'Head for Cuba – are you crazy?' Haru screamed. 'So what if their boats are all at sea? Who's to say there aren't twenty more of them on the island? There could be thousands of them, just waiting on the beach for us to arrive.'
'No, this is a good plan,' Ingo said firmly.
Haru sagged, realising that he was outnumbered.
'We don't need to land, we can skirt the island,' I said. 'All we need to do is get past the Infected.'
They were barely a hundred meters away now – too close to change our minds. We were the nearest of all Queen M's fleet to them, the most obvious target. I could see the crew of their leading ship, leaning forward in the prow as if they couldn't wait to get at us.
Behind the yacht were five jet skis, with two Infected clinging on to each. Fuck. The yacht would never turn in time, but the jet skis… I turned to Soren, thinking maybe it wasn't too late to turn back.
He read my expression and shook his head. No time.
'Then give me a fucking gun. A big one. Take one yourself and give Haru the tiller.'
'Hey!' Haru said, at the implication that he'd be useless in an actual fight. Then he glanced up and saw the Infected. Closer now, close enough that we could see their faces – the festering cuts and sores. He took the wheel without protest.
I scrabbled in the stern of the boat, hauling aside the tarpaulin that Soren and Kelis had hidden themselves under, revealing the cache of arms and ammo I just knew they'd have brought with them. I picked up a semi- automatic rifle that made my small pistol look like a toy and handed out the rest. Soren took two, one for each meaty arm. Kelis gave a very small smile as she saw him do it.
To starboard, the great hulk of Queen M's flagship was finally beginning to turn, as unwieldy as a cow on a race track. I gave it even odds whether it would run aground or skim the shore and make it back out to sea. Whatever happened, it couldn't outpace the Infected. Their ships were swarming around it, little insect-figures of people already beginning to scale the hull.
Not my problem if the people I'd once thought to rescue had instead been brought here to their deaths.
Ahead the Infected yacht was heading straight for us, prow sharp as a knife ready to cut through our little tub. It was a game of chicken which we could only lose, playing against a ship full of people with no fear of pain or death.
'Hang on!' Haru shouted, his voice high with terror. Almost before he'd finished speaking he pulled the tiller hard round, flinging us desperately out of the path of the approaching ship.
I grabbed a thick metal ring set in the floor as my body was flung against the starboard railing. I heard a crack that might have been the boat, might have been a rib but I held on grimly, splashed by an arc of seawater as we tipped at nearly ninety degrees.
A second later there was another crack that was neither the boat nor a rib. A neat little nick of wood chipped up from the deck five inches from my face and I knew that we were being fired on.
Somehow I'd managed to keep my grip on the rifle. But I'd need two hands to fire it, and one of them was still desperately clinging on to the metal ring which was the only thing keeping me out of the water. The boat tipped a little further, so far that I could feel the salt sting in my eyes from the upward spit of the waves. A lurch, and suddenly we were tipping the other way, faster. And then finally a fierce blow against my back as we hit the water. My jaw slammed shut, trapping my tongue between my teeth. There was a trickle of blood down my throat, copper. And all around me now, the insect whine of bullets.
My back clenched, protested, but I fought against the agony and dragged myself to my knees. One quick glance to the side and I saw that Haru had done it. The Infected yacht was beside us for one moment and then passed, drawn helplessly onwards by the wind. I swivelled to fire off a brief burst. I thought that maybe one figure in the stern dropped the rifle it was holding to clutch at its shoulder. But then we were past and the hail of bullets eased, and for just a second our path looked clear to Cuba's golden shore.
Then the jet skis were all around us. The odds were still against us.
The worst thing was the way the riders were smiling, a polite little social smile, as if none of this mattered very much. Their hands on their guns were relaxed, fingers engorged with blood, not white with tension like mine were around the trigger of the rifle. Nothing about them said they cared – about anything.
The stream of bullets from my rifle took one of them right through that social smile. Teeth shattered, fragments of enamel sticking to her ruined cheeks.
Haru was screaming, a constant noise that might have contained words. Kelis let out a whoop at her own shot, straight through the heart of the grey-haired man on the leading jet ski. She was enjoying herself, high on the adrenaline. I understood it, but I couldn't feel the same. The air was full of death, meaningless and sudden. I didn't want to die. I wasn't ready.
The people I'd killed weren't ready either. But that didn't stop me from firing again, missing my first target but winging the second. Another jet ski veered and faltered, and now there were just three. Suddenly the odds were favouring us.
The Infected seemed to realise that a frontal assault wasn't working. Now they were hanging back, using the fronts of their skis as shields, heads bobbing round for just fractions of a second each time they let off a shot.
I fired back, a short, controlled burst. The bullets hit the water, sending up little geysers of crystal. I jerked the rifle up, over-correcting, and the bullets flew wildly high, arcing over the heads of the Infected. My finger was pressed hard against metal but nothing was happening, and I realised that I'd run out of ammo. Reflexively, my hand reached down to my belt for a spare clip, but of course I hadn't thought to bring any.
The ammo I needed was five meters away, still hidden under the tarpaulin. It might as well have been five hundred meters because the Infected realised what was happening. He was coming straight for me, closing fast. The gun in his hand had plenty of ammo and all of it was headed in my direction.
I felt a sudden, fierce pain in my right calf as a bullet tore straight through the meat of my leg. Blood trickled hot into my sandals, congealing with the sweat between my toes. The Infected was nearer still and now his smile looked predatory, because he knew that there was no longer any way he could miss.
My hand was still grappling uselessly at my belt. Except that now it had found metal and, of course, it wasn't useless. My conscious mind, numb with fear, had forgotten. But my subconscious knew that there was another gun in my belt.
I smiled too. I didn't remember bringing the gun up. Somehow I did though, because the jet ski was still coming, heading straight for us, only now there was no one guiding it. The Infected teetered for a moment on one leg, like a cut-rate circus performer. His eyes told me he was already dead, but his body didn't want to recognise it and, for just a second, it looked like he might leap off the ski and drag me down with him.
Then he fell and I saw his body sink through the clear waters. He didn't go far. We were over coral reefs now and there he was, like a cancerous growth on the rock, something for the multi-coloured fish to eat. I laughed, crazily, because every second from now on was a second when I didn't think I'd be alive.
Except, fuck, why was the water so clear, the sand so golden beneath it? And suddenly everything Haru was screaming became clear, like a radio that had finally moved from noise to signal. 'We're going to hit land!' And the Infected's plan became clear too, the way the jet skis had surrounded us, herding us like cattle. They hadn't needed to kill us, just to get us somewhere someone else could do it for them.
The bottom of the boat scraped against coral. The vibrations shot through the soles of my feet, a gentle almost tickling sensation. Then rougher, more violent. I saw Haru try to wrench the tiller around. The boat bucked and swerved but kept on moving forward, momentum carrying it now because the engine was out of the water. And, finally, like a crippled animal, it dragged itself onto land to die.
The Infected were everywhere. Haru had been right after all – the beach was crawling with them. They'd been climbing into boats, joining the swarm trying to bring down the flagship. But unlike us it had somehow managed to stay at sea, picking up speed as it headed back out into open waters.
I almost felt it physically, the moment when two hundred pairs of eyes turned from the flagship to us. The beach was blank, a few desiccated palm trees above the tide line. This was a tourist beach, a cheap one. Behind the sand I could see the plain concrete blocks of hotels, little parasols with cracked tables and chairs that would never have been comfortable, not even when they were new. The harsh midday sun shone down on it all, unmoved.
Soren and Kelis flanked me and raised their guns. Ingo too, looking just a little startled, as if he'd discovered one too many zeroes in a complex calculation. Haru cowered in the cockpit, like a child who thought that if he
