Bzrk Apocalypse (41 page)

thrived for tens of millions of years before dying out. How many spe-

cies had evolved, survived, and then at last succumbed?

Homo sapiens
were, what, a million years old? And all of human

civilization just a tenth of that. Had the clock run out?

Noah, lying in his own blood while the Twins raged and Burnof-

sky gloated.

Had she loved him? Then how could it be that she’d not told him?

Too late now. Now she could only offer him more blood. More mur-

der.

I’ll kill her. For you, Noah.

“It’s cold,” Plath said. “Let’s get this done.”

“We’ll drive you around to the far side, to the top of the ramp,

and then stay out of sight.”

Staying out of sight was an illusion. Sensors had tracked the approach

of the sleighs. And now Stillers reported to Lear that the sleighs were

behaving strangely. They had stopped for a while at the northern end

of the valley before continuing on around to the southern entrance.

“Now they’re just sitting there.”

Interesting
, Lear thought. Frightened employees? Was some of

the biot conditioning that all her core people had been subjected to

beginning to weaken?

Her eyes flicked to the TV. YouTube was still up, thankfully. Bug

Man was watching a shaky video of a Tesco being looted.

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MICHAEL GRANT

“Do we have cameras on the ramp?” Lear asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Stillers said.

“Get them on-screen here.” Soon a dimly lit image of the ramp

opened. At first: nothing, just gravel and ice. Then, someone walk-

ing down the ramp. The person wore a heavy parka with a fur-lined

hood, with dark goggles covering the upper part of the face.

“Can’t see the face,” Stillers said. “I’ll send some guys up there.”

“No.” Lear smiled. “I think . . . I think maybe I can guess who this

is. Yeah. Have men ready, get a sniper into position to cover my door,

make sure all security personnel are armed at all times, and I’ll want

a handgun for myself. Do nothing unless I give the order.”

Stillers nodded and went about his work.

“I believe we have company, yeah,” Lear said to Bug Man. “I do

not know how she did it, clever girl, but if I’m right, we’ll have an old

friend of yours over for a drink.”

Opportunity for Suarez came with Kung Pao chicken—extra spicy,

the way she liked it—brown rice, and a glass of Austrian white wine.

After so long planning what to do with a bucket as the only

weapon, she was handed a golden opportunity: Chesterfield came

armed.

She immediately recognized it as a Glock nine-mil with a sev-

enteen-round clip. She had fired hundreds of rounds from a weapon

essentially identical to this. All that was good, but the beautiful part

from her perspective was that the standard cop holster was also very

familiar, and she would be able to draw it smoothly, especially if she

could get behind him.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Much better than trying to beat him down with a pee bucket.

The final piece of the puzzle was the Kung Pao. And more spe-

cifically, the peanuts.

She accepted her tray, invited him to stay so she could be sure it

wasn’t too spicy. She took a bite and cried, “Oh, no. No! Peanuts!”

“What’s the matter?”

She put a hand to her throat and began wheezing dramatically.

“Allergic . . . to . . . peanuts. I can’t breathe! Help . . .” And then chok-

ing noises and a strained, whooping breathing and Chesterfield made

the fatal move: he behaved like a human being, stepped in, knelt

down, and in a blur of movement felt the muzzle pressed against the

side of his head.

“I would honestly hate to do it,” Suarez said. “You’ve been decent

to me. But Chesterfield, I will blow your brains out if I have to. The

alternative . . .”

Which was how Chesterfield ended up wearing her chains, with

handcuffs added to keep him in a hog-tie position, and his own socks

stuffed in his mouth with his belt wrapped tight to hold them in place.

“Can you breathe okay?” she asked him.

He nodded, and Suarez, armed with the gun, an extra clip, his

radio, and his keys, opened the door to her cell very slightly and

looked cautiously left and right. If there were cameras, they were not

in evidence. Which did not mean they weren’t there.

Nothing you can do about that but move fast
, Suarez told herself.

Down the hallway, which carried the ridiculous medieval dungeon

theme forward. A door. She cracked it slightly. There was a sort of

control room—monitors and swivel chairs and two women chatting

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MICHAEL GRANT

as they watched the screens. Panic buttons were large and prominent.

She winced. There was no room for error or pity.

“Hey,” she said, stepping into view, and with two head shots

dropped the women. One was clearly dead. The other rattled her

shallow breaths in and out until Suarez covered her mouth and nose

and waited for the final spasm. No point wasting ammo, and no point

risking a third shot attracting attention.

Her immediate goal was simple: to find and take the sleigh she’d

ridden in and get the hell out of there. But that would require some

intel. She dropped into one of the dead women’s seats and began

cycling through the camera angles, one of which did in fact show the

hallway outside her dungeon. She had been lucky they hadn’t spotted

her.

This monitoring station appeared to have only limited access

to cameras, concentrating on the dungeon and what appeared to be

extensive storerooms. Really quite impressive storerooms, too large to

be in any of the aboveground buildings. She saw other people, some

armed, some not. Some doing mundane tasks with iPad inventory

systems, others driving forklifts, still others . . .

A man walked toward the monitoring station, holding three dis-

posable cups and a paper sack in a recyclable cardboard holder. He

might easily have been coming from a Starbucks.

“Hey, coffee!” he said as he stepped into the room. Suarez grabbed

his hand, yanked him forward, slammed the door shut, and blew out

his brains.

One of the coffees survived the fall, and she took a sip before get-

ting back to her research. Surely there must be a way to break out of

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

this limited protocol and access more cameras.

She was beginning to regret having killed all three of them—she

could have used some help. But then she stumbled upon an open link

that led her helpfully to a schematic of the base. The schematic had

green dots for camera locations.

The first was password protected. She tried the usual combina-

tions, and none worked. So she rifled the pockets and wallets of the

dead, and finally found a tiny slip of yellow legal pad.

“Thank God for unreliable memories.” Moments later: “And

bingo. We are in.”

The sun was just millimeters above the horizon, and the weak light

left the valley in darkness. Stadium lights cast a circle of eerie orange

across the main buildings, excepting the house, which cast its own

warm, buttery light.

Plath was shaking with cold and fear by the time she had

descended the long ramp and then crunched her way across the gravel

to the house. She did not spot—indeed did not look for—the sniper

who watched her through his telescopic sights.

She climbed the few stairs and stood on the porch of the impos-

sible house belonging, she was certain, to Lystra Reid, also known as

Lear.

She pulled off her glove and knocked.

The door flew open to reveal an attractive young woman wearing

white yoga pants, shearling boots, and a blue down vest over a sheer

white tunic.

Plath pushed up her goggles and slid back her hood.

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MICHAEL GRANT

“Oh. My. God.” Lear said. “It
is
you.”

“May I come in?” Plath asked, feeling an absurdity in it all that

went beyond the merely surreal.

“Mmm, not just yet. First, I should tell you there’s a very good

shot watching you, yeah, and ready to fire at any excuse. So. Shrug off

the coat, keep your hands where I can see them, and don’t move.” In

order to emphasize her point, Lear pointed with one hand at the gun

in the other.

Plath complied.

“Now, turn around slowly.”

This, too, Plath did.

“Ah! There we go. You
do
have a gun. I thought you might.” Lear

pulled the gun from Plath’s waistband and tossed it out onto the ice.

It came to rest by a lawn ornament, a pink flamingo that must have

been someone’s idea of witty commentary on the climate.

“Now, come on and warm up,” Lear said. “Bug and I are drinking

excellent bourbon, would you like some?”

“Bug?”

Plath looked past Lear and saw a badly battered Bug Man, sitting

on a couch and looking miserable and humiliated, and perhaps just

a little hopeful.

“You two have met, right?”

“Briefly,” Plath said. Then added, “I don’t drink.”

“Yes, you do, yeah, not a lot but on occasion,” Lear said smugly.

“Yeah.” She handed Plath a glass. Plath took a sip, grimaced, and put

the glass aside.

“If we’re going to be friends, you’re going to have to get into the

spirit of things,” Lear said, her face darkening.

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So Plath picked the glass back up and followed Lear’s direction to

sit, sit down, take it easy, relax.

Plath sat. She saw the TV, currently on a YouTube of a burning

house. Where it was she had no idea. Bug Man sat stiff and wary.

“I did it,” Plath said.

“Did it?” Lear asked.

“I blew up the Tulip. I gave the order to Caligula. Then I followed

the bread crumbs here.”

That had the desired effect of throwing Lear off stride. “Are you

trying to tell me that—”

“Did I know it was you behind it?” Plath interrupted. “Yes. After

you killed Jin it was obvious that he had failed you, somehow. Was

it that he found out the reason you’d ordered him to wire Vincent?”

Lear, small smile growing. “In a way. Nijinsky hated you. He

didn’t like being pushed aside for some kid. So that was part of it. But

yeah, he was starting to get cold feet. Developing a conscience.”

“I didn’t want to die choking on my own tongue on an escalator.

So I didn’t fight it very hard. I could have sent my own biots in to stop

it all happening, my own rewiring. But I could see where it was all

going.”

“Oh?”

“I came to like the idea. I came to like the whole, meticulous

planning of it. It was brilliant. It was genius. It’s historic.”

Lear’s nostrils flared, and her eyes widened. “Historic?”

So, Plath noted, she liked that word. “Well, yeah,” she said. She

took a sip of the whiskey, suppressed the face she wanted to make, and

instead said, “It gets better as you get used to it.”

“Historic, yeah?” Lear prompted.

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MICHAEL GRANT

“I remember this lecture in history class. All about Genghis

Khan. You know, the Mongol guy.”

“I know.”

No, Plath thought, Lear had not heard of the great Khan. But she

didn’t like admitting it. “Well, the point was that Genghis killed, like,

thirty million people, no one is sure how many. Maybe twice that

much. There was this one thing where he took a bunch of captured

enemies, and built a platform on top of them. His own soldiers had

lunch on the platform as it slowly crushed all the men beneath.”

“Yes,” Lear said fervently.

“But the point was, that later, like nowadays, we look back on

him, Genghis, I mean, as a great historical figure. He, like, improved

the economy and so on by clearing out a bunch of people who were in

his way. But he killed millions.”

“He changed the game. But I’m changing it more. I’m changing it

all,” Lear boasted. “I’m creating whole new species, yeah, to take over.

I mean, you know, thanks to your dad, who was a genius. Yeah. By the

way, condolences on his death, he was a great man.”

Plath’s mask almost dropped then. Almost. “Yes, he was.”

“But we used his techniques and played around, and now we have

three very interesting species.
Macro
, not micro. We’ll breed them

up, yeah, and then release them when the time is right. One of them

can’t metabolize anything but pork and human meat. Hah! Later, at

the next level, yeah.”

“But how are you going to watch what happens? I mean . . .” She

waved a hand at the YouTube video. “How much longer is Google

going to work?”

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

“Oh, don’t worry. The satellites will work independently for a

long time. And we’ll start placing cameras here and there, when the

time is right.”

“You’ve thought of everything,” Plath said.

Lear smiled, a shark’s smile this time. “You don’t really think I’m

buying any of this, do you?”

“Sorry?”

“This bad-girl act.
This
Sadie McLure, indifferent to suffering.

You tried to stop Caligula. I
know
. I spoke to my father before he died.