them, kill them all'? Because speaking as an objective observer, that sort of thing really doesn't make sense.'
'Sometimes it says that kind of thing,' I admitted, feeling the atmosphere thicken around me. 'But it's not…' I laughed. 'It feels absurd to talk about the Voice as a person, but in a way it seems to be, or that's how I experience it: as something independent that has its own agenda. And that's what it's about, when it tells me to do terrible things. It doesn't want them because it enjoys seeing people suffer. It's not psychotic – except in the literal sense. It just wants what it wants and it doesn't care who gets hurt in the process.'
'So,' Kelis said, 'not so much psychotic as sociopathic.'
'Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't care about anything, except maybe me, and even then I think it just sees me as a means to an end.'
'You realise this is crazy, right?' Haru said. 'This voice isn't real. It doesn't want anything. It's just, I don't know, repressed urges inside you getting out, right? The things you don't want to admit to wanting.'
His pale cheeks were flushed and I thought that he really was only a few seconds away from shooting me where I sat. 'I thought that too,' I told him. 'I mean, it's the only thing that makes sense, isn't it? Except how could I have gone my whole life without even beginning to guess that I wanted to do those things? And if the Voice really is just my subconscious, why does it seem to be working to a plan that I'm not privy to?'
'You keep talking about a plan,' Kelis said softly. Her face was a closed book again. Before, she'd been trying to tell me something about the way she felt about me, but I knew looking at her that whatever that was it wouldn't save me if she decided I was a threat. It was like she'd said – everyone there had survived for a reason, and one of those reasons must have been that they didn't let sentiment get in the way of necessity.
She held my gaze for only a moment, then looked away. Best not to look in the eyes of a woman you might be about to kill. 'What is the plan? What is it that you think this Voice inside you wants?'
'I don't know. I didn't want to know, that was why I started taking the drugs to silence it – first the opiates, then the anti-psychotics. I never let myself hear the Voice clearly enough to find out what it wanted.'
'I still do not see the connection to the Infected of Cuba,' Ingo said. 'You are not telling us, are you, that it was you who infected them?'
'No,' I said. 'It wasn't me. It was Ash.'
'The face on all the posters, the Leader,' and Kelis was there again, too quickly for comfort. 'That was the other scientist you worked with?'
I nodded. 'The thing about Ash was, he liked the Voice. When I first woke up, after the Cure had run its course, I… killed a young soldier. The Voice told me to do it. And I think that's probably how I was able to resist the Voice long enough to suppress it. Because however much the Voice told me to, I couldn't forget the look in the soldier's eyes just before I snapped his neck. But Ash… he found me just after I'd done it, and I could tell that he didn't feel any guilt at all, even though I found out later that he had a lot more blood on his hands than that.
'He'd woken up before me, you see. I don't know why – maybe just a faster metabolism. So he'd had time to speak to some of the others on the base. I didn't see it at the time but I read the accounts of it later in the logs. There was videotape too, from the security cameras. Ash was like a messiah. He had this incredible self-belief when he spoke, and it made other people believe him too – even when he told them to do terrible things.'
'What sort of terrible things?' Kelis asked.
'Turning people against each other, soldiers against scientists, soldiers against soldiers. People who'd once been friends. Ash sowed doubt in everyone's minds and in the end the only person they trusted was him. I guess it didn't work on me because the Voice in my own head gave me a kind of immunity. When Ash wasn't watching me I sneaked away and found some opiates and I injected enough into my veins to make sure I didn't give a damn what the Voice wanted me to do.
'The trouble was, the opiates stopped me caring about anything – including trying to stop Ash.' I swallowed as I realised that maybe this was the real reason I hadn't wanted to tell them the story. Not because I was afraid of their anger, but of their disdain. Old guilt is like wine. It doesn't lose its strength, it just turns to vinegar – sour and corrosive. 'He was trying to get everyone else to take the Cure, you see. Even back then. I'd almost forgotten it – I guess I'd just dismissed it as a part of his madness. But now… now that I've seen what he did in Cuba, I know that it wasn't incidental to what he wanted. It was central to it.'
'And was that where the first Infected came from?' Kelis asked. 'Those soldiers and scientists on the base?'
I shook my head. 'They would have been, I suppose, but Ash wasn't the only crazy person there. There was a soldier, I don't really remember his name, but I do remember that he started some kind of fight, a stand-off between Ash's men and his. I just tried to get away from it all, hiding deeper in the base. Then there was an explosion and I was left on one side of it with them on the other. And that's where the story ends.'
'Not Ash's story though,' Soren said. 'Seems like his story has quite a long epilogue.'
'Yeah.' I took the wheel again and looked out over the waves ahead of us, where the American coast was finally approaching. 'I can only guess what happened next. He must have made it away from the base with his followers. I suppose he tried to give them the Cure like he'd been intending, but my guess is that it didn't work. It was designed specifically for non O-negs. I don't know what it would have done in its original form to anyone who was O-neg, but I suspect it might have been fatal. So he would have had to do more research, refine it. If he took what he needed from the base when he left, that would have been possible.' And now I thought about it, some of the equipment in that laboratory in Havana had looked familiar. I shrugged. 'Then at some point he came to Cuba and tested it out.'
'But why?' Soren asked. 'What exactly was he hoping to achieve?'
'I don't know, but I know it's nothing good. When I heard the Voice something inside me knew that it was the voice of madness, and I rejected it. But Ash embraced it, and I think maybe he wants everyone else to embrace it too. Cuba was just the start. It was a failed experiment – that's why he abandoned it. But there's no question in my mind that he's going to try again.'
'And you intend to find him,' Kelis said. It wasn't a question.
'I have to,' I said. 'I'm the only one who can possibly understand what it is he's trying to do. Which means I'm the only one who's got a chance of stopping him.'
'OK,' Haru said. 'And why exactly should we help you do that?'
'Because Cuba was only the beginning. You can leave me if you like. That's why I told you the truth – so you can make a real choice. All I ask is that you don't make mine for me. Leave me free to follow Ash. Because you all might regret it if I don't.'
I got up to take the wheel after that, leaving them free to make their decision without me around. But the truth was, without them I was sunk. There was no way I'd be able to make it all the way to Las Vegas on my own. Even with them to back me up it was a long-shot.
'Why didn't you tell us this before?' Kelis asked. If there was anyone who might follow me, I knew it was her. For all the wrong reasons, though, and wasn't it wrong of me to exploit that? I shot her a quick look but she was watching the waves, not me.
'I was afraid of what you'd do if you knew I was Infected too.'
'Are you infectious?' she asked me.
I shook my head. 'I don't think so. That's what Ash's research was all about, you see – making the Cure transmittable, because that wasn't how we originally designed it.'
'Its weapons tech, isn't it? The Cure.' Kelis said.
'Ash's contribution was, yeah. We put stuff in there that we didn't fully understand – or at least I didn't. We were desperate enough to try anything.'
'Do you think someone somewhere planned this all?' she asked me. 'The Cull and the Cure?'
'That's another reason to find Ash, isn't it?' I said. 'To answer that question.'
She nodded and I thought that maybe she was going to tell me that she'd made her decision and she would come with me. But instead her hand reached out to clasp mine over the wheel. Her eyes strained towards the distant coastline of Florida.
'What is it?' I said. There were black dots on the shore that might have been people, but that wasn't unexpected. Miami was a big place and there was no reason to think it would be entirely deserted after the Cull.
She didn't answer me, just called out for Soren. He leapt up to join her, Haru and Ingo hanging behind. Ingo's dark face was sweating lightly, drops of crystal on mahogany, no clue there about what decision he'd made. Haru
