Bzrk Apocalypse (44 page)

Then, all at once, she was awake. A doctor was beside her. And to

her utter amazement, Vincent, Wilkes, and Bug Man were standing

before her. There was also a Latino woman she had never seen before.

“Where am I?” Plath asked.

“You’re still here, in the valley,” Wilkes said.

Plath stared. Looked left and right. It could have been a room in

any well-appointed, new hospital. She saw her leg, swathed in rigid

webbing over bandages. It hurt like hell. Her arm hurt as well, but

not as bad.

Her face felt raw, as if it had been sunburned. Something was

wrong with the bandaged hand. She saw bandages over the stubs of

her amputated little and ring finger.

Her head hurt. But she was alive.

In her mind, she saw three windows.

She took a deep breath, drank some water through a straw,

answered the doctor’s questions, and said, “What’s happened?”

“Later,” Wilkes said. “We had you brought around so that, uh . . .

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There’s a pretty big question, and we think we need to ask you.”

“Wait. Are we—”

“We’re in charge,” Vincent said. “We’re running this base now.

Suarez here can fly a helicopter, and do a few other things, and—”

Wilkes broke in to say, “And with Lear out of the picture, all her

wired-up zombies here didn’t exactly know what to do.”

“You’ve been unconscious for eighteen hours,” the doctor said. “I

gave you a stimulant to wake you up. But it won’t last long, the pain

will get worse, and you’ll be better off asleep for a while longer while

your body recovers. You’ve been through a lot.”

“Why did you wake me up?” Plath asked Wilkes.

But Wilkes looked pleadingly at Bug Man. “Okay, this is some

very bad shit to deal with. But the gray goo, Burnofsky’s babies, we’re

not sure . . . I’m seeing stuff that may be caused by self-replicating

nanobots. But very small scale so far. And it could be I’m wrong.”

“And there’s the Floor Thirty-Four virus,” Vincent said. “Maybe

it never escaped the Tulip. But maybe it did. The whole final tranche

of Lear’s victims have biots. We stopped the process before they were

killed off, That’s thousands of people with living biots who would

suffer madness if the Floor Thirty-Four virus were to get loose.”

“Not to mention all of us,” Bug Man said.

“Uh-huh.” Plath wanted very badly to go back to sleep, and the

doctor was right; the pain from her shattered knee was stalking her.

“The thing is, there’s only one way to stop the gray goo, and to

make sure the Floor Thirty-Four virus never escapes,” Vincent said

in his dispassionate voice. “Nuclear.”

“What? Wait, um, I’m lost, here. I don’t exactly have an atomic

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bomb on me, oh, damn—Doctor, can I at least get an ibuprofen or

something?”

“If it’s out there and we don’t stop it, the whole world dies,” Wil-

kes said. She put her hand on Plath’s forehead and held the cup so she

could take another sip of water. “Bug Man has an idea.”

Bug Man nodded uncertainly, not quite sure about how Plath

would receive what he was about to say. “Listen, we stopped the biot

crèches. The madness has stopped, but man, half the world is burn-

ing. Millions . . . You know. Nobody’s in charge. But people know

what it means if a window all of a sudden opens up in their head. And

we still can control the crèches, we can still, you know . . .”

“Why would we?” Plath asked. Her head was throbbing. Her

mouth felt like flannel, and nausea tickled the bottom of her throat.

“Because we need someone to blow up New York City,” Vin-

cent said. “Lear had good records, good data. We can pinpoint guys

with access to nukes. Americans, Russians, French, Brits. And Bug

Man realized that when the biots quicken—when they’re born, you

know—they see. And they could read. We can bring biots online, and

we can show them a message.”

“What message?” Plath asked.

One by one they looked to Bug Man. “Do it, or we kill your biots.

Do it, or we take out your family. We explain, as much as you can, you

know. . . . The whole thing. But if we don’t stop this, we’re all dead.

Us last of all, down here on the ice. But everyone. The whole human

race. The whole planet.”

Plath felt tears welling in her eyes. “You woke me up for this? To

vote on—”

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“Not a vote,” Wilkes said. “We already took a vote. You’re in

charge, Plath. Sadie. Suarez will run security, and eventually we’ll

unwire some of these people, but right now, it’s on you.”

“Vincent?” Plath pleaded.

He looked away, ashamed. “It’s on you, Plath. Whatever you

decide.”

In the end it was a Chinese missile that did it. The Chinese general

responsible, once certain that his family was safe, tied a rope to a tree

in one of his favorite countryside spots, and hanged himself.

There were very few functioning governments still left to do useful

things like tally up the death toll of the Plague of Madness. But later,

historical estimates would set the count at two hundred ten million,

in thirty-six countries.

Four million of those had come as a consequence of Plath’s order.

But, in the end, Burnofsky’s gray goo did not make it off Manhattan.

The human race was saved. Life on planet Earth would go on.

In the weeks that followed, Plath drank much more than she should

have, sitting in the living room of what had been Lear’s house. She

shared the house with Wilkes, Vincent, and Bug Man. She tried not to

drink before lunch, but she often failed. She tried to stop, but not very

hard. Wilkes made efforts to get her to move on, but the very words

died on her lips when she looked into Sadie McLure’s haunted eyes.

Once, and only once, had Plath gone to look at Lear.

Lear sat chained in the dungeon that had once held Suarez. Plath

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had asked for the door to be opened so that she could see her. See the

monster. The mass murderer.

But Lear had not responded to Plath, had seemingly not noticed

that she was there.

Plath stopped using that name, and reverted to Sadie. She had

tried and mostly succeeded in accepting Noah’s death. But she could

not reconcile herself to what had happened, what she had done, to

New York City.

Four months on, Wilkes found her on the floor, choking on her

own vomit after drinking an entire bottle of Lear’s bourbon. It was

terribly clear that Sadie McLure would, sooner or later, manage to kill

herself in expiation of her sins.

Wilkes would not allow that. She went to Vincent, and to Bug

Man, and slowly, so very gently, the biots went to work. And little by

little, Sadie McLure forgot.

379

TWO YEARS LATER

The woman was probably in her early fifties but looked much older.

She was dressed in clean but tattered clothing, layers of it, as if she had

to be ready for any sort of weather. In the pocket of her patched coat

she carried a crumpled black trash bag to use as an umbrella. London

was out of umbrellas.

“That’s her,” a street kid said, jerking his chin and holding out his

hand. “That’s old Mrs. Cotton.”

Sadie pressed a small gold bar—no bigger than a segment of Kit

Kat—into his hand and said, “If you lied to us, kid, we’ll find you.”

The “we” in question included seven uniformed, heavily armed

men who had fanned out on both sides of the street. London had qui-

eted since the worst of the Madness, as it was commonly called, but it

was still a wild place where street gangs ruled many neighborhoods.

The “we” also included Wilkes, now somewhat changed as well. She

still bore the strange flame tattoo beneath one eye, but she had grown

out her hair into a simple blunt cut. She was dressed in a zippered

black jumpsuit and carried a machine pistol over her shoulder.

Sadie waved Wilkes back a few steps and moved closer to Mrs.

Cotton, keeping pace with her.

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“I’m not a danger to you, Mrs. Cotton,” Sadie said. “I’m here to

tell you about your son.”

The woman stopped. She turned a scarred and ravaged face to

Sadie. Such signs of abuse were common among the survivors of the

Madness. Sadie could only imagine what this woman had endured.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Sadie McLure.” The name obviously meant nothing to Mrs,

Cotton, and Sadie was relieved. A lot of stories were going around the

newly revived Internet. There were even ridiculous rumors that Sadie

McLure had actually ordered New York City destroyed. “I knew your

son.”

“Alex? You were a friend of Alex?” The woman peered skeptically

at Sadie.

“No, ma’am, Noah. In fact . . . we were close. I was with him at

the end.”

Sadie led Mrs. Cotton to a small coffee shop, a place the older

woman would never have been able to afford on the starvation pen-

sion and ration coupons the shaky government was able to pay her.

But Sadie had gold, and gold made many things possible.

They bought weak coffee—or at least part of the hot brew was

coffee, with just a bit of wheat chaff. And they each had a biscuit.

“Were you his girlfriend?”

“Yes,” Sadie said.

Silence. Nothing but the munching of the dry cookie. The sip-

ping of coffee. Then, “How did he do? At the end?”

“Mrs. Cotton, Noah died a hero.” Sadie did not elaborate. Mrs.

Cotton did not seem to need it, and the truth was that Sadie’s memories

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of Noah at the end were disjointed. Parts of what she thought she

remembered seemed unrealistic. Parts of her memory seemed to fit

poorly with other memories.

Wilkes stood a distance away, close enough to smell the coffee

and overhear snippets of the conversation whenever the room was

quiet. She had, of course, been involved in rewiring Sadie. She and

Vincent had written a heroic end for Noah, an ending in which he

single-handedly took down the Armstrong Twins and stopped Burn-

ofsky.

There were elements of truth—a good wiring always rests best

on a foundation of some truth. But it was still a work in progress,

connecting images of Noah to heroic pictures gleaned painstakingly

from Sadie’s memories of movies and books.

“Your son saved the human race,” Sadie said, and believed it,

mostly.

Mrs. Cotton nodded grimly. “He was always a good boy.”

“Yes. I loved him.”

Mrs. Cotton’s composure broke then, and tears filled her eyes. “I

couldn’t . . . I didn’t know how to reach him. . . . He had this job in

New York. . . .”

“It was an important job. He was an important boy. Man, actu-

ally. Because he was definitely a man by the end,” Sadie said.

“I’m glad you told me this,” Mrs. Cotton said, though her face was

anything but happy. “Did you tell him?”

“Did I tell him what?” Sadie asked.

“Did you tell him that you loved him?”

Sadie took her hand and squeezed it gently. “Yes. I told him that I

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loved him. I told him that many times.” Sadie glanced at Wilkes, who

blushed and looked down. “He loved me, and I loved him. I think that

memory is all that’s kept me alive.”

Sadie sat for a while longer with Noah’s mother and left her with

enough small gold bars to take the edge off her poverty.

She and Wilkes walked down streets that still showed the bullet

holes, the fire scorches, the wreckage of the Plague of Madness. But

London had suffered this badly before in its long history and knew

how to put itself back together. Crews were at work. There were police

on the streets. Life was slowly returning.

A century would pass before New York City could say the same.

“Now what?” Wilkes asked.

“How much of what I told that woman was true?” Sadie asked.

Wilkes met her gaze and waited, saying nothing. Finally she said,

“Now what?”

They were in front of what had once been a pizza restaurant, but

was now burned out and choked with rubble.

“How long has it been since you had a decent pizza, Wilkes?”

“Long, long time,” Wilkes acknowledged, peering into the res-

taurant. “I think those ovens may still be usable. Of course someone

would have to clean the place up. Get the gas working again.”

“You have something better to do?” Sadie asked. She stepped over

the threshold, bent down, and grabbed hold of a broken table. “Help

me with this.”

383

TWELVE YEARS LATER

Three windows were open in Sadie McLure’s brain.

Her three biots sat immobile in the glass vial she wore on a chain

around her neck.

When business was slow at Poet Pizza, she would sit in a cor-

ner booth with her old friends, Anthony and Wilkes. Their daughter

would tease the cooks while their baby son chuckled on his father’s

lap.

Ten thousand miles away to the south, Michael Ford, once known

as Vincent, supervised the skeleton staff that maintained what had