BZRK: Apocalypse

by Michael Grant

  She sent her biot racing toward the deadly leak, clambered madly atop the artery and saw her mistake. It was not coming from the artery itself but from a much smaller vein just behind it. Still dangerous, but the pressure was less intense. Still dangerous, still potentially deadly.

  And yet, had the foe wanted to kill her, it could certainly have sliced the artery. And there would be more than a few hundred cells flying. He could have done it more than once in the time available. She could right now be swimming through a blood-clouded fluid.

  She had nothing to patch the hole. “Bring some fibers,” Plath told Keats.

  “Yes,” he said tersely. He still held her shoulders. She shrugged him off, turned away, ashamed of her suspicions, ashamed to have him know.

  Veins were delicate things, unlike arteries, which managed higher pressures. This vein was about as big around as the biot—translucent, like a worm that never sees sunlight—and it undulated as the blood cells jostled and pushed to make their way back to the heart.

  Then she saw the bulge. Something larger than blood cells almost too large to squeeze through the vein. The enemy. It had not just punctured the vein as a distraction, it had stretched the cut to crawl inside and escape.

  She could stab it right through the sausage-casing walls of the vein. She could probably kill it. But she’d be poking holes in her own vein, and the enemy—who had thus far not done anything as drastic as cut an artery—might get frantic, might start slashing from inside the vein.

  “I’m almost there,” Keats said.

  “I’m going after him,” she said, without explaining what she meant.

  With her front two biot legs she pried open the elastic flesh of the vein. Blood cells pummeled her face. A white blood cell hit her, rolled down her back, and clung on. It took all her strength to push into the flow, like trying to move uphill against a rockslide.

  Halfway in and the pressure shifted. Now it was cells in the vein battering her like dozens of flat stones, pushing her head and upper body after the escaping enemy. She slipped the rest of the way in and fought down the claustrophobia as the vein fitted around her like a body sock. The blood was pushing her along, pushing her toward the distant lungs where oxygen would flow to the cells and they would be fired into arteries for the outward-bound trip.

  She could see nothing but blood cells, red and white, crowded all around her. Her hope was that her prey would soon cut his way out and she would be swept along with him.

  But if he didn’t? If he rode this all the way to the heart and the lungs? She could be lost forever in the miles and miles of blood vessels.

  “No!” she said in sudden panic.

  “I don’t see you yet,” Keats said. He had switched on the harsh overhead light so that the two of them, in various states of dress, looked sickly and frightened.

  Too late to get back to her entry point, Plath knew; now she would have to cut her own way out. A second bleeder in her brain. God, she was making things worse. A risk of a second blowout that could kill her, weighed against the terror of being lost forever inside her own body.

  Soon this vein would merge with another, and then any exit would cause more blood loss. She had to cut her way out now or lose her chance altogether.

  She stabbed a claw into the vein wall but almost could not hold on against the pressure. Making matters worse, the cell was on her back, oozing its way like warmed Silly Putty into her shoulders, reducing the mobility of her legs. And another now attached to her left hind leg, a fat slug of a thing wrapping its mindless self around her sticklike limb.

  Panic!

  She slashed madly at the vein wall, heedless, cut it and felt the blood change speed and direction. Biots are not flexible, so all she could do was use her front legs to cantilever her rear out of the incision.

  Suddenly the pressure was too much. Her grip failed. Her biot went tumbling end over end, no way to tell where she was, in or out of the vein.

  And then, all at once, she was floating free in cerebral fluid, riding like a beach ball atop a stream of cells. She grabbed onto brain tissue and hauled herself out of the current.

  From there at last she could turn around and see the damage she’d done.

  The leak was twice as large as the first one. Cells were flying out in threes and fours rather than singly.

  With her heart in her throat she grabbed Keats’s shoulder.

  “Where are you?” she demanded.

  Keats took her in his arms and held her as his biot crossed into view bearing a half-dozen fibers to begin the job of yet again saving Sadie McLure from her own blood.

  FOURTEEN

  It was called the Gyllene Salen, the Golden Hall. It was a vast space—a long rectangle with an impossibly high ceiling, reminding some first-time visitors of a medieval cathedral decorated by Liberace.

  All of one long wall was taken up by five arches opening onto a courtyard. The opposite wall was seven arches. And all of it—virtually every square inch—was covered in just under nineteen million pieces of tile, most of them gold. They depicted various characters from Swedish history—kings and saints, for the most part.

  Lystra had done her homework and knew all of this. The detail added to the experience. It was a wondrous place and the perfect setting for the annual Nobel Prize ball and banquet.

  At this moment on this dark December night, a handful of Nobel laureates, a slightly larger handful of previous Nobel laureates, the family and friends of said laureates, assorted VIPs and kind-of VIPs—amounting, in total, to several hundred people, all in tuxedos and evening dresses—were seated at long banquet tables loaded down with the sort of china and stemware you don’t find at Bed Bath & Beyond.

  This, thought Lystra, would be the point at which she would have to be very careful for her personal safety. First her immediate, physical safety—because what was coming would be violent. But more to the point, this was where the intelligence agencies of the world would focus like laser beams once the event had … well, played out. All the major intel powers—America, China, Japan, the UK, France, Germany, Russia—had prominent citizens here. What was coming would be an event of earthshaking impact. No one cared much what happened to a single actress or a single businessman, and no one would connect any of this to the nosy New Zealand cops who’d had to be eliminated, or to poor, conscience-wracked Nijinsky.

  But the self-murder of the president of the United States, and then the sudden fatal “illness” of the Chinese leader, followed by the madness of the Brazilian president, and then this? Even the disaster in Hong Kong. Oh yes: the pennies would begin to drop. The spies and the cops and their ilk would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to begin to see a hand behind it all. Right now people were jumpy, worried, on edge, but they still believed the world was just sort of having a bad run of luck.

  There was no luck involved. Well, she corrected herself, there was a bit of luck: the blundering Armstrong Twins had unintentionally heralded what was to come. They had provided the fanfare presaging the main event.

  The Twins, poor silly buggers, were actually helping her carry out her far superior, far cooler plan.

  The thought of them, those hideous freaks, imagining that they were in control. Lystra’s lip curled. For a while there had been a freak show with the carnival: a bearded lady, a dwarf who dressed up like a Tolkien character, and a genetically deformed man with hands like lobster claws. They had frightened her then. The bearded lady in particular had tried to be friendly, motherly. The Human Claw, as the lobster-handed man had styled himself, was easier to handle. He just leered, the pervert, until her father had threatened to decapitate him.

  Well, let the freaks think they had something. Let the Twins congratulate themselves for killing the president, blundering idiots. The penny would drop for them, too, soon.

  “Girls’ night tonight, boys,” Lystra whispered.

  She wondered if Bug Man, back at the hotel, was watching and could see her on TV. She’d told him to, and while
he wasn’t the obedient type, he was the frightened type.

  The great thing about tonight was that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would never suspect the end goal. They’d be waiting for some kind of blackmail demand. They’d be looking for a rational motive. The fatal weakness of rational people was that they always looked for the rational answer.

  The attendees were mostly through the appetizer—a lobster-and-crab terrine with snap pea mousse, brioche, and edible flower fantasie—when last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Miguel Reynaldo, stopped talking about his younger days when he was a hobo, or traveling minstrel, or whatever it was he thought he was, and stared hard at the Swedish finance minister, a dull middle-aged woman seated across from him.

  “I … I’ve just had the strangest … But it’s still there. I’m seeing …”

  And at that point the CEO of Spotify said, “Like windows? Like there’s windows in your head?”

  The two men stared at each other, while those around them formed expressions of polite concern.

  “Something is the matter!” This came from a second table, from a past Nobel Peace Prize winner, a man credited with saving many lives through nonviolent means—but he was not now seeming nonviolent. He had lurched to his feet, and in the process he had knocked over his very expensive glass of Champagne and caused his dinnerware to rattle and his chair to scrape.

  “Moi aussi, mais c’est bizarre, ça!” cried a French industrialist. Then he, too, shoved back from the table as if scalded. He tried to switch to English, but it was a mangled job. “In my head things. I am see.”

  It spread quickly. There were a dozen tables, hundreds of well-dressed folk, and some of them, far too many of them, were now whispering urgently or shouting hysterically that something was very odd, something was not right in their heads.

  “Bloody hell!” the English ambassador cried. “It’s some sort of insect. Oh!”

  And then versions of that in a dozen languages and multiple accented versions of English. Those not directly affected were rushing to give comfort. People shouted for doctors. The words food poisoning were spoken. Others said it was drugs. Someone must have spiked the crabe et homard with LSD.

  Everyone was talking. The hall was a posh tower of Babel, volume rising, some voices trying to dominate, impose order.

  Then came the first true scream. It was a soprano sound, a woman’s voice. It began in terror, rose in pitch, roughened, and turned at last into a throaty animal howl.

  Lystra closed her eyes and savored it. It went on for a very long time, and a smile split Lystra’s face, perfect teeth shining in candlelight.

  The room froze, listening, straining to see the source of this delicious scream. Already some were moving prudently toward the exits.

  “God fuck you all! God fuck you all!” A deep male voice, but frantic not angry, fearful and repeating the curse over and over as the man backed away from the table, plowed into people with outstretched arms. “God fuck you alllllll!”

  Now the screams and cries, the roars and shouts and canine yelps broke loose in full.

  Miguel Reynaldo was laughing and howling like some demented hyena, mouth so wide open it seemed his jaw must dislocate. He dug his fingernails into his face, down his forehead and cheeks, leaving bloody trails behind. Then he threw himself onto the table, twisted onto his back, shrieking all the while, kicking dinnerware and baskets of bread and glasses of sparkling water in every direction, like some great toddler having the mother of all tantrums.

  And that’s when things turned really ugly. Because someone—later identified as a Finnish philanthropist—came up behind the Swedish minister of finance and cut her throat ear to ear with a table knife.

  And when she had sunk to the floor—gurgling, dying, spraying crimson across white linen—he kept sawing away, brushing aside her weak defensive efforts, sawing away at her trachea.

  Panic!

  The screams were general now as people rushed to the exits, crushed into one another in their desperate desire to get the hell out of that room, but not all those in the crowd were behaving normally. A past Nobel laureate for physics had stripped off his clothing and was peeing on anyone within reach.

  Lystra, too, began to scream and wave her hands in the air. And she grinned, widely, not only because that’s what would be expected of a madwoman, but also because it was all just so wonderful.

  “I bring you madness!” she yelled, and laughed, but kept a careful eye on all around her as she backed toward the nearest exit.

  Back in the center of the room a man later identified as one of the world’s great scientific minds was squatting on a table defecating, while around him madmen and madwomen screamed and threw things, attacked one another with cutlery and broken glass, clawed their own eyes, or simply huddled in corners yelping at imaginary spirits.

  “Madness!” Lystra yelled as she reached the door.

  In the space of five minutes the Nobel banquet had become a blood-splattered insane asylum.

  Would Bug Man appreciate it? Would he get it? Probably not. Buggy was useful for some things, not for others. He would not be enough to occupy her own Eden. Someone smarter would be good. Someone more subtle. Someone who would chafe even more and thus be even more completely subjugated in the end.

  Sadie McLure. God, the irony would be wonderful.

  Not everyone was driven mad at the Golden Hall. Most were not, though it was hard to differentiate them as they ran from the hellscape splattered with blood.

  Lystra Reid’s gown—Prada, very chic—was already red, so the blood didn’t show. However, her shoes—Christian Louboutin pumps—were absolutely ruined.

  But she could not resist, as she fled the room, crying out in her pretended madness: “ ‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.’ ”

  Thus did Lear quote from King Lear as she kicked off her shoes and ran barefoot into the cold night, laughing and twirling as snowflakes fell.

  FIFTEEN

  Keats handed Plath a cup of coffee. Her hands were shaking. It was morning and she’d had no sleep. They stood in the kitchen, Keats in some soccer team jersey and sweatpants; Plath in an unattractive sweater, panties, and socks.

  “It’s plugged. The big one.” Keats sipped his own coffee and looked at her over the rim as he took a second sip.

  “What?” She was confused for a moment, thinking he was talking about the coffee.

  “The second hole. It’s plugged. I don’t think it was all that dangerous, anyway, but I’ve patched it, the lymphocytes are keeping it clean, and I can see clotting factor forming nicely.”

  “Thanks.” She sent him a very serious look and added, “I don’t say that enough, do I? Thanks.”

  “Hungry?”

  She considered it. “Yes, I am.”

  “I’ll fry some eggs and bacon. No bangers, I’m afraid. You Americans don’t really do sausages very well.”

  “You can cook?”

  He made a small laugh. “Oddly enough, I don’t actually live at Downton Abbey.” Then, thinking that may have sounded resentful, he smiled and touched her shoulder. “I learned a bit of this and that. Enough to fry an egg and make toast. If we have bread.” He searched the cupboards. “Yes, we do have bread. But no beans or tomato.”

  “Beans?”

  He sighed. “The thing you Americans so proudly think of as breakfast is a sad affair compared to a proper full English breakfast. Eggs, bacon, toast, black pudding, mushrooms, beans, and a nice grilled tomato. And coffee, of course, unless you prefer tea.”

  “Black pudding?”

  “Given your adventures tonight, it’s maybe best not to discuss black pudding.”

  “No?”

  “It’s also called blood sausage.”

  “Ah. Yeah. Enough blood.”

  He set a rectangular grill on the cooktop and turned on the fire. He peeled strips of bacon from the package and started the flame beneath a sauté pan. In
seconds the bacon was sizzling, and both the familiar sound and aroma made Plath’s mouth water.

  “Were you going to tell me?” he asked, once he had things organized and under way.

  She stalled for a moment by sipping her coffee. She didn’t have to tell him. But he had possibly just saved her life.

  “I was planning an armed attack. I was planning to kill people. I met with Stern, without you. I asked him for … and he said …” She sighed, lost momentarily. “I never really asked myself whether it was the right thing. I have this picture in my head.…” She let that sentence peter out, not willing, still, to tell him everything. Not the things that would make him despise her.

  He nodded. “You started to suspect you’d been wired.” He sighed, turned the bacon, pushed the toast down, and used his spatula to keep the eggs from spreading out. “And you didn’t tell me because you thought I might be the one doing it.”

  “It’s the world we’re in, isn’t it?” she asked.

  He nodded. “It’s the world we’re in.”

  “But it wasn’t you.” She took his hand, which after a few seconds he took back to press the spatula down on the bacon.

  “Which leaves who?” he asked.

  She glanced toward the door, wondering if anyone was on the other side listening. “Wilkes. Billy. Maybe even Vincent, maybe that affectless thing he’s doing is just camouflage. Or it’s someone else with BZRK, someone not from our group. We’re just a part of it, after all.”

  “You’re sure it was a biot, not a nanobot?”

  She played the memories back. “Not a hundred percent.” She tried out various values in her head. “Seventy percent sure. But if I’m planning on blowing up, um, attacking the Tulip … the Armstrongs wouldn’t be doing that; they wouldn’t be wiring me to kill them.”

  He served the food onto two plates, and they sat at the counter and ate, side by side, leaning so that their shoulders would touch.

  Finally Keats spoke. “If you were wired, why? I mean, what you’re pointing to are kind of, I don’t know, moral changes.”