Rebecca Levene - Kill or Cure

You know what they say about being able to see yourself reflected in the pupils of someone's eyes? Bullshit. When you're standing that close to a man, all you can see in the centre of his eyes is darkness. But when I looked at him, I did see myself. An epileptic flash of memory on my retina, I saw myself back when I'd first met him. Jesus, how was it possible to ever be that young? And then an epileptic flash of the future, I looked at him and saw what I would become.

He smiled, a vivid flash of white in the brown of his face. And, despite everything, I smiled back. "Jasmine," he said. "How did this happen? How did you and I come to this?"

I raised the gun and pressed the muzzle hard into his cheek, the soft flesh yielding around it. I gave him the gun, because it was easier than the answer.

The answer started months before, back when my world was a hundred foot square and white, and there'd been no one to share it with for five years. I didn't mind, though. I didn't care very much about anything then as my mind, and everything that made me me, snoozed contently under a warm blanket of opiates.

I don't know if you've ever got high. It's like a golden glow that spreads out through your veins and rushes into everything; into every dark corner of you. It makes you feel that everything is absolutely fine, like main-lining optimism. Forget the physical high, the orgasmic rush it's that unshakeable fine that makes it all worthwhile.

Or at least, that's what it's like to begin with. After the first few times, it's more like scratching an itch. And the longer you feed it, the deeper and crueller the itch gets. Normal people find it almost impossible to stop. Junkies get clean in prison and swear they're never going to let that shit screw up their lives again.

But when they're out and their life just isn't fine, but they know something that will make it feel that way people who've tried it don't call it junk. They know better than that.

For junkies it's hard, but for me it was impossible. Because the morphine in my veins was the only thing that blotted out the Voice in my head. I could always hear it, whispering and giggling at the edge of my consciousness, but with enough drugs inside me I couldn't quite make out the words.

That morning started the same way every morning had for the last five years: first the Voice and then the drugs. It was always the Voice that woke me, growing louder as the protective blanket of morphine slipped away. Maybe outside there might be something to distract me from it. In here there was nothing. Just a small white warren, five corridors, two labs, one half-wrecked an office with a long fritzed computer and the corpses of two of my colleagues, desiccated now, embracing in the cleaning cupboard where I locked them until the smell of decaying flesh became bearable. There were only two books, one by Geoffrey Deaver and the other a microbiology textbook, both of which I'd read so often that I could recite them pretty much by heart. The morphine helped with the boredom, too. And the terrible loneliness.

There was a cannula in my arm. I'd treated enough smack addicts in my time to know that you didn't want to keep digging fresh holes in your veins, because pretty soon the ones in your arms would be on the point of collapse, pocked with gaping, pustulant sores, and then you'd find yourself moving on to the ones in your thighs, your eyeball. I'd seen junkies without a penis, rotted away where they'd kept on injecting, even as the flesh festered and died, the pain less important than the hit.

So I fixed a cannula in my arm, like a terminal patient in a cancer ward. All I needed to get my fix was to empty the ampoule into a syringe and push the needle through the rubber tube permanently hanging from the crook of my elbow like the open, hungry mouth of a baby bird, desperate for that next meal. I could feel the excitement build up as I put the tip of the syringe in place, my heart rate speeding as I anticipated the rush. Junkie thinking, I knew. But what else did I have to live for?

Yeah, there was one answer to that, but he was on the other side of the world and probably dead and, anyway, I couldn't give him me without giving him the Voice, and I thought that was one thing I should keep to myself.

That day, though, I wasn't even thinking about him. I didn't think about anything much by then, the thoughts in my head so repetitive they'd begun to wear thin, like an old video played over and over. All I thought about was getting the drug into my system.

I'd started pressing down on the plunger of the syringe, the first molecules of opiate trickling into my blood, when I heard it. A voice.

A voice, but not the Voice. It was coming from the one break in the whiteness, the mound of rubble from the explosion which had trapped me in here, back when the world still had some hope in it.

It was coming from outside.

Christ.

My brain was still fuzzy from yesterday's drugs and the white noise of the psychosis they helped to mask. It couldn't quite process this. I had to think this through one step at a time. Voices meant people. Voices meant people inside the base deep inside. The explosion had only sealed off the innermost areas. They couldn't have just wandered into a military base on an island in the middle of a lake. They'd come here deliberately. They were looking for something.

Were they looking for me?

Who was looking for me?

For a moment I felt a flare of sharp, bright hope a spike of emotion stronger than anything I'd ever got from the drugs. It was him, it had to be. Who else would come to this place, after all this time, to hunt me down? But a moment later, reason swum up sluggishly through the murky waters of my thoughts.

If it was him, why hadn't he tried to contact me? The comms unit had been sealed in along with me, powered like the rest of the base by generators built to survive a nuclear war. If he thought I was alive, he'd know where I was. But there was no way he'd think I was alive. I shouldn't be alive. I could have let him know different, but for five long years I'd chosen not to, because the price I'd paid for survival was too high, and I preferred him to remember me as I was than as what I'd become.

And then I heard the voices more clearly, calling out instructions to each other about clearing the rubble, and I knew for sure that it wasn't him. Because his voice was deep and just a little gravely and these voices were light, with an accent I couldn't quite place.

"Getting thermal signs of a living body behind here," one of the voices said with sudden clarity. Shit! They knew I was here. These strangers, whoever they were, were coming for me to take me away, to kill me, to do whatever they wanted with me. And suddenly all the reasons that had kept me from getting in touch with him didn't feel like enough and I wanted to hear his voice one last time before I died.

The comms unit was two rooms away, tucked into the back of the base. A part of me wanted to stay and face whatever was coming head on. But I could hear the clanging of heavy machinery and I knew that they'd be through the rubble soon; I'd only have this one chance.

The walk to the comms unit seemed to last forever. The opiates were beginning to flush themselves out of my system, leaving behind a dull ache in my limbs, a cold sweat and emptiness in my head just the kind of vacuum that nature abhors. The Voice grew louder as I walked, filling the void, its cadence following the rhythm of my footsteps, echoing through my mind in time with the shivers which were beginning to wrack my body. I could make out words now, 'blood' and 'cure' and other, more brutal words that I didn't know lived anywhere inside me, but I ignored them.

I hadn't entered this room since the first few weeks after I'd been trapped. Too tempting, if I was there, to call him. I was shocked to see the layer of dust lying over everything, like a thick brown snowfall.