Rebecca Levene - Kill or Cure

"Not entirely," I said again. "We did find a cure, but we found it too late."

"I never heard that," Kelis said with wonder. "That's… I don't know, that makes everything so much worse, somehow. To know that someone got so close to stopping it all."

I shook my head. "No, not really, you see…" I laughed harshly, because this was harder to do than I'd imagined. "You see, I haven't been entirely honest with you."

At that I felt four different people stiffen around me and I remembered suddenly that all of them had guns. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea, but I could see their faces, closed and untrusting, and I knew that it was too late to back down now.

"The Infected, on Cuba – I knew exactly what was wrong with them. I knew it because I recognised it. Jesus, I helped to design it."

"They'd been given the Cure?" Kelis said slowly.

I nodded. "Yeah. A version of it. The Cure stopped the Cull, you see, but it didn't leave the people we gave it to unchanged. It caused auditory hallucinations, delusions, the whole schizophrenic works."

"You were cured," Haru said in amazement, and one by one I saw the others realise that he must be right.

I smiled with unexpected relief. It felt great not to have to hide myself any longer. "Yes. We tested it on ourselves, me and Ash, and on a few of the others."

"That's why you need those drugs," Kelis said. "The ones we went hunting for in Havana."

"Yes," I said again.

"And what exactly happens," Haru asked, "if you stop taking them?"

Like Kelis earlier I leaned back, looking up at the sky rather than across at my companions. "Bad things. Worse things than even I imagined. You see Ash – he was another scientist, a bio-weapons expert – he took the Cure too. We were both sick for a long time, days of pain when we didn't think we'd survive. When we finally woke up, there was… the Voice." I could hear it now, on the edge of my consciousness, hissing at me to keep quiet, to go on keeping its secret. But I found that with these not-quite-friends around me it was possible to ignore it.

"It spoke to me, inside my head. It still does. It's not my voice – it's not the voice of anyone I know. And it's not – I don't know how to describe this, to someone who hasn't felt it. The Voice doesn't make me obey it. There's no compulsion about it. It's just that when it speaks, everything it says seems to make such perfect sense that there's really no question of not listening to it."

"Yeah?" Haru said uneasily. "And what kind of thing does this Voice say? Are we talking along the lines of 'kill them, kill them all'? Because speaking as an objective observer, that sort of thing really doesn't make sense."

"Sometimes it says that kind of thing," I admitted, feeling the atmosphere thicken around me. "But it's not…" I laughed. "It feels absurd to talk about the Voice as a person, but in a way it seems to be, or that's how I experience it: as something independent that has its own agenda. And that's what it's about, when it tells me to do terrible things. It doesn't want them because it enjoys seeing people suffer. It's not psychotic – except in the literal sense. It just wants what it wants and it doesn't care who gets hurt in the process."

"So," Kelis said, "not so much psychotic as sociopathic."

"Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't care about anything, except maybe me, and even then I think it just sees me as a means to an end."

"You realise this is crazy, right?" Haru said. "This voice isn't real. It doesn't want anything. It's just, I don't know, repressed urges inside you getting out, right? The things you don't want to admit to wanting."

His pale cheeks were flushed and I thought that he really was only a few seconds away from shooting me where I sat. "I thought that too," I told him. "I mean, it's the only thing that makes sense, isn't it? Except how could I have gone my whole life without even beginning to guess that I wanted to do those things? And if the Voice really is just my subconscious, why does it seem to be working to a plan that I'm not privy to?"

"You keep talking about a plan," Kelis said softly. Her face was a closed book again. Before, she'd been trying to tell me something about the way she felt about me, but I knew looking at her that whatever that was it wouldn't save me if she decided I was a threat. It was like she'd said – everyone there had survived for a reason, and one of those reasons must have been that they didn't let sentiment get in the way of necessity.

She held my gaze for only a moment, then looked away. Best not to look in the eyes of a woman you might be about to kill. "What is the plan? What is it that you think this Voice inside you wants?"

"I don't know. I didn't want to know, that was why I started taking the drugs to silence it – first the opiates, then the anti-psychotics. I never let myself hear the Voice clearly enough to find out what it wanted."

"I still do not see the connection to the Infected of Cuba," Ingo said. "You are not telling us, are you, that it was you who infected them?"

"No," I said. "It wasn't me. It was Ash."

"The face on all the posters, the Leader," and Kelis was there again, too quickly for comfort. "That was the other scientist you worked with?"

I nodded. "The thing about Ash was, he liked the Voice. When I first woke up, after the Cure had run its course, I… killed a young soldier. The Voice told me to do it. And I think that's probably how I was able to resist the Voice long enough to suppress it. Because however much the Voice told me to, I couldn't forget the look in the soldier's eyes just before I snapped his neck. But Ash… he found me just after I'd done it, and I could tell that he didn't feel any guilt at all, even though I found out later that he had a lot more blood on his hands than that.

"He'd woken up before me, you see. I don't know why – maybe just a faster metabolism. So he'd had time to speak to some of the others on the base. I didn't see it at the time but I read the accounts of it later in the logs. There was videotape too, from the security cameras. Ash was like a messiah. He had this incredible self-belief when he spoke, and it made other people believe him too – even when he told them to do terrible things."

"What sort of terrible things?" Kelis asked.

"Turning people against each other, soldiers against scientists, soldiers against soldiers. People who'd once been friends. Ash sowed doubt in everyone's minds and in the end the only person they trusted was him. I guess it didn't work on me because the Voice in my own head gave me a kind of immunity. When Ash wasn't watching me I sneaked away and found some opiates and I injected enough into my veins to make sure I didn't give a damn what the Voice wanted me to do.

"The trouble was, the opiates stopped me caring about anything – including trying to stop Ash." I swallowed as I realised that maybe this was the real reason I hadn't wanted to tell them the story. Not because I was afraid of their anger, but of their disdain. Old guilt is like wine. It doesn't lose its strength, it just turns to vinegar – sour and corrosive. "He was trying to get everyone else to take the Cure, you see. Even back then. I'd almost forgotten it – I guess I'd just dismissed it as a part of his madness. But now… now that I've seen what he did in Cuba, I know that it wasn't incidental to what he wanted. It was central to it."

"And was that where the first Infected came from?" Kelis asked. "Those soldiers and scientists on the base?"

I shook my head. "They would have been, I suppose, but Ash wasn't the only crazy person there. There was a soldier, I don't really remember his name, but I do remember that he started some kind of fight, a stand-off between Ash's men and his. I just tried to get away from it all, hiding deeper in the base. Then there was an explosion and I was left on one side of it with them on the other. And that's where the story ends."