Rebecca Levene: Kill or Cure

Going cold turkey is no one's idea of fun. It's a private kind of hell. What can I say about it that hasn't been said already? Just sobbing and puking and sometimes fitting and nearly dying. I didn't know where I was – but I was somewhere. We'd arrived. The visions of my past eased up after that first rush, leaving nothing to relieve the monotony. That's the biggest secret about illness and pain. How monumentally fucking boring it is.

People drifted in and out, shot things into my arm and sometimes forced them down my throat. Some of those things must have been anti-psychotics, because after a while the Voice faded into silence. My mind felt clearer than it had in five years. When I'd stopped screaming in agony, I guessed I'd be grateful for that.

On the fourth day, I realised that the rocking sensation I was feeling had nothing to do with drug withdrawal. I was still on a boat. Something about the motion told me it was a big one, an order of magnitude above the yacht which had brought me here. I spent ten minutes lying there wondering if it was worth the effort to get up and walk towards the port hole I could see to my left. The shutters were closed over it, a relic of the stage when any light stabbed into my eyes like a knife, but the diamond splinter pain behind my temples had faded to a dull ache, and I thought I could risk a look.

If I could make it the five paces across the floor to the porthole… my knees buckled the instant I stepped out of bed. My joints felt like they were held together with weak glue. I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror against one of the dark-stained wooden walls. Dark shadows circled my eyes like bruises and my hair hung lank and unwashed around my face, grease turning the vivid red of it almost brown. My skin was so white it looked translucent, a spider's web of blue veins beneath it. I realised that this was the first time I'd seen myself in years. I'd deliberately smashed the one mirror in the base after the first few months of staring at my blank, desperate eyes. I'd hidden the fragments of glass in the closet along with my colleague's corpses.

The catch on the porthole was tight. I had to stop to gather my breath four times before I finally managed to twist it open. I flinched from the light that poured in when I finally did, but my eyes adjusted without problem. I suddenly realised that I felt alive, really alive. It was a weird sensation.

The sky was only a little paler than the sea, a brilliant, tropical blue. The water was far below, fifty feet or more, the waves smacking against the hull in sharp little peaks and troughs. The ship was even bigger than I'd realised. There was a coastline ahead of us, a crescent of pure white sand leading back to dark trees then rising into jagged volcanic peaks. Almost certainly the Caribbean.

A long way from Lake Eerie. I wondered what the people who'd found me had been searching for, all that way from home. And I wondered why they'd bothered to bring me all the way back here, when they hadn't thought I was worth the trouble of saving. Had I said something in my delirium that had made me sound valuable? But what use was an expert in a virus that had killed everyone already?

I heard the sound of a key turning in the lock of my door and realised for the first time that I had been a prisoner. The man who stepped through was big, blond and handsome in the kind of way that just wasn't very interesting to look at.

"Dr Kirik?" he said. He had a faint Scandinavian accent and a lighter voice than I'd expected from such a large man.

I nodded, and a wave of dizziness washed through me. I leaned an unsteady hand against the porthole for support, feeling like I'd been on my feet for ten hours, not ten minutes.

The man seemed to realise what was up because he strode over in two long paces and carefully supported my arm under the elbow. Or maybe he just wanted to make sure I wasn't going to make a run for it.

"I have a lot of questions," I told him.

"Yes, I guess so." It was immediately apparently that he wasn't going to be the man to answer them. "Are you well enough to…?" he nodded at the door.

I wasn't, but I couldn't stand the thought of spending a moment longer in that room. A waft of cool, fresh air was drifting in through the door and I realised for the first time that it stank in here. I reeked of old sweat and the toxins that had washed out of my body along with it. "Yeah, I think so," I told him. "Maybe I could take a shower first."

"After," he said.

I wasn't going to argue with him, I'd just noticed the handle of the semi-automatic poking out of the waistband of his jeans.

There was another person waiting outside the room – a tall woman with olive skin and a face as elegantly carved and impassive as a mask. She didn't say anything, just fell into step behind me as the man led me forward. The ship was a warren, corridors snaking fore and aft with cabin after cabin leading from them. The carpet underfoot had once been expensive but was now frayed and a little threadbare. The chandeliers hanging from the ceiling were covered in grime. I was almost certain now that I was on board a commercial cruise liner. It seemed so improbable, a relic of a time before the world had sickened and died.

We passed other people, some of whom nodded greetings to my two guides. No one ethnic group seemed to predominate; a mixture of brown, black and white faces. They were all dressed colourfully, many of them in leather and silk, and there was something old-fashioned… a little studied about their clothes. They almost looked like costumes, or a bizarre sort of uniform. I felt their curious eyes following me as I passed. So, a big ship but not that big a crew – small enough, anyway, to recognise a stranger among them.

At the end of one seemingly endless corridor we came to a lift. The walls were entirely covered in mirrors, dusty but clear enough to give me an unwelcome view of myself. I'd seen homeless junkies on the streets of London who looked more promising. No wonder no one wanted to talk to me.

The lift seemed to go up a very long way. I felt the sea-breeze the moment I stepped out, tasted the salty tang of it. Five paces and we were out in the open. The sun deck of a ship, even larger than I'd guessed – a floating city.

And here, at last, was a crowd. They were as colourful as the people on the lower decks, and far noisier. The babble of talk hit me the moment I stepped out and I found myself physically recoiling from it. People are a habit it's easy to lose. I felt like a wild animal encountering humanity for the first time.

In the centre of the deck was a big rectangular pit which I realised after a moment was a dried-up swimming pool. An over-sized wooden chair had been placed at one end of it, and though not everyone was facing it, I could tell that it was the centre of the gathering.

I realised that I'd stopped short when I felt something pressing into my back, nudging me forward. It might have been my escort's finger, or maybe her gun, but either way I wasn't arguing.

The woman on the chair watched me all the way. Her eyes were brown and cynical, a shade darker than her coffee-coloured skin. Mixed race I guessed, and definitely part Afro-Caribbean. Her hair clung to her head in tight cornrows, then hung down her back in a long cascade, stiff with beads. I could feel the power emanating from her. This was a woman who ruled – and these people were her subjects.

She smiled, finally, when I was only a few paces away from her. The expression was startling, suddenly making her seem entirely normal, like someone you'd be introduced to at a friend's party who turned out to work for the local council. She was quite young, maybe in her late thirties. But the lines around her mouth told me that she didn't smile very often. She was dangerous, however friendly she seemed.