Bzrk Apocalypse (43 page)

through the engines of Tanner’s sleigh, and it settled to the ground.

Tanner tried to run. His legs took two more steps after the cannon

cut him in half.

Bug Man screeched in terror and bolted back toward the ramp.

Plath meanwhile had managed to drag herself out onto the ice and

was making a red smear across it, crawling, crawling but not dead yet.

Cold, dead soon,
she thought,
not dead yet.

In her mind there were three windows.

Three biots ran up the side of Lear’s face. Blood—a jumble of red

Frisbees and expiring whitish sponges—lay strewn across a landscape

of flesh.

Was she even going the right direction? Which way was up? Plath

saw a stream, like a mountain spring rushing down a cliff face, but

the water was a landslide of blood cells.

“Okay, that’s up,” she told the ice that was freezing to her lip.

Up and up, following the stream, the biots raced, the newest, P3,

bounding ahead.

Ahead a forest of dark hair, huge, rough-textured whips sprout-

ing from the flesh soil.

“Mmm, left,” Plath mumbled.

The biots veered left toward the falling blood, leapt atop the soft-

textured, tumbling cells, running, losing ground as the current swept

them, then out onto dry surface.

And yes, ahead the slope leading toward the eye, a vast lake cov-

ered then revealed, covered then revealed by blinking eyelids.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

This was a road Plath had traveled before. Her biots pushed

through the twitching leafless palm trees of eyelashes and leapt onto

the surface of Lear’s eye.

Normally biots could travel unfelt across an eyeball, but not when

the biot twitcher deliberately dragged sharp claws, slicing the outer

layer of the cornea.

A sky-blackening hand fell from outer space and mashed the eye-

lid down on Plath’s biots, but it didn’t matter. You could no more

squash a biot with a hand than you could stomp a cockroach in plush

bedroom slippers.

“That’s right, Lear. Still here,” Plath said. Her body was shaking

with cold. She was sure she was going to die. But before she did . . .

Her biots skated hard around the orb, leaving tiny rips over the

mineshaft of the pupil, racing ever faster into the dark, clambering

over veins, stabbing them as she went, loosing narrow fountains of

blood that sprayed up to beat against the back of Lear’s eye socket.

For you, Noah. For you. It’s the best I have. . . .

Ahead lay the twining cables of the optic nerve. P1 dropped back

to sink a probe and try to see what Lear was seeing.

P2 ran after P3, now well ahead and already ripping and tearing

its way through mucus membrane, widening an access to the brain

itself.

Suarez saw the sleigh, but someone was already in the cockpit, canopy

open, revving the engines. She ran flat out now. The sleigh driver saw

her and seemed to be fumbling for a weapon since the sleigh was still

too sluggish to move.

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MICHAEL GRANT

Suarez jumped onto the sleigh’s surface and pointed her gun

directly down at the driver’s head. “It would be a pain in the ass to

haul your dead body out of that cockpit.”

The driver saw the logic of that, held up his hands, and piled out

onto the ground.

“Good choice,” Suarez said, and shot him in the foot.

She slammed the canopy closed and cranked the throttle, send-

ing ice crystals and grit flying.

Across the compound she saw the chopper pulling away, rising

toward the level of the ice above.

“Yeah, you just go that way, and I’ll go the other,” she said, and

sent the sleigh hurtling toward the ramp, cannon firing at anything

that crossed her path.

Babbington had grown tired of being bullied. He had run off across

the ice, but when he saw O’Dell abandon the sleigh and jump in

beside Tanner, he’d run back. The sleigh was warm at least. He had

barely made it before the chills came on so hard that for the next

twenty minutes he just shook while waiting for the cockpit heater to

thaw his bones.

And then, up had shot the other sleigh.

Babbington’s thoughts had been less about needing to kill Tanner

than they were about not wanting to yet again be forced out into the

killing cold.

His first salvo blew the engine apart.

His second tore Tanner in half. The shock of that moment froze

Babbington in a very different way. He pushed away from the controls

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

and just in front of him the helicopter, bristling with weapons, rose

like an avenging god.

Cold was not worse than being blown apart. Babbington threw

back the canopy to wave his arms, show his face, anything to keep the

helicopter from firing, but the dragonfly-looking monster still swept

toward him, nose down.

Cannon fire ripped the ice, swept by, and now Babbington was

warm enough. He ran from the sleigh, ran in panic across the ice

toward the ramp, waving his arms.

Suarez shot up the ramp, then swerved madly as a boy in a bathrobe

came pelting down. It was perhaps the most improbable thing she had

ever seen. She backed the engines, shoved brakes into gravel, threw

back her canopy, and yelled, “Who the hell are you supposed to be?”

The boy, wild-eyed, dove into the cockpit beside her.

“Yeah, okay,” Suarez said. “Just don’t talk.” She hit the throttle

and Bug Man, facedown in the seat, twisted like an eel to get back

upright.

The sleigh topped the crest and shot directly beneath the heli-

copter.

“Oh, that’s not good,” Suarez said.

“It’ after ush!” Bug Man yelled.

The chainsaw roar of the chopper’s cannon opened up, blowing a

hole in the canopy, sending plastic shards everywhere. Suarez hauled

the sleigh sharply left. Looked at her left hand. A two-inch piece of

plastic protruded from the back of it. Her tendons were cut, her fin-

gers slack.

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MICHAEL GRANT

Suarez pushed the throttle to full speed and said, “Hey, kid!”

“Wha? Wha? Wha?”

“Ever play video games?”

“What?”

“See that thing right there, kinda looks like a game controller?

Well, that’s our weapons system.”

“She’s in my eye!” Lear yelled. “She’s in my eye!”

The doctor did not understand. Stillers did. “I’ll get some of our

twitchers!”

Lear’s head was almost clear now, but now sheer, blind rage was

clouding her thoughts. She’d been bluffed! The McLure girl hadn’t

had biots in her brain, but they were sure on their way there now. Still

time to stop them, maybe. Somehow.

Had to be. Otherwise . . .

The nanobots could survive, the whole thing would be ruined—

had to win this, had to stay alive and win this. The Twins were dead,

they couldn’t defeat her—dead, impossible!

“Don’t kill,” Plath groaned to herself. “Wire.”

But Plath’s own body was in spasm now, convulsing. She could

no longer feel her face. Her hands blue before her, frozen to the ice.

P3 stabbed a needle into brain tissue, didn’t matter where, spooled

wire from its spider spinnerets as it ran, and stabbed a second pin.

“Toast!” Lear yelled.

“What? Why are you yelling toast?” the doctor asked.

Another pin, another wire and Lear felt an overwhelming urge

to bite her lip.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Now P2 was in the act, stabbing and spooling, stabbing and

spooling.

“She’s wiring me! She’s wiring me!” Lear cried.

When she wasn’t stabbing pins and running wire, Plath was sim-

ply slicing through neurons and axons, plowing the soft pinkish-gray

tissue.

“No!” Lear shouted. “No. No! Grah! Grah!”

Plath felt a strange warmth creeping over her. Not real, she knew.

Illusion. The body shutting down. Shutting down, conserving blood

warmth in her core, saying farewell to limbs.

If I didn’t love you, Noah, why am I thinking of you now, now at

the end?

She no longer felt the pain of her knee. Numb. Her arm still

ached, but it was so very far away.

I loved that you loved me, Noah.

But still enough consciousness to stab and spool and stab again.

I loved making love to you.

“Grah, I, grah, yeah,” Lear said, straining to be understood.

“She’s having a stroke,” the doctor said. “Look! Her left pupil is

blown!”

Lear no longer saw the doctor. She saw her mother, her mother,

the whore had actually slapped her across the face when she’d seen

her daughter’s disapproving gaze, a red welt and a sting and a humili-

ation.

Slap me? Slap me? SLAP ME?

I wasn’t brave enough to love you, Noah.

Bitch-slap me? Me? Me? Me?

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MICHAEL GRANT

Incoherent sounds came from Lear’s mouth between manic

twitches. The doctor and Stillers laid her down on the floor.

“I’m giving her blood thinners,” a funny, funny voice said, com-

ing from her mother’s screaming mouth, the cleaver in Lystra’s hand,

yeah, die yeah, slap me?

Me? Meeeee? Meeeee?

The helicopter had a top speed just ten knots slower than the sleigh.

The sleigh pulled away but with painful, painful slowness.

And the sleigh was definitely not faster than cannon or missiles.

The missile grazed the cockpit with a fiery tail and exploded a

hundred yards ahead. The sleigh’s computers were fast, but not fast

enough at one hundred sixty miles an hour to avoid the ice and stone

thrown up in the explosion. It was like driving full speed in a hail-

storm with golf ball–size hail.

But the sleigh survived, rocking wildly from side to side.

“Okay, we get one shot at this, kid,” Suarez said. “Be ready!”

Suarez hit the brakes. The sleigh slowed in a storm of ice par-

ticles, the helicopter roared by overhead, and Bug Man pushed the

button.

The recoil was unexpected, as was the inundation of smoke and

flame as the missile launched from the sleigh and curved into the sky,

seeking a heat source.

The missile flew harmlessly past the helicopter—which now,

ominously, turned to come back. It came on cannon blazing, blasting

ice on its way to killing Suarez and Bug Man.

Suarez spun the sleigh and shot back toward the valley.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

“You know there’s a big giant hole up ahead there, right?” Bug

Man yelled.

“Yeah. We’re going to see what this toy can do.”

The distance was not great. The helicopter was a half mile behind.

Suarez could only hope the chopper pilot wouldn’t risk firing on her

own people.

Out into nothingness, out over the lip of the valley, the sleigh

shot out into midair. And fell. The engines roared, trying frantically

to push enough air downward to slow the descent. It worked, but not

well.

The sleigh fell, faster and faster, and Suarez grunted and switched

the thrust from vertical to horizontal once again.

The sleigh bolted forward and fell even more rapidly.

Ahead, a patch of blue.

Just feet from the plastic dome, Suarez kicked all the thrust back

to lift. The force of it bent the dome, then the sleigh broke through the

plastic and with a loud crash slammed into the pool, snapped a diving

board, and rode up and over a chaise longue to stop just inches from

breaking through the far end of the dome.

The engine died then and the sleigh lay inert, back half trailing in

the shallow end, front end tilted up.

“I gotta get this game,” Bug Man said.

Tara Longwood—the chopper pilot—gave a thumbs-up to her weap-

ons officer and took a victory pass over the wet sleigh below.

Then she turned the helicopter back, scanning for any other

targets. There was still a sleigh at the top of the cliff, but last she’d

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MICHAEL GRANT

seen, the pilot, Babbington, was running like a scared rabbit.

However . . . She frowned and pointed. A green Sno-Cat sat

steaming within a few yards of the sleigh.

“One of ours,” the weapons officer said. “Must have just come up

from Forward Green.”

Tara nodded. She saw a dark-haired man climb into the sleigh’s

cockpit before she flew on around, circumnavigating the valley, look-

ing for trouble.

By the time she got back to the sleigh and the Sno-Cat, she had

heard a panicky babble of voices in her earpiece, coming from the

ground. The dark-haired fellow in the sleigh was waving his arms,

trying to attract her attention.

A young woman and another man were carrying what could only

be a body toward the Sno-Cat.

Tara brought the chopper in low, ready to help ferry the wounded

now that the fight was over. She landed, and the young man in the

sleigh trotted toward her, seemingly unconcerned, waving as he came

on.

She slid the side panel of her cockpit open. “What is this?” she

asked.

And Vincent shot her in the face.

374

THIRTY-THREE

Plath woke slowly. She was a drowning person, fighting her way up

toward air and light, but it was so far, and her arms were so heavy.