Kill or Cure

by Rebecca Levene

But there weren't many deaths that night. Not as many as there would have been if our crew had struck during the day. I guess that was the point. By the time my eyes were open and I was fully awake there were already three bodies on the ground by the door. I could hear the sounds of fighting further out and Curtis was holding a big black Beretta against Jules' head. The awareness of it spread like a ripple through our hosts and, one by one, the weapons they'd picked up were dropped to their sides.

  Somewhere at the back of the room a baby was crying. I could hear the harsh, desperate whispers of its mother as she tried to quiet it down. She was probably afraid that our people would kill it, if she couldn't get it to stop. I wasn't sure they wouldn't.

  For a moment, Jules' eyes glared into mine through the gloom and I read a bitter accusation there. I wanted to tell him that I hadn't known this was going to happen - except that would be a lie.

  Soren had a gun in his hand and he looked happy, or at least satisfied. He herded our hosts out of the gallery, pushing them towards the grand marble stairs that led to the ante-chamber below the glass pyramid, then up into the big, empty square. The sky was dark and starless above us.

  Kelis carried one of the women who had been wounded in the brief crossfire, blood oozing from her side onto Kelis' t-shirt. She avoided my eye as she walked past and I wanted to believe that it was because she was ashamed - because I'd thought I might be starting to like her.

  There was more sobbing now, not just from the baby. They thought we were going to kill them all; a death squad come to end their little social experiment. But that wasn't it at all.

  They divided them up: men, women, old, young. The four oldest were pushed into a far corner, away from everyone else - discarded. Historical memories washed up, of other times when one group of humans had sorted another in this way, but I let them ebb. We weren't a death squad. I was sure of that, at least.

  "Check them over," Curtis said to me.

  I folded my arms, not wanting him to see them shaking. "Check them over for what?"

  He frowned. "Disease. Injuries - you know, doctor stuff."

  "Treat them like animals, you mean."

  I saw his hand tighten on the trigger of his gun, the barrel twitching reflexively towards me.

  "I'll treat the wounded," I said, and there was no disguising the shake in my voice. "That's the only 'doctor stuff' I'm prepared to do."

  "Listed, lady. We've been doing this for a long time before you joined the show. And we can carry on just fine without you."

  "So why do you need me at all?" I asked.

  His lips curled in a sneer, but Soren stepped forward before he could speak. "Check them all out," he said, "and you can treat that lady. She'll die if you don't look at her. You can see that."

  I could. The bleeding from her side hadn't slowed, and her face was the ivory pale of someone a few pints short of a full load. "Promise me no one will die," I said.

  "No one will die," Curtis said, so quickly that I knew there had to be some kind of catch. "You've got my word on that. If everyone plays nicely, no one gets hurt," he added, and I could see that he wasn't lying.

  The woman's injuries took half an hour to patch up: a pressure bandage, some stitches and antibiotics. I wanted to give her some painkillers too, but Curtis' hand clamped around my arm as I reached back into my medicine bag. "She'll live without that, won't she?"

  I nodded reluctantly.

  "Then it's time to do your job."

  I approached Jules first. His face was numb with shock. I stood awkwardly in front of him for a moment, wondering what exactly I was supposed to be doing. Taking his temperature? His pulse? Holding his balls and telling him to cough? In the end I settled for the first two and rolled back his eyelids to check for anaemia. Curtis was still looking at me impassively, so I took his blood pressure too - sky high, but that was hardly surprising - and then I examined his tongue. After that I turned to Curtis and shrugged. What the hell else was I supposed to do?

  "Strip," Curtis said, and for one moment I thought he meant me. Then he turned to include all our captives in the instruction. "Strip - all of you."

  Now the visual really was like something from the darkest pages of history. I saw the women look at each other, look at the men - look at their children. But when there are fifty odd guns pointing in your direction, there isn't much time for modesty. And they'd heard Curtis' promise that no one would get hurt. I was clinging on to that hope too. Quietly, trying not to look anyone in the eye, I gave each of them a more thorough exam, peering at bellies sagging from childbirth or the bitter scars of acne on a teenage face. After each one I gave Curtis a report, a run down of past ailments, possible present conditions. A young woman's eyes stared at me, wide and uncomprehending, when I told her she was in the late phases of breast cancer, almost certainly fatal.

  After me it was Kelis, questioning each of them about their background, their qualifications, their skills. They were kept shivering and naked as they answered in the chill Paris air, dank with a mist which smelled as if it had come straight from the sewers.

  And then, finally, Curtis began pointing. There were seventeen empty seats on the plane and fifty-six people to choose from. I could do the math. The true scarce resource these days are people, Queen M had told me. And I guess however many plantations and wind farms you build, you can still only pump out new people at the same old slow rate.

  Unless you go and steal them from somewhere else, of course.

  A lot of jet fuel for seventeen new subjects, but you're looking at a lifetime of work. Especially if you pick the young and the healthy, and you leave behind the old and the barren. The seven year-old child - bright-eyed and full of energy - had been sorted into the wheat; worth the investment of a few more years training. But the baby, the child's sister, got left behind - a chesty cough that might just be a cold, might be something more serious.

  I saw the awful realisation of what was about to happen in the mother's eyes a second before she started screaming. Curtis didn't say anything, just backhanded her across the mouth. She fell to the ground, the scream boiling down to a desperate whimper.

  "Whatever you're doing," Jules said, "don't do it. Please. We're happy here. We're... we'll trade with you. We'll give you what you need. We'll... anything."

  Curtis shrugged, looking not just uncaring but actively bored. I wondered how many times he'd witnessed this little scene before. Just variations on a theme to him by now, I guessed, the same words coming out of different mouths. "Yeah, we'll take some technology back with us," he said. "But the only thing we really want is you."

  "Then take us all! You're separating husbands and wives. Families. You might as well kill the people you are leaving behind - you know they have no chance on their own." Jules voice was soft and persuasive, but I could tell he already knew that Curtis was deaf to any plea or persuasion. His face hardened.

  "Fine. Take us. Point a gun to our heads and take us - but do not expect us to work with you. Do not imagine that every second of every day we won't be searching for a way to pay you back for what you have done."

  And that was the one thing I still didn't understand. Queen M could take them, but how could she control them? How do you keep a whole slave kingdom docile? I'd seen the scientists working on her flagship, the people in the fields - unguarded.

  It was Soren who put the final little piece into the puzzle, the picture springing out clear and clever, and ugly as hell. He drew something from his belt that I'd taken for yet another gun. But I saw now that the barrel was too thin to spit out conventional bullets. It was meant for something else.

  He approached Jules first, and the man flinched away. But when Soren dropped to his knees in front of him, he looked briefly taken aback, not quite sure where this could be heading. Before he'd even begun to guess, Soren grabbed his leg, pressed the barrel of the strange silver gun against his thigh, and pressed.

  Jules let out a scream of profound agony, dropping helplessly to his knees as
Soren moved on to the next woman, shooting whatever it was into her too. He turned back to me before the third victim, waiting for this one, struggling and screaming, to be restrained by our soldiers. "They'll need dressings for that," he said.

  There was no point refusing. The wound on Jules' leg where the gun had fired was small but weeping a blackish fluid, as if something had penetrated to the deepest parts of him. It would get infected if I didn't cover it soon. I tried to figure out what had happened as I worked on him and the rest. The only thing I knew for sure was that the hole wasn't empty - something was lodged inside.

  The process didn't stop with those who'd been chosen. The discards, too, were shot. Only with the baby did Soren hesitate, before a short, angry jerk of Curtis' head urged him on and - face turned away - he pressed the gun against his tiny leg too. The child's agonised wail went on and on, overlaying everything that followed.

  "You've all been fitted with tracking devices," Curtis said flatly. "Long range, ten years of battery life. And that," he said to Jules now, seeming to take a sort of pleasure in it, "is why you'll be doing every fucking thing that we tell you. Because not only will we know where you are at any time, we'll know where they are." He pointed at the small, frightened group of those to be left behind. "And if you do something we don't like, they'll be the ones to suffer."

  I realised suddenly that Kelis was hovering at my shoulder, watching my face rather than the bloody little drama playing out in front of us. She touched my shoulder lightly. "We're taking them to a better life, you know. We're rebuilding society - the only people who are."

  "And that makes this all right, does it?" I asked bitterly. "That's how you live with yourself?"

  She shrugged one elegant shoulder. "I live with myself because I haven't got any more choice than they do." She rolled up the rough green cotton of her combats, and I saw a small white scar on her outer thigh, right where her own implant had gone in.

  It only took me a second to understand it all. My fingers shook as I rolled up my own trouser leg. And even though I was expecting it, the sight of the puckered little scar on my right thigh still sent a wave of nausea through me, the bile rising in my throat.

  "I don't have a choice," Kelis said. "And neither do you."

  The plane was fixed by the time we returned, but there wasn't much of an air of celebration as we climbed onboard. The newcomers were silent, shell-shocked. I caught the eyes of the little seven-year-old girl as we taxied and took off, and read a dawning knowledge in them that someone that young wasn't meant to have.

  I'd been sleeping, fitfully, when I felt the plane begin to descend. A glance at my watch told me we'd only been airborne a few hours, and I looked out of the window and saw the green-grey land beneath us. No way was that St Lucia or anywhere else in the tropics.

  Ireland, I realised as the plane landed, more cleanly this time, a strip of concrete that might have been a road once. Curtis didn't take everyone this time, just Jules and me and four of the others - no explanation, just a brusque order to follow him.

  The people he was looking for were nearly a mile's walk away, over the hills and the long wet grass. There was a fresh smell to the air, cleansing after the decay of Paris, but I didn't find it refreshing.

  When they saw us they raised their hands to their heads, three little matchstick figures in the distance. They must have known we were trouble but they didn't try to run. Perhaps they'd realised there wasn't any point.

  Curtis was watching them through military grade binoculars, still and silent for two minutes. Whatever he saw must have satisfied him because he made a sharp gesture and we all walked forward. They stayed stock still, waiting.

  "There were six of them when we came," Curtis said. "We took two. The rest were too old or two weak. They had the trackers put in, same as you. But I guess they just didn't believe us."

  Close up, and they'd gone from stick-men to stick-thin real people. I guess subsistence farming isn't so easy when you have a climate like Ireland's and no wind generators. I thought they were probably younger than they looked, but fear and hunger had hollowed out their faces. They could have been in their sixties, three women and a man, stooped over the hoes with which they'd been tilling the fields.

  A fine drizzle had started as we walked, plastering everyone's hair to their heads, dripping from the tips of their noses. The same nose on each of them, with a little up-tilt at the end that must have looked cute back when they were children. All the same family, I guessed. The separation must have hit them hard.

  "They ran away," Curtis suddenly said, to us and to the four forlorn figures in front of us. "Your sisters or wives or, who the fuck knows, maybe both. Just so as you know who to blame for what's about to happen."

  Then he pulled out his gun and shot all four of them - two in the back as they'd finally realised that they needed to run away. Even the blood looked grey in the watery sunlight. I wanted to look away, but I didn't. Everyone ought to have someone watch, and care, while they die.

  And then we went back to the plane. Lesson over. Of course, there was no way of knowing if what he'd told us was true, if they really were the relatives of runaway slaves. For all I knew, they could have been some random strangers he'd seen from the air.

  But in a way, that was the point. Because now we knew exactly how ruthless he was. We knew he didn't make empty threats.

  I saw in the hopeless droop of Jules' shoulders that the knowledge had broken him. He'd do whatever Queen M wanted him to. And, in time, maybe he'd even come to enjoy his new life. Now that he knew he had no choice, he could forgive himself for his desertion - I knew how people's psychologies worked. Self-justification. Cognitive dissonance. We need to believe that what we're doing is the right thing, always. If our beliefs say it isn't, we're more likely to change our beliefs than our actions. I guess human beings are lazy that way.

  In his own brutal way, Curtis had given Queen M's newest recruits a sort of freedom - to embrace their new life without guilt.

  But not me, I'd learnt a different lesson. If I wanted to escape I'd have to be very clever, and very, very careful.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It felt almost unreal to be back under the clean sunlight of the Caribbean. As soon as we landed I was given a list of patients and put right back into the routine I'd had before the flight to Paris, as if nothing at all had changed. The slowly healing bullet wound in my leg was the only concrete reminder of what had happened. Everywhere I went, Soren and Kelis came too. For the first two days I refused to speak to either of them. Soren took the snub with his usual stoic restraint, or possibly indifference. Kelis didn't say anything, but there were tight little lines around her eyes, deepening every hour I ignored her. For some reason, my opinion seemed to matter to her.

  Good. I could use that.

  On the third day, we were eating breakfast in our customary silence when Kelis suddenly said, "You can keep this up forever, I can tell. You're stubborn as hell. But really, what's the point? You've made the same decision we have - to accept what's been done to us and to live rather than die."

  My mouth tightened. "Yeah. But my decision involves curing people and yours involves killing them. Excuse me if I don't see the equivalence."

  Soren grinned, his blond hair blowing in the sea breeze scraping the deck of the flagship. "You cure them so that we can kill them later," he said. "Excuse me if I don't think that makes you any better."

  "Soren," Kelis said, frowning at him. "You know that isn't -"

  But I interrupted her. "No. He's right. Where do I get off thinking I'm any better than you?"

  And yeah, it was a calculated move. First the punishment, then the forgiveness. But at the same time, it was true. I wasn't any better. And if they'd found him, my husband, then left him behind somewhere with a tracker in his thigh and a death threat hanging over him, would I even be thinking about escaping?

  Of course, he'd have found a way to remove the tracker - probably amputating his own leg - and have tr
acked me down by now, taking out Queen M's entire army in the process, but that was another story. I've always remembered an interview I once saw with a survivor of one of the Nazi death camps, someone whose job it had been to drag the corpses from the gas chambers to the ovens.

  "Until you find yourself there," he'd said. "You don't know the things you'll do for just one more minute of life."

  I guess something of that acceptance must have registered in my face, because the third week after we returned I finally woke to find that Kelis and Soren weren't outside my door. "Recruiting mission," someone told me at breakfast on the big communal tables out on the deck, but they didn't explain. No one else had anything very much to say to me either, and I wondered what Queen M had told her people about me. I realised I was lonely without my two constant shadows.

  I spent the morning running a small surgery on the ship, giving the once over to people suffering everything from colds to colitis but mostly VD. I didn't have to hear the noise from some of the cabins at night to know how most of Queen M's crew killed the idle hours. Nothing like living through the apocalypse to reawaken your lust for life. If they kept going at this rate, we'd be developing antibiotic resistant strains of syphilis which were just going to be a whole bundle of laughs.

  After lunch a call came through that there'd been an injury on one of the plantations on St Kitts. A machete wound, deep by the sound of it. I was required to treat it and get the man back in working shape. And if I couldn't... I could already imagine the cold little cost-benefit analysis going on in Queen M's head. I'd seen her only once since my return from Paris, and then we hadn't spoken. She'd just looked into my furious eyes and smiled, patronisingly - as if I were small child throwing a temper tantrum that would be indulged at first and then, if necessary, punished. I don't think, up till that point in my life, I'd ever hated anyone so much.

  But when I got the order to go to St Kitts, I went, just like she knew I would. What was I going to do, leave the man to die of his injuries?