BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

“You have a name, soldier?” Suarez asked as he set the plate carefully on the floor, five feet from where she sat.

“Yes, sir,” he said reflexively. So (a) he was an ex-soldier, and (b) he knew that she’d been an officer.

He flushed, realizing his mistake. Then said, “You can call me Chesterfield.”

“That’s not your name. It’s a brand of cigarette.” When he did not demur, she said, “So, I’m guessing the other guards will be Marlboro and Lucky Strike?”

“Eat your food. Ma’am.”

“Looks good. And I am hungry.” She crawled to the food. Took a sip of the wine. “Know what the wine is?”

?

?It’s French.”

“Expensive, too, I’d guess. No point paying to ship cheap wine all the way here. Of course I’m more of a whiskey drinker.”

“So’s the boss.”

“The boss,” Suarez said pensively. “The one who thinks civilization is about to crumble so she built Crazy Town here. You’re not crazy, though, right? You’re just here for the money? Bad economy and all, a former serviceman has bills to pay like anyone else.”

“If the boss says it’s all coming down, it’s all coming down. I mean, she’s probably the smartest person in the world, smarter than Dr. Stephen Hawking.”

Dr. Stephen Hawking? Suarez rolled that around in her head. A strange way for a guy who looked like this to put it. Doctor?

“Okay, well, what do you do for fun around here while you’re waiting for the apocalypse?”

“It won’t be an apocalypse for the people here; it will be a rebirth.”

No irony in his gaze. He was dead serious. Someone had definitely sold this boy a complete bill of goods.

“Okay, which still leaves the question of what you do to pass the time?”

He shrugged, and Suarez detected a softness in him. I’m going to try not to kill you, she thought.

“I don’t suppose there’s any way I can get a shower? You know, hot water? Soap?” She mimed it for him, mimicking the movements of a bar of soap over her body, not lasciviously—that would be too obvious and set off alarm bells. Just … enough. She just wanted him to connect his boredom with the mental picture of a reasonably attractive woman taking a shower. Let him stew on that for a while. Activate the twin male instincts of protection and predation.

Later, when the time was right, there would be the metal pail.

“No shower,” he said in a voice just a tiny bit lower than it had been. “I could maybe get you a deck of cards.”

“I would be very grateful.”

The explosion came as the elevator rose, an impact that knocked Keats, Plath, and Wilkes to their knees. Not an explosion that would bring down a building. Smaller.

But the elevator stopped moving, and the door did not open. The backlit buttons went dark. The overhead light snapped off, replaced by an eerie emergency light.

“He blew up the elevator doors down there,” Keats said, offering his hand to Plath.

She spurned it and jumped to her feet. “We have to get out of here.”

A second explosion, more distant this time. The second elevator.

“He’s cutting himself off,” Keats said.

“He’ll die with the explosion,” Plath said. Then, softly, “Maybe that was the plan all along.”

Wilkes had started trying to pry open the elevator doors. Keats and Plath jumped in, jamming splintering fingernails into the gap. Slowly, inch by inch, the door opened. They were between floors, but with an open space of several feet.