couldn't see them, they couldn't see him. There was no way that we could survive this, there were just too many of them.
'Fuck!' Soren shouted. 'What the fuck do we do now?'
Kelis dropped one hand from her gun and I thought that she was going to reach across to offer him some sort of comfort – but it was my arm she grabbed instead.
The moment seemed frozen in time: the sand, the sun, her arm, the barest whisper of a breeze. The oily smell of our burst fuel tank. The Infected, their guns. A story with only one ending.
'Jasmine,' Kelis started. Her eyes were wide and wild. I didn't know what she wanted to say to me, but it seemed somehow right that the last words I ever heard would be hers.
'Stop,' a voice said, resonant, male and unexpected – and all around us the Infected did just that. They cocked their heads to the side, each of them the exact same angle, and they waited.
Haru lifted his head a little above the dip of the cockpit, searching for the source of the voice. After a second he found it – a loudspeaker high on a pole at the far end of the beach.
I lifted my gun. Beside me, Kelis and Soren did the same. The muzzles wavered as we each picked out one target among the many. We didn't fire, though, because a bullet might have woken them from this sudden strange stillness.
'The invasion is over,' the voice crackled again from the loudspeaker. 'Leave the coast and go back to your homes. Enjoy yourselves.'
There was an abrupt hubbub and I jumped, nerves still on a knife edge. But it was just chatter, two hundred people suddenly behaving like people again and not like zombies. All around us the Infected were sauntering and running and breaking up into social little knots and groups as they left the beach. The only odd thing about them now was the way they completely ignored us.
I stood and watched in startled silence and then, almost helplessly, I started to walk after them. I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe to convince myself that they were really going and this wasn't just some cruel joke. I sensed the others hesitating behind me, but after a moment they started walking too.
When the Infected reached the road that ran in front of the beachfront hotels they separated, veering off to left and right. Heading home, I guessed – just like they'd been told to do. We walked a little further, between two of the hotels and into the beginnings of the city behind.
The first thing that caught my eye was a poster, fresh and bright where the plaster on the building was peeling and faded. For one second I thought it must be Castro, a holdover from the times before the Cull.
It wasn't Castro, though. But it was a face I recognised. Just like I'd unconsciously recognised the voice that the Infected had obeyed so unquestioningly.
The voice belonged with the face – both of which belonged to a person I'd never expected to see again. Or maybe I had, and hadn't wanted to admit it to myself. But now the memories wouldn't be held back.
I looked down at the body of Andy, an eighteen year-old soldier whose neck had snapped in my hands like a piece of balsa wood. For just a second I felt a twinge of guilt. Hadn't he once helped me to carry some equipment into the lab? I'd thought then that he might have a little crush on me. But no, there was no need to think like that. The person he'd flirted with was gone, and the person I was now had more important things to worry about. That was what the Voice told me.
A last vestigial flicker of something – my humanity maybe – made me reach over and press the lids down over Andy's blank blue eyes. Then I took the gun out of his slack fingers, chambered another round, and headed for the door.
Get out of the base, the Voice told me. It isn't safe for you here anymore.
In the distance I could hear gunshots and the cries of people in pain. The base was tearing itself apart, a microcosm of the world. People turning savagely on each other as if the Cull had infected everyone in some way, loosing something primal and cold within them which had been waiting all these years to get out.
You're different, the Voice told me. You're Cured.
The door opened before I could reach it, easing cautiously back as if the person on the other side wasn't quite sure what he'd find inside.
And he, the Voice told me, is Cured too.
I didn't need the Voice to tell me that, I could see it in his eyes. They'd always been distinctive, so brown they were almost black and sparkling with an inner life that was the most attractive thing about him. Now they were burning and nothing about the smile he showed me was human.
'Hi, Jasmine,' he said and I heard the Voice echoing through his words. I saw it in his face, the same ruthless certainty that was in mine. There was a knife in his hands, sharp and clinical. Its blade was smeared with blood, more blood smeared across his hand, up the length of his arm. He reached out to brush a lock of brown hair out of his eyes and left a streak of red there too, like a tribal mark across his cheek.
'Hi, Ash,' I said as I studied his face.
The same face I saw now. The face staring back at me from a poster on the streets of Havana.
CHAPTER FIVE
We'd been in the town-centre apartment for three days now. There'd been one excursion to scavenge food. Pointless. The stores in the crumbling heart of the city had been picked clean long ago. I guessed the Infected must have been getting food from somewhere but wherever it was we hadn't been able to find it. We found a chemist's though, virtually untouched, and among the bottles of prescription medicines a week's supply of anti-psychotic pills. I took one gladly, then forced myself to put the rest back in my pack. It wasn't enough to kill the Voice entirely but it would have to do. God knew when I'd be able to find any more. There were clothes shops too, windows smashed and wares dragged out over the pavement, but enough left for us to find a few changes of clothing.
Ingo was looking very dashing now in a pair of black trousers and a garish purple shirt. He seemed fond of it. I'd see him stroking the material sometimes, a far off look on his face. Haru had managed to put together a leather outfit that made him look like an extra in Mad Max. It must have been hot as hell in the stifling Cuban heat, but he sweated it out, a triumph of style over good sense.
I didn't ask where Kelis and Soren found their khaki combats. Stripped off one of the decayed corpses that littered the street, I suspected.
Clothes and drugs that first day, then back to the apartment with its peeling plaster and non-functioning taps, and there we stayed.
The Infected were everywhere. Queen M must have been right that whatever ailed them was contagious, because the population of Cuba alone couldn't have accounted for the numbers of them. They must have been recruiting.
They walked around in little family groups, in pairs, on their own, as if nothing about the world had changed in the last five years. To see them here, on their home ground, you couldn't imagine what they'd been, the berserker rage when they'd attacked us. But then…
… then you saw them up close: the suppurating sores on their faces; the fingers hanging from hands by ragged threads of skin. The missing eyes, ears, noses; white bones poking through gangrenous flesh. That first day, as we carried our findings back towards the centre of the city, I saw a toddler trip and fall over a jagged chunk of masonry. Her mother didn't seem to care; she didn't even notice. And the child just got up and carried on. No tears, no screams no nothing. Her little brown ringlets bounced as she followed her mother down the street.
But I saw her leg, the place where a broken-off nail in the concrete had caught her as she fell: the four-inch cut, the torn muscle of her calf and the greasy yellow fat above. Blood streamed down her leg, pooling in her little trainers as she ran, but it wasn't enough to wash away the brown clots of dirt and rust which the nail had gouged into her flesh. It would be gangrenous within a day, beyond saving in three.
'Shit,' Kelis said, watching them trot away along the narrow alley ahead of us. 'What the fuck is wrong with these people.' It was just a whisper, but she might as well have been shouting. The Infected acted like we were invisible. I guess they hadn't been told to see us.
There were loudspeakers everywhere on the island. Loudspeakers and cameras – Ash's eyes and ears. And his face on posters everywhere, watching us. Four times a day or more, his voice would ring out, issuing
