Bzrk Apocalypse (17 page)

replaced it with your own. You enslaved her. And when you have sex

with someone in that condition, it’s rape.”

He shook his head and took a drink just so he’d have an excuse

not to meet her gaze.

“Rapist. Murderer. Terrorist. That’s you, Bug, by the standards of

the wide world, yeah.”

Bug Man frowned. No, that wasn’t right. “I’m . . . no. No way. I’m

a gamer. I’m just playing.”

“Buggy, Buggy, Buggy.” She patted his knee, and he felt his flesh

creep. “If you were charged in a court of law, you’d be looking at life

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MICHAEL GRANT

without parole in New York. In Texas, hell, they’d execute you, yeah.

Electric chair in Texas? Let me Google that.” She pulled out her phone

and opened the browser.

Bug Man let loose a weird giggle, and then was appalled by the

sound he’d made.

“You’re a very bad person. In this world. In this real world the

way it is. You’re a monster. Don’t you know that? Damn! I was wrong.”

She held up her phone for him to see. “Lethal injection in Texas. The

needle. That’s such a weak way to die.”

“I don’t know what you want,” Bug Man pleaded.

She didn’t answer directly. Then she said, “Drink,” and he drank.

Then she said, “You didn’t listen closely enough. I said ‘In this world.

In this real world the way it is.’ But this isn’t the only way the world

could be. Is it?”

The whiskey had started a fire in his throat. And now a danger-

ous warmth spread from his stomach outward. He flicked his eyes

up at her. She wasn’t stronger than him. She wasn’t armed. He could

probably smash this heavy glass against the side of her head. Push

her out of the window. It was, what, six floors down to the pavement?

What did he have to lose if what she said about him was true?

“I sent a text just now,” Lystra said.

“So what?”

“So . . . wait. Ticktock. Ticktock, yeah.” She smiled. It was almost

playful. “Ticky tocky.”

“Lady, I think I’ve had it with your shi—” His mouth still moved,

but no sound came out. Because just then a window opened in his

brain.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

“Mmmm,” Lystra said, savoring it.

A second window opened in his brain. A second little TV screen

with nothing in view but something that might just be an insect’s leg.

“Is the third one up yet?”

A third window. This one showed all too clearly the shape he’d

come to know as prey and fear as predator. A biot.

“You ever hear the phrase ‘dead man’s switch’?”

He had. But he felt as if he couldn’t open his mouth. Fear seeped

into his blood with icy fingers that outraced the warm glow of alco-

hol.

“A dead man’s switch. They use it on subways and things like

that,” she explained. “If the subway conductor dies, see, he lets go of

the switch and the train automatically stops, yeah. Yeah. That’s me

now. I’m your own personal dead man’s switch. Because if my heart

stops beating, guess what?”

When he didn’t answer, she bared her teeth, and once again, that

skeletal presence seemed to burn through her flesh. “If I die, little Bug

Man, all three of your biots . . . Oh, and they are
yours
now . . . die as well.” She put a fist over her heart, opened it, closed it, opened it, in a

mockery of sinus rhythm.

“What do you want?” he screamed, losing the last of his self-con-

trol. Then, weeping, softly repeated, “What do you want? What do

you want?”

“I’m going to create a new world,” she said, sitting back, dreamy

now, her eyes gazing toward the French doors and the city beyond.

“A whole new world. I am its god. But it’s a lonely thing, being god;

you could ask the real God, if he existed. He’d tell you. He created the

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MICHAEL GRANT

world, and then, he was all alone with no one to talk to. He needed

friends. But!” She held up a cautionary finger. “He needed friends

who understood who they were, and who he was, and who held the

lightning bolts, and who was there to cower and serve. He needed the

love that only comes from those who are afraid. Love me, your god,

or burn in hell. I’m offering the same deal as Jehovah.”

“You’re fucking crazy.”

He flinched, expecting her to reveal that awful presence again,

but instead she laughed a genuine, happy laugh. “Crazy? Nah. I’m

BZRK.”

138

THIRTEEN

Keats pulled away from her. “What’s the matter?”

“Wire, Noah. Wire in my brain.”

It took him a few seconds to make sense of things. “You’re down

in the meat?”

She nodded—distracted, scared. She pushed him off her and

jumped from the bed. She grabbed at clothing. “I knew something . .

. I just . . . Something was weird, so I looked.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you ask me to help?” But

even as the words were out of his mouth, he knew the answer. “You

thought it was me.”

Plath didn’t answer, her attention was elsewhere. The biot—if it

was a biot, how could it be?—had disappeared, and its light along with

it. Plath swung her biot left, right, shining her illumination around in

the brain fluid.

Then she saw it: a fountain. Instead of water it sprayed red blood

cells, the flattened lozenges that were never supposed to fly loose in

the cranial fluid. The artery lay like some massive fire hose, coiled

across the surface of the brain. It pulsed obscenely with every beat

of her racing heart and the blood cells twirled as they flew, then

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MICHAEL GRANT

arced away, scattering through the liquid.

The enemy was cutting into her artery.

“No!” she cried.

“What?” Keats demanded.

“He’s cut an artery!”

“Where? Where?” Keats grabbed her shoulders, shaking her,

forcing her to pay attention and answer.

“Hippocampus,” she said, and Keats sent his biot racing to her.

In Plath’s mind she saw the three open windows. Nothing but

glass in one. A bleary view from Anya’s half-closed eye of the other

side of Anya’s bed, empty—a slit of light coming from the bathroom.

And in the final window that deadly fountain.

She sent her biot racing toward the deadly leak, clambered madly

atop the artery and saw her mistake. It was not coming from the artery

itself but from a much smaller vein just behind it. Still dangerous, but

the pressure was less intense. Still dangerous, still potentially deadly.

And yet, had the foe wanted to kill her, it could certainly have

sliced the artery. And there would be more than a few hundred cells

flying. He could have done it more than once in the time available.

She could right now be swimming through a blood-clouded fluid.

She had nothing to patch the hole. “Bring some fibers,” Plath told

Keats.

“Yes,” he said tersely. He still held her shoulders. She shrugged

him off, turned away, ashamed of her suspicions, ashamed to have

him know.

Veins were delicate things, unlike arteries, which managed higher

pressures. This vein was about as big around as the biot—translucent,

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

like a worm that never sees sunlight—and it undulated as the blood

cells jostled and pushed to make their way back to the heart.

Then she saw the bulge. Something larger than blood cells almost

too large to squeeze through the vein. The enemy. It had not just

punctured the vein as a distraction, it had stretched the cut to crawl

inside and escape.

She could stab it right through the sausage-casing walls of the

vein. She could probably kill it. But she’d be poking holes in her own

vein, and the enemy—who had thus far not done anything as drastic

as cut an artery—might get frantic, might start slashing from inside

the vein.

“I’m almost there,” Keats said.

“I’m going after him,” she said, without explaining what she

meant.

With her front two biot legs she pried open the elastic flesh of the

vein. Blood cells pummeled her face. A white blood cell hit her, rolled

down her back, and clung on. It took all her strength to push into the

flow, like trying to move uphill against a rockslide.

Halfway in and the pressure shifted. Now it was cells in the vein

battering her like dozens of flat stones, pushing her head and upper

body after the escaping enemy. She slipped the rest of the way in and

fought down the claustrophobia as the vein fitted around her like a

body sock. The blood was pushing her along, pushing her toward the

distant lungs where oxygen would flow to the cells and they would be

fired into arteries for the outward-bound trip.

She could see nothing but blood cells, red and white, crowded all

around her. Her hope was that her prey would soon cut his way out

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MICHAEL GRANT

and she would be swept along with him.

But if he didn’t? If he rode this all the way to the heart and the

lungs? She could be lost forever in the miles and miles of blood ves-

sels.

“No!” she said in sudden panic.

“I don’t see you yet,” Keats said. He had switched on the harsh

overhead light so that the two of them, in various states of dress,

looked sickly and frightened.

Too late to get back to her entry point, Plath knew; now she would

have to cut her own way out. A second bleeder in her brain. God, she

was making things worse. A risk of a second blowout that could kill

her, weighed against the terror of being lost forever inside her own

body.

Soon this vein would merge with another, and then any exit

would cause more blood loss. She had to cut her way out now or lose

her chance altogether.

She stabbed a claw into the vein wall but almost could not hold on

against the pressure. Making matters worse, the cell was on her back,

oozing its way like warmed Silly Putty into her shoulders, reducing

the mobility of her legs. And another now attached to her left hind

leg, a fat slug of a thing wrapping its mindless self around her stick-

like limb.

Panic!

She slashed madly at the vein wall, heedless, cut it and felt the

blood change speed and direction. Biots are not flexible, so all she

could do was use her front legs to cantilever her rear out of the inci-

sion.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Suddenly the pressure was too much. Her grip failed. Her biot

went tumbling end over end, no way to tell where she was, in or out

of the vein.

And then, all at once, she was floating free in cerebral fluid, rid-

ing like a beach ball atop a stream of cells. She grabbed onto brain

tissue and hauled herself out of the current.

From there at last she could turn around and see the damage

she’d done.

The leak was twice as large as the first one. Cells were flying out

in threes and fours rather than singly.

With her heart in her throat she grabbed Keats’s shoulder.

“Where are you?” she demanded.

Keats took her in his arms and held her as his biot crossed into

view bearing a half-dozen fibers to begin the job of yet again saving

Sadie McLure from her own blood.

143

FOURTEEN

It was called the Gyllene Salen, the Golden Hall. It was a vast space—a

long rectangle with an impossibly high ceiling, reminding some first-

time visitors of a medieval cathedral decorated by Liberace.

All of one long wall was taken up by five arches opening onto a

courtyard. The opposite wall was seven arches. And all of it—virtu-

ally every square inch—was covered in just under nineteen million

pieces of tile, most of them gold. They depicted various characters

from Swedish history—kings and saints, for the most part.

Lystra had done her homework and knew all of this. The detail

added to the experience. It was a wondrous place and the perfect set-

ting for the annual Nobel Prize ball and banquet.

At this moment on this dark December night, a handful of

Nobel laureates, a slightly larger handful of previous Nobel laureates,

the family and friends of said laureates, assorted VIPs and kind-of

VIPs—amounting, in total, to several hundred people, all in tuxedos

and evening dresses—were seated at long banquet tables loaded down

with the sort of china and stemware you don’t find at Bed Bath &

Beyond.

This, thought Lystra, would be the point at which she would have

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to be very careful for her personal safety. First her immediate, physi-

cal safety—because what was coming would be violent. But more to

the point, this was where the intelligence agencies of the world would

focus like laser beams once the event had . . . well, played out. All the

major intel powers—America, China, Japan, the UK, France, Ger-

many, Russia—had prominent citizens here. What was coming would

be an event of earthshaking impact. No one cared much what hap-

pened to a single actress or a single businessman, and no one would

connect any of this to the nosy New Zealand cops who’d had to be

eliminated, or to poor, conscience-wracked Nijinsky.

But the self-murder of the president of the United States, and then