Two sweeps of my hand cleared the worst of the dirt from the controls. My fingers were clumsy on the keys, but this was something deep-programmed into my neural pathways and not even five years of neglect had atrophied it. Thirty seconds later I'd punched in the code for the headquarters in London. I'd no guarantee he'd be there – no guarantee he was even alive, but that was a thought I didn't let myself think. And if he was alive, I knew him. He'd have found the safest, most defensible place in London to hole up. And that was HQ – somewhere only he and a select few others even had access to.
For a painfully long moment, the comms unit was silent. The gritty sound of debris being cleared echoed through the corridors behind me. Then, sharply, there was a crackle of static followed by the hungry silence of an open communications link.
'Are… are you there?' I said, paralysed suddenly. What do you say to a husband you haven't spoken to in five years? Or to whoever else it might be who was listening, far away across an ocean and half a continent. Or to the emptiness of a deserted building, everyone who might have found their way into it already long dead.
And then it came to me, the flood of words I wanted to say to him, everything that had been dammed up inside me by drugs and loneliness and fear. And I started speaking but a moment later I realised that the silence I was filling was no longer expectant. It was the silence of dead air. Every light on the unit had gone out.
But those words had gone through. I had to believe that. And if he'd received them, he'd know where they'd come from.
My bedroom was two doors down, but as I ran in I could already hear other footsteps. The invaders were through. It took a desperate scramble to find my diary, buried under a mound of unwashed clothes and discarded food packaging. Personal hygiene hadn't been high on my agenda for a while. When I finally pulled it out, a grease stain from a discarded half-eaten ration pack on its front cover, I was shocked to realise how long it was since I'd last written. The clock on the wall gave me today's date. The last entry was six months before. Writing in here was the one thing I'd tried to do. When I got the balance of the drugs just right, I'd sit down and I'd think about him and I'd write him words which I knew he'd never read.
And now I had just a few minutes to write the last words – and this time, there was a chance he would see them. Behind me, I could hear voices, footsteps. They were outside the room. Going slowly. Treating the base as hostile ground. I had a minute, tops.
Find me, I wrote, the pen stiff and awkward in fingers that had forgotten the simple motion of writing. Come and find me, my love.
He never will, the Voice said in my head. You're all alone in the world.
But I wasn't. The intruders had arrived.
They took me to a flying boat, bobbing outside the base on the quiet waters of the lake. They were keeping a careful distance, their guns and their eyes on me. I knew why. I was shivering almost uncontrollably now and a cold, sick sweat was slicking my skin. My eyes must have looked quite mad.
Diseased, they were thinking.
Just crazy, I wanted to say, and maybe I did. Just a crazy junkie.
My mind didn't seem able to settle on any one thing, like a bee in a flower field, constantly caught by individual bright detail. The gun that was pointed straight at me, barrel thin and long. He would have known what it was: make, calibre, stopping power. On our second date he had taken me to the Imperial War Museum. The next day I took him to this little collection of antique surgical instruments they used to keep up in Camden somewhere. We always understood one another.
The gun flicked and I realised that the person holding it was waving me on – a distant blur at the periphery of my attention. I looked down and something else caught my eye, hooking into my mind and dragging it there. A little flower, yellow and drab, struggling up through a crack in the concrete of the helipad.
I hate flowers. I was sick once, very sick, when I was seven. Leukaemia. Everybody brought flowers. The hospital room was full of them, the smell so strong it muscled out the stink of antiseptic and old vomit. But I preferred the stink. It was what that place was all about. The flowers were a lie.
They had to carry me on board the flying boat. My muscles were cramping by then and the shivers were so hard they were close to convulsions. When I was halfway in I suddenly knew that I had to vomit. I don't know what I hit. One of my captors if the shouts of disgust were anything to go by. A part of me knew that I could die from withdrawal this severe.
Tell them you need the drugs, the Voice said. It's obvious they want you alive.
This made perfect sense, but I suspected the Voice had its own agenda. I tried to ask for anti-psychotics instead, the one thing I hadn't been able to obtain inside the base. But my ears were deaf to my own voice and I'm not sure how much of it there was left. I was sobbing helplessly with the pain by then.
Pain. That brought back another memory. The strongest of all. The first time the madness came and brought the Voice with it. Twice in my life, I've had a disease that wanted to kill me. And each time the pain it brought had a different quality. A terminal quality. This was a pain that was trying to drag you down with it, drag you away somewhere you weren't coming back from.
When the Cull struck, it was a quick death, but it wasn't a clean one. When you're bleeding out of every pore in your body, but you're still conscious. When your brain's frying inside your skull. When you're thirty years old and you know that you've only got two more days on this earth, and each of them will be filled with this same, unending agony…
And if the Cull was bad, the thing we did to ourselves to avoid it was unendurably worse.
The first time the Voice spoke, I thought it was one of my colleagues, the O-neg staff members who were the only ones left on the base to treat the many of us who were dying. The pain will end, it said, suddenly and clearly. If you surrender, it will leave you. It seemed like a dumb thing for a doctor to be saying. Nothing but death would end this pain, not even the painkillers they'd been pumping straight into my veins. Or was that what they meant – that I'd be better off just letting go and dying? But that didn't sound like something one of my colleagues would say either.
And then I realised, as I was thinking this, the pain had lessened. That terrible tearing in my muscles, the feeling of my body ripping itself apart. Gone. And my breathing was easier, too.
My head felt clearest of all. Clearer than it had ever been. Yes, the Voice said, you can hear me now. A distant part of me told me that this was a symptom of psychosis. Maybe even the result of a high fever, or maybe just approaching death, but the Voice was louder and stronger and this new rush of energy surging through me didn't feel like death. It felt like rebirth.
I opened my eyes for the first time in days, weeks. Before, every attempt to do this had been met by a blinding sear of white-hot light. Now I could see everything, more than I'd ever seen before. Colours were richer, more vibrant. I stared at the wall beside my bed for a moment, fascinated by the way the light reflected from the tight grain of the white-painted concrete. I could see, just by looking, that there were precisely five thousand three hundred and seventy-one grains of sand on the surface of one square inch of wall. Each one seemed to be sparkling at me individually.
The euphoria of returning health, I told myself.
No, the Voice told me, it's more than that. You're different now.
I knew that it was right.
You need to get out of here, the Voice said, and I knew that was right too. There was no question of arguing with it, not because its command was so powerful, but because it seemed to make so much sense. It felt like the voice of reason.
You know how they say that madness feels like sanity? That delusions feel like a new and wonderful clarity?
No shit.
I turned away from my study of the wall to look carefully around the rest of the room. There were five other beds, all empty, some surrounded by the detritus of emergency medical procedures. My memory was hazy still, but I knew that I hadn't been the only one culled on the base. Or the only one Cured. There was no sign of them now.
Don't worry about them, the Voice told me. You can find them when you're free.
My arm was hooked up to an IV tube, my chest to a heart monitor. I detached both, unhooking the monitor from the power so that it wouldn't make a betraying noise. When I pulled the tube from my arm an ooze of blood followed it, darker and thicker than was healthy. I watched, mesmerised, as drops of it fell in perfect globules to
