Bzrk Apocalypse (29 page)

Part of her just wanted to keep shooting across the ice, but she

slowed reluctantly and nosed the sleigh closer to the edge of the val-

ley. Still she could see nothing ahead of her but ice and more ice.

“On foot it is, then,” she muttered. With great reluctance she

raised the canopy, unwedged herself, and managed to climb rather

ungracefully out. The wind was doing thirty knots—gentle by local

standards—just enough to push cold stilettos through every seam,

every zipper, every opening in her parka. She pulled on her bear claw

mittens, cinched the neck strap a bit tighter, and leaned into the wind

to walk what seemed to be the last hundred yards.

She didn’t see the edge of the precipice until she was practically

on top of it.

“Whoa.” Antarctica had millions of square miles of same-old,

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same-old, but hidden here and there in the largely unexplored conti-

nent there were features that would take your breath away. This was

one of those times.

The ice fell away in a sheer cliff just beyond the toes of her boots.

Spread out below her was a narrow valley shaped like a boat hull—

pointed at the near end, rounded at the far end. Suarez’s position

would correspond to just off the starboard bow.

The topography was not complicated; it was effectively a big,

oblong hole in the ice, maybe two kilometers long, a quarter that in

width at the widest point. The floor of the valley was reddish gravel

and looked like an abandoned quarry. About where the cabin would

be on a yacht was a series of structures—four buildings, one quite

large by polar standards, and, sure enough, under a plastic dome

there was unmistakably a swimming pool.

Somebody really liked to swim.

Suarez carefully absorbed the layout. The structure with the two

stubby towers would be the power plant. The largest building was

some sort of hangar or factory space, unmistakably utilitarian. The

third, a two-story L-shape, would be a barracks. Room for, what, four-

teen, sixteen rooms plus a common space? So not a huge contingent.

And finally what looked very much like a private home, done

with a reckless disregard for energy conservation, a three-story,

ultra-modern, Scandinavian-looking thing with the kind of floor-to-

ceiling windows you just didn’t see in Antarctica, and a plastic tunnel

running to the pool.

Instead of the inevitable Sno-Cats there was a pair of Audi SUVs

parked outside the house, as though the occupant might have kids

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MICHAEL GRANT

and pets who needed transportation to the nearest soccer field or dog

park.

Craziness. Suarez had to laugh. It was nuts. And whoever had

built it was nuts. They were hundreds of miles from the coast, which

was to say a whole long way from even the thinnest edge of civiliza-

tion. This might easily be the most isolated house on planet Earth.

Sure as hell the furthest from a Starbucks.

Two helicopters lay all tied down and shipshape on a well-marked

pad. One was an EC130, a species of chopper found all over the ice.

But the other was an Apache, with missile pods on the stubby wings

and a swivel-mounted thirty-millimeter cannon.

Who had the kind of political juice to get hold of a freaking

Apache?

How had this place even been discovered? Either someone had

amazing luck, or they had some amazing satellite imagery. Speaking

of which, a satellite would have to be directly overhead to see the val-

ley at all.

Suarez peered off to the far end of the valley. Was that a road? It

looked
like a road cut into the ice wall, rising at a steep grade up to

the outside. Could she drive the sleigh down there? Bigger question:

Could she get it back out?

The smart thing to do would be to take some pictures and get

the hell out of here, get back to Tanner and let him take it from there.

That was definitely the smart move.

Yes.

So Suarez, face already numb and hands getting there, climbed

back into the sleigh and drove at safe speed around to the head of the

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road. It was definitely a road, hopefully just wide enough to allow a

large truck—or the sleigh—to avoid going off the side.

“All in now,” she said to herself, and sent the sleigh creeping

down the incline. This proved to be as tricky as she’d thought it

might be. There was no pavement, of course, just icy gravel, drop-

ping what looked to be about one hundred meters in the course of

a quarter mile, one heck of a grade. The sleigh, like any hovercraft,

was not well suited to going downhill in a controlled manner and

started to slide sideways almost immediately, but Suarez got the

hang of it and made it to the valley floor without plunging off the

side of the ice ramp.

Still no one came rushing to greet or confront her. Either would

almost have been welcome merely for the purpose of ending the sus-

pense. The sleigh was more than capable of crossing gravel, but now,

down inside the rift, it was a high-strung Thoroughbred in a too-

narrow paddock.

Was the whole place abandoned? Obviously anyone there would

have heard, if not seen, the sleigh. You don’t exactly sneak up on peo-

ple when you’re in a jet-powered hovercraft.

She throttled forward, creeping along at walking speed, aim-

ing for the bizarre house—which was no less bizarre down here at

eye level. The glass windows were mirrored, so Suarez could not see

inside and instead saw the reflection of herself scowling from beneath

the canopy.

Finally, lacking any better idea of what to do, she parked the

sleigh, killed the engines, and climbed out again. There was no wind,

which did not make it any warmer but did reduce the effects a bit.

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MICHAEL GRANT

Her breath rose as steam but her face, while cold, regained some of

its feeling.

Now what? Ring the doorbell?

She crunched across the gravel to the door of the house. There

was no bell. So she stripped off one glove and knocked.

Bad idea. The door was steel and very, very cold. Had she knocked

any slower she’d have left knuckle skin behind.

No answer.

“This is insane.”

The next likely target was the large—quite large—building fifty

meters away.

There would presumably be a satellite phone in the buildings, or

an Internet connection—some way to inform Tanner. The question

was whether there would also be men and women with guns. It all

had an empty but not-quite-abandoned feel.

The building was not locked. Well, why would you lock a build-

ing that was a million miles from nothing much? But it bothered her.

This was all too easy.

She pushed in. Lights were on, illuminating a single large open

space populated by machinery of a sleek, white-coated type. She

recognized only the 3D printers, monitors, and touch screens. The

other objects were not familiar, and might have been anything from

manufacturing to medical gear. But one particular type of equipment

predominated: a chest-height, white rectangle with inexplicable slots

outlined in green light. There were a lot of those. Dozens. Maybe a

hundred. These definitely were some kind of manufacturing equip-

ment, not computers. Probably automated, given that the machines

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were backed too closely together to allow for people to move easily

around them.

Fascinated by trying to make sense of the machines, Suarez belat-

edly registered the sound of armed men taking positions behind her.

Six of them. Six automatic rifles leveled at her from behind the

cover of the equipment.

One of the downsides of actually being a trained fighter is that

you come to accept that real life isn’t Hollywood, and no one wins a

fight that pits a single assault rifle against six.

“Set the gun aside. Raise your hands.”

That’s what she did.

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TWENTY-THREE

The line of limos completely choked West 54th Street, extended back

onto Seventh Avenue and then all the way up to 56th Street. Stretches,

town cars, the occasional privately owned Mercedes or Tesla.

Crowds pushed against barricades manned by tolerantly amused

NYPD pulling down some welcome overtime pay. Satellite trucks had

been parked right on the sidewalk across from the Bow Tie Ziegfeld

Theater, which all by themselves doubled the congestion.

It was not an uncommon situation. This was not New York’s first

big movie premiere. But even New York could not be jaded about this

much star power. Every A-list actor, director, and producer was here,

all of Hollywood royalty, for the premiere of the year’s biggest-budget

flick
Fast, Fast, Dead,
starring, among several actual human stars,

a computer-generated Marilyn Monroe that was supposed to be so

indistinguishable from the long-dead real thing that there’d been

some speculation about whether the program might be up for an

Oscar nomination.

Lystra Reid had managed an invitation for herself and a plus

one. The plus one was at least ten years her junior, but this was a

Hollywood crowd, and if the relatively unknown but reputed to be

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fabulously rich woman wanted a young, black, not-terribly-attractive

boy toy who had clearly been on the wrong end of either a bar fight or

a car accident, hey, who cared, really? The country had bigger prob-

lems.

“We’re toward the back,” Lystra said, guiding Bug Man in.

Despite the rocketing pain of his broken teeth and the split,

swollen lips, Bug Man was enthralled. Obviously Lystra was up to

something horrific, but in the meantime Bug Man played Spot the

Star. Seeing a very familiar face, he said, “Man, I ufed to cruff on her

when I wa’ a little ki’ looking a’ Harry Potter,” he said.

“Watching what?”

“Harry . . . Never mind.” Lystra Reid was not big on popular cul-

ture, Bug Man had decided. And talking was painful and difficult,

though he was adjusting to the lack of front teeth.

“I’ tha’ Gwynneff?” Bug Man asked, but of course Lystra was pay-

ing no attention. And the star-dense crowd was not looking at Bug

Man. They were hailing old friends and talking to the roving camera

crews still pushing through packed-in A-listers.

The jocularity was strained. There was not a person in the room

so oblivious to all that had happened in the world that they were not

nervous. Some celebrities who had initially agreed to attend had sud-

denly discovered that they had headaches and would need to skip the

proceedings. But the ideal of “the show must go on” and the lure of

cameras had kept numbers high enough to prevent organizers from

canceling.

“Time to send a text,” Lystra said. And when Bug Man failed to

cease craning his neck to locate a particular buxom TV star, she said

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MICHAEL GRANT

more pointedly, “This is going to go bad in a few minutes. So stay

close to me.” She laid a hand gently on his swollen cheek. “I wouldn’t

want anything to happen to you. And don’t forget: you wouldn’t want

anything to happen to me.”

She thumbed in a text that went to the closest cell-phone tower,

from there to a satellite, and from that satellite to a touch screen

almost ten thousand miles away and very far to the south.

She almost blew the timing. Another minute or two and the cam-

eras would have turned off their lights and been hustled from the

theater by security people and public relations folk.

Lystra wanted cameras. All the cameras.

The first person to cry out in a startled voice that carried even

over the hubbub was a big man with a big voice who said, “I see bugs!”

Ten seconds later, another voice, female, screamed.

“Oh my God, it’s like, it’s like that thing in Sweden!” Lystra herself

cried helpfully. “That’s what
they
said. Bugs! That’s what happened

there! Oh my God, we’re all going mad!”

“Aaaaaahhhh!” a man cried, and then more, and more, and all at

once everyone in the theater seemed to realize what was happening.

And what was coming.

A well-liked hunk known for starring in superhero movies

started laughing and then tried to shove his entire hand into his

mouth. Bug Man stared in disbelief. It was one thing knowing that

something could theoretically happen. It was a whole different thing

when a Marvel superhero was trying to gag himself right in front of

you.

“And now we exit,” Lystra said. She smiled at Bug Man. She was

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enjoying his amazement. She’d been right to bring him along. It would

be fun to have someone to share it all with afterward. “See, this is why

I’ve savored, yeah, a few of these events in person: video doesn’t do it

justice. The edge of panic. Yeah. The wild look in people’s eyes.”

The panic was like a herd of wildebeest smelling a lion. In a

heartbeat hundreds of people surged toward the exits. A woman in an