Rebecca Levene - Kill or Cure

Off to one side, I could see Haru with a joint hanging from his mouth, his eyes narrow and bloodshot but content. I smiled at him and he smiled back. I knew what I really thought of him, his cowardice and the moral vacuum where his heart should have been, but for just that moment I didn't care. The love I felt was big enough to include him, to include everyone. To my new eyes everyone looked like an echo of the Goth girl, a young life curling and growing inside them, pregnant with hope.

I joined a circle of people dancing around the bonfire. My hand was taken by a thin brown one on one side, a blunt white one on the other. The family of man, I thought, and laughed.

The hours stretched and warped and the night lasted both forever and no time at all. I took another pill, and then some of the powder which made me feel higher, or clearer, or happier; by then I could barely tell. The high couldn't last though – it was fighting against too much. The melancholy was lurking just underneath it. A moment's inattention and it crept back in and grabbed me.

I walked away, out from the others into the wide desert around us. Someone called out to me, but I ignored them and they didn't follow. The joy the drugs brought felt like a joining, but there was a profound selfishness at the heart of it, an attention only to one's own pleasure. I walked until the fire was a distant blur of orange and the stars were the brightest thing in the night. I could just walk forever, I thought. Ash needed to be stopped, but it didn't have to be me. For one moment I let myself entertain the fantasy. Going back, across the continent and then the ocean. Finding him and pretending that I was still the person he loved. He'd never know all the things I'd done, and I'd never have to tell him.

He's long dead, the Voice told me, and you can't go back to being who you were. It's too late. I sighed and took one last look around me at the stark solitude of the desert, then walked back to the light and the people.

When I woke up the next morning I felt the lingering remnants of the drugs, a quiet echo of the absolute contentment I'd felt last night. Kelis wordlessly brought me a mug of coffee. I didn't know where she'd spent the night. She hadn't been in the truck when I'd returned to sleep there, curling myself in the back seat.

"Vegas in five hours," she told me. There was an edge of accusation in her tone – do you really think that was the best time to get wrecked? – but she didn't voice it.

The desert looked bleaker in the early morning light, or maybe that was the beginning of the vicious come-down I was due any time now. I sighed and started the engine.

Three hours of driving later we hit the Colorado river, wide and powerful down here in the plains. We drove along its high banks for ten miles and then, suddenly, there was the concrete sweep of the Hoover dam, so vast you almost couldn't believe that it was man made. I wondered how long it would be before we were ready to make anything that astonishing again.

The tarmac in the road over the bridge was crazed and broken causing the convoy to slow almost to a stop. I felt a crawling sense of unease as we crossed, the sense that we were being watched.

"Cameras," Kelis said, pointing. She was right. There were two of them, high on the struts at each end of the dam, swivelling sleekly to follow us as we passed. I had the sudden, suffocating certainty that we were back in Ash's kingdom. I was sure the broken road surface was his doing, a way of slowing everyone down to let him examine them and decide whether to let them in. There were blocky buildings at each end of the bridge which I thought had once housed museums and tourist shops. Now they would be filled with his people, ready to push undesirables off the narrow road and far, far down to the waters below.

I turned my face away, keeping it as much in shadow as I could. My fingers itched to be holding a weapon although I was sure that was just the sort of thing the invisible observers would be watching for.

The minutes seem to pass agonisingly slowly as the convoy inched its way over the bridge. My head began to throb with the tension. Even Ingo seemed uneasy, the dark skin on his round face looking stretched and old.

"Come on, come one," Haru muttered. He was rocking backwards and forwards in his seat, little jerky motions which I don't think he knew he was making. Ingo reached out a hand and pressed him back firmly into his seat. Trying to calm him.

But no one stopped us, because fifteen minutes later we were driving past the last buildings and away from the bridge. Haru let out a gasp of relief that was almost a sob and we drove on, an ugly green minnow in a school of gaudy angel fish.

There were five more checkpoints in the next sixty miles and they waved us through each one. As we passed I saw people lean out of the windows of the buses, throwing little parcels to the guardsmen, the price of passage. I look at them out of the corner of my eye, trying not to let them know that I was watching. There was nothing about them that resembled the Infected in Cuba: just bored-looking men in khaki, smoking cigarettes and now the joints that the Party People had thrown them.

"They look OK," Kelis said. "Like regular people."

"Yeah," I said. "And so do I. The Infected only look the way they do because Ash got it wrong. Maybe he's perfected it."

Haru scowled. "A city of lunatics."

"Or worse," I said, and we carried on driving in silence.

Finally we could see Vegas ahead of us, a dark stain on the sand that slowly resolved itself into a network of roads and then into trees, cars, individual houses. There was a burst of gold at the centre of it, bright in the midday sun, and I realised that the lights of Glitter Gulch were still blazing. That was just like Ash, I thought, who despite being a scientist had always been a showman.

The city blended out into the desert and we were driving into the suburbs before I'd even realised. There was no obvious check-point but I knew that the unseen watchers were here too. Cameras were everywhere and people too. Some of them stopped and stared as we passed, none of the zombie-like inattention of the Cubans here. The women were wearing floral dresses, the men jeans and t-shirts. Different faces, different bodies, yet so alike in some way I couldn't quite identify. If I didn't know better they could have been clones, the same few individuals repeated over and over.

"Is it just me," Haru said, "or are all the women here pregnant?"

As soon as he said it I knew that I'd noticed it from the start but my conscious mind hadn't quite processed it.

"Yeah, they are," Kelis said. "That's… creepy."

"Rebirth is the only way to repopulate," Ingo said. I hoped that it was as simple as that, but I absolutely knew that it wasn't.

Deeper into the city, but not quite at its heart, the buses finally stopped and we dismounted. Kelis looked a question at me and I nodded. The party people had bought us safe passage so far and we had nothing to gain by ditching them yet. I looked around. There didn't seem to be anything special about the place we'd stopped: tract housing to one side, the concrete cubes of a hospital the other.

My nerves had been humming with tension, the vibration rising in pitch the nearer we came to Ash. I could sense his presence everywhere, and in my head the Voice was telling me that I should go to him. "Any reason we've stopped here?" I asked Mike as casually as I could.

He smiled and pointed at the hospital. "Medical check-up. No one's allowed in without one." Justified paranoia in a post-Cull world, to check that newcomers weren't bringing new diseases with them – except I knew Ash and I didn't believe this was the real reason. The rest of Mike's people had dismounted the buses as we spoke. As I tried to back away I realised that we were surrounded, ten of Mike's people around each of us, subtly isolating us. I reached for my gun but they were so close there was no room to draw it, and even if I could take some of them before they overpowered me, I couldn't take them all.