BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

“Maybe,” Plath said. “But our time in the Garden of Eden had to end eventually. We had to go back. We’re supposed to be running things.”

Keats met her gaze and shook his head slowly. “No, not we. You, Sadie.” Then with a wry smile he corrected himself. “You, Plath.”

She could have said that they were partners. She could have said that obviously he was as important as she was.

But she had not told him about the message from Lear telling her to get back in the game. The message she had ignored for days.

She wondered if she should tell him now.

But instead she copied him and mopped up some gravy. She didn’t have time to worry about tending to Keats’s ego. Her mind was filling with the implications of the suspicion that they were being shepherded.

Driven.

Manipulated.

· · ·

Anthony Elder, who had once used the name Bug Man, was shopping for onions at Tesco. Not just onions, there were other things on the list, too. But it was onions that somehow irritated him.

Nutella

Beans

Bread

Pasta (store brand, nothing fancy)

Mushrooms (fresh, button, 1/2 pound)

Cheerios

2 oranges

3 onions (the white kind)

Three onions. The white kind.

This was his life. Again. His mother was already on him about going back to school. To school!

“You don’t want to go on neglecting your education, Anthony. That’s most likely why you were let go.”

Let go.

Well, no, Mum, I wasn’t exactly let go. I ran for my life—flew for it, actually, all the way back to England—after my mistakes caused the American president to blow her brains out in front of the whole world. It wasn’t because I couldn’t conjugate French verbs or recall the date of the Battle of Hastings.

He didn’t say that to his mother, of course.

He walked down the cereal aisle searching for Cheerios, maneuvering around a woman who was pushing both a baby buggy and a shopping cart. He found the cereal, puzzled for a moment over what size box he should be getting. His mother would chide him no matter what he chose.

Small, then. Easier to carry home. Less chance of catching some smart remarks from passing thugs.

He’d been on top of the world. Now he was self-conscious about being seen by others his age, struggling with plastic bags of pasta and Nutella and onions. The white kind.

A

pretty girl coming toward him looked right through him as if he was invisible.

He’d had the most beautiful girl in the world. Jessica. She’d been a slave to him. A slave. The memories made him ache inside. He would never get within conversational range of a girl like that again.