Bzrk Apocalypse (30 page)

evening gown went down. She tried to stand, but someone tromped

on the hem of her dress and she fell again.

Lystra and Bug Man barely made it out the door without being

trampled, and she laughed as she was jostled and laughed as she was

pushed hard against a door and laughed still as she spilled out onto

54th Street into the glare of lights.

They ran to get ahead of the flood, raced to get behind the cam-

eras to watch as long as Lystra could without endangering herself too

much.

A bloody Broadway star was shouting nonsense syllables. A

famously beautiful actor was tearing her dress off while her director

crawled on all fours making a sound like a sheep. Hollywood’s favor-

ite dad was playing with his hair, twining his fingers through it and

laughing hysterically.

An Oscar-winning producer launched himself at a New York

police officer, pushed him to the ground, and yanked the gun from

the startled cop. The first shot struck a film critic in the chest, a fact

that he found funny until he fell over dead.

“Time to get out of here. Guns are dangerous,” Lystra observed.

Bug Man stared at her, looked around at the madness, and back

at her. At the wild glee in her eyes.

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MICHAEL GRANT

“I know how they feel,” Lystra said without even a hint of com-

passion. “I’ve been there. I’ve been crazy. It’s kind of . . . amazing,

really.”

She turned and walked quickly away, ignoring the well-dressed

lunatics rushing by, dancing, twirling and attacking each other with

fists and fingernails.

Bug Man followed her, because Bug Man had nowhere else to go.

The trick was to pop the natural gas pipeline in a way that would not

cause a spark. Caligula was not interested in suicide.

Power saw and small explosive charge were both ruled out. And

he didn’t just want to open a smaller release valve—it would take for-

ever for the gas to build up. He needed a rupture in one of the main

lines. He needed the gas to come roaring in, thousands of cubic yards

of it.

He had disabled the local safety cutoffs. The next cutoff covered

an entire six-block area—this rupture would probably trigger it even-

tually, but not quickly enough.

He had brought a car jack with him, the simple, screw-type

device, capable of lifting a car off the street. More than enough if he

could just find the right position.

He needed a place where the pipe was rigid. Like right . . .
there

. . . where it emerged from the concrete foundation. And just two

feet from that point there was a junction, a sort of flange—he wasn’t

exactly familiar with the terminology. Perfect. If he could just get the

jack between the concrete wall and the pipe standing eight inches out

from same. He pulled the jack from a bag and looked at it critically. It

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

would be a tough squeeze. The jack, even screwed all the way down,

was ten inches tall. So he either had to find another place, or he would

have to chip away some of the concrete to make room.

He sighed and retrieved a chisel and a rubber mallet. Slight delay,

that was all.

“He’s in the basement,” Keats said. “I can see what he’s doing. He’s

chipping away at something with a chisel. There’s still time.”

They were outside the Tulip. In the alleyway behind. Staring at

various doors—two loading bays, a smaller door, a door a few dozen

yards away that was vented so probably contained electrical equip-

ment.

No clue.

There was the front door, out on the street, but that was guarded.

Their weapons were: one little kid with a Colt .45.

No. Wait. There was a second weapon: the biot in Caligula’s head.

Keats could blind the killer.

Or he could maybe slice through an artery and kill or cripple

Caligula.

Rewiring was not going to happen in the few minutes remaining

to them. There would be no time for subtlety. And if Keats moved

his biot farther into Caligula’s brain, he would have to detach from

the optic nerve and would no longer be able to see what Caligula was

doing.

How long to blind one eye? And could he reach the other eye in

time to truly stop Caligula? Or would he be better off diving down

deep, finding a fat artery, and sawing away?

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MICHAEL GRANT

Keats felt sick inside. He had no plan. He had a Goth chick, a wild

street kid with a gun, a biot, and Plath, who might or might not be

entirely okay.

“What do we do, pretty blue eyes?” Wilkes of course, jumpy,

nervous, eyes darting everywhere with manic appreciation of their

hopeless plight.

The door beside the second loading bay opened. Light spilled out.

A man in silhouette yelled, “Hey, move along, you three.”

Before Keats could react there was a loud bang and a flash. A cry

of pain. The man in silhouette was visible for a millisecond in the

flash. He was younger than his voice, maybe twenty-five, uniformed.

A security guard. A minimum-wage grunt with a hole in his chest

that leaked dark blood onto khaki.

Billy was moving, leapt up the four concrete steps, and grabbed

the door as the man fell back.

“Jesus!” Keats cried.

Wilkes was quicker, just seconds behind Billy. She grabbed the

door, freeing Billy, who calmly knelt and took the dying man’s gun.

Keats and Plath followed, Keats feeling as if he was in a dream.

Two biot windows were open in his head, one showing the damned

bulge in Plath’s brain, the other watching the rise and fall, rise and

fall of mallet on chisel.

Billy was already proffering the guard’s pistol to Keats, butt-for-

ward. Keats stared at it. Wilkes took it.

Keats stepped over the guard. He was crying softly and holding

his wound with one hand while fumbling for his radio with the other.

He couldn’t be left alive to raise the alarm.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Wilkes and Billy both looked at Keats expectantly. Waiting for

his order. Plath seemed mesmerized.

On me, the responsibility
, Keats thought. It had been so quick,

somehow, getting to this point, the kill-or-be-killed point.

Billy must have seen the answer in Keats’s eyes. He squatted and

pressed the muzzle directly against the man’s heart, muffling the

sound as much as he could.

BANG!

And blood sprayed across Billy’s face.

“It’s okay,” Billy said. “I did it before. Just another first-person

shooter, right?”

Keats felt like throwing up. He felt a flash of fury at Plath.

Shouldn’t she have made the decision? Shouldn’t the guilt be
hers
to

bear?

The guard was motionless now. But all was not still. They were

in a short hallway—barely painted drywall, weak overhead lighting,

second door now opening fast, someone coming through expecting

trouble, gun already leveled and—

BANG!

Head shot. A single hole drilled right in the man’s forehead. The

back of his head—a crust of skull and hair and something like ham-

burger—hit the wall and slid down, leaving a trail.

“Go,” Keats said, barely audible.

Through the door, now in the wide-open space within the load-

ing bay, boxes and crates and a chair and table and playing cards laid

out, and a coffee mug, and flickering monitors.

“Basement,” Keats managed to say, trying to push aside the

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MICHAEL GRANT

memory of tears rolling down a doomed man’s cheeks.

One of the innocents I was trying to save
, Keats thought.

Now, two of the innocents I was trying to save.

They were lost and needed light. Keats spotted a bank of light

switches, crossed to them, made it halfway before his stomach sent its

contents burbling out of his mouth. He threw every switch, wiped his

mouth, and said, “Find a way down!”

The glare of fluorescent light had the effect of casting deep

shadows that if anything made the room seem darker, with every

high-piled stack of crates like a skyscraper shadowing narrow alleys.

They ran then, moved forward, the young sociopath with the

name of a young sociopath leading the way. Billy moved like a cop,

cover to cover, gun steadied in both hands, a goddamned gamer, a

goddamned game, where would the bad guys pop up next?

“Whoa. Down here,” Wilkes said, waving her own gun fecklessly

toward a dark hallway.

Billy moved smoothly ahead of her. Cover. Pause. Scan. Run to

cover. Pause. Scan.

A freight elevator, with buttons for up and down.

“Down,” Keats said, feeling useless and now seeing flashes of his

London home, so squalid and dull all his life, but now so beloved, so

needed
. To crawl into his own bed . . .

The elevator door opened on a guard with headphones in and

singing along tunelessly, yet Keats recognized the song.

“Born This Way.” An old Gaga tune.

Keats barely flinched when Billy put a bullet into the guard’s

head. The bullet must have hit just wrong because it entered the

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forehead and blew an exit wound out through the man’s jaw.

The ricochet could have killed one of them, but no, and the

man went down with such completeness that he might have been a

dropped sack of garbage.

Wilkes dragged the dead man off the elevator.

Buttons. Three different sublevels. Where was Caligula? Go all

the way down. Why not? Gates of hell. Keats punched the S3 button.

The elevator doors closed over smeared blood.

Billy popped the clip from the gun, counted the bullets and said,

“I don’t think there are upgrades or reloads in this game.”

It struck Keats that if he had ever found a match for Caligula, it

was this sad, sick little boy. It was not a good thought. His stomach

was empty, and the smell of his vomit filled the padding-walled eleva-

tor as it dropped beneath them.

Keats had kept his place on Caligula’s optic nerve. He saw the

sudden cessation of hammering. The visual field swirled as Caligula

moved quickly.

“He’s heard us!”

“Up against the walls, hide under the blankets!” Billy yelled in

high-pitched excitement.

The blankets were the padding hung to protect the elevator walls.

Wilkes and Keats dived under. Too late Keats saw that Plath hadn’t

moved.

Billy stood waiting, gun drawn and leveled.

Keats saw Caligula rushing toward the elevator, stopping, duck-

ing behind cover. And then the peace of the game descended on

Keats. It was live-or-die time. Win-or-lose time.

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MICHAEL GRANT

All his gaming life Keats had had this other place he could go,

except that he didn’t quite go there as an act of deliberate choice, it

would just
happen
. It would come down over him—a calm, a control,

a speed of perception, an ease of decision making—blessedly blank-

ing out fear and self-loathing.

“He’ll be to your left, Billy,” Keats said. “Behind a thick vertical

pipe painted orange.”

Billy shifted stance without a word.

“He’s expecting an adult, someone tall,” Keats said, still deadly

calm.

Billy nodded and squatted. His head would be lower than a grown

man’s belly. Caligula would be quick, but he might hesitate on seeing

a child.

“Wilkes. Give me your gun. As soon as the door opens, scream,

really loud,” Keats ordered. “Like you need help.”

Caligula’s eye was steady now, lid drooping just a bit, unafraid

surely, confident that no one could beat him. Keats’s biot was already

busy sawing away at the massive optic nerve beneath its feet. Cutting,

cutting, like trying to slice through a bridge cable with a hacksaw, but

nerve fibers popped and coiled away, wildly whipping wires, and each

taking with it a tiny part of Caligula’s visual field.

The elevator stopped.

The door was loud as it opened.

Wilkes screamed, “Help! Help me! Help me!”

BANG!

BANG!

Billy and Caligula fired almost simultaneously and out came

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Keats from behind the hanging blanket and fired wildly,
BANG-

BANGBANG!
with bullets ricocheting off pipes.

Keats’s biot sawed madly and now more shooting, and Keats

was on the floor of the elevator now, crawling on his belly, aiming,

squeezing off rounds, gun bucking in his hand until it banged open,

out of bullets.

Billy, still standing, advanced in quickstep, running for cover,

and Keats saw Caligula’s eye tracking him, saw the butt of Caligula’s

gun as it bucked from recoil and heard the loud
BANG!
and saw Billy

the Kid’s neck suddenly no longer all there.

The boy fired again as arterial blood sprayed like a cut fire hose,

until his head, no longer supported, fell to one side and hung limply,

and Billy fell, knees hitting the floor, then onto his back and his head

bounced, barely tethered. His gun twirled across the floor leaving a

blood trail.

Caligula emerged from cover. He holstered his now-empty gun.