Ash's kingdom. I was sure the broken road surface was his doing, a way of slowing everyone down to let him examine them and decide whether to let them in. There were blocky buildings at each end of the bridge which I thought had once housed museums and tourist shops. Now they would be filled with his people, ready to push undesirables off the narrow road and far, far down to the waters below.
I turned my face away, keeping it as much in shadow as I could. My fingers itched to be holding a weapon although I was sure that was just the sort of thing the invisible observers would be watching for.
The minutes seem to pass agonisingly slowly as the convoy inched its way over the bridge. My head began to throb with the tension. Even Ingo seemed uneasy, the dark skin on his round face looking stretched and old.
'Come on, come one,' Haru muttered. He was rocking backwards and forwards in his seat, little jerky motions which I don't think he knew he was making. Ingo reached out a hand and pressed him back firmly into his seat. Trying to calm him.
But no one stopped us, because fifteen minutes later we were driving past the last buildings and away from the bridge. Haru let out a gasp of relief that was almost a sob and we drove on, an ugly green minnow in a school of gaudy angel fish.
There were five more checkpoints in the next sixty miles and they waved us through each one. As we passed I saw people lean out of the windows of the buses, throwing little parcels to the guardsmen, the price of passage. I look at them out of the corner of my eye, trying not to let them know that I was watching. There was nothing about them that resembled the Infected in Cuba: just bored-looking men in khaki, smoking cigarettes and now the joints that the Party People had thrown them.
'They look OK,' Kelis said. 'Like regular people.'
'Yeah,' I said. 'And so do I. The Infected only look the way they do because Ash got it wrong. Maybe he's perfected it.'
Haru scowled. 'A city of lunatics.'
'Or worse,' I said, and we carried on driving in silence.
Finally we could see Vegas ahead of us, a dark stain on the sand that slowly resolved itself into a network of roads and then into trees, cars, individual houses. There was a burst of gold at the centre of it, bright in the midday sun, and I realised that the lights of Glitter Gulch were still blazing. That was just like Ash, I thought, who despite being a scientist had always been a showman.
The city blended out into the desert and we were driving into the suburbs before I'd even realised. There was no obvious check-point but I knew that the unseen watchers were here too. Cameras were everywhere and people too. Some of them stopped and stared as we passed, none of the zombie-like inattention of the Cubans here. The women were wearing floral dresses, the men jeans and t-shirts. Different faces, different bodies, yet so alike in some way I couldn't quite identify. If I didn't know better they could have been clones, the same few individuals repeated over and over.
'Is it just me,' Haru said, 'or are all the women here pregnant?'
As soon as he said it I knew that I'd noticed it from the start but my conscious mind hadn't quite processed it.
'Yeah, they are,' Kelis said. 'That's… creepy.'
'Rebirth is the only way to repopulate,' Ingo said. I hoped that it was as simple as that, but I absolutely knew that it wasn't.
Deeper into the city, but not quite at its heart, the buses finally stopped and we dismounted. Kelis looked a question at me and I nodded. The party people had bought us safe passage so far and we had nothing to gain by ditching them yet. I looked around. There didn't seem to be anything special about the place we'd stopped: tract housing to one side, the concrete cubes of a hospital the other.
My nerves had been humming with tension, the vibration rising in pitch the nearer we came to Ash. I could sense his presence everywhere, and in my head the Voice was telling me that I should go to him. 'Any reason we've stopped here?' I asked Mike as casually as I could.
He smiled and pointed at the hospital. 'Medical check-up. No one's allowed in without one.' Justified paranoia in a post-Cull world, to check that newcomers weren't bringing new diseases with them – except I knew Ash and I didn't believe this was the real reason. The rest of Mike's people had dismounted the buses as we spoke. As I tried to back away I realised that we were surrounded, ten of Mike's people around each of us, subtly isolating us. I reached for my gun but they were so close there was no room to draw it, and even if I could take some of them before they overpowered me, I couldn't take them all.
I tried to catch Kelis' eye, or Ingo's, but we'd been separated quite efficiently and now the party people were moving towards the hospital entrance, pressing us along with them. 'What's this about?' I asked Mike, trying to swim uselessly against the tide of people carrying me forward.
'It's just routine,' he said. He was still smiling but the smile looked like something frozen now. Fake.
Helplessly, I was pushed through the hospital doors. I drew my gun finally, however useless it might be, because I knew this was where the storm I'd been sensing all day was going to break.
A hand grabbed my arm and the gun was taken from me before I could even think of using it. I snapped my head round but the woman had already backed away from me. She was big, armed and unsmiling. She was also pregnant. I heard a cry of pain to my left and saw Kelis drop to her knees. I knew that she'd been disarmed too. There were twenty or more women waiting in the room, all armed and all of them pregnant. As soon as they had our weapons they stepped in front of the doors behind us, blocking our escape.
I looked at Mike, leaning relaxed against one wall. 'You didn't get any message from the Collector,' I said. 'It was Ash who sent you to pick us up.'
He smiled and shrugged, as if none of it really mattered. 'It's OK. They won't hurt you if you co-operate.'
There were doctors in the room, men in white coats with friendly reassuring faces, and it almost could have been just a routine physical. Except I remembered Paris and there was something about the set-up here, about the way they herded the women to the right and men to the left, that sent a spike of unease through my nerves.
'It's OK,' said one of the girls, the young Goth with the black hair. 'They'll do the men first. And you're not… you know… are you?'
'I'm not what?' I asked, my voice a dry rasp. And then, before she could answer, a horrible suspicion began to form. 'I'm not pregnant?'
'Right,' she said and I tried to back away but there was nowhere to go and about twenty guns pointed right at me. I didn't think they'd hesitate to shoot through the girl to get at me.
'You'll need to strip,' the doctor said to the men. Exactly like Paris, I thought, as the men from the buses stripped while Ingo and Haru watched, motionless. It was almost comedic, the sight of all that tanned, naked flesh and the two clothed figures in the middle of it, upright and tense. I was so focussed on Ingo and Haru that it took me a moment to work out what was wrong. It was only when Mike turned his dazed, not-all-there smile on me that I saw it.
Mike's stomach was flat, abs perfectly sculpted, a thin line of hair leading down from the middle of his belly to… nothing. There was nothing there, not even a stump, nothing left of his genitals but a healed over white scar. I felt a rush of bile to the back of my throat and pressed a hand against my mouth to hold it in.
I looked past Mike at the other men. All of them were the same. Some of the scars were angry and red, recent. Some were clumsier than others, the mark of a more amateur surgeon. But every one of them was a eunuch. Worse than eunuchs – geldings. No longer men in the way that really mattered.
I saw Haru's face, frozen with horror, as he took it in. Beside him Ingo was utterly impassive. Mike turned his smile on them both. 'It's really all right,' he told them. 'They'll give you an anaesthetic, you won't feel anything. And you can take hormones, if you want them, to replace what's lost.'
'To replace..?' Haru said, voice high and incredulous. And then his paralysis suddenly broke and he was running towards the entrance. The men reached out for him but their hands slid away as Haru's desperate flight carried him past. He was only ten feet from the door when they finally brought him to the ground, five of them piling themselves on top of him. I could hear Haru's ragged, half-sobbing breaths from beneath the pile of naked men. When they slowly let him up, arms locked behind him, he was crying.
Throughout it all, Ingo had remained entirely still. He might have used the distraction to make his own escape, but he didn't. When Haru was finally subdued, Ingo calmly shucked first his own loose green t-shirt, and then the khaki trousers he was wearing underneath. When he was entirely naked, he turned to face me.
I don't know why I was so shocked to see the same angry red scar on Ingo's groin, the same absence
