Rebecca Levene: Kill or Cure

Then, on the eighth day, everything changed. I woke to the sound of pounding on my cabin door. They didn't wait for me to answer and a second later I opened my eyes, disoriented, to find Soren's blue ones looking down at me. His very blond lashes blinked three times over them without either of us saying anything.

"So, I guess you want me to get up," I said eventually.

He nodded, taciturn as ever. I wondered suddenly what he did when he wasn't traipsing around after me. He was one of those people you couldn't really imagine relaxing, knocking back a few drinks with his friends or sunbathing with a good book. He didn't look like a man who ever really enjoyed himself.

"Why?" I asked him. "Has something happened?"

"No," Kelis said. I realised for the first time that she'd been hovering by the door all this time, brown skin almost the same colour as the mahogany panelling on the wall behind her. "It's time for you to really earn your keep."

A catamaran took us to the island and from there a car drove us to the airport, just two strips of tarmac cut through the trees. There were twenty others with us, and this time there were none of the bright colours, the play-acting at pirates. This time it was clear that I was travelling with a regiment from someone's private army.

Soren was dressed all in black. There were ammunition belts slung over both his shoulders and he was carrying more guns than he had limbs. It was almost absurd, but I could see the way one of his thumbs was tapping a jittery rhythm against the barrel of the largest rifle and the small drop of blood forming on his lip where he couldn't seem to stop chewing it. Anything that made Soren nervous made me very nervous.

Kelis' face was as calm as ever, her body entirely motionless. Only two spots of colour, high in her cheeks, told me anything about what was going on inside her. I'd been given combats to wear, an ugly olive green that clashed horribly with my red hair. I felt ridiculous, a little girl playing at being a soldier.

They'd given me a medical kit but they hadn't given me a gun.

The small jet took off from the runway, wheels bumping alarmingly along the pock-marked surface, without anyone having said a word to me about where we were going. After an hour though, as the sea crawled on endlessly beneath us, I was sure that we were travelling east, crossing the Atlantic.

"May as well sleep," Kelis told me. "We'll be nine hours yet."

Going all the way to Europe then. Bringing me closer to my husband, a small, hopeful voice said in my head.

But not, in the end, close enough. I woke up seven hours later to a rising sun and the approaching coastline of a country that I knew wasn't England.

"France," Kelis said.

"OK," I answered. "Why?"

"Recruitment drive," one of the others told me, a middle-aged white man with leathery skin and a thin, mean face. He'd introduced himself as Curtis, though whether this was his first or his last name I never found out.

I remembered what Queen M had told me, that people were the scarce resource now. I thought about pirates and the British navy of old, and the weapons that everyone but me was carrying – and I began to guess what we were. A press gang.

Paris approached. More golden than I'd remembered it; like a vast human honeycomb. There were blots of darkness in the gold, relics of a recent burning. As the plane sank lower I saw that whole streets and neighbourhoods had been reduced to rubble. Strange, how people can face a disease that wants to kill them all and still have the energy to kill each other.

The plane sank lower still, low enough that I could make out the insect forms of people on the city's streets. Never alone, always in crowds of ten, or twenty, or greater. Safety in numbers.

Soon, the plane was low enough that I could see individual faces. I could also see the Eiffel Tower, prodding the sky above the heart of the city. I began to wonder where, exactly, they were planning on landing.

A few minutes later and we were a hundred meters or so above the roofs of the buildings and a few hundred meters away from the start of the Champs Elysees. "You have got to be fucking kidding me!" I said.

Kelis grinned, making her look like a little kid for about a tenth of a second. "What's the matter?"

The list that sprung into my head was too long to recite in the few seconds before we ploughed towards the ground at several hundred miles an hour. I settled for, "What about the cars?" I'd seen news broadcasts in the bunker, the streets of every major city choked with vehicles abandoned when their owners sickened and died.

"Cleared them the last time we were here," Soren said.

And when was that? I wanted to shout. How do you know people haven't been piling the road high with broken-down cars and trucks since you left?

No time left for that. The plane had started its final, fatal plummet to the ground. Now I could feel the breakfast I'd eaten four hours ago rising up to choke me and I think I might have screamed for real, because roads are narrow and aeroplanes are wide and no one in their right mind tries to set one down on top of the other in the middle of one of Europe's biggest cities.

The golden blur of buildings rushed by on either side. I looked across at Soren but he was just frowning faintly, like a man wondering whether there was a chance he'd forgotten to buy milk that morning. Kelis was still smiling, the expression more feral than happy.

And then we were only twenty feet above the road. There were cars there, three of them right ahead of us, but there was absolutely no way we'd be pulling up now. The wind screamed past the wings and I screamed too, but it didn't matter because the back wheels had finally hit the ground with a noise louder than I could have believed possible. As they scraped along with the front wheels still stubbornly in the air, the plane jerked underneath us like a wild horse which had just been saddled for the first time. Suddenly I wasn't the only one screaming.

I was buckled in, but the strap nearly broke around me as we swerved violently to the right. There was a hideous crunch beneath us, as if we'd just run over the world's largest cockroach and I knew that we'd passed the first of the cars. But there were still two more to go. For just a moment I wished that I hadn't taken the drugs which had killed the Voice inside me. That I could have heard it still, telling me that everything was going to be OK, that I was invincible. But maybe even the Voice would have had a few doubts right then.

Another swerve, to the left this time. Another horrible crunch. A firework display spat gold past the windows. After a second of confusion I realised that it was the spark of the undercarriage dragging over metal. There were screams outside the plane too now. Our landing must have come out of the blue sky without warning for those on the ground. I wondered if anyone had been caught beneath it. If some of the crunch we'd heard had been bone, not metal. But I didn't wonder too hard. Other people's deaths don't count for much when you're facing your own.

Then, almost incredibly, we were slowing down. The awful rasping sound of metal on tarmac was still shuddering the inside of the plane. I guessed that we were pulling one of the crushed cars along with us, the drag of the undercarriage fighting against our vast momentum. We were going no faster than a car on a motorway now, the buildings rushing past us on either side finally individual and recognisable. And then we stopped altogether.

There was a second of one of the most profound silences I'd ever heard. Then one of the men beside me whooped and soon the rest of the crew joined in, and I did too because, Jesus, it felt good to be alive.

When we got out, we saw that we'd stopped just ten feet shy of the Arc de Triomphe. I wasn't the only one who let out a jagged, slightly hysterical burst of laughter at the sight of the plane's nose, sniffing at the base of the world-famous landmark. The plane itself had seen better days: one of the wheels had torn off, and an engine was hanging loosely from the wing.