shatter on the floor. I expected to feel weak when I rose, convalescent. But I didn't feel dizzy, more like I was floating. As if I could do anything. I looked down at my legs under the short hospital gown, expecting to see them somehow magically transformed, muscles bulging. But they were still thin, white and wasted from illness and long confinement underground.
When I looked up again, it was to find someone standing in the doorway, watching me. He was wearing a white coat, but he was also carrying a gun. 'Dr Kirik?' he said cautiously. A prominent Adam's Apple bobbed in his thin throat. I recognised him as one of the soldiers who guarded the base, but I couldn't remember his name. Military and medical didn't mix.
Kill him, the Voice told me, Kill him before he realises what you've become.
That seemed to make perfect sense. I smiled at the boy, little older than eighteen, whose name I suddenly remembered was Andy. 'Yes,' I told him. 'I'm feeling much better.' I took a hesitant step towards him, as if I still had almost no strength, and tried to calculate how close I'd need to be before I could wrench the gun out of his hand, put my hands around his neck and snap it.
I watched his eyes as they tracked the blood still dripping from my arm to the floor, the unplugged IV, the dead heart monitor. 'No,' he told me. 'Dr Kirik, you're not well at all.'
A sudden flash of the present intruded, and I opened my eyes for a moment to see a sickening, vertiginous view of trees and water far below. The base was receding, just a grey dot on the horizon. My mind floated above it for a moment, trying to cling on to the past, but then it tore away and for a while there was no coherence to my fever dreams, just fragments of images as jagged as pain.
The plane landed at some point, a sickening lurch and then a nauseating sway on water. I was shaken by rough hands and then kicked, but no force on earth could get me to my feet, and eventually I was carried out of the plane and onto the large pontoons that held it over the shifting surface of the waves. A wash of warm saltiness revived me and I saw that they were carrying me towards a boat, a big one. A yacht, sails snapping in the wind.
Faces watched me from the deck as I was hauled up the side like a sack of potatoes. I watched them for a moment, round circles of brown and black and pink. There were black gashes in their centre, mouths open in smiles or grimaces, it was hard to tell. My eyes drifted away and, instead, I watched the sweat which was pouring off me as it dripped and fell into the ocean below. Salt into salt.
After a few minutes I sprawled on the deck. The sun blazed down on me but I felt cold, drawing my knees and elbows in to shape myself into a foetal ball. The faces blinked above me, watching.
'This is what you bring me?' one of them said. I thought I recognised the accent as Eastern European.
I saw one of my rescuers shrug. Seemed to feel it too, as if my skin was now so hypersensitive that the slightest shift in the air moved agonisingly against it. The Voice was screaming at me to get away, but the pain was screaming louder and I put all my energy into ignoring them both.
'She's a scientist, a doctor. Last survivor of the research centre. That's got to be worth something,' my rescuer said.
'She's a junkie.'
I couldn't argue with that. The junk was flushing itself out in my sweat as they spoke, leaving a hungry void behind.
I felt them stop and look at me. 'So,' my rescuer said, 'she'll live or she'll die and then we'll know if she's any use. All we need to do is wait.'
So, she'll live or she'll die… The words echoed hollowly in my head, banging against other memories, knocking them loose.
'So,' I said, right back when this all first began, 'either we'll live or we'll die, but at least we'll know. We know we won't be safe here forever. No matter how careful we are, or how airtight we think this place is, the virus is going to get in eventually. I'll take a punt on a zero-point-one per cent chance of survival over no chance at all.'
The others nodded. They knew I was right. And sitting there, safe with their O-neg blood, they were in no position to be giving lectures on safety to someone sitting right in the crosshairs of the virus. The room was crowded, the top brass of the base all gathered together. This, after all, was what it had all been about. Why we'd all been brought here in the first place, safe from the savage fate of the rest of the world. There was a thick smell in the room, too many people who got to wash too infrequently. Put us all in one place and the stench reached a critical mass.
I saw Corporal Wetlock, brown face washed pallid by too long spent underground, staring at a speck of dirt on the wall as if it might hold some sort of answer. I'd noticed that a lot over the last few weeks. The saved unable to look the damned in the eye. Not often, I guess, that you get to work up close and personal with real-life walking corpses.
But maybe not. Not anymore – not if Ash and I had got it right.
'Zero-point-one per cent?' General Hamilton asked. 'That's all you can offer me – after all this time?' Her chest was a mosaic of medals. I wondered when she'd had the time to earn them all.
We all knew that time was running out. Deaths were in the millions worldwide, maybe hundreds of millions already beyond saving. No point getting angry at her impatience.
'I don't see any other project offering you odds at all,' Ash said, pissed off nevertheless. He glared around the table, over the proud arch of his nose. Several more eyes dropped. There were seven separate research programmes going on here, coming at the problem from every sensible angle and a couple of straight-out crazy ones. The nearest anyone else had got to a vaccine was something that gave lab rats intestinal cancer within two days of injection. Nothing else had even progressed to in-vivo testing.
'OK,' Hamilton said. 'But testing on yourselves? You're the last people we can afford to lose in the ninety-nine point nine per cent likelihood that all it does is give you pancreatic cancer or cause your brain to bleed out your goddamn ears.'
The bleeding out the ears had been one of our earlier attempts. Poor rats.
'General,' I said, 'If it doesn't work, if this avenue's a dead end, we're useless to you anyway. By the time we've started a new line of research…' I shrugged. 'We'll be bleeding out of pretty much every part of our body.'
'Fine,' she said. 'Try it.'
And that, right there, was the single worst decision anyone could have made.
CHAPTER ONE
Going cold turkey is no one's idea of fun. It's a private kind of hell. What can I say about it that hasn't been said already? Just sobbing and puking and sometimes fitting and nearly dying. I didn't know where I was – but I was somewhere. We'd arrived. The visions of my past eased up after that first rush, leaving nothing to relieve the monotony. That's the biggest secret about illness and pain. How monumentally fucking boring it is.
People drifted in and out, shot things into my arm and sometimes forced them down my throat. Some of those things must have been anti-psychotics, because after a while the Voice faded into silence. My mind felt clearer than it had in five years. When I'd stopped screaming in agony, I guessed I'd be grateful for that.
On the fourth day, I realised that the rocking sensation I was feeling had nothing to do with drug withdrawal. I was still on a boat. Something about the motion told me it was a big one, an order of magnitude above the yacht which had brought me here. I spent ten minutes lying there wondering if it was worth the effort to get up and walk towards the port hole I could see to my left. The shutters were closed over it, a relic of the stage when any light stabbed into my eyes like a knife, but the diamond splinter pain behind my temples had faded to a dull ache, and I thought I could risk a look.
If I could make it the five paces across the floor to the porthole… my knees buckled the instant I stepped out of bed. My joints felt like they were held together with weak glue. I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror against one of the dark-stained wooden walls. Dark shadows circled my eyes like bruises and my hair hung lank and unwashed around my face, grease turning the vivid red of it almost brown. My skin was so white it looked translucent, a spider's web of blue veins beneath it. I realised that this was the first time I'd seen myself in years.
