Rebecca Levene - Kill or Cure

Mike, the surfer-boy leader of the group, shrugged. "Everyone needs to relax now and again."

"You've been to Vegas?" I pressed. "Recently?"

The young black-haired Goth who'd twined herself around his arm the moment he sat down, laughed. "Yeah, but wherever we go there's a party – that's, like, the point."

I looked across the cooking fire to Haru, clutching a metal bowl of soup between his hands. He rolled his eyes. These guys were worse than useless as a source of information, but if they could slip us into Vegas under the radar they'd be worth their weight in gold.

There were a lot of them – more than I'd realised; at least a hundred. They were sitting around their own small cooking fires in huddles of three or four. The flames of the central bonfire shot thirty, forty feet into the air, advertising our presence to anyone with their eyes open – but they didn't seem to care. They seemed supremely confident that nothing in the world would hurt them. Could be the drugs – could be something else. And if we were hooking up with these people I wanted to know for sure.

When the meal was done I turned to Mike and asked as casually as possible if it would be OK to take a look at the buses. "We're running low on fuel ourselves – solar power's got to be the way forward."

"Sure," he said, waving a lazy arm towards the distant, misshapen silhouettes of the vehicles. "Just be back in time for the burning – it's kind of a bonding ritual." His other hand was in the young Goth's hair, gently running the strands through his fingers, and I noticed for the first time that she was pregnant. Only a few months gone, the little creature inside her was adding just a slight roundness to her belly. For a second I couldn't take my eyes off them: the tenderness of his gesture, the blind hopefulness of bringing another life into this world. With an effort I blinked and looked away.

Kelis was out on the periphery of the group, a darker blot against the night sky. I didn't like sitting with the vast emptiness of the desert behind me, but I knew she'd rather have that at her back than these strangers. When she saw me heading for the buses she drifted to her feet and joined me. A moment later and Ingo was with us too, silent and thoughtful. Haru looked up and then back at his sketch, a delicate line drawing of the Goth girl that hinted at the body beneath her baggy black clothes. He kept the page carefully tipped up towards him, so Mike wouldn't see it. I shrugged and turned back to the others as we mounted the steps to the first of the buses.

"Are these guys for real?" Kelis asked.

I looked back at them, lounging contentedly around their small camp fires. "They didn't seem too bothered about us poking around. They haven't searched us, or asked for our weapons."

"Or asked us who we are or why we're going to Vegas," Kelis said. "Don't you think that's odd?"

I shrugged. "With anyone else, yeah. With these guys…"

And then we were inside the bus and I felt a sick lurch in my stomach. It was a lab, low-tech but unmistakeable. Fuck! Why the hell did I still trust anyone? I backed away, gun out of its holster, ready to make a run if it wasn't already too late. I looked to Kelis, expecting her usual hair-trigger reaction to threat, but she was still looking at the lab. Looking and laughing.

I relaxed, just a little, though my heartbeat was still pulsing in my ears. "There's something I'm not getting here, right?"

Kelis took in my expression, my hand clawed around the handle of the Magnum. "It's OK, its fine,' she said, hand gently resting against mine, prying my fingers loose. Her tone was almost crooning, the voice you used with a hysteric. I must have seemed close to the edge, teetering on it. I guess I was. The Voice was constant now, chipping away at my calm and sanity.

"This is not the same as Ashok's laboratory in Cuba," Ingo said. He had a beaker in his hand, squinting at its thick brown-yellow contents.

"It's a meth lab," Kelis said. "Primitive, but it doesn't take much. Look." She gestured at a side table, which I saw now was piled high with opened boxes of prescription cold medicine. The ephedrine, I suddenly remembered – extract it and you were halfway to having yourself a batch of crystal meth.

Finally, I laughed too. "Tweakers. OK."

Not just tweakers, it turned out. The next bus had a lab set-up that looked a lot more complex but by then I wasn't too worried. Beside, they'd left a convenient pile of their end product on one table, little off-white pills with the rough imprint of a dove on them. Old school. "Ecstasy," I said.

Kelis was inspecting a heap of white powder. She took a small dab on her finger and licked it before I could stop her. "Speed too, I think. Or it could be ketamine." She grinned, suddenly. "Give me five minutes – if I start fighting its speed, if I just lie there staring at my fingers, it's K."

"You have not taken enough for either effect," Ingo said. Kelis' eyes met mine, amused. A second later we looked away, the momentary closeness between us a reminder of things we didn't want to think about.

The third bus was a living quarter, crowded bunk beds and a filthy bathroom. The walls were draped with tie-died fabric and bad art. It looked like a squat I'd lived in for a week back when I was a medical student.

"How do these people survive?" Kelis asked as we walked into the fourth bus. "They're sitting targets." Here was something I'd seen in the squat, too: growing tanks, heat lamps, and a profusion of green. The unmistakeable harsh greasy smell of dope.

"Like the farmers," I said. "They've got the expertise to make this stuff, why would anyone want to interfere with that? And my guess is they give it away for free."

"We do," Mike said, a dark shape in the doorway of the bus. "We don't have the tech to make anything high grade, but it's good enough to get rolling."

"It's a fair trade, drugs for food and safe passage."

He smiled, lopsided. "But the drugs are just a means to an end. It's the party we're about – the good time."

"Yes," Ingo said, "because a party is precisely what people need in this world."

Mike shook his head, taking Ingo's flat tone for sarcasm. But I knew that Ingo didn't do irony, and I thought that he was probably right. Mike and his people offered an escape, and that was more valuable than any pill, powder or plant.

Later, they had a party for us. I hadn't intended to join in, but when they dragged out the effigy, a huge figure of wood and paper that must have been hidden away somewhere behind the buses, I decided that I'd stay to watch that at least. I was flooded with childhood memories of Guy Fawkes Night, innocent memories too painful to look at and too precious to ignore.

It took twenty of them to carry the figure to the fire. They used a pulley to lever it upright and for a moment it teetered, a stain on the starscape, before it tipped over and burnt. As the flames licked up the wooden struts of its legs, turning them to ash, I felt other more unwelcome memories. The people of Cuba, burnt to death for a deal they'd made years before, whose terms they probably hadn't understood.

I turned away, sickened, to find Mike behind me, holding out a tray of pills. The doves mocked me, symbols of a peace none of us would know again. But I wanted to. Suddenly, I really wanted to. So I took one and put it in my mouth, quickly swallowing away the bitter chemical taste of it. I could feel Kelis' eyes burning into my face, but I wouldn't meet them.

Half an hour later, the drug began to kick in, first a rush that was almost a panic, then the panic transforming into an energy that was also the most profound relaxation I'd ever felt. There was music playing somewhere, a haunting melody and a heavy beat. I let my body move to it, the movement no effort at all.