BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

Billy was already proffering the guard’s pistol to Keats, buttforward. Keats stared at it. Wilkes took it.

Keats stepped over the guard. He was crying softly and holding his wound with one hand while fumbling for his radio with the other.

He couldn’t be left alive to raise the alarm.

Wilkes and Billy both looked at Keats expectantly. Waiting for his order. Plath seemed mesmerized.

On me, the responsibility, Keats thought. It had been so quick, somehow, getting to this point, the kill-or-be-killed point.

Billy must have seen the answer in Keats’s eyes. He squatted and pressed the muzzle directly against the man’s heart, muffling the sound as much as he could.

BANG!

And blood sprayed across Billy’s face.

“It’s okay,” Billy said. “I did it before. Just another first-person shooter, right?”

Keats felt like throwing up. He felt a flash of fury at Plath. Shouldn’t she have made the decision? Shouldn’t the guilt be hers to bear?

The guard was motionless now. But all was not still. They were in a short hallway—barely painted drywall, weak overhead lighting, second door now opening fast, someone coming through expecting trouble, gun already leveled and—

BANG!

Head shot. A single hole drilled right in the man’s forehead. The back of his head—a crust of skull and hair and something like hamburger—hit the wall and slid down, leaving a trail.

“Go,” Keats said, barely audible.

Through the door, now in the wide-open space within the loading bay, boxes and crates and a chair and table and playing cards laid out, and a coffee mug, and flickering monitors.

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“Basement,” Keats managed to say, trying to push aside the memory of tears rolling down a doomed man’s cheeks.

One of the innocents I was trying to save, Keats thought.

Now, two of the innocents I was trying to save.

They were lost and needed light. Keats spotted a bank of light switches, crossed to them, made it halfway before his stomach sent its contents burbling out of his mouth. He threw every switch, wiped his mouth, and said, “Find a way down!”

The glare of fluorescent light had the effect of casting deep shadows that if anything made the room seem darker, with every high-piled stack of crates like a skyscraper shadowing narrow alleys.

They ran then, moved forward, the young sociopath with the name of a young sociopath leading the way. Billy moved like a cop, cover to cover, gun steadied in both hands, a goddamned gamer, a goddamned game, where would the bad guys pop up next?

“Whoa. Down here,” Wilkes said, waving her own gun fecklessly toward a dark hallway.

Billy moved smoothly ahead of her. Cover. Pause. Scan. Run to cover. Pause. Scan.

A freight elevator, with buttons for up and down.

“Down,” Keats said, feeling useless and now seeing flashes of his London home, so squalid and dull all his life, but now so beloved, so needed. To crawl into his own bed …

The elevator door opened on a guard with headphones in and singing along tunelessly, yet Keats recognized the song.

“Born This Way.” An old Gaga tune.

Keats barely flinched when Billy put a bullet into the guard’s head. The bullet must have hit just wrong because it entered the forehead and blew an exit wound out through the man’s jaw.

The ricochet could have killed one of them, but no, and the man went down with such completeness that he might have been a dropped sack of garbage.