Bzrk Apocalypse (6 page)

Her Facebook and Twitter accounts were closed. Her Internet access—

in fact her whole family’s Internet access—was blocked.

Then her mother was called in to see the commander of the local

base where Minako’s father—himself a U.S. marine—had been sta-

tioned before he was sent to Afghanistan and killed. She was told

40

BZRK APOCALYPSE

quite simply that if she could keep her daughter quiet, her family

would be safe and her late husband’s official military service record

would remain unblemished.

There was no direct threat. Just that promise. Just the carrot. The

stick was only implied. The general looked sick to his stomach going

even that far, but marines obey orders, and it was clear that he was

passing on an order that came from very high up the chain of com-

mand.

Having been saved by one marine, and honoring the memory of

her father, upon hearing the ultimatum Minako nodded solemnly

and raised a hand in salute.

“Semper fi,” she said.

A week later Minako’s mother, the police chief of their little town,

was offered a civilian contract to work in security on the base, at a

seven-hundred-dollar-a-month increase in pay.

Minako got a Vespa motor scooter.

And from that point on Minako discussed the
Doll Ship
only

with her marines-supplied therapist, who duly shredded all records

of her visits and prescribed Prozac.

Despite the separate efforts of the Chinese and U.S. governments,

Google searches for various conspiracies were up in the last month.

Way, way up.

Possible suspects included the Illuminati, the Church of Scientol-

ogy, Anonymous, the Freemasons, the Roman Catholic Church, the

Bilderberg Group, Iran, China, the CIA, the NSA, the DEA, MI5 and

MI6, Mossad, Agência Brasileira de Inteligência, Direction Centrale

41

MICHAEL GRANT

du Renseignement Intérieur, the Russian Federal Security Service,

and, of course, space aliens.

With far fewer searches: the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation.

And with only a handful of searches, most as a result of acciden-

tal misspellings: BZRK.

There was no change whatsoever in searches for “Lear.”

42

FIVE

Plath. That was her name again. Plath, not Sadie.

She’d been back in New York for just thirty-six hours, sleeping

the first half of that.

Plath was provided by the weather with a perfect disguise to move

about the streets of New York. It was freezing and the faux-fur-lined

hood of her coat along with superfluous glasses and her newly blonde

hair made it very unlikely that anyone would recognize her.

She had taken a cab to the Tulip. The Armstrong headquarters

was not a place where she could take any, even slight, risks of being

recognized.

But she had gotten out and walked the last block to the Freedom

Tower. It soared up into low-hanging clouds. One hundred and four

stories of defiance to replace the lost World Trade Center towers.

She had not yet been born when the towers fell, but she had seen

the video. They’d had a unit on terrorism in school.

The Tulip was not as tall as either the World Trade Center or the

Freedom Tower.

She had distinct memories of the videos of that day, September

11, 2001. Funny that she recalled them so clearly. But there it was,

43

MICHAEL GRANT

playing over and over in her mind.

The jets.

The initial explosions.

The spreading horror of billowing smoke.

Two hundred people leaping to their deaths rather than die more

slowly of smoke and flame.

The awe-inspiring, horrific collapse as the melted, hollowed-out

building fell.

Find and kill the twins. Destroy all AFGC records. Kill or wire all

AFGC scientists and engineers. Their technology must be obliterated.

It was all in the Tulip. The technology, the records, the scientists.

The Twins. Up there at the top floors, what, sixty-seven? Sixty-eight?

She’d been rather distracted the last time she was in the Tulip, hard to

recall the exact floors where the Twins lived and looked out over the

concrete and haze of the city.

A single skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan.

Her breath came out in a cloud of ice crystals. She looked

around, feeling obscurely guilty, but no one in the sparse crowd of

tourists or the crew at work around a steaming manhole was look-

ing at her.

Under her breath, Plath made a sound. It was the sound of a slow-

motion explosion.

Lystra Reid watched Plath as she looked up at the Freedom Tower and

knew exactly what she was thinking. Exactly. She was contemplat-

ing destruction,
yeah, yeah, yeah
. Destruction. She was envisioning

it already.

44

BZRK APOCALYPSE

That was quick
.
But then, if you want great results, hire great peo-

ple. Even if they are a wee bit nuts.

Lystra had a Starbucks latte in her hand. One of the things she

would miss, she supposed: convenient and at least somewhat drink-

able coffee. There were things about this game space, this paradigm,

that she would regret losing. But it was never good to become com-

placent.

Time for the 2.0. As there was a Grand Theft Auto 6, there must

inevitably come a day when GTA 6 was done and a GTA 7 must be

born. Even the greatest game was eventually played out. When you

had squeezed all the fun out of Portal you needed a Portal 2, 3, 4 . . .

“Yeah. Yeah.”

She shivered—it was cold—and tossed the cup into a trash can.

Her newest tattoo was itching, and she scratched her rib cage dis-

creetly. She was just thirty feet or so from Plath. Plath was, what,

fifteen years her junior? But they could have been sisters, perhaps, in

a different world. Maybe, come to think of it, they
would be,
in this

new game Lystra was creating.

She acknowledged her own loneliness. Emotional honesty did

not frighten her. There had been a price to pay for becoming what

she was: rich, successful, powerful beyond what anyone would guess.

Arguably at this point, the most powerful person on Earth.

No, the truth never scared Lystra.

Lonely? True. Strange? True, yeah. Yeah. Crazy? Well, once upon

a time, yeah, but no longer.

She closed her eyes and replayed the memory of seeing madness

overtake Sandra Piper. God, that had been intense. The eye-stabbing

45

MICHAEL GRANT

thing, wow, that was the kind of detail you got only from seeing

things firsthand.

She remembered a girl trying to strangle herself with a bed-

sheet. Crazy people did crazy things.
Back in the day, back in the old

days, yeah.
But never anything to match the weirdness of watching a

famous actress stabbing her own eyes. Now
that
was crazy.

Sad to think that she would have to retreat soon and watch the

endgame play out from a distance. But not yet. There would be many

rich, visceral experiences to come before she headed south.

And then?

And then she would play the new game and win that as well. Or

not. She might not master the new game. She might even lose.

The idea made her smile. Her father had taught her to understand

that life was a walk on a tightrope and death was the ground. Sooner

or later, no matter how agile you were, the ground would claim you.

He’d been full of gloomy pronouncements back in the old days,

sitting in lawn chairs outside their trailer as the carnival shut down

for the night. They would sit there, the two of them, the man and

the child, as the lights went out on the Mad Mouse and the Ferris

wheel. They would sit and sip their drinks—bourbon for her father,

unsweetened iced tea for her—and acknowledge the nods and the

weary greetings as the other carnies headed for their own digs.

The nights had almost always been warm and muggy. The car-

nival mostly played the south: Baton Rouge, Bogalusa, Hattiesburg,

Vicksburg. She’d seldom been cold, which was maybe why the cold

attracted her now. Cold was clean. Hot was sweaty and dirty.

Back then, back before the train wreck that was in her future,

46

BZRK APOCALYPSE

Lystra had wanted two things: For her mother to come back. And

to be able someday to take over a couple of the sideshow games. An

old man named Sprinkle operated the coin toss, the dart throw, the

water pistol, and the ring toss. He let his games get shabby, refusing to

spring for so much as a few cans of paint.

Lystra thought she could do better. She could make the games

livelier and more profitable. The key was to make them a bit easier.

Let the marks take home a teddy bear occasionally; it was good adver-

tising. Run an honest game, attract more players, pay out more in

prizes—but offer more levels, more depth, and make more money in

the end.

“Yeah!” Lystra said to no one. It made her smile to think how even

then, even when she was a lonely seven-year-old, she was ambitious.

But yes, lonely. She had always wanted a younger sister. Someone

like Plath, maybe. Someone to look up to her. Someone to talk to and

play with.

Even a brother would have been welcome.

Interesting thought.

“A game within a game?” Lystra muttered under her breath.

Would it add spice? Yes. Would it complicate the overall plan?

She walked it through step-by-step in her mind and concluded that it

would have only a small downside risk.

It would be good to have someone to appreciate what she had

accomplished. It would be good to have someone to watch it all play

out with her.

“Minions,” she said, and laughed. “I need minions. Yeah.”

47

SIX

“No. Vincent is not ready to resume control.” This was from Anya

Violet, and spoken in a whisper. “He may never be ready.”

Plath was making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in the

kitchen of the new Manhattan safe house. One for herself and one

for Keats. And seeing Billy’s level of interest she pulled out two more

slices of bread for him.

They were in the kitchen: Plath, Keats, Billy the Kid who really

was a kid, and Dr. Anya Violet. Anya was of undetermined age—per-

haps in her thirties, perhaps she had edged into her forties—but to

Plath, at least, she seemed beautiful, sophisticated, and effortlessly

sexy in a way that she decided must come only with some age and

some experience.

Anya had not yet chosen a nom de guerre. She thought it was

a silly affectation. Of course, she understood the thinking behind

choosing the name of some mad or at least seriously unbalanced per-

son: it signaled acceptance of the core reality for BZRK members. It

signaled a break with the past. It signaled a chin-out acknowledgment

of the fact that madness was very likely in their future.

She understood all that, but Dr. Anya Violet was not a child and

48

BZRK APOCALYPSE

was not interested in following the rules of the clubhouse. Nor was

she sure she wanted to accept the authority of a sixteen-year-old girl.

Yes, Plath was the daughter of Grey McLure, Anya’s former employer,

and Plath had proven herself in battle. And it had become clear that

she was a bit more . . . stable . . . than Nijinsky, who had been in charge

during Vincent’s recovery.

But Anya was suspicious of money. She could call herself Plath,

but Anya knew who Sadie was. She was rich, that’s what she was.

Worse yet, she’d always been rich. She’d had life handed to her. Anya

would rather have seen Keats in the top job, because
there
was a boy

who had never been handed anything, and Anya instinctively trusted

working people. She herself had come from nothing and nowhere to

earn a PhD. She shared with Keats an emotional knowledge of hard

times and hard choices.

But Keats was totally loyal to Plath.

Billy was a child. Wilkes was . . . well, she was Wilkes. Nijinsky

had to a great extent lost the confidence of the group. And that left

two people to run things at the New York cell of BZRK: Vincent or

Plath.

Plath, who saw a great deal when she paid close attention, saw all

this in Anya’s smoky eyes. Vincent might or might not still be dam-

aged, but Anya loved him and would never admit he was ready to take

charge again. Not if it meant risking his life and sanity.

In the matter of safe houses things had improved quite a bit. Plath

had access to most of her own money now, and she had Mr. Stern and

the McLure security apparatus to arrange things. So BZRK New York

was quite nicely established in a five-story townhouse not far from

49

MICHAEL GRANT

Columbus Circle on the Upper West Side.

They had obtained it through numerous cutouts and guys-who-

knew-a-guy, and bought it for cash for nine million dollars.

Just twelve blocks away was a second safe house. This had also

been purchased for cash, but this time the cutouts had been just a bit