Bzrk Apocalypse (2 page)

with a point and modest serrations. She stabbed it into Nolan’s thick

bicep.

The strong man screamed, a more feminine sound than one

might have expected.

“Hah! Hah, devil!” Sandra yelled, happy at the sight of his blood,

fascinated.

Wade and Quentin backpedaled, making sure to keep the table

between themselves and the long shot for Best Actress.

In Sandra’s eyes they were not backing away, they were coming

for her, with their fangs out, and claws for fingers, and liquid fire

dripping from their eyeballs——it was all about the eyeballs, it was

there, in the eyes, the demons.

Sandra Piper turned the knife around and stabbed it into her belly.

It didn’t go far. It drew blood, but just a stain the size of a quarter.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Quentin yelled.

“No, no, stop that, stop that this instant,” Wade said.

Nolan made another move——this time wary——to take the

knife from her.

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MICHAEL GRANT

Sandra spit at him. “Hah!” she yelled, and stabbed the knife into

her own eye. Her left eye. Pulled it out bloody and clotted with vis-

cous goo.

Cries of horror, and now even she could see that they were back-

ing away, the devils. It was working.
Hah! Run, devils, run!

She then stabbed the knife into her other eye and pushed it

through cracking bone, pushed it until the hilt was stopped. Then she

twisted the knife around as if she was trying to churn her own brain.

Her knees gave way. The knife dropped from her hand.

“Stupid Mission project,” she said. Then fell onto her back, laugh-

ing and howling, laughing and howling. “Devils! Dev——”

It was Lystra Reid who took the knife from her. And Lystra who

placed a napkin over the bloody craters in her face.

Not that Sandra Piper could see that.

6

TWO

Her name was Sadie McLure. She had indifferently styled brown hair

and smart, skeptical brown eyes that could take on golden highlights

and even suggestions of green in certain lights. She had freckles on

her cheeks and across the bridge of her nose. She’d never liked the

freckles—they seemed to be accompanied by the word
cute
and she

didn’t like people thinking of her as cute. Cute was a belittling word.

The cute freckles had a second outpost on her chest, and a lesser

presence on her shoulders. But all her freckles were now almost hid-

den by a rich, deep tan.

Her name was Sadie McLure, but in certain company she called

herself Plath, after the great and tragically suicidal poet.

It was her nom de guerre. Her BZRK name. The name that defi-

antly acknowledged that there were only two possible fates in her

future as a member of BZRK: death or madness.

She had a net worth expressed in billions of dollars. She had a

small but effective private army in the form of McLure Labs security

under a Mr. Stern. (She must have heard his first name at some point,

but what had stuck was the Mr. And the Stern.)

She had seen terrible things, Sadie had. As Plath she had
done

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MICHAEL GRANT

terrible things, too, and had terrible things done to her.

She was sixteen years old.

A month had passed since that bizarre and fateful day when the

Doll Ship
had burned down much of the Hong Kong harbor water-

front. A month since the president of the United States had blown her

own brains out on nationwide TV after being (correctly) suspected of

murdering her husband.

A month since Sadie as Plath had sent her biots into Vincent’s

brain, one armed with acid to burn the biot-death madness from him.

The great advantage of biots over their mechanical competitors, the

nanobots, was the closeness of the connection between twitcher and

biot. That was also the greatest disadvantage because that same con-

nection meant that the loss of a biot sent its creator on a downward

spiral into madness.

Vincent had spiraled following the loss of one biot and serious

injury to a second.

From a desperate desire to save Vincent, Sadie had undertaken a

grim mission to cauterize parts of his brain. But at this moment that

terrible day was compartmentalized if not forgotten, and Sadie was

doing something that was not at all terrible. She was on a white-sand

beach beneath palm trees. A picnic was laid out on a woven mat of the

kind the locals used. There was cold fried chicken, cold lobster, and a

bowl of vanilla-spiked fruit in the local Madagascar style.

There was also a bottle of white wine, now empty, and a bottle of

vodka, now partly empty.

And there was a boy.

He was naked as Sadie. His name was Noah, though like Sadie he

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

sometimes used a nom de guerre: Keats.

Whether they were Plath and Keats or Sadie and Noah, she was

on top and he was inside her. They were both smiling because the ash

from the joint in Sadie’s mouth had landed on the very tip of Noah’s

nose, and when she blew it away it made him sneeze. Which struck

them both as funny, so they laughed, and that physical convulsion

had interesting side effects.

“Laugh again,” Noah said.

“Not yet,” Sadie said.

“You’re torturing me.”

“I’m teaching you endurance,” she said, voice slurring.

“I’m standing right at the very edge of a cliff,” he said, and his

eyes closed and his smile became dreamier. “If you laugh . . . or even

move at all . . . or even breathe deeply, I’ll go right . . .
mmmm
. . . over

. . . the edge.”

“You’re going with a cliff metaphor?” she asked, and giggled.

Which was all it took.

She watched his face while his body arched and thrust and shud-

dered and finally subsided. His expression was more animal than

human in the first seconds, and the sounds he made were definitely

not witty banter. Or even half-drunk and quite stoned banter. But

then that feral look softened into an expression like you’d see on the

face of a saint in a Renaissance painting.

And then he laughed, too.

And opened his blue, blue eyes and said, “Don’t go yet.”

He remained inside her, in more ways than one. He was also

inside her brain, and not metaphorically. A tiny creature smaller than

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MICHAEL GRANT

the period at the end of a sentence——a creature that was built from

an exotic stew of DNA that included Noah’s own——was deep within

Sadie’s brain. This was a
biot
. One of
his
, Noah’s biots, because biots were nothing if not unique to their creator. It was designated K2.

Keats 2. His other biot, K1, was in a tiny vial stuck in the buttoned

pocket of his shorts, which were . . . he looked around . . . over there,

somewhere.

K2 had the job of maintaining the fragile latticework painstak-

ingly built around a bulge in an artery in Sadie’s brain. Left alone, the

aneurysm might never pop. Then again it might pop at any moment,

which would almost certainly kill Sadie, perhaps over the course of

pain-filled hours.

Noah had worked with scarcely a break over this last month to

strengthen the Teflon casing around the deadly bulge. It was tedious

work. Fibers had to be carried through Sadie’s eye, down the optic

nerve, up and down the soggy hills and deep valleys of her brain——

quite a long trip for a biot—then carefully threaded in place. Basket

weaving.

All the while a sort of picture-in-picture was open in Noah’s own

mind, an artificially color-enhanced but grainy picture. Imagine a 3D

special-effects movie but with the color flattened out and stripped of

nuance, all shot through a dirty lens.

Noah knew Sadie with an intimacy that was impossible for people

who did not travel
down in the meat
. When she became aroused, he

could feel the artery beneath his biot’s six legs pumping faster, harder.

But it was not just the relatively monotonous, liquid-encased surface

of the brain that he had seen up close. He had at various times, in the

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

course of more than one desperate mission, crawled across her eyes,

her lips, her tongue.

She kissed his mouth and then the place just beside his mouth

and then his neck. Then she rolled off onto the blanket and looked

toward the food.

“You didn’t . . . ,” he said.

“No.” She struggled to find the right tone. Unconcerned but not

indifferent. Nonchalant, not like it mattered. Then tried switching to

a sexy purr. “But I loved every minute. That’s not the only thing in the

world, you know.”

“It’s not?” he asked, trying to be funny.

“Want some lobster?” she asked, deflecting him. She didn’t like

talking about sex. The effects of weed and wine were ebbing, leav-

ing her tired and groggy. She could be cranky in a minute if she let

herself.

There were things nagging at her, distractions. She wanted to

keep pushing them away, but self-medication had its limits and all

those niggling worries would resurface, frequency and intensity

increasing. She had pushed it all away for a month and now “it” was

pushing back.

“I do want some lobster, I absolutely do,” Noah said.

“Then trot on over there and get me some, too.”

He sighed. “It’s always something with you.
Undress me. Make

love to me. Feed me lobster.
You are so demanding.” He stood up, and

she saw that half his hard, lean behind was coated with sand. She lay

back, head resting on one hand, enjoying that particular sight, and

the view beyond. They were in a secluded lagoon on the western edge

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MICHAEL GRANT

of the island, facing the much larger island of Madagascar, which was

a blur of green ten miles off.

A quarter mile to both north and south, armed men—fashionably

attired in white Tommy Bahama shirts and automatic rifles—watched

for any threat to their privacy. Just out of sight behind a rocky point, a

yacht crewed by ex-soldiers rolled in the gentle swell and kept a radar

lookout over the area.

Noah brought her pieces of lobster on a small china plate.

“We’re out of wine,” he said.

“Good. Time to sober up, anyway.”

“Is it?” he asked. “Why?”

She sat up and reached for her T-shirt. He interrupted her with a

kiss and gently stroked her breasts as if saying good-bye to them. “I

quite like these,” he said.

“I guessed that. Can I put on my shirt now?”

“I suppose.” He started to dress as well, shorts, a T-shirt, sandals.

He reached down and pulled her to her feet.

“I’ll call for our cab,” Sadie said. She pressed the talk button on a

handheld radio—there was no cell-phone reception this far up-island.

Five minutes later, as they packed up the picnic, a glittering white

cabin cruiser appeared around the point.

The captain gave a little
toot-toot
on the horn, and the boat blew

up.

It took a few seconds for the flat
CRUMP!
of the explosion to

reach them. It took a bit longer for the debris to splash into the water.

And just like that Sadie and Noah were Plath and Keats once

again, running now, food and blanket forgotten. McLure security

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

men were tearing along the beach from north and south, assault rifles

in their hands, yelling, “Get under cover, get under cover!”

The boat burned for a while—there was no possibility of anyone

having survived—and then it slipped beneath gentle waves that were

a very similar color to Noah’s eyes. The pillar of black smoke was

smothered. A black smudge rose until it was caught by a breeze and

blown away over the island.

Vacation was over. The war for the human race was back on.

13

THREE

The roll that had begun was accelerating. The ship’s ballast had shifted

decisively. It rolled onto its side, sending the flames shooting hundreds

of feet into the air.

The inside of
Benjaminia
was a slaughterhouse
—
dead Marines,
many more dead residents hung from bloody catwalks. The sphere

turned on its axis, and floors became walls. Bodies fell through the

air.

Like the turning drum of a dryer, the sphere rolled on, and now

people clinging to desperate handholds fell screaming and crashed into

the painted mural of the Great Souls.

Water rushed in through the opened segments.

The blowtorch submerged but burned on and turned the water to

steam as the
Doll Ship
sank, and settled on the harbor floor.

When the
Doll Ship
sank, the Armstrong Twins had found them-

selves in Hong Kong’s Victoria harbor.

They could not swim. With some effort, and if they felt in a coop-

erative mood, they could manage to walk, dragging the useless third

leg. But swim?

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

It was Ling who had saved their lives. Tiny, ancient, birdlike Ling.

She had cupped her hand beneath their chin and churned the filthy