Rebecca Levene - Kill or Cure

They were far, far younger than I'd expected. The first one I killed was barely into his teens and no one was out of them. They dived to the ground as soon as the first of them fell, and I realised that they didn't know what they were doing, not even slightly.

I shot another in the gut and Ingo blew the heads off two more, fatty grey matter splattering the long grass. The four left were now holding their hands up and screaming at us to stop. Suddenly loud, the Voice said What are you going to do, take them to a prisoner of war camp? Leave them behind to come back and try again? I shot one in the heart, then looked away as Ingo took the rest.

I tried to remind myself what Ingo had said, about the things people like this did to the people they ruled. I tried to imagine one of the young girls who'd laughed and waved as we entered the town screaming as these boys gang raped her. But it was no use, all I could think was how young they were and that young people were the only hope left after the Cull.

There was nothing I wanted to say to Ingo when we were done. I walked silently through the back door and up the stairs. The house was a ruin. I put on a fresh set of clothes, then begun to shove my few possessions back into my bag. Kelis came in as I was doing it, her face lightly dusted with blood. I couldn't look her in the eye and she didn't seem to mind. I didn't need to ask if she'd left any alive. It wouldn't even have crossed her mind.

"Amateurs," she said dismissively.

"Yeah, neighbourhood kids gone bad." I could see their brutal little history as if I'd witnessed it. Children freed of all constraints, suddenly the strongest and the most powerful where once they'd been the weakest. Every town has a trench coat mafia waiting to happen.

"Want to have a word with the good people of the town?" she asked after a few seconds of silent scrutiny during which I resolutely kept my gaze fixed on the bag I was packing. "It must have been them who tipped the kids off."

"No," I said. "I think we've done enough already."

Ten minutes later we drove away, through a few hundred more miles of cornfields and past a few dozen more small towns. We didn't stop. The Interstate, bland and featureless, took us out of Oklahoma almost as fast as I wanted. For mile after mile we saw nothing but vast billboards advertising products no one could buy. Then we were back in Texas, a little northern jut of it, heading towards the desert of New Mexico, scrubby and dry and mercifully free of people. Las Vegas was in reach of one long drive and I didn't need to ask to discover that none of us had the stomach for more human interaction. We didn't want to stop again.

But fifty miles from Santa Fe we came to the first road block. On the straight desert road we could see it far ahead, slabs of concrete laid across the length of the road with the crouched figures of men behind them. "Should we go off-road, drive round?" I asked Kelis.

She shrugged and I could see her preparing to twist the wheel, but Haru reached forward from his place on the back seat and put a hand on her arm. "We can't risk damaging the car," he said. "Not out here."

He was right. Wreck our ride and we might not find another one before we dropped dead of dehydration and heat exhaustion. Kelis nodded and pulled the car to a halt twenty metres from the pile of concrete.

There was a moment's stand-off as we crouched down, guns at the ready, and the men behind the block did the same.

"Well, this is productive," I said eventually. My voice carried clearly in the still desert air.

"We've got food and water back here," a husky female voice shouted back. "We can wait all day. How about you?"

"We only want to pass through," Haru tried. "We're not looking for trouble."

"But we're quite capable of being trouble if we need to be," I added.

High overhead, vultures were circling. I guess they'd been having some good years.

"Pass through on the way to where?" the woman asked after a beat.

We glanced at each other but there didn't seem to be any reason to lie. "Las Vegas," I told her.

My finger tightened on the trigger at a sudden movement, but it was just the woman poking her head above the parapet. Even from fifty feet away I could see the black surprised 'O' of her mouth. "Are you crazy?" she said.

We drove to Santa Fe in convoy, our vehicle bracketed by two of theirs, strange solar-powered contraptions which looked like they'd been designed by a lunatic trying to recreate the moon unit from memory. They didn't top twenty miles an hour so the journey took a while, but we didn't try to break away. We might have outrun them before they shot us but I gave it even money. And besides, they had something we wanted: information.

"We work for The Collector," the woman had said when we'd finally dismounted from the car and approached the barricade. She was African-American and about as wide as she was tall. I couldn't be sure that all of it wasn't muscle. She told us her name was Jeannine, but that her friends called her Jen.

"Yeah?" I said cautiously. "And what does he collect?"

"Oh," she said, "stuff." Then she squinted at us, heavy brows lowering over small eyes. She took in the red and black of Kelis' clothing, the military way she held herself. Her eyes skittered over me, then Haru and Ingo. "You're Queen M's, aren't you?"

I twitched in surprise and then it was too late to lie. I shrugged. "We were… guests of hers for a while."

"Yeah," Jeannine said, smiling. "We heard she misplaced quite a few of her guests last week. Don't worry – people are the last thing our boss is interested in. There are enough mouths to feed as it is."

"Yeah, OK," Haru said. "Then what's with the road blocks?"

She shrugged. "Human Intel. The most valuable currency there is."

It took us three hours to reach the outskirts of the city, its pale adobe houses like an extension of the desert on which they sat. We were only a few metres past the sign welcoming us to the place when I saw it. I did an almost perfect double take, but at the second glance I knew I hadn't imagined it: Rodin's Kiss, sitting by the side of the road, a grubby patina of dirt over the white marble. Kelis had seen it too. Her hand reached out to grab mine in surprise, then just as quickly pulled back.

Jeannine, sitting beside me in the back of our jeep, laughed at my expression. "We got a couple of copies of that, so he left that one as a kind of greeting. You know – make love not war."

I looked at the AK-47 she had strapped to her back and didn't mention that she seemed prepared for either contingency.

We drove slower now, through the drab suburbs and into the picturesque heart of the city. The town was full of people, more than the survivors of the Cull could account for. The Collector must have been recruiting, whatever Jeannine said. They didn't stop to greet us but I knew that we were being assessed and that if we hadn't been with Jeannine and her crew we wouldn't have got very far. It was subtle, but the place had the feel of a fortress: slabs of concrete sitting by the sides of roads that they could easily be dragged out to block and nests that probably held machine guns, maybe even AA guns. This wasn't a place anyone would want to take by force.

The drive through town took an hour and Jeannine seemed happy to act as tour guide, pointing out local landmarks as we passed. I guess she, at least, was a local. I tuned her out and concentrated on getting a read on the place, a sense of what went on here. The Voice had become a constant dull murmur in the last few days, clear enough to hear, and it was telling me to be careful. Warning me that the people here weren't my friends. I did my best to ignore it. Maybe there were no friends here, but I didn't get the sense that there were any enemies either. More like people from a parallel world, benignly indifferent to ours. We finally stopped, at a building that looked like a honeycomb, with a half-collapsed sign that told me it had once been a hotel.