Rebecca Levene - Kill or Cure

"Guess he didn't love you for yourself," Haru said. I realised it was the first joke any of us had made since Soren died and managed a tired smile.

Then we drove on. Ahead of us a pile of naked bodies writhed, fucking openly in the street. The men around them had their cocks in their hands, stroking them in time to the heaving pile of flesh. It looked vicious and unsafe, about something more primal than lust. Further down there was another crude ceremony, but this one had a victim.

The boy could only have been about five. When they slit his throat the blood jetted into the crowd and they lifted their faces, swallowing it down. I looked away as Ingo pressed down on the accelerator, face as impassive as ever. I wondered if he even saw it, or if he'd retreated far into his mind; contemplating numbers, equations and algorithms because they were so much cleaner than people.

Another hour passed before we'd driven our way clear of New Orleans and its human ugliness. After that we cut through a corner of Louisiana and then we were into Texas. Flat, hot and endless. We avoided the big towns by unspoken consent which meant, most of the time, all we had for company were cattle.

We'd taken it in turns trying to sleep but there was no rest in it. We were all white-skinned and dark-eyed. Our fingers tapped restlessly on our guns and I knew that if we didn't get some sleep soon we'd regret it.

After Texas we were into the corn fields of Oklahoma and finally we knew we had to stop. It was absurd really, caring about state boundaries in a world where they'd become meaningless. Except that when we crossed over that border something did seem to change. We drove through small towns and the people in them didn't run away from us. Some of them even stopped and smiled. The fields were tended and the people looked well fed. There was tightness around their eyes that spoke of a fear that never really went away, but that was hardly surprising.

"It's like we've driven into Stepford," Haru said the second time a crowd of children waved and laughed as we drove past.

"We should stop," I said.

"Why?" Haru said. "So they can take us away and replace us with identical robots?"

But Kelis was already slowing the jeep down on the outskirts of a bland, cookie-cutter town. It looked lower middle class. No white picket fences but lots of square, clapboard houses with square grassy yards around them. It wasn't a big place – I doubted the population was a thousand, even before the Cull. Now there was an air of neglect about the whole town. The grass was knee high and choked with weeds. Children's swing sets rusted in the middle of the unkempt lawns and unused cars rusted in the roads.

"We need to get some sleep," I said. "There's bound to be empty houses here and if we post a guard we can see trouble coming long before it reaches us." You could see anything coming here, across the endless expanse of the corn fields. In the distance I could make out the grey twist of a mini tornado, sweeping across the great, empty landscape.

"Yeah, and what if the trouble's already here?" Haru asked. He nodded to the left, where a group of ten or more adults was sauntering towards us. There were no weapons on display, nothing to indicate that they were a threat, but my hand drifted towards my gun all the same. I'd been out in the Culled world long enough now to know that trusting the good will of strangers got you nothing but an early grave.

I saw the same distrust mirrored in their eyes, but there was fear there too and that made me feel a little safer. If they were afraid of us, maybe we didn't need to be afraid of them.

"We tithe already," one of them said as soon as he was within earshot. He was a big, red-faced bear of a man but his shoulders were hunched and his gaze slipped away from mine. He reminded me of the Alsatian our neighbour had kept when I was a child, the one we'd heard yelping in the night when he'd beaten it. He had that same whipped expression. All these people had it.

"We're not after a tithe," I told him. I pointedly moved my hand away from my side, palm out and open, then frowned at Kelis until she did the same. "We just want a bed for the night. And if you've got any food to spare we'll trade you some ammo for it."

"We don't need ammo," a small blonde woman said quickly. "We're not looking to fight."

"Well, that's good then," Haru said, "because neither are we."

There was a small, awkward silence after that.

"So…" I said eventually. "How about that house over there? Anyone object if we camp out in it for the night?"

Finally they seemed to decide that we really meant what we said. The slump left their shoulders and the smile came back to their faces. "How long you looking to stay for?" the bear man asked.

"Just one night," I told him. "And we really would appreciate any food you've got going spare. We'll happily do some work in return." Haru frowned at that but I stamped on his foot and he quickly schooled his expression. We could take whatever we wanted from these people – which was exactly why we weren't going to do it.

"A tithe?" Ingo said later, when they'd left us alone in the big, run-down house with enough bread and cheese to feed a small army, along with a bottle of old, and probably precious, wine. They'd refused payment for it and in the end I'd given up trying to make them take it. Maybe the knowledge that we weren't planning to stay was payment enough.

I swigged back the wine. "Back to feudalism, I guess," I said. "The peasants till the land and the lords take a portion in return for not taking it all." My mind felt scraped raw, tiredness and a delayed reaction to the tension of the last few days. Even speaking was an effort.

"Why not just take it all?" Haru asked. "You're talking gangs right, armed gangs, maybe out of the city? It's not like the people here would put up much of a fight against them."

"But then who would grow the crops?" Ingo said quietly. "It is my experience that soldiers prefer fighting to farming. But it will not just be crops that they take when they come. They will have their pleasure in any way they wish, with anyone they want. I have seen it before."

Kelis shrugs. "Yeah, well, it's the farmers" choice, isn't it? There's almost certainly more of them – all they need to do is get organised and get armed."

"You think we should do a Magnificent Seven, train them up?" Haru asked.

She shrugged and looked quickly at me and then away. I didn't think she was really angry with the people here, just with everyone who made the kind of choice that Soren had and ended up dying for it.

"Maybe on the way back," I said, but it was just a salve to my conscience. I knew we'd never be back here. Even before the Cull the world had been full of injustice, and at least these people got to live and eat in relative peace. There were worse fates. I'd already seen them.

I lingered over the last drops of the wine, suddenly unwilling to go to bed. The house we were in was big enough for us to have taken a bedroom each. Mine must have been the youngest son's, decorated with pictures of rappers and American football stars. The living room was still fully furnished, covered in thick layers of dust but otherwise untouched since whatever had happened to its occupants had happened. The mantelpiece was lined with ornaments – a picture of the Virgin Mary made out of seashells, a terracotta replica of the Basilica, an ashtray so thick and crooked it could only have been one of the children's pottery projects.

How must it be, I wondered, for the townspeople to spend every day living beside the houses of the dead? At least I couldn't put a face to the ghosts here. These people had lost neighbours, family, friends. No wonder they took whatever dirty little compromise was offered to avoid the same fate.