Bzrk Apocalypse (40 page)

ans. Short-handed and poorly led, or we’d already be dead. Let’s not

give them time to figure anything out. Sergeant, blow some holes in

that first building. Ground level if you can. We need a door.”

The battle lasted two hours, by which time two more men had

been killed. Plath and her friends had been given the job of ferrying

wounded from the plane into the first tower while Tanner led the

assault on the second.

When it was all over, they counted seven bodies of former

Cathexis employees.

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MICHAEL GRANT

“A skeleton force,” Tanner said. “So this was just a warm-up.”

They had assembled in the dining hall and Wilkes had helpfully

brewed a pot of coffee and popped open bags of chocolate chip cook-

ies.

They were eight now, along with three wounded survivors from

the plane wrapped in blankets and lying bandaged on empty steel

tables. O’Dell and one other had taken a remaining Sno-Cat to what

looked like a hangar that lay well outside of the main base.

“Whoever was here pulled out,” Tanner said. “This place was not

built for the dozen men left behind.”

Vincent stood up and walked away.

“He’ll be okay,” Plath said, not believing it.

“He’s been through a lot,” Tanner said generously.

“You have no idea,” Wilkes muttered as she poured mugs of

coffee.

“We don’t know if anyone got off a message to whoever, wherever

. . . But let me just say that any skepticism about you, Ms. McLure, is

officially dead and buried. We have to find wherever they went, chase

them down, and stop this.”

“All we’ve got is a Sno-Cat,” a man observed. “Holds four pas-

sengers.”

Vincent came back and without pre-amble said, “They left their

computers on. There’s another base. Farther south. A couple hundred

miles.”

Someone whistled low, and slow, and said, “That’s a hell of a long

ride in a Cat.”

Then O’Dell returned. He had two prisoners, held at gunpoint.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

“Meet Mademoiselle Bonnard and Mr. Babbington.”

“Dr. Babbington, actually.”

O’Dell smacked his rifle butt into the man’s spine.

“They didn’t even know what was going on. They’re out at the

hangar out there, working on . . . Well, you’ll want to see this, Tan-

ner.”

“Is it a hovercraft with a jet engine and missiles?” Tanner asked

wearily.

O’Dell threw up his free hand in exasperation. “You are no fun to

surprise, Captain.”

“We were just completing the assembly,” the Frenchwoman said.

“We are not dangerous. You have no need to point guns. We are engi-

neers, just working for the company. Let us go free.”

“Uh-huh,” Tanner said. “Well, ma’am, you, too,
Doctor
, you now

work for the U.S. Navy. You will complete your work, and if you man-

age to do it inside of two hours, I will not strip you both down to your

underwear and send you out onto the ice.”

“The sleighs are coming in,” Stillers reported. He was casting ques-

tioning glances at Bug Man, wondering no doubt why his face was

swollen, why his teeth were missing, and why he was wearing a

bathrobe and flicking between YouTube and Twitter on the big TV

monitor in Lystra Reid’s living room.

“Yeah,” Lear said distractedly.

“That will be the last of it,” Stillers said.

“It’s all coming down, Stillers. Um . . . Tell everyone good job,

yeah? Yeah. Tell them all I said well done.”

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MICHAEL GRANT

He nodded. “Did you want to, maybe, come over to the dining

hall and speak to them?”

Lear considered the idea, shook her head almost shyly, and said,

“No, I have to watch.” She waved a hand toward a shaky YouTube of

one of the endless array of riots in one of the endless number of burn-

ing cities. “Panic, you know. That’s what gets them killed. It’s like

medieval, yeah? Plague. Or cholera.”

She was no longer talking to Stillers, who sensed that fact and

stood there stoic and awkward.

“That’s the whole point. Madness leading to panic. If they just

didn’t panic, yeah, they’d be okay. Yeah? If they just didn’t panic. But

I knew they would.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Mmm. You can go, Stillers.”

Stillers seemed relieved. Bug Man was not. It was better to have at

least one extra person in the room in case Lear lost it again.

She flopped beside him on the couch. They had been watching

together for the last few hours. Eating and watching in a bizarre par-

ody of a girls’ night at the movies. Bug Man had been half afraid she’d

decide to paint his nails or talk about her love life.

“I’m glad you decided to join me, Buggy. Good old Buggy. You get

it, yeah. You’ve been down there, down in the meat. You’ve been part

of the game for a long time.”

Bug Man did not remember choosing to be here. He remem-

bered being blackmailed and threatened, made a party to yet

another crime. If anyone ever lived to tell this story in some his-

tory book, he would be labeled as the guy who killed a president

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

and almost killed a pope. Which was unfair. He was, at most, an

accessory.

An accessory to the end of the world.

“Get us a drink, Buggy. You know, I wanted to get Sadie here, too.

I thought she would be fun to have around, yeah. For a little girl-time,

you know? We could talk girl stuff, yeah, that I can’t talk about with

you.”

He poured them each a bourbon. She had said they had enough

for two years, at least. He hoped that was true, because he felt he was

going to need to drink an awful lot.

I’m turning into Burnofsky
, he thought.
Old degenerate trying to

drink away his sins. That’s me now, but not old. So I can live with this

for a long time. If she doesn’t kill me.

“What is that? Is that a cross? Oh, that is awesome. They’re nail-

ing that woman to a cross!”

Bug Man was sick so far down into his soul that he wished he

could shut down his brain, go into some kind of coma—wake up later,

maybe a lot later. He waited for the shaky video to end then navigated

to the next clip.

“So Sadie, that didn’t work out. But I’ve got you, Buggy. And it’s

all working,” she said. “All working. Except for the self-replicating

nanobots. Yeah. The goo.”

“I haven’t seen anything like what you’re looking for,” Bug Man

ventured. “Just crazies, no buildings eaten up or whatever.”

“Mmm. Yeah.” Lear was pensive. “Probably all burned up when

the Tulip came down. Burned up with the Twins. Wish I’d been able

to stay to see even more of that, yeah. Yeah. Burning Armstrongs, that

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MICHAEL GRANT

would have been excellent.” She shrugged and sighed, disappointed.

“But all it takes is one of those SRNs to survive. Just one.” She bit a

fingernail and added a superfluous, “Yeah.”

“I’m sure—”

“Shut up!” Lear snapped. “You’re not sure. I’m not sure, so you’re

not sure.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Gotta exterminate them, somehow. They’ll just . . . just keep on.

Gotta be a way to stop them.”

“Race to the end of the world,” Bug Man said, his tongue loos-

ened by the whiskey. “Choose your apocalypse.”

“I can’t let them beat me, the Twins. Burnofsky.”

An idea occurred to Bug Man. If he spoke it, he would never be

able to unsay it. If she liked the idea, she would be happy with him.

If not . . .

“I have an idea,” he said.

“Speak it, Buggy.”

“You have people’s biots. You can send them a message. To the

right people. I mean, you have all that cross-referenced, right? I mean,

you would know which people were in the Pentagon, or maybe in

Russia, wherever.”

She was looking at him with the intensity of a cobra looking at a

mouse. “Spit it out of that mush mouth, Bug Man.”

“Okay, say you have some general, or whatever. You fire up his

biots, right? He knows now what’s coming. He knows he’s screwed.

But biots can see, right? They could see, you know, if you showed

them a sign. Held up a sign in front of them.”

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

She stared at him for a full minute, during which Bug Man won-

dered if he would have the strength even to resist if she decided to kill

him. Did he even want to live?

Then she reached out one hand, pinched his swollen cheek, and

said, “Buggy, you are a genius.”

345

THIRTY-ONE

Plath was in the second seat of the sleigh. Tanner was driving. O’Dell

was in the other sleigh, being driven by Babbington, who had been

convinced to help when O’Dell shot two of his toes off and promised

to keep going if he didn’t.

Three more men plus Vincent and Wilkes were crammed into

the Sno-Cat, trailing many miles behind.

“I still don’t see a damned thing, and we’re supposedly right on

top of it,” Tanner said. Then, “Ahhh! Shit! O’Dell, stop, stop, stop!” he

yelled through his radio.

He killed the engine and fumbled for the brakes that slammed

steel claws down into the ice. The sleigh went from a moderate sev-

enty miles an hour—neither Tanner nor Babbington felt confident

going any faster—to zero in five seconds. Even so the front two feet of

the sleigh were over the lip of a sharp drop-off.

“This thing have a reverse gear?” Tanner wondered. If there was,

he never found it. “Okay, we get out and push it sideways.”

Tanner and Plath climbed out onto the ice. Only then did they see

the brightly lit compound nestled in the dry valley below.

“Under my nose,” Tanner muttered. “They built this right under

my nose.”

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

“Antarctica is a big place,” Plath soothed. “And Lear has a lot of

money.”

“Is that another swimming pool?”

O’Dell and Babbington joined them and helped manhandle the

sleigh back from the lip of the cliff. Under low power, just enough to

raise the weight of the sleigh from the ice, it wasn’t too hard.

“There’s ramp over there,” O’Dell said. “But we could just sit

up here and fire down into the base. Twelve missiles, fair amount of

thirty-mil cannon . . .” He shrugged.

“No,” Plath said. “We need to know whether this base is the place

she’s using to control events, or just a place to hide while the work is

done elsewhere.”

Tanner nodded. “Look at that slag heap over there. That’s way

more than you’d get from just leveling. They’ve dug some holes.”

“Yeah, well, that base looks like it will sustain a hundred men,”

O’Dell argued. “I’m not seeing the gun emplacements we saw back at

Forward Green. Still, we could get a very hot greeting. These sleighs

aren’t armored worth a damn.”

Babbington took offense at that. “We needed to keep weight

down, obviously. The engine is armored.”

“Yeah? How about the cockpit?” O’Dell asked. “Yeah, I thought

so.”

“The house,” Plath said.

“Yep,” Tanner said. “That’s the big-boss house right there. If we

catch them by surprise, decapitate them—

“That chopper down there has missile launchers and a cannon,”

O’Dell pointed out.

Plath said, “Look, for whatever reason, Lear hasn’t killed me yet.

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MICHAEL GRANT

She could have. She wanted me back in the game. She insisted I play

an active role. I think . . . I think she doesn’t want me dead.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“I think I walk down there, knock on the door, and hope she

shakes hands.”

“I’m going to try to get through to some rational person, either

in D.C. or Langley or any random naval vessel that might be within

range. But don’t count on the cavalry. You understand?”

“I do,” Plath said.

He gave her an appraising look. “What are you, sixteen?”

“Yes,” Plath said. “But I’ve packed a lot into the last few months.”

He nodded. “I have a son about your age. Back in the world. Min-

neapolis, with my parents. I’m trying to tell myself he’s okay.”

Plath started to answer, stopped herself, shook her head, and

finally said, “I was about to say I’m doing the same. But everyone I

care about is either dead, or here with me.” Noah, lying in his own

blood, gasping final breaths.

She squeezed her eyes shut. There were no tears—which, she

thought, was a good thing as they would have frozen.

Her father, her brother. Ophelia, Nijinsky, Anya. Billy. She saw

his head fall to the side, his neck cut almost through.

At least her mother had died of natural causes. She hadn’t been

murdered. So much sadness, and now, the whole world was joining

Plath in that sadness. That did not help. The old saying was that mis-

ery loves company. But Plath knew that misery needed hope. Misery

needed to believe in a better future.

What was happening back in the world where Tanner’s son lived?

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Had Lear’s madness killed millions, or just hundreds of thousands?

Had Burnofsky’s vile machines escaped to obliterate all of life?

How much could the human race stand? The dinosaurs had