Bzrk Apocalypse (27 page)

The number you have dialed is not a working number.

No, of course not. Lear would swap phones regularly, clever boy.

Or girl. Could it really be a woman? Was a woman capable of such

malice? Would a woman play this game?

He opened his browser. How did one get samples of DNA? Any

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

hospital, sure, but these were samples from multiple countries. Who

could do that?

He searched
medical testing labs
, impeded somewhat by the fact

that he couldn’t quite direct his fingers to hit the right keys. He came

up with too many results. He added qualifiers and came up with fewer

hits. Then refined the search further to focus on corporate structures.

There were only six that were privately owned and reached

beyond just North America. One of them, Janklow/MediStat, had

recently lost its owner in an unfortunate boating accident.

“Accident. Hah.”

Among those present on the boat and giving statements to the

police was another—competing—corporate titan. A woman.

Three seconds later he had a photograph looking at him from his

monitor, the face of Lystra Ellen Alice Reid.

L. E. A. R.

He stared at the picture. He laughed.
My God, a pretty young

woman.
That face, that serious, intelligent, attractive face hid a mad-

ness as profound as anything bubbling beneath the surface of two

men so hideous they couldn’t walk down the street.

Lear. Self-aware madness, then. She knew, Lear did; the creator

of BZRK knew she was mad. The wicked thing. The wicked, wicked

thing.

He raised his mostly empty bottle to her in a wry toast. “Nice.

Very nice.”

He could probably stop her. He could take this to the Twins, and

they
could probably stop her.

“I could save the world,” Burnofsky said, his tone mocking.

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MICHAEL GRANT

In the old days, he might have been tempted by that. He could be

a hero. A hero/murderer. A hero who had helped to cause the suicide

of the president of the United States.
Right. Hero.

He could save the world.

Or.

Or he could beat Lear to the punch and shove it in the Twins’ face

as well.

Hero? Sorry, Dr. Burnofsky, that role is no longer available to you.

How about killer? How about destroyer of worlds?

Yeah, that position was still open.

“Why?” Keats asked it, though he knew it was foolish. How did you

ask for explanations when the person you were asking might be wired

himself? But he asked, anyway. “Why, Vincent?”

“I had my orders. From Lear. He gave me instructions.”

Plath licked her lips, nervous, angry, but feeling as if she should

be far angrier.
Knowing
she should be far angrier. But somehow the

emotion didn’t quite come. The rage did not rise in her. “Tell me what

he instructed,” she said, her voice roughened to simulate the emotion

she did not feel.

“He said to wire you. To reduce your skepticism. To avoid suspi-

cion of Lear. Or of me.”

“What else?”

“Seventy percent,” Wilkes snarled. “Right.”

“There are . . . holes in my mind,” Vincent said. “I feel them. I

know something is wrong with me. That’s not a lie.”

“Asshole!” Wilkes said, far more furious than Plath.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Plath raised a hand to silence Wilkes. “Tell me the rest,” she said

to Vincent.

Anya sat beside Vincent, who seemed terribly small. She was

weeping quietly, holding one of his hands in hers. Expecting him to

be killed.

Plath saw herself through Anya’s eye. She saw a grim-faced girl, a

sixteen-year-old girl with freckles for God’s sake, with stupid freckles.

That picture of her finally brought the true emotion to the surface,

but the emotion was disgust. Plath was disgusted with herself, with

what she had become.

“Tell me what you did about the Tulip, Vincent,” Plath said.

Vincent flinched and broke eye contact. “You know what I did.”

“You wired the Tulip and the Twin Towers together,” Plath said

bitterly. “And you looped in, what? Something that would make me

less questioning, something . . .”

“I wired the memories of the Towers, the Tulip, and your pleasure

centers, all together,” Vincent said. “They were Lear’s orders. That’s

what he wanted. I . . .” He looked at Anya, and now Plath was looking

at Vincent through her own eyes and through Anya’s. “I—”

“Did you at least argue? Did you at least question?” This was

Keats now, raging. “Did you not say, ‘What the hell are you talking

about?’ Did you not say, ‘How dare you?’ Did you not tell Lear to
go

fuck himself
?” Keats looked as if he might beat Vincent to death right

then and there.

“He’s been wired, too,” Plath said wearily. “We burned holes

in his brain to save him, but someone else saw an opportunity in

that. We never checked because . . . Well, because we felt so sad and

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MICHAEL GRANT

guilty. But Lear got to Vincent, Vincent got to me.”

“Who would have wired Vincent?” Keats asked, but even as the

words were forming, he saw the answer. “Nijinsky. It’s like a disease.

Lear to Nijinksy, Nijinsky to Vincent, Vincent to Plath. Like a virus.”

“Vincent, walk your biot out of me,” Plath ordered. “Do it now.”

Vincent said nothing, just looked at her, so Wilkes dropped down

beside him, clapped a friendly hand on his leg, and in a flash there

was a knife in her free hand. She jabbed the point against his carotid

artery. “Do what the lady says, Vincent. Or I have to kill you. Give up

the one you have in her, and your others, too. It’s either that or you

die.”

“Do it, Vincent,” Anya pleaded. “For me, do it.”

Half an hour later Vincent’s biots were in a vial hanging from

Plath’s neck. Vincent, the once-invincible Vincent, was still just sev-

enty percent. But he was one hundred percent in Plath’s power.

228

STATE OF PLAY

Enough dots had been connected. But twenty-four hours after the day

of the prince and the Pope, no one had an explanation. The prince

was locked in a comfortable room in the palace and tranquilized to

near coma.

His Holiness was locked in comfortable rooms at the Vatican,

tied to his bed, and tranquilized to near coma.

Stockholm was fresh out of psychiatric beds in its institutions.

And then the new head of Wells Fargo bank drove her car off a

bridge.

And several hours after that the Ayatollah Aliabadi was discov-

ered amid broken glass cutting his wrists.

And the fashion model who leapt out of a tenth-floor window in

Kyoto.

And the rock star who stormed off-stage at a concert in Toronto,

only to return a few minutes later, armed with a pistol, which he emp-

tied into the audience, killing one and injuring four.

And the president of the World Bank who swam frantically into

the Baltic Sea in freezing conditions. He was rescued but had to be

confined.

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MICHAEL GRANT

It soon became hard to keep track of.

The Christmas Crazy, it was called, though it had begun earlier.

The Season of Hope, as some faiths called it, had taken a very grim

turn.

The world was on edge. The world was baffled and frightened

but still somewhat amused, as it was only prominent people being

affected by whatever bizarre syndrome was occurring.

But then a tenth-grade teacher in Larkspur, California, began

attacking students with a knife. Five injured, one critically.

And a soldier at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, grabbed his AR-15 and

began shooting up the officer’s club. Seven dead, three critically

wounded.

The word was out: listen for people who claim to suddenly be see-

ing things in their head. Especially if they claim to be seeing strange

insects.

Grab them, restrain them immediately, or at least get the hell out

of the vicinity.

All over the world events were being postponed or canceled. All

over the world people eyed each other with suspicion bordering on

paranoia.

Then . . . nothing. For twenty-four hours.

Some dared to hope that it—whatever
it
was—was over.

Others wondered if whoever was behind this—aliens were the

top choice—was just taking a break in order to build up to something

even more unsettling.

The Centers for Disease Control and counterparts all over the

world were in panic mode, searching for the cause, or at least the

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

common thread. But it was a business consultant, who worked

frequently with major medical clients, who made the tentative con-

nection on his blog.

This person, David Schiller, sixty-three, suggested that, based on

limited available data, it seemed those affected were more likely than

the norm to have had lab work done. Medical tests. Blood tests. Urine

samples.

He wrote this up on his blog. The dozen or so readers who saw

the post wrote in comments that they would be very interested to see

this developed further.

Sadly Schiller was unable to post a follow-up, as six hours after he

published his blog post he was arrested by Chicago police for barbe-

cuing one of his beloved Samoyeds on a fire he built in his front yard.

His blog was hacked and deleted.

The world was frightened. On edge. Desperate for some peace or

some explanation.

The world was ready.

And so was Lear.

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TWENTY-TWO

“I don’t know how I feel,” Plath said. “I feel . . .”

“It’s probably weird,” Keats said.

“Hollow.”

They had walked out of the safe house, both feeling that there was

too little air in the place, both needing to be reassured that the outside

world still existed.

They looked at each other, and Keats knew that a vast distance

had opened up between them. He had wanted nothing so much as to

close the much smaller distance that had persisted, even during the

idyll on Île Sainte-Marie. Instead, he had dug the Grand Canyon and

now looked at her across it.

She had not raged at him. She seemed too tired to be very angry

that he had unwired her without permission, in fact in direct rejec-

tion of her wishes. The temperature of their conversation was cold,

not hot. She stood with her hands down at her sides. Her eyes were as

big as ever, but now they seemed to be looking just past him, refusing

to make eye contact.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“No. You did the right thing,” she said. There was no reassurance

in her tone.

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“Brains are complicated,” Keats said pointlessly.

“Mmm. Yeah. Complicated.”

“I have to ask . . .”

“What?” She frowned, wishing he would go away and let her

adjust to this feeling of emptiness. She felt nauseous. She felt as if she

might at some point throw up. She felt
not herself
, like this was not

her body, like she was a head transplant attached to some new torso.

Alien.

“I have to ask what you told Caligula.”

“Caligula? Nothing. I can’t text him or call him.”

Keats wanted to heave a sigh of relief, but it might have seemed as

if he hadn’t trusted her. Then . . .

“I told Lear.”

His blue eyes snapped up to hers, and his brows lowered. “Told

Lear what?”

“That Caligula should do it.”

“What?” He grabbed her shoulders. “You gave the go-ahead to

blow up the Tulip?”

She nodded. No emotion. Yes, she had ordered up an atrocity. No

emotion. Yes, she had ordered mass murder. Nothing.

“Jesus, Sadie,” he said, and his voice broke.

She blinked, taken aback by his reaction. “It’s okay,” she said.

He released her, and now he was no longer looking at her, he

was staring into the window in his mind where his biot’s visual flow

would be. But the images were grainy and indistinct. The distance

was too great. The biot he had in Caligula’s head was too far out of

range for useful input.

“We have to stop him,” Keats said.

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MICHAEL GRANT

“Uh-huh,” she said indifferently.

What happened next was pure instinct, and he regretted it even

as his hand was flying through the air, even as the flat of his palm

connected with the side of her face with enough force to snap her

head around and start the tears in her eyes.

When her eyes came back around there was emotion. Anger.

Finally, anger.

“Listen to me,” he said, regretful but determined, too. “We have

to stop him.”

“Don’t you fucking hit me,” she snarled.

“Good. You’re not dead yet, are you? I’m sorry about the slap, but

you sound like you’re in a coma.”

“And who put me there?” she demanded.

“Lear put you there!” he said. “This has all been a game for him.

We wanted to stop one evil, so we never even asked questions about

whether the man we served was just as bad. Or worse.” He felt her

attention slipping away and wanted to grab her but knew that would