BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

“It was an important job. He was an important boy. Man, actually. Because he was definitely a man by the end,” Sadie said.

“I’m glad you told me this,” Mrs. Cotton said, though her face was anything but happy. “Did you tell him?”

“Did I tell him what?” Sadie asked.

“Did you tell him that you loved him?”

Sadie took her hand and squeezed it gently. “Yes. I told him that I loved him. I told him that many times.” Sadie glanced at Wilkes, who blushed and looked down. “He loved me, and I loved him. I think that memory is all that’s kept me alive.”

Sadie sat for a while longer with Noah’s mother and left her with enough small gold bars to take the edge off her poverty.

She and Wilkes walked down streets that still showed the bullet holes, the fire scorches, the wreckage of the Plague of Madness. But London had suffered this badly before in its long history and knew how to put itself back together. Crews were at work. There were police on the streets. Life was slowly returning.

A century would pass before New York City could say the same.

“Now what?” Wilkes asked.

“How much of what I told that woman was true?” Sadie asked.

Wilkes met her gaze and waited, saying nothing. Finally she said, “Now what?”

They were in front of what had once been a pizza restaurant, but was now burned out and choked with rubble.

“How long has it been since you had a decent pizza, Wilkes?”

“Long, long time,” Wilkes acknowledged, peering into the restaurant. “I think those ovens may still be usable. Of course someone would have to clean the place up. Get the gas working again.”

“You have something better to do?” Sadie asked. She stepped over the threshold, bent down, and grabbed hold of a broken table. “Help me with this.”

TWELVE YEARS LATER

Three windows were open in Sadie McLure’s brain.

Her three biots sat immobile in the glass vial she wore on a chain around her neck.

When business was slow at Poet Pizza, she would sit in a corner booth with her old friends, Anthony and Wilkes. Their daughter would tease the cooks while their baby son chuckled on his father’s lap.

Ten thousand miles away to the south, Michael Ford, once known as Vincent, supervised the skeleton staff that maintained what had become, in effect, a prison.

A prison with a single prisoner. Who sat in her cell, chained to the wall, screaming.

“Meeee? Meeee?”