Kill or Cure

by Rebecca Levene

  They had all of them by the look of it. The delicate friezes of gods, heroes and monsters that I had last seen six years ago in the British Museum.

  I looked across at Jeannine and she grinned back, looking amazingly impish for such a vast woman. "Like I said, he collects stuff. And the cold is good - helps preserve them, the paintings especially."

  "Don't tell me," I said. "You were an art historian in a previous life."

  "Curator," she told me. "He's very particular about who he recruits. Want the tour?"

  They'd pretty much gutted the British Museum. The dining room was filled, floor to ceiling, with totem poles, leering animal faces staring out at walls covered in African tribal masks which glared blankly back at them. The bar was filled with mummies, standing around in conversational huddles. A giant stone scarab sat in the middle of it all, impassive.

  "No Rosetta Stone?" I asked.

  Jeannine shook her head. "He's interested in art, not history."

  The paintings were in the guest rooms, carefully preserved behind glass. Hanging on walls above beds and dressers, where once there would have been cheap hotel art. I saw Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus, Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe and Grant Wood's American Gothic. Haru brought out his sketchbook, the first time I'd seen it since Cuba, and drew neat little pencil sketches of the works we passed. I glanced at one and saw the subtle way he'd changed it: the Madonna's eyes just a little rounder, her mouth a little smaller, the baby in her arms with a wild look in its eyes, as if what made him more than human wasn't entirely safe.

  The grounds of the hotel were filled with sculptures. I stopped for a long time in front of Epstein's vast, chunky statue of Jacob wrestling the angel. The dusty pink of the marble blended with the red-gold desert sand. It made me think, suddenly, of the voice in my head, my own struggle with it. But was the Voice Jacob or the angel? I used to be quite certain of the answer, but the louder the Voice got, the less sure I became.

  "That's always been a favourite of mine, too." said a man so slender he was little more than bone. His skin and hair were as pale as each other, as if one had been entirely bleached by the sun while the other was always hidden from it.

  "Well, I guess no one from Tate Britain will likely miss it too much."

  He smiled, open and friendly. "No one's voiced any complaints so far."

  They cooked a meal for us out on one of the hotel's patios, a barbecue. The warmth of the flame was welcome in the abrupt chill of a desert night. He ate delicately, picking at the chicken wings and beef steaks with his fingers as if testing their consistency. We ate ravenously, tearing at the meat with our teeth like animals. He watched us with a wry twist of amusement on his mouth.

  "This is what you've been doing, ever since the Cull?" I asked him.

  He nodded. "From the moment the Cull started, once we could see where it was all heading."

  "But why all the way out here?" Kelis asked. "Why not just take over the Smithsonian, somewhere you've got a head start and don't have to transport a million tonnes of rock over ten-million fucking acres of desert?"

  "Because it's all the way out here," he said. "We don't get many visitors, and that's just the way I like it. And because this is my home, and why the hell shouldn't Santa Fe be the new cultural capital of the world?"

  "There's more though, isn't there?" Haru squinted at him under lowered brows. "Being far away isn't a guarantee of safety on its own."

  I remembered the Irish farmers, out in their lonely hills, and knew that he was right. The Collector looked at him a long time, and beside me I felt Jeannine tense. But then he smiled again, a cadaverous grin in his wasted face. "You're a clever boy. Yes, you're right, there's more to being safe than enough sand between you and your enemies. Like the good 'ole boys in our neighbouring state used to say, an armed society is a polite one."

  "Machine gun nests, AA emplacements. I'd say manners around here must be pretty damn good," I said.

  He laughed. "Oh, those things are just gravy. What keeps the scavengers away is the stuff that used to lie buried beneath the earth, not many miles from here."

  "You are talking of nuclear weapons," Ingo said calmly.

  I wanted to laugh, because that would have made it a joke, but it clearly wasn't. "You've got nukes?"

  "Just the two," the Collector said demurely.

  "Nukes are a weapon of deterrence, not a weapon of use," Ingo said. "Will anyone believe that you would detonate them, simply to protect this?"

  "Oh yeah," he said, his tight smile bringing out the subtle networks of wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. I realised he was much older than I had originally thought. "They know I will."

  "Really?" Kelis said. "You'd really nuke anyone who tried to take your collection?"

  "It's not mine. It's ours - humanity's. The things I have here, these are the best of us. They're the only part of us left that's worth killing for."

  I remembered all the people I'd killed and the reasons for it, and I thought that maybe he was right.

  Later, when he'd opened a bottle of cognac and we were lounging on cushions in a room whose walls were guarded by the Terracotta Army, he said, "I hear you want to go to Vegas?"

  "Yeah," Kelis said. "That's the plan. Know anything about what's going on there?"

  He shrugged. "More than you probably. Less than I'd like."

  "Did..." I hesitated but, really, if this man was in league with Ash it was already too late. "Did anything change there, recently, maybe around six months ago?"

  His eyes narrowed. "You know something about this new guy who's taken over there?"

  "Yeah, we do," I said. "And I can tell you one thing, this is not someone you want as a neighbour. Have there been any... have you noticed anything odd about his followers? He does have followers, right? An army of them."

  The Collector shrugged. "He's got people working for him, that's for sure. Beyond that no one knows anything. Soon as he arrived he sealed Vegas up so tight it's a wonder air can get in there. He closed it and he fortified it, and if you think we've got a few guns lying around this place, you should see Sin City. Rumours are he's got as much ordinance in that place as a small country."

  "Rumours?" Kelis said. "So no one knows for sure?"

  "No," Jeannine said, "on account of the fact that no one we sent in there ever came out again."

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The next day Jeannine took us to see the other collection, a warehouse full of army-issue small and not-so-small arms. Kelis smiled for the first time since Soren had died. "Yeah," she said, wandering through the aisles of weaponry, handling a rifle here, a rocket launcher there, "this is more like it."

  "He's still going to cream your asses," Jeannine said. "No amount of guns are going to change that."

  "So why are you giving us any?" I asked.

  She shrugged. "Because you might do some damage while he takes you down, and that's worth a small investment."

  "Gee, thanks," I said dryly, but in truth I was grateful to the Collector. Without his help we would have stood no chance at all. He was giving us food too, water for the long drive across the desert and a new vehicle to make it in. The truck was big and green and ugly as hell but it looked like it could get into an argument with a rhino and win. I'd seen tanks which were less heavily armoured. We loaded it with the guns, grenades and rockets Kelis had chosen, then gathered round to plan our attack.

  The Collector had given us maps of Vegas too. Haru spread one of them out on the hood of the truck, peering at the network of roads and houses fading into the emptiness of the desert. "It's a big place," Haru said. "Do you really think he fortified it all?"

  I looked at the tangle of roads and tried to figure out where I'd have put the bulk of my forces. Everywhere, the Voice told me. You will never defeat him - you can only join him. I didn't want to believe it but I knew it was right, at least about one thing. "He won't have taken any chances," I said. "He'll have surveillance, like he did in Cuba, and he'll have his forces depl
oyed so they can respond to any point of attack as quickly as possible."

  "No weak spots?" Kelis said doubtfully.

  "So then, stealth would be better." Ingo suggested.

  "Maybe," I said. "But this is a city in the middle of a desert. Sneaking in unnoticed isn't really an option."

  "OK," Kelis said. "So what's the plan?"

  I shrugged. "Try not to get killed too quickly."

  Santa Fe receded into the distance behind us, lost in the dust. Far ahead and to our right, the plain gave way to hills and then mountains, the scattered remnants of the Rockies. Out here, it was easy to forget the Cull had ever happened. People had always shunned this barren land, ghost towns already lost in the sand long before the deaths started, places where the young no longer saw any reason to stay. It was impossible to say how old the corpses of the cars and lorries that littered the roadside were. Some looked like they came from the Nineteen-Fifties. They had probably been rusting down to zero for decades.

  It's hard to grasp the endless vastness of America, its landscapes which just go on and on. We drove for two hours and the mountains didn't seem to get any nearer. Maybe I'd died during the gun battle in Oklahoma, or on the beach at Miami, even back at the base, and this was the afterlife I'd been condemned to, this endless journey. Punishment for taking that young soldier's life.

  The scenery was hypnotic in its monotony. I'd chosen to drive, glad of anything that used up cognitive space and stopped me thinking about anything else, like how the hell I thought I was going to face up to Ash. Or whether, when it came to it, I'd even want to. I was down to two doses of anti-psychotics now. In two days time, if I didn't find more, I'd be Ash.

  At first the dust cloud was just a distraction at the edge of my vision. A micro-storm, I thought, a dust devil weaving a solitary path across the desert. Except, no natural storm ever kept going in a line that straight. A line that ran entirely parallel to ours, and had done for at least fifteen miles now.

  Kelis followed the direction of my gaze and tensed. "Convoy," she said. "Off-road vehicles out in the desert."

  She was right. I could see the glint of metal and something brighter in the heart of the dust cloud now. Another minute and I could make out the individual vehicles, bigger than cars or even trucks. Winnebagos maybe, sturdy enough to travel over sand and rock.

  "They're heading towards us," Haru said.

  Ingo nodded. "Our paths will converge in approximately ten minutes" Despite the cold jolt of alarm in my stomach I smiled. There was something reassuring about his inability to react in a normal human way to anything.

  "Stop and fortify or try to outrun them?" Kelis asked.

  My hands tightened on the wheel. "How do we know they're hostile?"

  "How do we know they're not?"

  We opted to stop, in the end. There was no telling what the maximum speed was on their vehicles. And even if we could outrun them, did we really want to be heading into Vegas with another batch of enemies on our tail?

  The desert was eerily silent when we switched off our engine. The air shivered with heat, foxing my eyes as I strained into the distance, trying to see if our shadows were turning to face us or continuing on their original course.

  "Why did I ever leave Japan?" Haru said suddenly. "I'm so tired of this. I thought danger would be exciting . Isn't that what the stories tell you? But all it does is wear you down."

  "You're welcome to leave," Kelis said. She hooked a thumb back over her shoulder. "Santa Fe's three hundred miles in that direction."

  Haru grimaced and looked away, but I knew just what he meant. I was tired too, of the constant fights, particularly the one going on inside me. Surrender seemed to be an increasingly attractive option. Just... giving up.

  The convoy was definitely heading towards us. The dust cloud's shape had shifted, seeming to shorten as the vehicles turned and sped towards us straight on. I could hear them now, the rattle of wheels over rocks, the grind of motors - and something else. After a few moments I realised that it was music. The deep bass beat of it seemed to resonate through the rocks beneath us and up into our bodies.

  The closer they came, the odder the convoy looked. I could see now what the bright flash I'd seen earlier had been - solar panels on the roof of each of the dozen or so vehicles, iridescent and delicate as butterfly wings. The vehicles themselves seemed to be buses. But they were definitely home-made because no factory could possibly turn out machines that crazy looking; sides meeting at every angle except ninety degrees, paint covering every inch of them, and each inch a different colour.

  The first of them swerved to a halt a hundred yards ahead of us, and I saw that there was a big yellow smiley face painted on its side, grinning out at us from beneath a painting of a dove. I felt the barrel of my gun slowly drooping from horizontal to vertical.

  Kelis frowned at me. "Could be trying to lull us into a false sense of security."

  "It's working," I told her. Up close, I'd finally recognised the music: it was Hello by the Beloved. Either there was some very complex psychological warfare going on, or these people were no sort of threat.

  Five of them came out of the first bus as the others begun to pull up behind it. They were all young, twenties to thirties, and the kind of dishevelled that took some effort to achieve. I stared at them, disbelieving, because I thought that kind of studied cool had disappeared from the world along with ninety-three per cent of its population. None of them was armed which meant either that there were more people hidden behind the mirrored windows of the bus pointing something lethal at us, or they were suicidally stupid. Looking at their dazed, slightly vacant faces, I was going to opt for the latter.

  "Hey," the leader said, a tanned, sandy haired boy who wouldn't have looked out of place on a surfboard.

  "Hello," I said cautiously. My hand was still on my gun and so was Kelis', but he didn't seem to mind.

  "We're not looking for a fight," another of them said. She was tall and stringy with features that were okay individually but didn't quite match up on her face.

  "Us neither," I said. "On the other hand, we weren't following you, so I think we've got less explaining to do."

  Surfer boy laughed and so did the others, and for the first time I realised why they were so relaxed: they were stoned. I holstered my gun, the jittery adrenaline rush easing off.

  "Who are you people?" Haru said.

  "We're the party at the end of the world," surfer boy said. "Want to have some fun?"

  "You know what," I said, "I think I've already had about as much fun as I can handle."

  He shrugged. "Also, we're going to Vegas, and the Collector thought you might be looking for an escort."

  "So, is Las Vegas a big party town these days?" I asked later, when we'd driven in convoy with the party people till a few hours past sunset. We all stuck to the road this time, finally leaving it only to park up on a camping spot they told us they'd used before.

  There were stockpiles of wood here, twisted and bleached like bones, and they'd lit fires, several smaller cooking fires and one huge central bonfire whose heat radiated out into the night, chasing away the creeping cold. The flames were bright, although above us the stars seemed brighter, a perfect spread of them across the sky, pin-sharp. There wasn't a flicker of light pollution from horizon to horizon, probably not even back before the Cull.

  Mike, the surfer-boy leader of the group, shrugged. "Everyone needs to relax now and again."

  "You've been to Vegas?" I pressed. "Recently?"

  The young black-haired Goth who'd twined herself around his arm the moment he sat down, laughed. "Yeah, but wherever we go there's a party - that's, like, the point."

  I looked across the cooking fire to Haru, clutching a metal bowl of soup between his hands. He rolled his eyes. These guys were worse than useless as a source of information, but if they could slip us into Vegas under the radar they'd be worth their weight in gold.

  There were a lot of them - more than I'd realised; a
t least a hundred. They were sitting around their own small cooking fires in huddles of three or four. The flames of the central bonfire shot thirty, forty feet into the air, advertising our presence to anyone with their eyes open - but they didn't seem to care. They seemed supremely confident that nothing in the world would hurt them. Could be the drugs - could be something else. And if we were hooking up with these people I wanted to know for sure.

  When the meal was done I turned to Mike and asked as casually as possible if it would be OK to take a look at the buses. "We're running low on fuel ourselves - solar power's got to be the way forward."

  "Sure," he said, waving a lazy arm towards the distant, misshapen silhouettes of the vehicles. "Just be back in time for the burning - it's kind of a bonding ritual." His other hand was in the young Goth's hair, gently running the strands through his fingers, and I noticed for the first time that she was pregnant. Only a few months gone, the little creature inside her was adding just a slight roundness to her belly. For a second I couldn't take my eyes off them: the tenderness of his gesture, the blind hopefulness of bringing another life into this world. With an effort I blinked and looked away.

  Kelis was out on the periphery of the group, a darker blot against the night sky. I didn't like sitting with the vast emptiness of the desert behind me, but I knew she'd rather have that at her back than these strangers. When she saw me heading for the buses she drifted to her feet and joined me. A moment later and Ingo was with us too, silent and thoughtful. Haru looked up and then back at his sketch, a delicate line drawing of the Goth girl that hinted at the body beneath her baggy black clothes. He kept the page carefully tipped up towards him, so Mike wouldn't see it. I shrugged and turned back to the others as we mounted the steps to the first of the buses.

  "Are these guys for real?" Kelis asked.

  I looked back at them, lounging contentedly around their small camp fires. "They didn't seem too bothered about us poking around. They haven't searched us, or asked for our weapons."