Bzrk Apocalypse (34 page)

“Not your fault,” he said to her. “None of this is your fault.”

“But it is,” she said.

“He’s picked up a crowbar. His fingers can barely hold it. He’s

dropped it. He’s staring at it.”

“For God’s sake, evacuate the building!” Plath shrieked at the

Twins.

Burnofsky, disheveled but animated, came in with guards on

either side. His rheumy eyes sparkled. “Ah, ah, ah!” he said on spying

Plath and Keats and Wilkes. “So,
that’s
the panic.” He seemed pleased

and relieved.

“Help me get these idiots to evacuate the building,” Plath pleaded.

“Caligula’s flooding the basement with natural gas. In six minutes

this whole place goes up!”

“Is that true?” Burnofsky demanded, squinting hard at the Twins.

He glanced at the monitor. The cameras in the basement had been

redirected, searching for Caligula. A grainy image showed him walk-

ing, dragging one leg, then collapsing on the floor.

Keats had never been inside the brain of a dying man. There was

nothing to see on the optic nerve, nothing changing in his immedi-

ate environment. But the eyelid no longer blinked as often, and it

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

seemed to be drooping, partly obscuring the view.

If Caligula died before the explosion, then Keats would have been

his killer. His biot might sit for several minutes in a dead man’s brain

before the explosion killed his biot and plunged him down into the

dark hell of madness.

How would it feel, he wondered. How would it feel to no longer

be himself?

Keats’s throat was dry. His breathing was shallow. He was afraid.

First would come the razor edge of madness, to be followed by an

explosion that—

A brilliant flash of light from Caligula’s eye.

The same bright flash filled the monitor that had been trained on

Caligula. The camera aimed at the exterior where the men had been

wielding the cutting torch went dead.

“They burned through!” Jindal cried.

“System,” Charles yelled, his voice cracking. “Sublevel two, north-

east corner stairwell cameras!”

Blank nothing, dead cameras.

“System, sublevel one, northeast corner!”

Here, too, the cameras were blank. A shudder communicated

itself up the length of the Tulip to Keats’s feet, like a minor earth-

quake. A glass fell from a shelf and shattered.

The fire killed Caligula instantly. Then it began to burn through his

flesh, boiling the blood in his veins, sloughing away charred skin,

burning its way to his heart, to his lungs. To his brain.

“Fire in the lobby!” Jindal reported, phone to his ear.

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MICHAEL GRANT

“They can put it out!” Burnofsky yelled. “They have to put it out!”

His relief was all gone now, all gone, as his brilliant mind frantically

calculated the damage that could be done to his nanobots by a burn-

ing building.

“The southwest corner stairwell is still clear,” Jindal said. “Gentle-

men, we have to get you out of here!” This to the Twins, who seemed

paralyzed.

“Anyone who wants to live, get out of here!” Plath yelled, pulling

away from Keats.

A window in Keats’s mind went dark and then disappeared. Keats

felt strange, very strange. Not upset. Just . . . alone . . .

“Wilkes! Run!” Plath pleaded.

“Not without you and blue eyes,” Wilkes said.

. . . alone in a strange landscape.

“No one moves!” three different security men yelled at once, wav-

ing their guns in a bewildered effort to assert control.

“It blew up early,” Plath said, looking to the Twins. “The explo-

sion was only limited, but it’s still burning, and there’s an open gas

line feeding that fire. We may still get out.”

Burnofsky yelled, “System: show Burnofsky lab!”

Such strange images. Flashing pictures of his old room in London,

of playing
football in the alley, of the island. Of Sadie. Of the dark,
looming monster that seemed now to be emerging from her, bursting

from her flesh, a dark, terrible beast . . .

Burnofsky’s lab was untouched. He saw assistants going about

their business, clueless.

“Evacuate the building!” Charles yelled.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

“No!” This came from Benjamin. Jindal stutter-stepped and

stopped.

Keats saw it all. The Twins were a glowing two-headed dragon,

with liquid fire bleeding from Benjamin’s lips. Burnofsky melting,

somehow melting, and Keats felt the laughter rise in him, rise and fill

his chest and come burbling out of his mouth. He pulled against imagi-

nary chains, yanking his arms against nonexistent restraints.

“Noah,” Sadie pleaded, helpless, knowing what was happening to

him, knowing that he was spiraling down.

A part of Keats
—
a fading, weakening remnant
—
watched it all

from very far away, a shadow of his mind, watching himself slip, slip,

slip. . . . It was all very, very clear, very, very clear to Noah, Noah like
the guy with the ark, the one who liked animals, all clear, they were all

devils, all of them. Mad, each of them, mad as . . . mad as . . .

A whimpering voice, Noah’s own voice, but not operated by him,

no, a voice mewling and laughing and crying out, “Kill me, kill me,

it’s what you all want, isn’t it?”

In that moment, a final becalmed moment, the last sane vestiges

of his mind took it all in, and his laughter was not yet the laughter of

the insane, but the knowing, cynical laughter of one who sees every-

thing clearly, if only for a single second in time.

He saw Benjamin and Charles as what they were, two rejected,

despised, sad little children forever bound together, neither able to

feel even a moment’s freedom.

He saw Burnofsky, so desperate for redemption from suffering

that he would bring down the whole world in a fit of self-loathing.

And Sadie, Sadie his love, her brain a tangled mess, wired,

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MICHAEL GRANT

unwired, but even before that crippled by a dead mother, a dead

brother, a dead father, and corrupted by wealth and power and

crushed by responsibility. Mad. Her, too: mad.

They were all mad. They always had been.

Crazy people had gotten their hands on deadly toys. The end was

inevitable.

And me, too
, he thought. As mad as any of them, believing that

there could be love and honor in the midst of it.

They had all tried to armor themselves against this final moment,

but their defiance had been its own lie: there was never a choice

between death and madness. It was always to be both.

And then, with a strangled cry in his throat, Noah attacked.

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TWENTY-SIX

Lear watched, hands behind her back, lifting herself up on the balls of

her feet, bouncing with anticipation. When she first saw the fire burst

from the ground-floor windows and setting a passing man alight, she

let out a happy squeal.

But then, when the Tulip still stood, she clenched her fists and

began to curse. “Fucking useless old man. Useless old man,” she said.

“Trying to say I killed her, and now look! Look!”

When Bug Man did not move from the couch, she took two long

steps, reached down, grabbed the neck of his T-shirt, and dragged

him to the window.

“Iff’ burning,” Bug Man said.

“It’s not supposed to
burn
, it’s supposed to explode! The gas was

supposed to explode! The whole thing should be toppling over!”

The TV was on, showing a sea of flashing red lights around the

theater, with cutaways to eerie vignettes of cops tackling a naked, rav-

ing rock star, or Tasering a man in a business suit carrying a severed

arm, the remnants of the lunacy at the premiere.

“Blow up! Blow up, blow up, blow up,
blow up
!” Lear raged, bang-

ing the plate glass with her fists.

291

29

MICHAEL GRANT

As if on command a huge fireball erupted from the windows of

the third floor.

“It could still fall, yeah,” Lear said, nodding, reassuring herself.

She bent to a tripod-mounted telescope. “Can’t see anything through

their dark glass. Are you scared yet, you freaks? Are you wetting

yourselves, you
freaks
?”

Bug Man had had enough, more than enough. He had to get

away. He shot a look toward the door. Did she have guards out there?

If she died, he went mad . . . if she was telling the truth about a dead

man’s switch . . . But there wasn’t anything he could do about that,

and he could not be here watching all this. He could not be with this

crazy witch raving and pounding on the glass like an infuriated ape

in a cage.

He stepped back, back, turned, and ran for the door. Locked.

“Really, Bug Man?” Lear asked in a mocking voice. “Really? You

think you get to run away?”

“You ’ave to le’ me go,” he pleaded.

She ignored him and crowed wildly as another burst of orange

flame billowed out from the base of the Tulip. “It’ll collapse. Has to.

The fire will melt the girders, has to, yeah. Damn, I want to see them

when it happens.”

“You coul’ talk to them.”

Lear’s eyes lit up. She grinned. “What?”

“I know Burnofsshky’s number. He’ prob’ly there. He worksh

late.”

She grabbed Bug Man’s bicep and propelled him to a laptop. “Do

it! Do it and I’ll . . . I’ll get you new teeth. Any color you want.”

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Bug Man opened an app, punched in the number, and hit Con-

nect.

Keats rushed at the Twins, hands clawing the air, animal noises com-

ing from him.

Plath shoved Wilkes aside to put herself between Keats and his

intended victims. Keats never seemed to notice her. He ran right

through her, sending her sprawling.

It was on her back, stunned by the violence of his assault, that

Plath—Sadie McLure—saw three security men turn, as if in slow

motion, and raise their guns.

BANG! BANGBANG!

Keats twisted, turned, stood . . .

BANG! BANG!

. . . fell.

A terrible scream rose from her mouth, echoed by Wilkes as they

both fell more than ran toward Keats.

“No, no, no, no, no!” Plath cried.

“You fucking assholes! You murdering assholes!” Wilkes

screamed.

Keats lay on his back. Three bullets had struck him in the side

of his chest, in his upper arm, in the side of his head. He was not yet

dead, eyes glazing, dark blood like ink pumping from him to form

a pool on the floor, his mouth working like a beached fish, gasping.

“Oh, God, Noah! Oh, God, Noah!”

He tried to speak but only managed to form a blood bubble. He

grunted, the sound of a dying beast. He breathed heavily, looked at

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MICHAEL GRANT

Plath, grunted again. He blinked, just one eye, almost as if he was

winking. Blood found its way out of his ears, out of his nose.

Plath tried to cradle him in her arms, tried to hold his head, but

when she did, a part of his skull came away and she screamed. Wil-

kes, her own hands red, took Plath’s hand and kept saying, “He’ll be

okay, he’ll be okay.”

A siren was screeching, up and down the scale, up and down in

Plath’s head, but it was only her own screams.

A cell phone rang.

Plath stared at Noah, his eyes still so blue, his eyes open, his lips

no longer the parchment landscape she had seen through biot eyes,

now only the lips that had kissed her. They were moving silently.

Plath’s entire body was shaking. She heard nothing, and for a

while she saw nothing. The world was lost to her. Only Wilkes’s arms

around her connected her to reality.

The sound of a phone ringing. And going to voice mail.

“I hate people who get my hopes up,” Lear said. But she was dis-

tracted by a third eruption of flames. This one blew the windows

out of half the lower floors. A shower of crystal fell through yellow

flames, pursued by billows of smoke.

Bug Man dialed again. This time, the call was answered.

“Kind of a bad time, Anthony,” Burnofsky said.

“Lear wan’ to tal’ to th’ Twinshh,” he said.

“Oh, does she?” Burnofsky said, his voice flat. “A little late for

talk, I think. Hey, Anthony?”

“Wha’?”

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

“I never hated you, Anthony,” Burnofsky said.

Bug Man had no idea how to respond to that, so he simply handed

the phone to Lear after pushing the Speaker button: he wanted to

hear.

“Who is this?” Lear demanded.

“Well, well, if it isn’t Lystra Reid. Or should I say ‘Lear’?” Burn-

ofsky said.

“Is this one of the Twins?”

“This is Burnofsky. Dr. Burnofsky. But you can call me Karl.”

“Give me the Twins.”

“Well, we’re all kind of busy panicking and getting ready to die,”

Burnofsky said. “Hey, just out of curiosity, Ms. Reid, did you ever fig-

ure out what the Twins were up to on Floor Thirty-Four?”

Burnofsky heard the silence of confusion. Then, “What are you