Except there were private files – and they were to do with work. Not our work, the job I thought he'd left behind him when he came here. I knew, of course, that for the last few years he'd been employed by the Department of Defence. There hadn't seemed anything sinister about it, there were plenty of reasons why the DoD might want to employ a virologist. Defensive reasons.
I'd known, too, that some of the ingredients we'd been mixing into this 'Cure' we were creating came from classified sources. The cutting edge gene therapies, the more esoteric retroviruses, borderline unethical stem cell research. These weren't things available to the general public. But here they were in Ash's files, files with dates going back months, years; long before he knew we were going to use them. This was the stuff Ash had been working on before the Cull struck. Wasn't it just the mother of all coincidences that it turned out to be exactly what we needed to make the Cure?
No, I told myself, as my heart raced. It was just Goldilocks Syndrome. We live in the only possible universe that can support human life because if it couldn't, we wouldn't be here to marvel at it. And Ash had been recruited into the project precisely because his experience was so exactly what we needed.
Except. Except… here was a file on gene-therapy for sickle cell anaemia. There was another on the use of stem cells in adult neural rewriting. It was now obvious to me that the RNA we were carefully sculpting to change A and B to O-neg was a mash-up of both of these. But why the second? As far as we knew, the Cull wasn't neuro- active.
'What are you doing?' Ash asked from right over my shoulder.
'Snooping through your files,' I told him, because he and I had never been able to lie to each other. Or at least I hadn't. For the first time, I was beginning to wonder about him.
'Find anything interesting?' he asked, so nonchalantly that I instantly relaxed.
'Yeah, highly classified defence department files. It said something about killing anyone who read them – but they were just kidding, right?'
He smiled and we got back to work and I never did ask him what exactly that research had been about, and why exactly it had fitted our needs so precisely. I never asked – but sometimes, late at night, I wondered.
'Find anything interesting?' Kelis asked me now, and I knew that I was pale when I turned from the laptop's screen to face her.
'Yeah, I guess interesting is one word for it.'
'And what would be another word?' Ingo asked, as literal as ever.
'Terrifying.'
'It's the Infected, isn't it?' Haru ran a hand nervously through the dark spikes of his hair. 'This was done deliberately. The Infection – it was designed, not accidental.'
I nodded and Haru grimaced and turned away.
Kelis was still studying me carefully, her intense brown eyes narrowed. 'That's not everything, is it?'
'No, it isn't. The thing is, he did create the Infection deliberately.' A perversion of the Cure I was carrying in my own blood, but I wasn't ready to tell her that yet. 'He deliberately made it contagious. Blood-borne at the moment.'
'At the moment?' Haru's eyebrows were so high they were lost in his hairline.
'That was the best he could do to begin with. But he was researching other forms of transmission.'
'Airborne?' Ingo asked, and even he sounded hushed. Everyone knew that the Cull had been airborne too. It couldn't have done what it did otherwise.
'Maybe. But the trail here had reached a dead end, and he abandoned it about six months ago. That's the date of the last update to any of the files.' And that really was as much as I could tell from the fragments of half- finished research on the abandoned laptop.
'We need to find him, wherever he is now,' Kelis said and I felt a warm rush of relief because I didn't want to be the one who had to suggest this.
'How?' Haru asked.
Ingo held up his hand, like a child in class asking for permission to speak. 'Somewhere in here there must be a central computer co-ordinating the information going in and out. If we can find that, I can tell you where the transmission is being sent.'
'Good,' I said. 'When you find it, there's one other thing I need you to do.'
Have you ever watched a whole city burn? There's a wild kind of pleasure in it, giving free reign to a force of nature that we're more often trying to contain. The truck we'd commandeered raced over the cracked tarmac of the road, but the heat travelled faster, clasping at our throats as we tried to outrun what we'd done.
All around us, the loudspeakers were still blaring the same message: 'Everyone must come to Havana immediately. Come to the centre of Havana and await further instructions.' They'd been saying the same thing for the last two days. We hadn't been able to wait any longer, but it hadn't been quite long enough. All around us, Infected were still flooding into the city, calmly walking into the flames which had already consumed thousands, tens of thousands, of lives. The fire wouldn't get all of them, there'd still be pockets of them in the furthest reaches of the island. But still, it would get enough.
So I was a mass murderer now. And in the end it had been so easy. All it needed was for Ingo to splice together audio tracks from a few of Ash's previous messages. The words didn't sound quite right, the emphasis in the wrong places, elision between syllables which didn't belong together. But the Infected didn't seem to care. It was their master's voice, and they had no choice but to obey it. The cameras were put on a loop, so Ash wouldn't be able to see what we'd done, while his own audio feed had been cut. We'd left him no way to save this terrible experiment of his, we were putting the Petri-dishes in the furnace and burning the cultures away for good.
After that, it was just a few cans of petrol over some central buildings, a hot day and a strong wind. Fire is endlessly hungry – it doesn't need much of an invitation to consume everything. I leaned against the cab of the truck and looked back, like Lott's wife, knowing there was a price to pay but helpless to avoid seeing for myself what we were leaving behind.
There's a Pink Floyd album cover: a burning man shaking hands with another, oblivious to the fire which is eating him alive. It's almost funny, the way he just doesn't seem to care. There were hordes of them, all walking into the furnace, on and on as their flesh blistered and burned, red fissures opening in skin like the cracks in the surface of a volcano that tell you another eruption is due. The smell was overwhelming. The meaty, porky smell of human beings burning.
I saw a girl no older than eight walk calmly down the narrow alley between two buildings. The doorways of the buildings belched yellow fire at her, little sparks of it drifting ahead of the body of the flame. Her hair caught first, burning a bright orange against her skull, but she kept on walking. She kept walking until her legs gave way, the bones snapping in the heat.
Finally, when the girl's body was lost to sight and the crowds on the streets had begun to thin and the flames receded into the distance, I looked away.
Kelis caught my eye. 'We had no choice,' she told me in a voice that said even she didn't believe it.
'It's done now,' I said. 'They won't be going out recruiting for a while. And they won't be trying to stop us from leaving.'
'So now we find the dear Leader and stop him doing anything worse,' Kelis said, offering a sort of comfort.
I looked ahead in my mind to the ocean fast approaching, and beyond to our destination, across the waters and most of the way across a continent. All the way to Las Vegas where, one day soon, I'd look Ash in the eye and make him pay. Not so much for what he'd done, but for what he'd turned me into.
CHAPTER SIX
It was ninety miles to Miami by boat. We'd found a light aircraft on the island but since none of us could fly it, it looked like we'd be going to Vegas the long way. I didn't look at Cuba as it receded into the distance behind us, just took the wheel and looked forward over the calm seas. As we'd sat on the shore and waited for the world to turn and the sun to rise, I'd decided that I was done with regrets.
The journey was peaceful, no one in pursuit, nothing but us and the seagulls hovering over the waves. After
