ENEMY MINE

'GO TO THE left.' Xian Mei relayed the instruction to Mowen as the handheld mine detector, not much bigger than a TV remote control, began to beep insistently.

The detector consisted of a mostly black display screen, which depicted Mowen's boat as a slowly moving white dot.

Whenever they got close to one of the hidden underwater mines surrounding the prison island, a flashing red dot would appear, accompanied by a high-pitched beep.

The closer they were to the mine, the more frantic both the flashing and the beeping would become.

Mowen had told them that he sometimes ran errands for the prison governor and had been given the device to enable him to move safely through the waters between Banoi and the smaller island a couple of miles offshore.

He didn't elaborate on the nature of the errands, and no one asked.

Because they had to be almost on top of a mine before the detector picked up its signal, progress through the water was slow.

For a while it seemed that the black island jutting from the sea, dominated by its forbidding grey tower like the domain of an evil sorcerer in a fairy story, wasn't getting any closer.

Not that Sam, for one, minded at all. Despite their destination, he was just glad to be heading away from Banoi and to be breathing fresh air untainted by the stench of corruption.

It was a glorious day, the eggshell-blue of the sky reflected in the deeper blue of the calm and glittering ocean. Odd to think that, like Banoi itself, the sea's beauty concealed such deadly danger lurking beneath its surface.

Inevitably, however, they did eventually draw closer to the island, the jagged black rocks that fringed the shoreline like the beckoning claws of some vast leviathan.

The island itself, which rose to a plateau on which the prison was built, appeared to swell from the ocean.

As Mowen slowly and skillfully steered his boat through the rocks towards a small inlet, Purna dialed Ryder White's number.

'We're here,' she said when her call was answered. 'How do we get in?'

Reception was poor, a mass of white noise through which White's voice could barely be heard. 'Climb over elec… fence.

I'll cut off … tricity supply for an hour once you're up on the plateau … give you a chance to—' A prolonged burst of static drowned out his next words. Purna winced and held the phone away from her ear.

'I'm losing you, White,' she shouted. 'What did you say?'

For a moment there was simply more white noise, then it died away a little and Purna heard White's voice, faint and distorted, rising up through it again.

'… make for Sector Seven. I repeat, Sector Seven. But be care … fected everywhere.'

'Got it,' said Purna. 'See you soon.'

She rang off and told the others what White had said. They drifted into shore, and Mowen cut the engine.

Before them, clear water lapped gently at a stony, sloping beach. Beyond that rose a gentle cliff face, leveling out to the plateau perhaps thirty meters above. Ringing the plateau was a four-meter-tall security fence topped with metal spikes.

Signs at five-meter intervals depicted a skull beneath a zig-zagging lightning bolt, white on red. Though the fence was high above them, they could hear it humming faintly, and through it, they could just make out vague dark shapes wandering aimlessly about – the infected with nothing to attack.

Purna sighed. Her life seemed to have boiled down to little more than a succession of obstacles, and here were more of them.

She looked at her fellow survivors – a patched-up, motley bunch of strangers, who in the past couple of days had been through hell, both collectively and individually, and who had been forced to mold themselves into a ruthless fighting unit to stay alive.

She fervently hoped that their ordeal was now, finally, coming to an end, that soon they would be able to return to their old lives and (as much as they were able) put this terrible episode behind them.

However, in her heart of hearts, she suspected that the outcome would not be quite as simple and straightforward as that, and that even if everything did eventually work out, there were still battles ahead to be fought and won.

Once they were ashore, Mowen raised a hand in farewell. 'I go now.'

Logan stepped forward and shook the trader's hand. 'Take it easy, man,' he said. 'Thanks for everything.'

Mowen nodded, implacable as ever, his eyes still hidden behind his shades. 'Good luck,' he said.

'You too,' said Sam, also shaking Mowen's hand, while Xian Mei, Jin, and Yerema smiled and nodded in agreement.

Purna, however, simply gave a single curt nod, acknowledging Mowen's help, but knowing that the relationship between themselves and the trader was fragile and temporary at best. It was based – on Mowen's part – not on mutual respect and a genuine willingness to help but purely on monetary gain.

They watched Mowen's boat chug slowly away, then they turned back to the matter at hand. Purna led the way, as she so often did, as they trudged towards the gently sloping cliff face and began to climb.

It was neither a long nor particularly arduous journey to the summit, but the heat of the sun and the weight of their backpacks were more than enough to sap their strength.

By the time they reached the plateau, they were each panting and sweating and grateful for a drink.

As they sipped water and looked through the buzzing electric fence at the drearily ominous prison building across the two-hundred-meter square expanse of a flat and dusty exercise yard, those infected who had been milling outside began – based on their physical ability – to shamble or run or crawl towards them.

'Here we go again,' Sam said almost wearily and unshouldered his rifle. At the same moment, the low humming of the electric fence ceased.

'White's turned it off. That gives us an hour,' said Purna.

'How did he know we were here?' asked Jin.

Purna pointed silently up at one of many CCTV cameras mounted high enough on the prison walls that they couldn't be damaged or disabled. A second later the first of the infected threw himself against the security fence with a metallic crash.

He was a big shaven-headed man with a rearing cobra tattoo on the side of his neck. Like most of the zombies here, he was wearing orange prison overalls. To everyone's surprise, it was Yerema who raised her pistol and shot the man in the head. He fell like a sack of cement, face turning slack and almost baby-like as the savagery abruptly went out of him.

'You done that before?' Purna asked, regarding the girl shrewdly.

Yerema shook her head, trying not to look shocked at her actions. 'No, but I knew that to survive I was going to have to kill. And I also knew that the more I put it off the harder it would be.'

Purna nodded in grim

approval and tried not to flash a knowing look at Jin.

'If it helps, try not to think of it as killing,' said Sam. 'Try to think of it as switching off a dangerous machine. Whoever that guy was, he died a while ago. All you've done is stopped the virus from using his body.'

Yerema nodded her thanks as more of the infected hurled themselves against the security fence. They rammed their faces between the bars, growling and snapping like vicious but frustrated guard dogs.

No one needed to be told that the creatures would have to be dealt with before the six of them could even think of climbing the fence into the prison. Like kids at a shooting gallery, they silently arranged themselves into a line, raised their guns, and began to pick off the infected one by one.

There were around sixty of them, maybe more, but it was over in a matter of minutes. As soon as the last of the infected had fallen, Purna, Sam, and the rest lowered their weapons and moved further along the fence, stopping at a spot far enough away from the carnage that they wouldn't be trying to avoid landing in the spreading pool of blood when they climbed over.