BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

Back to New York, that’s what Lystra said. “Back to New York to watch the show, yeah. A lot happening very soon. Timing. It’s all in the timing, yeah.”

So here they were. New York City, and damned if the tattooed madwoman didn’t have an apartment a block away from the Tulip. He could look straight down Sixth Avenue and see the building. He could run for it, escape, get to the Twins and say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but you don’t know what this crazy bitch is doing!”

He could do that. And they’d thank him for the information and then kill him. Or Lystra would catch him and she would show him that scary face she had, the one where she seemed almost to turn into a skeleton. And then she could kill his biots and turn him loose.

Death or madness. Seriously? That’s what it was down to? The three windows in his head said yes, yes, that was exactly the choice.

He wondered rather morbidly just what kind of crazy he would be. Stories were still leaking out of Stockholm. They said some big-deal banker found a way to hang himself from a chandelier. They said a French general was found smeared with feces, crying. They said a famous American horror novelist had run into the street and beaten a party Santa to death with a fire extinguisher.

Which crazy will you be, Anthony? he asked himself.

What escape was there? The Twins? The American government?

He stopped breathing. The answer—not a good answer, a weak, probably worthless answer—popped into his head.

Someone brilliant. Someone with mad skills. Someone who once had almost, sort of, liked Bug Man. And was just a block away.

Burnofsky.

Lystra had taken his phone. She was on her own phone right now in the adjacent room, telling her CEO, some dude named Tom, to fire all the remaining employees, effective now, this minute, shut it all down, the whole Directive Medical shebang, stop all checks and buy more gold. Yeah. Just don’t touch Cathexis.

Burnofsky. The dude had invented nanobots. It stood to reason he’d have … something. But how to reach him? He knew Burnofsky’s e-mail and his cell, but Bug Man had no phone.

He would have to wait until she was asleep, the monster in the next room.

Maybe I won’t be a hanging-myself crazy, Bug Man thought. Maybe I’ll be a nice, gentle, shit-smeared kind of crazy.

Somehow he was convinced that none of this would ever have happened if he’d just found the onions sooner. Gotten home.

With a chill he remembered his mother coming down with a sinus infection a year ago, give or take. She’d had tests done. Her DNA, too, might be stored somewhere on one of Lystra Reid’s drives.

Her plan was now frighteningly clear. She had used her web of medical testing companies to acquire and digitize DNA from millions of people. Once you had the DNA, you could grow a biot derived in part from that DNA. The biot-DNA-donor mind link would happen—which would be disorienting all by itself. Suddenly having windows open in your mind … well, that was going to be disturbing.

But nothing to what came next. Lear wasn’t out to disturb or unsettle people, she was out to destroy civilization. For that she needed madness. Widespread, inexplicable, irresistible madness.

So once the biots were born, she had only to kill them. An electrical surge maybe, or extreme heat or acid.

Would it really work? Would one crazy woman be able to bring the whole world crashing down?

He turned on the television; it was all he had. Al Jazeera TV had a news bulletin. He reached for the remote. He did not want to see more video of that horror show in Stockholm.

Suddenly he felt Lystra’s presence and realized he was no longer hearing her from the other room. “Leave it,” she said, looking toward the TV screen. “I think something kind of, yeah, big just happened.”

Seven months earlier, the younger British prince had given blood in a public show of support for a National Blood Service blood drive. The NBS had been helped in their work by volunteers from Directive Medical UK.

Of course security for the Royal Family was very tight, so no one would be allowed to actually know which was his donation. It was labeled anonymously, just a numerical tracer, and sent off to the blood bank.

Except that the Directive Medical lab tech had already swapped it out with an earlier sample.

Now, as the television picture showed, the prince was in a gondola of the London Eye—the huge Ferris wheel beside the Thames—as part of an outreach to disadvantaged youth.

The gondolas were large enough to hold a couple of dozen people at once, and were in fact holding twelve specially chosen children of carefully varied ethnicities, who shrank in horror against the far end of the gondola as the prince repeatedly ran at the transparent wall and smashed his head into it.

Blood smeared the plastic. Blood completely covered the prince’s face and would have rendered him unrecognizable if not for the familiar red hair.

The Eye was slowly coming around, bringing the gondola back to earth, but that footage from three minutes earlier—brutal video of the raving royal slamming himself again and again and again—was competing in one half of the screen with a live shot showing him flailing, kicking, spitting blood in every direction as appalled Royalty Protection in plainclothes and uniformed London Met police tried to get him under control.

“That was excellent,” Lystra said. “You try to nail the timing, yeah, and arrange something spectacular, but wow, that was better than I’d hoped for. Yeah.”