BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

On her eighteenth birthday, Lystra had filed papers to form the Mad Alice Holding Company. And she’d gotten her first tattoo. She’d told the tattoo artist, “I want my adoptive parents, like in this picture. But I want them to be screaming.”

The tattoo artist had been reluctant, but an extra thousand dollars had cured him of all doubt.

The placement she’d chosen was strange. Her stepmother was beneath one breast, so that she seemed to be smothered by the weight of it. Her stepfather, also screaming, was beneath the other.

Once both tattoos were complete, they began to speak to her. They wept, sometimes. Other times they threatened. She heard their voices so very clearly. If she stripped off her shirt and her bra, she could see their mouths moving as they cried out in pain and despair.

But they could be useful, too, the talking tattoos. It was the dead Mr. Reid who suggested using her inheritance to buy a small, failing medical testing company outside of Washington, D.C.

So the Mad Alice Holding Company was dissolved and a successor corporation formed as an Isle of Man company, exempt from most supervision. And then, another stroke of unusual luck: a midsize competitor in the medical testing field had suffered a catastrophic hacking that had spilled the records all over the Internet.

Lystra Reid bought the stricken company and brought in the best security people around to ensure that a similar fate would never befall her. The result was a medical testing company, Directive Medical, which had never suffered a successful break-in, while—not so strangely—security problems plagued her competitors.

At the age of twenty-four, Reid controlled a third of the independent medical labs in North America, as well as significant portions of other markets around the world.

It was amazing what you could learn from data mining the health records of more than two hundred million people worldwide. You could, for example, learn that the wife of a brilliant medical researcher named Grey McLure had a rare cancer. And you could learn that this McLure fellow was suddenly in a desperate search for living cell samples. And with just a bit more work you could discover that he was also looking for a wide range of animal tissue samples for a very secret project of some sort.

Lystra hung up the phone, indifferent really to the current spreadsheet drama from her office. It didn’t matter. There was no future to worry about. She swallowed the last of the bourbon and stood up to stretch. The marina was nestled between Tiburon and the adjoining Belvedere Island. Unpretentious yet extremely expensive homes rose on a cute little hill to her left and up the longer, wooded slope of Belvedere to her right. Looking south through the forest of masts, she could see San Francisco. Fog was rolling out, revealing the city, all muted pastels and off-whites.

It was all in all a beautiful location, with sailboats and ferries and container ships passing by in review. A genteel, civilized, prosperous place.

And all of it about to come to a terrifying end.

It had been good to watch Janklow go mad; he had annoyed her on more than one occasion. She wanted to get a few tastes of the madness out here in the real world—before the final chapters, which would force her to hide out and watch it as well as she could via electronic means. The personal, real-world experiences would help her to enjoy the next step.

“All done?” the waiter asked, coming to clean her table.

“Soon,” she said.

EIGHT

The first thing Bug Man had asked was, “Where are we?”

Bug Man had flown on a private jet before. He wasn’t indifferent to it, but he wasn’t overly impressed, either. George had not told him where they were going but had retreated into a book, remaining sullen and uncommunicative.

Bug Man saw a city in the distance. It was all tan walls and terra-cotta roofs, a large blur extending far out in every direction, reaching beneath the jet with roads full of small cars.

“The former center of the Earth, once upon a time. The Eternal City,” George had said.

“Yeah, which is what?”

George sighed. “Your education is deplorable. The Eternal City is a reference to Rome.”

“Rome? That’s like, Italy, right?”

George managed not to roll his eyes, but only just. “Yes, Italy, Bug Man. Pizza, pasta, wine, priests, fashion, Rome. The Coliseum,” he added. “Gladiators and all of that.”

“I saw the movie,” Bug Man said. “Also, I played the game. Not a great game.”

“No?” The plane took a little lurch as a crosswind hit it. “What makes a good game?”

Bug Man had been much more sure of his ground on this topic. He didn’t know much about history, but he knew games. “A good game? That’s one where you can’t stop playing it, even when you’re asleep. Whatever you have to do that takes you away from the game, all you’re thinking about is getting back into it.”

“Hard?”

“It’s not about hard. Yeah, it has to be challenging. Can’t be so easy it’s over in five minutes, right? But it’s not just about hard; otherwise, you could play online chess or work a Rubik’s cube, man.”

He heard the grinding of the landing gear coming down.