Bzrk Apocalypse (42 page)

That was kind of a drag. He was very useful, the old man. I was never

going to bring him here, no, no, but it would have been fun watching

him deal with the world I’m creating. He would have been an interest-

ing player in the game.”

Plath put her drink down again. Her hand was shaking. Lear saw

it.

“The world you’re creating?”

But Lear wasn’t playing along anymore. “How much longer do

you think you have to live, Sadie?”

Plath did not answer.

“Two ways forward for you, Sadie. The usual choice: death or

madness. We have some decent twitchers here, and we could easily

wire you up. Or I could be disappointed that you would just walk in

here and think you could lie to me.” Lear raised the pistol on her lap

and leveled it at Plath.

The muzzle looked huge.
What a cliché
, some corner of Plath’s

mind thought.
That’s what everyone who has ever stared down the

wrong end of a gun thinks: oh, it’s big.

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MICHAEL GRANT

“Go ahead,” Plath said.

“You don’t think I will?” Lear stood up and let the down vest slide

to the floor. The sheer tunic revealed shadows of the tattoo horrors

beneath. Lear pointed to a spot on her belly, right where an appendix

scar would be. “Right here, yeah. That’s where I would tattoo your

face. Maybe then you’ll talk to me, yeah? They speak the truth, the

tattoos do. Yeah.”

“I believe you’ll kill me,” Plath said. “You’re a mass murderer.

Before you’re done you’ll kill more people than Genghis or Hitler.

You’re a sick, twisted, crazy woman playing an insane game. So yeah,

I think you’ll kill me.”

Lear cocked her head, all the while keeping the gun aimed. “Don’t

you want to beg?”

Plath forced a smile of her own. A peace had descended over

her. It was like what Noah had described to her, the eerie feeling of

detachment and fearlessness that could come in the midst of a very

challenging game. It would be over in minutes.

“I’m not afraid to die,” she said. “So long as I take you with me,

you foul, fucked-up psychopath.”

“Hah!” Lear said. And then, the wheels began to turn in her head.

Plath could see her retracing her steps. “You never touched me. Yeah,

you never touched me.”

“No,” Plath said. “But you took my gun. As I knew you would.”

Lear swallowed. She glanced at Bug Man, as if he would or could

help.

“You know the anterior cerebral artery?” Plath asked. “Don’t be

embarrassed if you don’t. I never would have, if some sick creature

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had not dragged me into her little BZRK game. But now, hey, I know a

fair amount. Like I know that the anterior cerebral artery feeds blood

to the frontal lobes. Which is where your consciousness lives.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“Three biots, Lear. Each has a nice, long spike buried in that

artery. There’s blood leaking, but just a few cells, nothing fatal. It

takes pressure to hold them in place. I think you may have high blood

pressure, because it’s a little like holding a Champagne cork in. If I

keep up the pressure, leave the spikes in, well, eventually clotting fac-

tor will seal the damage. But if I let the spikes out . . . which is what

will happen if my biots are suddenly no longer being controlled . . .

there will be a sudden spurt of blood. The pressure of cells forcing

their way out of the holes will actually widen the holes. And since all

the spikes are close together, the whole area will probably tear wide

open. I know these things because of my own aneurysm. Useful.”

Lear lowered the pistol and squeezed the trigger. The bang rattled

the glassware.

Plath felt a terrible blow, like a crowbar against her knee. The

pain was immediate. Blood gushed from the wound. Bits of white

bone stuck like teeth from ripped skin.

Plath fell to her other knee and shrieked in pain.

“See, little Sadie girl, there are other ways. I don’t have to kill you.

I can just keep hurting you. How does it feel? Does it hurt? It’s weird,

yeah, but people who can face the idea of dying can’t always face the

idea of suffering, yeah?”

The pain was beyond belief, beyond anything Plath had ever felt

before.

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MICHAEL GRANT

“See, honey, I’m not afraid to die, either. I’m afraid to fail. I’d

rather die than lose the game, yeah, my game,
my goddamned game
!”

She fired again, this time into the meat of Plath’s arm.

“Oh, did I get the bone on that one? Ouch, yeah? I have doctors, I

have morphine, I can help, but first—”

This crash was not nearly as loud as the gunfire. Just the
crump!

sound of a bourbon bottle hitting a skull.

Lear fell sideways, and Bug Man kicked her in the stomach, then

grabbed the gun from her hand.

“Shoot her,” Plath cried through waves of agony and terror.

“Can’t. She’s got me. Biots. Some kind of dead man’s switch. She

dies, I lose it. So you don’t kill her, either, Plath.”

“My biots never got to her brain. They’re only halfway up her

neck.”

“Hah! You bluffed the crazy bitch?”

A loud, imperious banging at the front door. Bug Man fired

through it. “They won’t shoot back,” he said, voice high with stress.

“They might kill their boss.” Then he yelled, “You come in her, I shoot

her! I shoot her right between the eyes!”

“That was gunfire,” Tanner said. “We go in.”

O’Dell threw a quick salute and ran for his sleigh. But Babbington

had run off, and O’Dell had never been any sort of pilot.

“With me, Sergeant!”

Tanner fired the engine as, down below, the helicopter’s rotors

began to turn.

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THIRTY-TWO

Suarez did not hear the gunfire in her underground position, but on

the monitor she did see men rushing, guns drawn.

“Something just hit the fan,” she muttered.

She had located her own sleigh. It was parked behind one of the

dormitories, not hard to get to so long as no one was shooting at you.

“Hope to hell they fueled the damn thing up,” she said. She

grabbed the guns from the dead guards, stuck them in her waist-

band feeling weighed down and a little ridiculous, and raced from

the room.

The dungeon theme was over, now it was bright-lit hallway, white

on white. Ahead, footsteps running. A man and a woman. It took her

three shots to kill them.

The hallway dead-ended, and she had to double back to find an

exit. She opened it quietly, glanced around to see the warehouse she

expected, and ran toward concealment behind stacked plastic crates.

“Who is that?” a voice yelled.

“The prisoner got loose!” she yelled, waited until a worried face

appeared, and put a bullet through its mouth.

Running, running, one of her extra guns clattered to the floor,

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MICHAEL GRANT

but she kept running. Running through her mind was that what-

ever had sent armed men rushing around, it wasn’t her. They’d been

headed somewhere else, after someone else.

Bless whoever the poor fool was, but that was not her problem.

Probably.

The sleigh came slipping and sliding, hard to control, very hard to

control as Tanner raced it down the ramp. First things first: kill that

chopper.

Small-arms fire popped off to his left, chipping stone from the

wall to his right.

“RPG at your six!” O’Dell yelled.

The wobbly rocket arced toward them, fired from behind and

below. It missed by inches and blew up against the stone wall. The

sleigh was blown clear of the ramp, still a hundred feet up from the

bottom of the valley.

But then the computer kicked in—roared the engines to push a

tornado of air beneath the hovercraft—which slowed the descent so

that rather than being fatal it was merely bone-jarring as it slammed

down onto gravel.

“RPG!” O’Dell yelled again, but this time Tanner had seen it com-

ing even before O’Dell and pushed the throttle forward. The sleigh

bucked, kicked up a storm of gravel, and blew past the missile, which

detonated fifty feet away.

“On that building!” O’Dell pointed and there, sure enough, were

two men manhandling yet another round into the missile launcher.

“Like hell,” Tanner yelled, swung the nose of the sleigh around

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and fired blind at the building with one of his own missiles. It struck

a second-floor window and blew a hole. It did not kill the men with

the RPG, but the concussion knocked them onto their backs.

“The house!” Tanner yelled. He aimed the sleigh toward it and

then, at the last second, sank the brakes into gravel and the sleigh

skidded sideways into a stop. O’Dell had already opened the canopy

and now leapt, pistol in hand, to rush the door.

The sniper fired once, and O’Dell slammed onto his face and did

not move. At the same moment the door of the house flew open and a

young black kid in a bathrobe appeared, dragging Sadie by one arm.

The sniper fired and missed.

Tanner spotted the muzzle flash, and thanked whatever God

watched over him that the sleigh had skidded sideways, because his

weapons were pointed in the right direction. He launched a missile

that blew a hole in this second structure, and while the sniper was

recovering Tanner emptied his pistol at the roofline.

“Get in! Get in!”

The boy climbed in, hauling a nearly helpless Plath after him.

The canopy would not close with Plath’s legs sticking out, but Tanner

wasn’t waiting. He gunned the engine and roared away toward the

ramp, firing his thirty-mil cannon continuously, causing bright-red

flowers to bloom on walls, empty ground, and a couple of men.

“Get her in, get her in!”

“Can’t, there’s no room!” Bug Man cried, but nevertheless he

hauled a screaming, bloody Plath the rest of the way into the cockpit,

a tumble of limbs and hair on Bug Man’s lap.

“Who are you?” Tanner demanded.

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MICHAEL GRANT

“They call me Bug Man.”

“Yeah, well, listen up, Bug Man. See this? That’s the throttle.

That’s the brake. This is the yoke. The computer will help.”

“What? Why? Are you bailing out?”

“No, but you will be. There’s another one of these at the top of

the ramp.”

Lear rose from the floor, woozy, took a stutter-step, and fell into the

wall. She left a trail of blood behind.

“Fu . . . The . . . Yeah . . .” she muttered.

Her legs were jelly. Her head was going around and around and

around and
oh, no
. She vomited onto the floor. Felt a little better after that. Wished she hadn’t been drinking. Wished she had more sleep.

Yeah. Sleep would be good. . . .

Stillers came pounding in, gun drawn. Three other men, all

armed.

“Boss!”

“Di . . . get ’em?”

“They’ve got the sleigh, but Tara’s getting airborne.”

“Kill them. Kill them,” Lear said, slurring where she wished she

was shouting.

“Someone get the doctor!” Stillers yelled.

More voices yelling, all around her; voices yelling and walkie-

talkies blasting away and something burning.

“I’m ’kay,” she said. Why wouldn’t her mouth work?

She felt the side of her head, then stared at her hand, red with

something she couldn’t bring herself to understand. “Mom?” she asked.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Slowly, slowly, her head stopped spinning. Her legs were still weak

but she could stand. A white-coated doctor was doing something to

her head. Someone else was putting something in her mouth. Water.

Had she asked for water?

She blinked. Her father was here. What was he doing here?

She shook her head, which set off a cascade of pain. She was sit-

ting now on a couch stained with red handprints.

Caligula. He had come around to peer at her, keeping his dis-

tance, but saying something. “She’s dead, Lyssie, she’s dead, and you

can’t ever tell anyone what you’ve done. . . .”

“My head,” she managed to say. “Give me something. Give me

something. Hurts.”

She blinked and her father was gone. She blinked again and

pushed herself to her feet. “Kill them! Kill them!” she cried, and this

time it came out right.

“Tara’s in the air,” Stillers said. “She’ll get them.”

By sheer dumb luck more than skill the sleigh made it to the top of

the ramp, weakly followed by small-arms fire that drilled a hole in the

canopy and brought a whinny of fear from Bug Man.

“There it is,” Tanner yelled.

“I don’t know how to drive that thing!”

“Go!”

Bug Man tried to crawl out from under Plath, who was only

barely moving and definitely not saying anything brilliant. There was

a pool of blood on the seat that had seeped into Bug Man’s bathrobe.

This as much as Tanner’s shout propelled Bug Man out and onto

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the ice. He immediately fell down, and that fact saved his life when

the sleigh he was aiming for suddenly began firing. Cannon fire blew