Rebecca Levene - Kill or Cure

Soren scratched at his short cropped hair. "Guess we're going to have to do some work on that." I couldn't see it being a quick job. But then I had no idea how long we were supposed to be here.

"Philips, Mitchell," Curtis said. Two of the crew crouched to begin work, others standing close by to guard. "The rest of you – it's time to rock and roll."

Every single person in the party save me was suddenly holding some very serious ordinance in a very serious way, and the few ragged people I'd seen melting out of the side streets around us were melting right back into them. There was a 'don't fuck with us' vibe going on that made me feel safe and uneasy at the same time.

Paris was eerily quiet. This was the first time I'd been in a major city since the Cull. I'd known, intellectually of course, what it would be like. Less than two per cent of the population left alive by now – the place was bound to be a ghost town. But nothing prepares you for the sight of somewhere you've seen full of people, noise and motion suddenly so still. Worse because the buildings – the bones of the place – were mostly intact, with no visible reason for what had gone so wrong.

Still, but not deserted. There were subliminal flickers of motion out the corner of my eye as we walked the narrow side streets in strict military formation: point man, scouts, rear guard. They'd placed me in the centre of their small arrow of personnel. For protection or to stop me escaping? I couldn't tell, it didn't make much difference. There was no way I'd be heading off into these mausoleum streets alone.

We were being watched – everyone knew it – and not by friendly eyes.

Still, the attack was unexpected when it came. Queen M's people were watching forward, sideways, behind. They were watching above, scanning the roofs of the buildings for snipers or spies.

They weren't looking below.

Being right in the middle is no protection at all when the attackers are coming at you out of the sewers. There was a quick, loud grate of metal as a cover was shoved aside. And then the whine of bullets and the crack of their impact as someone stuck his arm out and fired round a full 360 degrees. I felt a stinging graze on my right thigh and knew that one of the bullets had winged me.

Not everyone got off so lightly. Kelis let out a grunt and I could see that a bullet had struck a rib, probably snapping it. Another of the men went down and didn't get up. More bullets thudded into his corpse, the blood now oozing slowly out without a functional heart to pump it.

A second later, Soren had stepped in front of Kelis, pushing her to the ground behind the tree-trunk solidity of his body. His semi-automatic was firing round after round, and even over the noise of them, I heard the splash of our assailant's body falling into the filthy water below.

But he wasn't alone. Drain covers were popping up all over the street, figures pulling themselves acrobatically out of the sewer. Our formation was shot to hell. Everyone had scattered after that first, shocking burst of gunfire. I felt horribly exposed, unarmed and unprepared. My first instinct was to fall to the ground, but that's where the threat was coming from. Instead I found myself kneeling beside the fallen, bloody body of our lost man. Up close I could see that he was young, maybe still a teenager. His eyes were open, blankly reflecting back the last daylight he'd ever seen.

I didn't know exactly what I was doing there. My body seemed to be moving without my mind having to give it any instructions, as if it had realised that this was more than the conscious me could deal with. I wondered for a second if I'd meant to try to help him, but then my hands were reaching for the gun he'd never had a chance to fire, slicking the barrel back and forward to load a bullet into the chamber. Before I'd quite registered what I was doing I'd fired a round point-blank into the head just emerging from the dark hole of the sewer in-front of me.

The force of the shot twisted the man round, giving me a perfect view of the exit wound ripped out of the back of his skull, the bloodied shards of bone and the white meat inside.

I heard the ragged breath of someone behind me and twisted, firing at the same time. The shot was wild but good enough to take the man in the chest. He fell, gasping, with hands clutched against his body, trying to keep in everything that belonged inside. It was a battle he couldn't win, and after a few seconds his hands slackened and fell. I'd taken two lives.

After that I made it to the side of the road, crouching in the lee of a small brick wall. I could taste the adrenaline in my mouth, a bitter tang. It had flooded my system the moment the fight had begun but already it was washing back out again, leaving fear and weakness in its wake. I saw my hand holding the gun begin to droop and then shake. I brought my other hand up to steady it but that one was shaking so hard now too that I was afraid I might pull the trigger by mistake.

After a moment, I let it drop. Only three of our attackers were still alive and above ground. As I watched, Kelis kicked one of them in the knee, snapping the joint with a wet crack I could hear from fifteen feet away. When he was down she reached round and snapped his neck. The other two didn't last much longer, and as suddenly as it had begun, it was all over.

Only then did I notice the uniform our attackers had been wearing, sashes draped round their shoulders in the old revolutionary Tricoleur. Old tribalism revived, I thought. And old instincts coming back, even in the most civilised of us. The cold ability to kill or be killed.

I thought I might be sick but in the end I wasn't. Because they hadn't even spoken to us before they'd opened fire and I wasn't in any way sorry they were gone.

"Hey, you OK?" Kelis asked, crouching down beside me and staring at me in unexpected concern, as if her own body wasn't leaking blood onto the cobbled pavement.

"I'm fine," I said. "Bullet grazed me, that's all. But let me take a look at that."

She frowned for a moment, whether unsure if I really was all right or just not keen to let me treat her, I couldn't tell. But then, the heat of battle wearing off, her pain must have begun to register and she slid down the wall beside me and nodded.

The wound wasn't as bad as I'd thought, though she hissed in pain as I probed it with my fingers. "I think one rib's cracked," I told her, "but the bullet's gone clean through and it hasn't nicked any major vessels."

She looked down for a moment longer, as if mesmerised by the sight of my white fingers moving along her brown skin. I realised that I was closer to her than I'd ever been, and for the first time really registered her as another person, with thoughts and feelings inside her head which I couldn't know.

Then she swatted my hand away impatiently and nodded over to the other side of the street. "Go see to Michaels. He took one in the leg and he doesn't look so good. I can bandage this up myself."

It took me half an hour to patch us all together. Michaels needed something more major than the field surgery I could offer him, but he was safer with us than alone so I improvised a splint for his leg and shot him so full of opiates that he wouldn't care if it dropped off on the journey. For a moment, just a moment, I felt a fierce desire to turn the needle round and plunge it into my own arm, feed the hunger which would never quite die. I didn't though. Not this time.

The constant, never-ending war of the addict. Not this time. Not the next. The one after that? Yeah, that one you're never quite sure about.

I realised that one of our attackers was still alive. She was groaning quietly, body slumped half in, half out of the sewer. She looked to be middle aged and bald from some skin condition which left her looking like a medieval leper. The woman had taken a bullet to the gut but I probably could have saved her. Curtis spared me the effort though, not even wasting a bullet on her, just smashing the butt of his rifle hard against her head, driving it down into the pavement until the skull shattered.