Rebecca Levene: Kill or Cure

"Thank you Soren, Kelis," she said to the two who'd accompanied me. I was surprised to find that she had a British accent, an upper-class one. I don't know what I'd expected but it wasn't that.

Soren nodded and fell back to the side of the woman's chair. Behind me I felt Kelis shift, but I knew that she hadn't gone far. And everywhere around me there were guns. Knives too. And the brightness on some of the clothes was blood.

I looked back at the leader of this informal army. "Thank you for rescuing me."

She shrugged. "It wasn't intentional. We were just scavenging and there you were."

"Still," I said. "I'm grateful."

"Are you?" she studied me closely. "You'd been taking industrial quantities of opiates and benzoids." I noticed that she used the correct medical term. So, educated too.

"Yeah. The time in that bunker just flew by."

She smiled slightly at that. "How much time, exactly?"

"Five years. Give or take."

"Since it started."

I nodded. "We were a government research project but – the shit hit the usual apparatus. There was an explosion and half the place collapsed with me on the wrong side of the rubble." It was close enough to the truth.

She seemed to accept it. "And what were you researching?"

"The cure."

I felt a buzz pass through the crowd like an electric current. The woman's face remained unreadable, though. "Did you find it?"

I crooked an eyebrow and looked around me.

"I guess not," she said. "But you – you told us you needed anti-psychotics. Those aren't usually needed for opiate detox."

"I have mild schizophrenia," I told her. "Totally controllable, with the right medication."

She seemed to take a little longer to accept this half truth. Or maybe she was just wondering what the hell kind of use a head-case like me was going to be to her. Some, she must have decided, because then she asked, "You're a doctor, right?"

I nodded.

"Academic?"

"And practical. I was a haematologist before." I already knew that I didn't need to say before what. Time was now divided into 'Before' and 'After'.

"Can you set a broken limb? Sew up a cut or take down a fever?"

"Yeah," I told her. "Give me the right equipment and I can do all that." I glanced over the deck to the distant shoreline, palm trees leaning over the pure white beach. "I know my stuff when it comes to tropical diseases, too."

She smiled fully and stood up. She was exactly my height, our shoulders level as she reached out to embrace me in a hug that I sensed was more ritual than emotional. "Then welcome to my kingdom," she said. "I used to have another name, but now people just call me Queen M." She smiled, as if it was a big joke. But I knew damn well that she was a queen, and I'd better be sure to treat her like one.

Queen M took me on the tour herself. The flagship was just what I'd thought: a luxury cruise liner which had been stranded off the coast of St Martin when the Cull struck and its crew were too sick to think about anything but dying.

"We threw off the corpses, scrubbed down the decks and took her over," Queen M told me. She was standing at the prow of the small catamaran they'd launched from the belly of the cruise ship, the wind rattling through the beads in her hair.

"Where do you get the fuel to move her?" I asked.

Queen M looked at me, judging the question. Why did I want to know? Was I figuring out their weaknesses? "We don't very often," she told me eventually. "But it's useful to know that we can if we need to."

The catamaran circled the prow of the boat and I got my first view of the rest of the fleet. Hundreds of vessels, almost all of them sailboats, some big enough to carry a crew of fifty, others barely big enough for one. There were fishing boats as well as luxury yachts, and somewhere in the middle I saw the flying boat which had taken me from the compound. After a second I noticed that all the vessels were all flying the same flag: a stylised drawing of a red blood cell – the outline of the platelet picked out on red against a white background. A survivor's celebration. And also a subtle sort of warning.

"All following you?" I asked, watching one ship hove away from the fleet, the wind billowing its sails.

"I brought them together," she said, a non-answer.

"And the rest of the world?" In the back of my mind, always, were the thoughts of him. Of what had happened back in London and whether there was any chance he might have survived it.

She looked at me almost with pity. "You don't know?"

I looked away, not liking what I was reading in her eyes. "I can guess, but…"

"Yes," she said. "Everything you've guessed, and worse. There's no government left in Europe or America. The Cull took most people, but other illnesses and fighting and just outright stupidity took an awful lot more. Infrastructure broke down. The rule of law. There are crops rotting on the plains of America while the people of New York starve. You wouldn't believe, would you, that civilization could fall apart so quickly?"

I shook my head. But I saw in her face that she'd believed it – and prepared for it.

After that, the catamaran headed for one of the more distant islands, a small hump on the horizon. We passed more ships as we travelled, some with long thin lines stretching into the water from their bows, trawling the deep waters for fish.

"Yours too?" I asked.

She nodded at me and then at the dark-skinned fishermen on the boat as they shouted a greeting. Nearer in to the island I saw something stretching across the waves, barring our way. "Fishing net?" I guessed.

"Wave farm." The turbines stretched entirely around the shore, ringing the small island in steel. They must have generated enough power to supply everyone on board the flagship and then some. Civilisation might have collapsed elsewhere, but it seemed to be alive and kicking here.

"Food?" I asked. She didn't answer, just waved an instruction to our skipper. The catamaran veered sharply to starboard, throwing up a cliff of water as it turned, and we headed for yet another island.

At first I thought a massive fire had scorched this island's soil, but as we drew nearer I realised that it was just black, volcanic sand. The interior was flat, stretching off to a distant horizon, but it was vibrantly green. Closer still and I could see the pattern to it, a patchwork of fields with flourishing crops. There were people there; slowly working their way up the lines of crops, planting or weeding, whatever the hell you did when you were a farmer.

"Food," I said.

"The Caribbean's a fertile place," she replied.

"And that's why you came here?"

"One of the reasons. My mother was Trinidadian you know. We used to come here on family holidays when I was a child." Her face had a faraway look for a moment, drifting in memory.

"It must have taken a while to set this up, though. Time to gather resources…"

She smiled. "The scarce resource these days is people. And all you really need to do to gather them is offer a tiny bit of hope."

I looked over at the island again, the crops thriving in the region's benign climate as field workers sweated under the tropical sun. Maybe she was right.

After the tour they took me back to the flagship, to a different room from the one I'd detoxed in, bigger and cleaner. I had the impression that I'd passed some kind of test. But the instant I stepped onboard my two shadows joined me; Soren and Kelis, falling into step behind me as naturally as if they'd been doing it for weeks. I kinked an eyebrow at Kelis – figuring she'd be the more communicative of the two – and she seemed to understand the question.

"Bodyguards," she said. "For you protection." She had a Latin – American accent. A pleasant, light voice with an air of lethal competence about her. Kelis looked like she could kill without even raising a sweat.