Bzrk Apocalypse (39 page)

cathedral at Reims.

“Not that great an explosion, though,” Lear opined.

Suddenly the BBC was off the air, replaced by static.

“I knew this would be a problem,” Lear said. “I avoided messing

with media folks, yeah, but there’s no way to stop someone cutting

their power.” She began flipping through channels. Static and more

static. Then what appeared to be a Japanese news station with a fixed

camera aimed at a woman who was giggling and stabbing her arm

with broken shards of wooden chopsticks.

Al Jazeera was on, but in Arabic. A Russian station had a bespec-

tacled, overweight man with a bottle of vodka before him on the

anchor desk. He seemed to be announcing news, but his voice was

slurred, and as they watched he began weeping.

“CNN! Yes! See, that’s why I took it very easy on Atlanta.”

Lear seemed to think she deserved some praise for her foresight.

“At this time we cannot confirm that the event in Norfolk, Vir-

ginia, was a nuclear explosion, although Norfolk is a major naval base

that does handle ships carrying nuclear weapons.”

“No video?” Lear moaned.

“We now have video of an oil refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, which

is burning
.”

“I’ve seen oil refineries burn,” Lear complained. “I’ve never seen

a nuked city. Come on, they must have some video.”

“Here you go.” Bug Man plated the bacon and eggs.

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MICHAEL GRANT

“Next time drain the bacon a little better. Blot it with a paper

towel.”

They went into the dining room, all rich, dark wood with high-

backed chairs. A chandelier hung above the table.

“It’s going well, don’t you think? Yeah?”

“Yes.” What else could he say?

“Early stages yet.” She munched thoughtfully. “I wonder if I

should spread it out, you know? My first plan was to keep up the pace,

sixteen thousand an hour. But what if . . . No. No, I’m sticking with

the original plan. I don’t want to start second-guessing myself.”

No, you wouldn’t want that
, Bug Man thought. He wondered if

his mother was still alive. Had she killed herself like so many seemed

to do? Was she even now wandering the streets, raving? Maybe hurt-

ing other people? Maybe being hurt herself?

What was the point of caring? Lear had won. The world was

going crazy. The human race was killing itself in an orgy of madness.

“I have some work to do,” Lear said. “You stay and watch.”

“I don’t think—”

“That wasn’t a request, yeah? Stay and watch. You know what to

look for.”

“I do?” Bug Man was mystified.

“The Armstrongs had self-replicating nanobots. Yeah. Maybe the

fire at the Tulip got them all. Maybe not.” Lear shook her head and

her mouth was a grim, worried line. But she cheered up considerably

when the news announced that Berlin, Germany, had been hit by a

nuclear weapon.

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THIRTY

The C-130 carrying Plath and her crew, as well as Tanner and seven-

teen ex-military volunteers from McMurdo, landed at Cathexis Base

to find employees there bewildered and frightened. Their medical

team had all been ordered to Forward Green a day earlier without

explanation. And the Plague of Madness had spread there as well.

They had seven people locked up. A dormitory had been burned to

the ground, killing three.

The C-130 flew on to Forward Green. It was a cargo plane, a cav-

ernous, incredibly noisy and very cold open space with webbing seats

along both sides. Large dotted lines had been painted on the curved

walls, indicating just where the propellers would chew through the

fuselage should one come off in flight.

“This is their only other facility, so far as we know,” Tanner said.

The plane circled, coming around into a strengthening wind.

The sun was low on the horizon, as much like night as Antarctica got

this time of year.

“I don’t like that layout,” one of the ex-soldiers said. “Those tow-

ers sure as hell look like gun emplacements.”

The pilot called back over the intercom. “They are refusing to let

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MICHAEL GRANT

us land.” Then, a moment later, “Sir, they are warning us that they

will open fire if we attempt a landing.”

Tanner looked at Plath. “Well, I guess that tends to confirm your

story.”

He unhooked himself from his webbing seat and went forward to

speak to the pilot.

Plath looked at Vincent—arms folded, eyes in shadow. At Wilkes,

snoring beside her, somehow curled into a fetal ball in the webbing.

And Anya, who seemed never to need sleep.

Plath had removed her biot from Anya. With apologies. They

were all three now in her own head, as safe as they could be. To kill

her biots you’d have to kill Plath herself. Three windows were open, as

they always were, now showing slithering macrophages and twitch-

ing neurons and what were hopefully spiky balls of pollen in her eye

and not bacteria.

She—

BOOOOM!

Something had smacked the C-130 a staggering blow. Tanner

came tearing back from the cockpit, the back of his jacket on fire.

Plath unbuckled and threw her parka over him, smothering the

flames.

The plane jerked again, not as hard, but then nosed down. They

were low, no more than four thousand feet up; there was little room

to recover.

The nose came slowly, slowly up, but as it did the plane went into

a steep turn that threw Plath into Vincent.

“Sons of bitches!” Tanner yelled.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Plath worked her hand into the webbing and held on as the plane

rolled, rolled, and she hung suspended in midair while baggage and

vomit flew everywhere and grown men screamed.

Wilkes was yelling something that Plath couldn’t hear. “What?”

she yelled.

“I said: I can’t say it’s been fun, Plath, but it was good knowing

you!” Wilkes made a little mock-salute.

Plath reached her free arm across and took Wilkes’s hand. Plath

was not afraid to die, in some ways it spelled relief. But she was furious

at the idea that Lear would win. “I’m not dying until I’ve killed that

bitch!” she yelled to Wilkes, who smiled wryly and squeezed her hand.

Then, with a series of bone-shaking jerks, the plane slowly, slowly

leveled off, but all the while it drifted lower.

The pilot, voice wracked with pain and fear, yelled, “Hard land-

ing! Hard landing! Brace! Brace!”

The impact rattled Plath’s spine and chipped one of her teeth

tooth as her mouth slammed shut. The webbing seat held her, but

Anya was knocked from her seat and fell to the metal floor of the

plane. A metallic shriek went on and on and on.

And that’s when a spinning propeller—almost twenty feet from

tip to tip—exploded through the flimsy fuselage, tearing Anya Violet

and two of Tanner’s men apart.

The plane skidded to a stop.

A giant gash made by the prop had nearly split the plane in two.

Jagged metal edges were everywhere, blood and pale viscera was

sprayed around the fuselage like some demented Jackson Pollock

painting. A man with his leg gone at midthigh bellowed like a dying

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MICHAEL GRANT

bull and tried futilely to cover the pulsing wound with his hands.

Smoke rolled back through the cargo bay, whipped away by a

brutally cold wind coming through the gash.

Vincent stared at the place where Anya had been. He picked up

something white and red, some unrecognizable part of her, and held

it cradled on his lap.

Tanner was among the first to recover. “Get ready! They may

send someone to finish us off!” He drew his pistol. It looked small

and irrelevant in his hand. Dazed men responded, drawing their few

weapons. One was trying to draw a gun with a hand that was no lon-

ger there. Another man gently eased him into the webbing and took

the gun from him.

“You okay?” Plath asked Wilkes, and got a shaky nod in return.

“Vincent?”

Vincent stared at her as if he’d never seen her before, maybe

wasn’t seeing her now. His shallow breathing formed a small cloud

of steam.

“Anyone who can, follow me!” Tanner said. He wound his way

through tangled metal to leap from the gash. Half a dozen men fol-

lowed. Plath and Wilkes went to Vincent. “Come on, Vincent. Stay

alive now, grieve later.”

He flashed a look of pure, unadulterated fury that Plath at first

thought was directed at her.

“Come on, Vincent. We have to get off this pl—”

A machine gun, sounding like a chainsaw, opened up. A line of

holes appeared at the tail end of the cargo bay and walked its way

forward. Metal was flying everywhere. The air stank of cordite, steel,

blood, and human waste.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Plath grabbed Vincent by the jacket and yanked him to his feet as

Wilkes undid his safety harness. Vincent let the gruesome body part

drop, hesitated as if he might go back for it, and then Plath shoved

him out onto the ice and jumped after him.

Wilkes landed on Plath, rolled off, and slithered on her belly.

Plath glanced back and saw a Sno-Cat with a machine gun mounted

on its roof, still firing from the far side of the wreck.

Then, with a
woosh
of searing heat, the starboard-side fuel

tanks exploded, billowing out over the Sno-Cat. The man firing the

machine gun was aflame, twisting, writhing, trapped somehow, and

the machine gun stopped.

They were three hundred feet from the nearest building, which

was one of the four gun emplacements.

“Run run run!” Tanner yelled, and led the way, slipping and stag-

gering across the ice with the wind blessedly at his back. Plath saw

immediately what he was doing. The gun tower was opening, shutters

rising mechanically, revealing a long black muzzle. Tanner was trying

to close the distance and get below the place where the gun could be

depressed to target them.

It took twenty seconds for the shutters to open fully. Another ten

seconds for the gunners to ready their weapon, and at that moment

the gamble had failed. The gaggle of freezing survivors were in point-

blank range.

The machine gun fired. Two rounds, killing one man instantly

and hitting another in the thigh.

And then, the gun jammed.

Training took over for the ex-soldiers. They quickly closed the

distance to the tower’s base and began kicking at the door. One fired

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MICHAEL GRANT

at the lock. The door opened and small-arms fire—a
pop! pop! pop!

sound—came from within.

Tanner, yelling obscenities, picked up a fallen body and threw it

through the doorway to draw fire. He was in through the door in a

flash. More gunfire as those with weapons rushed the doorway after

him.

Silence descended. Tanner and his men had taken the tower.

“Come on,” Plath said to Vincent and Wilkes, “we’ll freeze out

here!”

A second Sno-Cat was barreling toward them from the center of

the compound, trailing a cloud of ice particles and steam.

The top third of the tower now rotated, bringing the machine

gun to bear on the Sno-Cat, which made the fatal mistake of hesitat-

ing, slowing, and then blew apart as Tanner poured fire into it.

Plath, Wilkes, and Vincent found themselves in a bare room at

the bottom of a steel spiral staircase leading up. “Wilkes, stay with

Vincent.”

Plath ran up the stairs to find Tanner still cursing, but also bleed-

ing into his parka, a growing stain.

“Goddammit, goddammit, they shot me,” he said as he tore off

his jacket, then burrowed through layers of warmth to find a hole in

his left side.

A soldier squatted to take a look. He grinned up at Tanner.

“Through and through, Captain. You’ll live if you don’t bleed out.”

“Slap on a compress, Sergeant O’Dell.”

Tanner looked at Plath. “You look okay for your first firefight.”

“Not my first,” Plath said. “Not even my second. It’s been a hell

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

of a week.” She peered out of the shooting hole as the machine gun

traversed left and right. Nothing moved. The plane and the two Sno-

cats burned.

“All those buildings—shuttered. Bulletproof, most likely.” O’Dell,

the ex-soldier who had tended Tanner’s wound.

“Jesus H.,” Tanner said. “It’s a fortress. See what we have here.

Inventory weapons and do a head count.”

The bad news was that there were just six battle-ready men, plus

Tanner, Plath, Vincent, and Wilkes.

The good news was delivered by O’Dell. “We have all the small

arms we could want, plenty of ammo, and a dozen of these.” The

“these” in question were shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.

“I’m not familiar with those. Russian?”

“Chinese,” O’Dell said. “And to answer your next question, yes,

they can be fused for impact.”

“Okay,” Tanner said. “That is not a professional outfit out there;

otherwise, they wouldn’t have driven that Sno-Cat into range and

then conveniently stopped. Amateurs with maybe a couple of veter-