Bzrk Apocalypse (36 page)

“It’s starting to buckle. Look! Look! You can see rebar starting to

stick out the side there. My dad came through in the end, I guess.”

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

“Your dad?”

“Yeah,” she said, almost fondly. “My dad. You must have heard of

Caligula. Of course that’s not his real name. I gave him that nom de

guerre. Caligula, yeah. Yeah.”

“Caligula’s your father?” He forced himself to quash the urge to

say that this explained a lot.

His mouth hurt terribly. He had finally been allowed a couple

ibuprofen swallowed with cold water, which had sent lightning bolts

of pain shooting from his broken teeth but was already clearing up his

speech. Now Bug Man was drinking raw bourbon, no ice, no water,

no nothing, because it just didn’t seem to matter anymore if his brain

was dulled. What was he holding out for? He was owned, body and

soul. He was her slave. He was her dog.

“Mmm,” Lear said. “Was. Past tense. He killed my mother, you

know. He tries to pretend it was me, yeah, like I could have done it.

Like I could have killed her. Like I could have found her unconscious,

yeah, and the cleaver, and thought . . . no. Yeah. But if I had, wouldn’t

I have a tattoo of her?”

Bug Man nodded wearily, as if this proved her case.

“Adoptive parents, yeah, that’s different,” Lear said. “You saw

them.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s going,” Lear said. “It’s going. Oh, this will be the best. Get me

a drink. I want to toast the Armstrong Twins as they die.”

“What have you done?” Charles demanded, aghast.

“Revenge is a dish best served cold,” Burnofsky said. “And you

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MICHAEL GRANT

know what? Even with the fire below, I feel chilly.”

“Damn you,
what have you done
?” Benjamin yelled, desperation

breaking his voice.

“My final work of genius,” Burnofsky said. “I programmed my

SRNs to respond not just to a time signature, or even a specific energy

source. I programmed them with a map. A topographical program.”

Charles began to scratch his chest, the place where his chest

became Benjamin’s.

“Yep, it will itch at first,” Burnofsky said. “Then it will burn. And

then, it will really start to become quite unpleasant.”

“What have you done? Tell us! What have you done?”

“I’ve granted your secret wish,” Burnofsky said. “You’ve lived

with each other every single minute of your lives. Neither of you has

ever been separate. Well, now you will be. The topography is
you
.”

“What?” Charles cried. “We’ll die!”

“Well, yeah,” Burnofsky allowed. “But not right away. Hey, I’ve

put a lot of thought into this. You don’t think I’d make it easy for you.

Has my life been easy? No, it has not.” He dropped the jocular tone.

“You bought my soul, you two. You bought my soul . . .”

Benjamin tore at the buttons of their tailor-made shirt, exposing

pink flesh with an angry, vertical red rash in the center. He clawed at

it then whinnied in horror as his fingernails came away trailing rib-

bons of flesh.

“. . . and then you let me be mind-raped. My brain. It’s all I had

after I killed her, my intellect. Oh, God, and still, still, do you know

what they did to me? Do you know what BZRK did? When I think of

her . . .”

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

“They’re on my back!” Charles cried.

“. . . I get turned on. Did you know that’s what they did to me

with their wire? Crude. They thought,
Well, we will just sort of reverse

polarities on old Burnofsky’s brain.
Like an old
Star Trek
, did you boys—”

“I can’t reach, I can’t reach!” Charles cried as he flailed madly, try-

ing to reach his back with his hand, but that had never been possible.

“Ever watch that show? They were always reversing polarities. All

bullshit. But that’s all Nijinsky had. Crude and cruel. A man should

do penance for his crimes. A man should pay. A man should suffer,

not feel pleasure.”

“We don’t deserve to suffer!” Charles shouted.

“No,” Burnofsky drawled. “You two? No, it’s not like you enslaved

a ship full of people and did to them just what BZRK did to me, right?

See how you’re not going to win that argument?”

“We’ll give you whatever you want,” Charles said, and then cried

out in pain and grabbed at his rear in what would in other circum-

stances be almost comic.

“Up your butt, are they? Right on schedule. There’ll be a couple

million of them by now.”

“We’ll give you anything! Anything!” Charles pleaded.

Burnofsky looked sick, like a man on the edge of vomiting. He

stood wearily, old bones popping with the effort, and stepped closer,

just out of reach of Benjamin’s grasping claw of a hand. “Anything?

Will you? Then give me back my little girl.”

“She had to die; it was treason!” Benjamin raged. “She was a

filthy, treacherous, little—”

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MICHAEL GRANT

Burnofsky punched him. It wasn’t much of a punch, just enough

to start the blood draining from a reddened nose.

“Give me my daughter. Give me my pride back. Give me back my

own brain. Do all of that, and I’ll stop them.” Then, he laughed—a

sudden, strange noise. “Kidding. They will carry out their program-

ming and—”

The floor tilted suddenly, a 10 degree pitch that sent the Twins

sprawling. Burnofsky staggered but remained standing.

“My apocalypse,” Burnofsky said, holding the deadly remote

control aloft. “Not Lear’s, not yours. Mine.”

“You’re insane!” Charles wailed.

“You think?” He drained the last of his bottle and smacked his

lips. “Who wasn’t insane in this?” His eyes fell on Noah’s twitching

body. Noah made an incoherent sound. The tilting floor had sent the

pool of blood trailing off like rivulets on a windshield. “Him, maybe.

Seems like a decent kid. Maybe even sane.”

The Twins were wallowing back and forth like a cockroach on its

back, trying to roll over so they could stand. Noah’s blood met Benja-

min’s elbow and soaked his shirt.

The smell of smoke had been growing more noticeable, and now

it could be seen, too, pouring in from two directions as well as rush-

ing past the windows like some gravity-defying waterfall.

The Twins were screaming now, fighting each other to scream,

lungs pumping out of sync, heart hammering. Screaming as the

nanobots used their flesh to create more nanobots, millions of little

worker ants carving tiny slices of flesh, busy little hog butchers carv-

ing a living pig.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Against all odds, slipping in blood, their own and Noah’s, the

Twins managed to get to their feet.

With a sound of screeching metal and shattering glass, the Tulip

sagged farther and Burnofsky staggered forward and was flattened

against the glass windows. The floor now tilted up and away from

him. But he still held the remote.

Then Noah began to slide, his movement lubricated by his own

blood. He slid straight toward Burnofsky.

With a sound like wood being split, the window behind Burn-

ofsky cracked but did not shatter. Burnofsky tried to push himself

away, to reach something, anything he could grab, but his feet were

slipping on the same blood that bore Noah’s body straight toward

him.

And then Noah made one desperate reach and grabbed the roll-

ing bottle of vodka. He grabbed it and dug his heel in—slipping,

sliding, but the angle helped him to rise, just a little, just enough, just

enough to hurl the bottle.

The bottle smashed into the cracked window.

Burnofsky in a moment of terrible awareness pressed his thumb

on the remote control, but missed the button. The remote was in his

hand, but awkwardly held. He reached with his free hand to straighten

it, and the window blew out.

Burnofsky went flying, flying through shattered glass, falling on

his back toward the street far below. Noah had plowed into him, and

for a moment the two of them were tangled in midair, grotesque acro-

bats trailing red.

Burnofsky fell and squeezed, but the remote was in the air beside

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MICHAEL GRANT

him, falling, and his hand was held in the slippery grip of the boy

with blue, blue eyes.

Madness
and
death,
Noah thought. It was funny.

He laughed as the sidewalk rushed toward him and obliterated

all that he was.

The Twins staggered into the hanging monitor, where Charles man-

aged to grab on, powerful fingers gripping slippery steel and glass.

Charles Armstrong saw his face, their faces, in the hanging mir-

ror they used to speak eye to eye.

What he saw was a grotesque head with two staring eyes and a

third, lesser eye that now belonged entirely to Benjamin. Two mouths

screamed. A line of blood had been drawn between those mouths,

between those eyes, as the self-replicating nanobots chewed their

industrious way through all that connected Charles to his brother.

The pain was unendurable. He could only scream and scream as

his privates and rectum, his stomach and chest, his neck and back and

now head were eaten away, faster and faster as the nanobot army mul-

tiplied. Eaten away and then cauterized as Burnofsky had planned, so

that blood loss would not occur too quickly.

Charles did not feel the moment when his body began to discon-

nect from Benjamin’s, the agony did not allow for calm consideration.

But he saw, as he looked down, as he and Benjamin lowered their

massive head to see, that they were now two dying men, two, con-

nected only at the brain.

Benjamin slipped, his leg going out from beneath him, but

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Charles still stood, as like a dividing cell they split slowly apart.

Then finally Charles lost his grip, and they fell onto their backs

and slid toward the window.

Charles tried to scream, but his throat was gone.

They slid, consciousness fading in a hell of pain and terror as they

accelerated.

Benjamin stuck out a hand and grabbed the leg of a table, but it,

too, was sliding. And then, with a bump at the sill, they were in the

air.

It would take them just under eight seconds to fall to the pave-

ment. At four seconds before impact Charles saw Benjamin’s body

separate from his, a crudely bisected man trailing blood.

He saw Benjamin. Saw him
there
.
There!
For the first time in his life.

The Armstrong Twins hit the pavement two tenths of a second

apart.

Two and a half minutes later, the Tulip came down in a cata-

strophic eruption of flame, smoke, steel, dust, and debris that buried

Burnofsky and the Twins and Noah.

And the remote that would have destroyed the world.

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TWENTY-EIGHT

Plath and Wilkes had to walk and hobble the whole way back to the

safe house. The subway had been shut down. The taxis had fled the

streets. They saw cars pass by, heading toward the bridge, pets and

houseplants inside, household goods strapped to the roof. A hard-to-

frighten city had at last been frightened.

By the time they made it they were numb with cold, lips blue,

teeth chattering. Plath’s tears had frozen on her cheeks. She recalled

the Île Sainte-Marie, recalled where she’d been not very many days

ago. A completely different world. It had been so perfect there. Warm

sunshine and blue water and Noah.

They had killed him. Noah. They had killed him.

Inside the safe house at last the two girls collapsed onto the

couch and shivered, burrowing beneath throw pillows in search of

warmth.

Plath saw that Anya was coming to investigate the noise. In the

window in her mind she saw herself through Anya’s eye. She looked

pitiful. Her face was smeared with smoke; her hair was thick with ash.

“What is the matter?” Anya asked. She didn’t wait for an answer

but ducked out to come back with blankets to pile on the frozen girls.

312

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Then she made hot tea and helped them hold the cups until their

hands could stop trembling.

“Where is Keats? Where is Billy?” Anya asked, already suspecting

the answer. The TV had been on when they came in, tuned to news.

On the screen the Tulip fell again and again. Hollywood and city

luminaries ran wild through the streets again and again. The lurid

loops played over and over again.

Plague of Madness.

An overhead shot of the Brooklyn Bridge was a river of red

lights—cars fleeing the city.

“Dead,” Plath said. “Both dead.”

“This is Lear’s doing,” Anya said. “He is—”

“She,” Wilkes interrupted. “Our overlord and master is a chick.”

Then, eyes darting suspiciously toward the stairs, said, “Get Vincent

down here. Get Mr. Seventy Percent.”

Anya seemed ready to argue, but acquiesced with downcast eyes.

Plath felt a wave of exhaustion that forced her eyelids down. She

coughed—she’d been coughing the whole way home. The nauseating