BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

“Give me a second!” he yelled. In his desk, all the way at the back, he found the little vial he’d prepared against this very moment. He slipped it into his pocket along with the remote control that could unleash Armageddon and opened the office door for what he suspected would be the last time.

The area within the force field continued to fill with his children.

Keats had his biot back on Caligula’s optic nerve. He was again seeing what the killer saw. Caligula seemed to be sitting, perhaps with his back against a wall. His legs were stretched out before him. He stared at his missing fingers, bleeding freely, unbandaged. He leaned down to rub a spot of mud from his boot, glanced at the timer—six minutes and nine seconds—then apparently coughed as his head jerked violently and his hand came up to his mouth.

Just six minutes until the natural gas flooding the basement would achieve sufficient density that a spark would bring down the entire building. The gas was invisible dynamite being stacked, ton upon ton. Caligula’s eye glanced toward the ruptured pipe. He had a picture of something in his hand, a photograph of a serious little girl slumped in a busted-webbing lawn chair outside a shabby trailer. There was a Ferris wheel in the background.

Caligula coughed again and drew something out of his bag. Keats saw a small steel cylinder, a clear plastic hose smeared with Caligula’s blood, and a clear plastic mask with elastic straps. It reminded him of the lecture aboard an airplane: Should there be a sudden loss of cabin pressure … Caligula pulled the mask on, and now the plastic partly filled Keats’s view. Caligula was determined to wait out the—

No, he was up, up and staggering, but not toward the rupture, or toward the elevators. Keats saw a steel door. Caligula’s eye went to the handle, then his hand as it touched the metal of the door.

“He knows your guys are burning through,” Keats said dully.

“Jindal!” Charles yelled in response.

Jindal talked into his phone and reported, “They say they’ll be through any second.”

Caligula glanced back toward the bomb. Glanced at the gun in his hands. Suddenly they trembled. He seemed to be struggling to hold on to the weapon; his mutilated hand was still bleeding freely, but even the fingers on his good hand looked stiff, uncooperative.

The gun fell from his grip. The picture, too, was facedown on the floor.

“He’s having a stroke,” Keats reported. Go on, he told himself, just keep watching. Until the end. Be the good boy. No freaking out, no last-minute pleas. Tough, that’s how his brother Alex had always been. “He’s stroking out from the artery I cut.”

Sadie was looking at him, her eyes ashamed, horrified.

“Not your fault,” he said to her. “None of this is your fault.”

“But it is,” she said.

“He’s picked up a crowbar. His fingers can barely hold it. He’s dropped it. He’s staring at it.”

“For God’s sake, evacuate the building!” Plath shrieked at the Twins.

Burnofsky, disheveled but animated, came in with guards on either side. His rheumy eyes sparkled. “Ah, ah, ah!” he said on spying Plath and Keats and Wilkes. “So, that’s the panic.” He seemed pleased and relieved.

“Help me get these idiots to evacuate the building,” Plath pleaded. “Caligula’s flooding the basement with natural gas. In six minutes this whole place goes up!”

“Is that true?” Burnofsky demanded, squinting hard at the Twins. He glanced at the monitor. The cameras in the basement had been redirected, searching for Caligula. A grainy image showed him walking, dragging one leg, then collapsing on the floor.

Keats had never been inside the brain of a dying man. There was nothing to see on the optic nerve, nothing changing in his immediate environment. But the eyelid no longer blinked as often, and it seemed to be drooping, partly obscuring the view.

If Caligula died before the explosion, then Keats would have been his killer. His biot might sit for several minutes in a dead man’s brain before the explosion killed his biot and plunged him down into the dark hell of madness.

How would it feel, he wondered. How would it feel to no longer be himself?

Keats’s throat was dry. His breathing was shallow. He was afraid. First would come the razor edge of madness, to be followed by an explosion that—

A brilliant flash of light from Caligula’s eye.

The same bright flash filled the monitor that had been trained on Caligula. The camera aimed at the exterior where the men had been wielding the cutting torch went dead.

“They burned through!” Jindal cried.

“System,” Charles yelled, his voice cracking. “Sublevel two, northeast corner stairwell cameras!”

Blank nothing, dead cameras.

“System, sublevel one, northeast corner!”