she saw me heading for the buses she drifted to her feet and joined me. A moment later and Ingo was with us too, silent and thoughtful. Haru looked up and then back at his sketch, a delicate line drawing of the Goth girl that hinted at the body beneath her baggy black clothes. He kept the page carefully tipped up towards him, so Mike wouldn't see it. I shrugged and turned back to the others as we mounted the steps to the first of the buses.
'Are these guys for real?' Kelis asked.
I looked back at them, lounging contentedly around their small camp fires. 'They didn't seem too bothered about us poking around. They haven't searched us, or asked for our weapons.'
'Or asked us who we are or why we're going to Vegas,' Kelis said. 'Don't you think that's odd?'
I shrugged. 'With anyone else, yeah. With these guys…'
And then we were inside the bus and I felt a sick lurch in my stomach. It was a lab, low-tech but unmistakeable. Fuck! Why the hell did I still trust anyone? I backed away, gun out of its holster, ready to make a run if it wasn't already too late. I looked to Kelis, expecting her usual hair-trigger reaction to threat, but she was still looking at the lab. Looking and laughing.
I relaxed, just a little, though my heartbeat was still pulsing in my ears. 'There's something I'm not getting here, right?'
Kelis took in my expression, my hand clawed around the handle of the Magnum. 'It's OK, its fine,' she said, hand gently resting against mine, prying my fingers loose. Her tone was almost crooning, the voice you used with a hysteric. I must have seemed close to the edge, teetering on it. I guess I was. The Voice was constant now, chipping away at my calm and sanity.
'This is not the same as Ashok's laboratory in Cuba,' Ingo said. He had a beaker in his hand, squinting at its thick brown-yellow contents.
'It's a meth lab,' Kelis said. 'Primitive, but it doesn't take much. Look.' She gestured at a side table, which I saw now was piled high with opened boxes of prescription cold medicine. The ephedrine, I suddenly remembered – extract it and you were halfway to having yourself a batch of crystal meth.
Finally, I laughed too. 'Tweakers. OK.'
Not just tweakers, it turned out. The next bus had a lab set-up that looked a lot more complex but by then I wasn't too worried. Beside, they'd left a convenient pile of their end product on one table, little off-white pills with the rough imprint of a dove on them. Old school. 'Ecstasy,' I said.
Kelis was inspecting a heap of white powder. She took a small dab on her finger and licked it before I could stop her. 'Speed too, I think. Or it could be ketamine.' She grinned, suddenly. 'Give me five minutes – if I start fighting its speed, if I just lie there staring at my fingers, it's K.'
'You have not taken enough for either effect,' Ingo said. Kelis' eyes met mine, amused. A second later we looked away, the momentary closeness between us a reminder of things we didn't want to think about.
The third bus was a living quarter, crowded bunk beds and a filthy bathroom. The walls were draped with tie-died fabric and bad art. It looked like a squat I'd lived in for a week back when I was a medical student.
'How do these people survive?' Kelis asked as we walked into the fourth bus. 'They're sitting targets.' Here was something I'd seen in the squat, too: growing tanks, heat lamps, and a profusion of green. The unmistakeable harsh greasy smell of dope.
'Like the farmers,' I said. 'They've got the expertise to make this stuff, why would anyone want to interfere with that? And my guess is they give it away for free.'
'We do,' Mike said, a dark shape in the doorway of the bus. 'We don't have the tech to make anything high grade, but it's good enough to get rolling.'
'It's a fair trade, drugs for food and safe passage.'
He smiled, lopsided. 'But the drugs are just a means to an end. It's the party we're about – the good time.'
'Yes,' Ingo said, 'because a party is precisely what people need in this world.'
Mike shook his head, taking Ingo's flat tone for sarcasm. But I knew that Ingo didn't do irony, and I thought that he was probably right. Mike and his people offered an escape, and that was more valuable than any pill, powder or plant.
Later, they had a party for us. I hadn't intended to join in, but when they dragged out the effigy, a huge figure of wood and paper that must have been hidden away somewhere behind the buses, I decided that I'd stay to watch that at least. I was flooded with childhood memories of Guy Fawkes Night, innocent memories too painful to look at and too precious to ignore.
It took twenty of them to carry the figure to the fire. They used a pulley to lever it upright and for a moment it teetered, a stain on the starscape, before it tipped over and burnt. As the flames licked up the wooden struts of its legs, turning them to ash, I felt other more unwelcome memories. The people of Cuba, burnt to death for a deal they'd made years before, whose terms they probably hadn't understood.
I turned away, sickened, to find Mike behind me, holding out a tray of pills. The doves mocked me, symbols of a peace none of us would know again. But I wanted to. Suddenly, I really wanted to. So I took one and put it in my mouth, quickly swallowing away the bitter chemical taste of it. I could feel Kelis' eyes burning into my face, but I wouldn't meet them.
Half an hour later, the drug began to kick in, first a rush that was almost a panic, then the panic transforming into an energy that was also the most profound relaxation I'd ever felt. There was music playing somewhere, a haunting melody and a heavy beat. I let my body move to it, the movement no effort at all.
Off to one side, I could see Haru with a joint hanging from his mouth, his eyes narrow and bloodshot but content. I smiled at him and he smiled back. I knew what I really thought of him, his cowardice and the moral vacuum where his heart should have been, but for just that moment I didn't care. The love I felt was big enough to include him, to include everyone. To my new eyes everyone looked like an echo of the Goth girl, a young life curling and growing inside them, pregnant with hope.
I joined a circle of people dancing around the bonfire. My hand was taken by a thin brown one on one side, a blunt white one on the other. The family of man, I thought, and laughed.
The hours stretched and warped and the night lasted both forever and no time at all. I took another pill, and then some of the powder which made me feel higher, or clearer, or happier; by then I could barely tell. The high couldn't last though – it was fighting against too much. The melancholy was lurking just underneath it. A moment's inattention and it crept back in and grabbed me.
I walked away, out from the others into the wide desert around us. Someone called out to me, but I ignored them and they didn't follow. The joy the drugs brought felt like a joining, but there was a profound selfishness at the heart of it, an attention only to one's own pleasure. I walked until the fire was a distant blur of orange and the stars were the brightest thing in the night. I could just walk forever, I thought. Ash needed to be stopped, but it didn't have to be me. For one moment I let myself entertain the fantasy. Going back, across the continent and then the ocean. Finding him and pretending that I was still the person he loved. He'd never know all the things I'd done, and I'd never have to tell him.
He's long dead, the Voice told me, and you can't go back to being who you were. It's too late. I sighed and took one last look around me at the stark solitude of the desert, then walked back to the light and the people.
When I woke up the next morning I felt the lingering remnants of the drugs, a quiet echo of the absolute contentment I'd felt last night. Kelis wordlessly brought me a mug of coffee. I didn't know where she'd spent the night. She hadn't been in the truck when I'd returned to sleep there, curling myself in the back seat.
'Vegas in five hours,' she told me. There was an edge of accusation in her tone – do you really think that was the best time to get wrecked? – but she didn't voice it.
The desert looked bleaker in the early morning light, or maybe that was the beginning of the vicious come- down I was due any time now. I sighed and started the engine.
Three hours of driving later we hit the Colorado river, wide and powerful down here in the plains. We drove along its high banks for ten miles and then, suddenly, there was the concrete sweep of the Hoover dam, so vast you almost couldn't believe that it was man made. I wondered how long it would be before we were ready to make anything that astonishing again.
The tarmac in the road over the bridge was crazed and broken causing the convoy to slow almost to a stop. I felt a crawling sense of unease as we crossed, the sense that we were being watched.
'Cameras,' Kelis said, pointing. She was right. There were two of them, high on the struts at each end of the dam, swivelling sleekly to follow us as we passed. I had the sudden, suffocating certainty that we were back in
