The pain was beyond belief, beyond anything Plath had ever felt before.
“See, honey, I’m not afraid to die, either. I’m afraid to fail. I’d rather die than lose the game, yeah, my game, my goddamned game!”
She fired again, this time into the meat of Plath’s arm.
“Oh, did I get the bone on that one? Ouch, yeah? I have doctors, I have morphine, I can help, but first—”
This crash was not nearly as loud as the gunfire. Just the crump! sound of a bourbon bottle hitting a skull.
Lear fell sideways, and Bug Man kicked her in the stomach, then grabbed the gun from her hand.
“Shoot her,” Plath cried through waves of agony and terror.
“Can’t. She’s got me. Biots. Some kind of dead man’s switch. She dies, I lose it. So you don’t kill her, either, Plath.”
“My biots never got to her brain. They’re only halfway up her neck.”
“Hah! You bluffed the crazy bitch?”
A loud, imperious banging at the front door. Bug Man fired through it. “They won’t shoot back,” he said, voice high with stress. “They might kill their boss.” Then he yelled, “You come in here, I shoot her! I shoot her right between the eyes!”
“That was gunfire,” Tanner said. “We go in.”
O’Dell threw a quick salute and ran for his sleigh. But Babbington had run off, and O’Dell had never been any sort of pilot.
“With me, Sergeant!”
Tanner fired the engine as, down below, the helicopter’s rotors began to turn.
THIRTY-TWO
Suarez did not hear the gunfire in her underground position, but on the monitor she did see men rushing, guns drawn.
“Something just hit the fan,” she muttered.
She had located her own sleigh. It was parked behind one of the dormitories, not hard to get to so long as no one was shooting at you.
“Hope to hell they fueled the damn thing up,” she said. She grabbed the guns from the dead guards, stuck them in her waistband feeling weighed down and a little ridiculous, and raced from the room.
The dungeon theme was over, now it was bright-lit hallway, white on white. Ahead, footsteps running. A man and a woman. It took her three shots to kill them.
The hallway dead-ended, and she had to double back to find an exit. She opened it quietly, glanced around to see the warehouse she expected, and ran toward concealment behind stacked plastic crates.
“Who is that?” a voice yelled.
“The prisoner got loose!” she yelled, waited until a worried face appeared, and put a bullet through its mouth.
Running, running, one of her extra guns clattered to the floor, but she kept running. Running through her mind was that whatever had sent armed men rushing around, it wasn’t her. They’d been headed somewhere else, after someone else.
Bless whoever the poor fool was, but that was not her problem.
Probably.
The sleigh came slipping and sliding, hard to control, very hard to control as Tanner raced it down the ramp. First things first: kill that chopper.
Small-arms fire popped off to his left, chipping stone from the wall to his right.
“RPG at your six!” O’Dell yelled.
The wobbly rocket arced toward them, fired from behind and below. It missed by inches and blew up against the stone wall. The sleigh was blown clear of the ramp, still a hundred feet up from the bottom of the valley.
But then the computer kicked in—roared the engines to push a tornado of air beneath the hovercraft—which slowed the descent so that rather than being fatal it was merely bone-jarring as it slammed down onto gravel.
“RPG!” O’Dell yelled again, but this time Tanner had seen it coming even before O’Dell and pushed the throttle forward. The sleigh bucked, kicked up a storm of gravel, and blew past the missile, which detonated fifty feet away.
“On that building!” O’Dell pointed and there, sure enough, were two men manhandling yet another round into the missile launcher.
“Like hell,” Tanner yelled, swung the nose of the sleigh around and fired blind at the building with one of his own missiles. It struck a second-floor window and blew a hole. It did not kill the men with the RPG, but the concussion knocked them onto their backs.
“The house!” Tanner yelled. He aimed the sleigh toward it and then, at the last second, sank the brakes into gravel and the sleigh skidded sideways into a stop. O’Dell had already opened the canopy and now leapt, pistol in hand, to rush the door.
The sniper fired once, and O’Dell slammed onto his face and did not move. At the same moment the door of the house flew open and a young black kid in a bathrobe appeared, dragging Sadie by one arm.
The sniper fired and missed.
Tanner spotted the muzzle flash, and thanked whatever God watched over him that the sleigh had skidded sideways, because his weapons were pointed in the right direction. He launched a missile that blew a hole in this second structure, and while the sniper was recovering Tanner emptied his pistol at the roofline.
“Get in! Get in!”
The boy climbed in, hauling a nearly helpless Plath after him. The canopy would not close with Plath’s legs sticking out, but Tanner wasn’t waiting. He gunned the engine and roared away toward the ramp, firing his thirty-mil cannon continuously, causing bright-red flowers to bloom on walls, empty ground, and a couple of men.
“Get her in, get her in!”
“Can’t, there’s no room!” Bug Man cried, but nevertheless he hauled a screaming, bloody Plath the rest of the way into the cockpit, a tumble of limbs and hair on Bug Man’s lap.
“Who are you?” Tanner demanded.
“They call me Bug Man.”
“Yeah, well, listen up, Bug Man. See this? That’s the throttle. That’s the brake. This is the yoke. The computer will help.”
“What? Why? Are you bailing out?”
“No, but you will be. There’s another one of these at the top of the ramp.”
Lear rose from the floor, woozy, took a stutter-step, and fell into the wall. She left a trail of blood behind.
“Fu … The … Yeah …” she muttered.
Her legs were jelly. Her head was going around and around and around and oh, no. She vomited onto the floor. Felt a little better after that. Wished she hadn’t been drinking. Wished she had more sleep. Yeah. Sleep would be good.…
Stillers came pounding in, gun drawn. Three other men, all armed.
“Boss!”
“Di … get ’em?”
“They’ve got the sleigh, but Tara’s getting airborne.”
“Kill them. Kill them,” Lear said, slurring where she wished she was shouting.
“Someone get the doctor!” Stillers yelled.
More voices yelling, all around her; voices yelling and walkie-talkies blasting away and something burning.
“I’m ‘kay,” she said. Why wouldn’t her mouth work?
She felt the side of her head, then stared at her hand, red with something she couldn’t bring herself to understand. “Mom?” she asked.
Slowly, slowly, her head stopped spinning. Her legs were still weak but she could stand. A white-coated doctor was doing something to her head. Someone else was putting something in her mouth. Water. Had she asked for water?
She blinked. Her father was here. What was he doing here?
She shook her head, which set off a cascade of pain. She was sitting now on a couch stained with red handprints.
Caligula. He had come around to peer at her, keeping his distance, but saying something. “She’s dead, Lyssie, she’s dead, and you can’t ever tell anyone what you’ve done.…”
“My head,” she managed to say. “Give me something. Give me something. Hurts.”
She blinked and her father was gone. She blinked again and pushed herself to her feet. “Kill them! Kill them!” she cried, and this time it came out right.
“Tara’s in the air,” Stillers said. “She’ll get them.”
By shee
r dumb luck more than skill the sleigh made it to the top of the ramp, weakly followed by small-arms fire that drilled a hole in the canopy and brought a whinny of fear from Bug Man.
“There it is,” Tanner yelled.
“I don’t know how to drive that thing!”
“Go!”
Bug Man tried to crawl out from under Plath, who was only barely moving and definitely not saying anything brilliant. There was a pool of blood on the seat that had seeped into Bug Man’s bathrobe.
This as much as Tanner’s shout propelled Bug Man out and onto the ice. He immediately fell down, and that fact saved his life when the sleigh he was aiming for suddenly began firing. Cannon fire blew 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 sprouting from the flesh soil.
“Mmm, left,” Plath mumbled.
The biots veered left toward the falling blood, leapt atop the softtextured, 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 covered then revealed, covered then revealed by blinking eyelids.
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 eyelid 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.
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, sending 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, he 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 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 helicopter.
“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 fingers slack.
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.
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 simply 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 humiliation.
Slap me? Slap me? SLAP ME?
I wasn’t brave enough to love you, Noah.
Bitch-slap me? Me? Me? Me?
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, coming 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 hailstorm with golf ball–sized 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 particles, the helicopter roared by overhead, and Bug Man pushed the button.
BZRK: Apocalypse Page 29