNA, coalescing and knotting to form the templates for alien proteins inside us, closing off the source of the AB blood cells that marked us for death. Telling our bodies that we'd been O-negs all the time, we just hadn't realised it yet.

Doing all of that – and something else too. A second after the small pain of the injection came a pain that was a thousand times worse. It felt as if something essential was being ripped loose right in the heart of us, and then again, and again, and again, until I couldn't imagine that it would ever end. Ash was the first to start screaming and once he'd started, he didn't stop. None of us did.

And now, here, as I looked at the slide, I knew exactly what I was seeing. Except, of course, that it shouldn't be possible. I turned to Kelis, hoping she couldn't see my shaking hands, that she wouldn't notice the way all the blood had drained from my face. Blood – ironic how everything comes back to that.

"Hey," I said, and tried not to wince at the fake casualness of it, my inability to seem normal when everything inside me was screaming as loud as it had when I first took the Cure. "Any chance you can scare up some food? I didn't have any breakfast earlier."

She looked at the boy's corpse, and then at me, eyebrows raised. "You're hungry – seriously?"

"Yeah, what can I say – I'm a doctor. Gore gives me an appetite."

She shrugged and headed out the door, maybe glad to get away from the gore herself. Strange to think of a killer being queasy at the sight of blood. But then killer didn't quite capture her. It implied a love of it, or a clinical efficiency. Soren was a killer. Kelis had gone about killing with a kind of weary resignation, like it had been her third-choice career while there was a kid at home with an out-of-work husband and she needed to bring in the dough.

I'd brought my medical bag with me. The sterile needle and syringe were right where they always were. I had to stop myself shooting edgy, guilty looks at the other scientists as I drew out my own blood from the crook of my elbow and carefully smeared it onto a slide. They wouldn't think there was anything odd about it. Why should they? I was just a fellow scientist, going about my scientific business.

The slide clicked into place beside the one I'd taken from the Infected boy. I already knew what I'd see, but like a lump of vomit stuck halfway up my throat, I was still reluctant to bring it all the way into the light of day. I took one deep shaking breath, a second, then put my eye against the microscope and focussed.

The slide of my blood was on the left. The boy's blood was on the right. I remembered that – but there was no other way to tell. The two slides were identical, the same sickly, deformed red blood cells, twisted into a shape that nature had never seen before Ash and I had had our bright idea, five years ago, when we'd believed we might be able to save the human race.

The cobbled-together, wing-and-a-prayer hybrid we'd engineered in a lab from cutting-edge medical tech and code black military wetware had driven me insane. Somehow, it had done something very different, but equally terrible, to the people of Cuba.

Ash and I had meant to cure one plague. Had we managed to start another? I guess I should have been feeling guilty, for letting loose this thing that could wipe out the last, ragged remnant of humanity. But that wasn't what I was thinking about right then. What I was thinking was that Queen M had been right: this thing was Infectious and I was a carrier. Hell, I was Patient Zero. And if she ever picked up even a hint of it, I'd be shark meat.

Suddenly escape was looking a whole lot more urgent. Fuck everyone else. I had to get out of there right now.

I'd finally managed to discover the location of the camera in my room, hidden in the handle of my wardrobe where it had a perfect view of the bed. I hoped whoever watched the footage enjoyed the view. I hadn't changed anything about my routine when I discovered it, not even giving in to the temptation to start undressing in the bathroom. Couldn't let them know I knew. Besides, there was probably a camera in the bathroom too, but that one didn't matter.

I couldn't set my alarm, not sure if there was sound recording in the room as well. It wasn't essential to my plan. Since my medical student days I'd always been able to wake when I wanted.

At exactly ten past four in the morning my eyes blinked uselessly open in the absolute darkness.

I'd spent five days learning my way around the cabin by touch. Subtly brushing a hand along the dresser, counting the paces from door to bed, feeling the rough patch in the carpet with my toes. I let my eyes slide shut as I felt in the wardrobe for my clothes, twisted the clasp on my blouse shut, slid my sandals over my feet.

There's something about the dead of night that seems to amplify sound, every rustle of cotton, metallic grate of zipper echoing in the seemingly cavernous room.

That night my fingers fumbled at my shoes, fingernails scraping against a buckle, and I froze for a second, my heart pounding.

Nothing. No sound of my shadows waiting outside my door. When I was dressed, I slid my feet over the carpet to the door, counting footsteps. One, two, three, four, five. The handle was right there and I turned it. The lip salve I'd casually smeared last night from my lips to my finger to the latch seemed to have done the trick and the door eased open without a sound.

The night lights in the corridor seemed momentarily far too bright and I had to fight the urge to flinch back. I knew where the camera here was too, ten feet away from my door. Fixed, no rotation. Nobody would see me leaving. But whoever was watching would see me walk past.

Not a problem. Like any tribe, the soldiers here liked to find ways to distinguish themselves from the common herd. They always wore red, somewhere on them, when they weren't out on a mission, boots rather than sandals, dog tags scavenged from god knows where. Those had been the hardest to get, but it's amazing what you'll find lying around in places where 93 per cent of the population didn't get to leave any kind of last will and testament.

They'd know my face, of course, if they were really looking. But why would they be, if I walked with confidence and looked like I knew where I was going? Stupidly, like someone picking at a scab on their finger when their whole leg needs amputating, that was the part of the plan I was most worried about. He'd always joked that I had no sense of direction and I'd quoted him psychological research about how men found their way using maps and women did it with landmarks; but both were equally good. Then he'd challenge me to find my way from Leicester Square to Covent Garden – and he was right. I couldn't navigate for shit.