Bzrk Apocalypse

“Yeah, but games are real,” Billy said. That’s what you don’t get, with respect to you, Plath. Games are real to the people playing them. While they’re playing.”

No one said anything; after all, Billy was just a kid. But Keats couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d just heard something important, that Billy had blurted out the truth. It could be real, and dangerous, and deadly, and yet still be a game, he thought.

First published in Great Britain 2014

by Electric Monkey – an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London, W11 4AN

Copyright © The Shadow Gang 2014

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Endpage photograph © Georgy Shafeev@shutterstock.com

First e-book edition 2014

ISBN 978 1 4052 6313 9

eISBN 978 1 7803 1256 9

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Our story began over a century ago, when seventeen-year-old Egmont Harald Petersen found a coin in the street. He was on his way to buy a flyswatter, a small hand-operated printing machine that he then set up in his tiny apartment.

The coin brought him such good luck that today Egmont has offices in over 30 countries around the world. And that lucky coin is still kept at the company’s head offices in Denmark.

For Katherine, Jake, and Julia.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

ARTIFACT

ELAPSED TIME

FIVE

SIX

ARTIFACT

ARTIFACT

SEVEN

EIGHT

BRAZIL

LOS ANGELES

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

ARTIFACT

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

ARTIFACT

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

STATE OF PLAY

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

TWO YEARS LATER

TWELVE YEARS LATER

Coming soon from Michael Grant

Sandra Piper was having dinner with friends when it started.

She was eating chilled lobster on the teak deck of a producer friend’s Malibu home, along with a former co-star named Wade Talon (a ridiculous screen name in Sandra’s opinion), her current director, Quentin (no last name necessary), a very rich and rather magnificently tattooed woman named Lystra Reid who had an odd vocal tic that added “Yeah,” to random sentences, and an extraordinarily fit, tall, and broad-shouldered man whose name she kept forgetting but who might have been named Noble, or something very close to that.

The Noble creature was listening, rapt, while the more famous folk discussed work and mutual friends and more work. In fact, in one way or another it was all work.

Sandra had been nominated. Best Actress. Very tough competition. The oddsmakers called her a long shot at six to one. Long but not impossible. And despite the fact that Sandra Piper was a mother of two, a down-to-earth thirty-ish woman with a masters in economics who had smoked pot exactly twice in her life and never drank more than two glasses of wine, she was thinking of seducing young Mr Shoulders. Mr Shy Grin. Mr Large-But-Sensitive Hands.

Because he was definitely interested, and she had been divorced for two years and dated no one in that time. And she was exhausted from long days on the current shoot, plus her son, Quarle (three years old), had just gotten over a two-week-long bout of flu.

And really, what the hell was the point of being America’s Sweetheart if you couldn’t even get laid? Would a male actor in the same situation even hesitate? Well, some, sure. But lots wouldn’t. So why should she? Wasn’t that why Quentin had invited Noble . . . No, wait, now she remembered. His name was Nolan. Whatever. Wasn’t he there for her, um . . . amusement?

Unless. Oh, had he come with the Lystra person? Was he here for her ? She would be closer to his age, not a beauty but attractive enough, given that she was not Hollywood at all but some sort of healthcare billionaire.

No. No, young Mr Body of Steel was not eyeing Lystra. He was eyeing the next winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress. Uh huh.

But the idea sighed inside her and deflated like a balloon with a slow leak. She shook her head, a tiny movement not intended for anyone else, and took a deep breath. She had to help Quinn (seven years old) with her stupid California Mission project, due tomorrow.

God she was boring. Boring and responsible and definitely America’s Sweetheart, except that when it came right down to it, she was Mommy.

Suddenly her hand jerked and she tipped her wine glass over. The last ounce of white wine drained onto the wood surface, alarming no one.

“Sorry. I just—”

Sandra frowned. Shook her head.

“What’s the matter, Sandy?” Wade asked.

“I’m just . . .” She shook her head again. Frowned, despite the fact that frowning would crease her ageless forehead. “Oh my God, is there something in the wine? I’m . . . I’m seeing something.”

Nolan looked at her from beneath lashes that would probably have tickled her cheeks (and other places, too, if she’d just said the word) and asked, “Are you feeling ill?”

“It’s . . .” She laughed. “This is going to sound crazy. It’s like I can see something that isn’t there. I’m . . .” She looked away from them, stared out toward the black Pacific Ocean, wondering if somehow what she was seeing was a reflection off the wine glasses.

But no. It was still there. It was as if she had a second set of eyes, and they opened onto a small TV screen in a corner of her own eyes.

“I’m seeing, like, like . . . just flat, but weird.” Then, a sudden, sharp gasp. “Oh my God, a second one. Like another window in my head.”

“Maybe you should lie down,” Nolan suggested.

“Or have another glass of wine,” Quentin said and laughed. But now he, too, was staring at her sideways, with concern on his face.

“There’s two . . . Oh! Oh! Oh! There’s a giant insect. I’m going nuts. Maybe I’m having a stroke.”

“I’m calling 911,” Nolan said and pulled out his phone.

“Jesus Christ! It’s a huge bug. I can see it! It’s turning, it’s coming toward me . . . Oh, oh God, I think I’m moving it! I think I’m making it move!”

She pushed back hard from the table. Glassware clattered and toppled. Wade leapt to his feet and caught her arm as she lurched away from the table.

“It has eyes! It has eyes! Oh God, oh God. My face! My eyes! Those are my eyes!”

She pushed Wade aside violently, then, abashed, shocked by her own behavior, she tried on a fleeting smile, reached out a reassuring hand and said, “I think I need help. I think I’d better see a doctor.”

“That would be best,” Lystra Reid said coolly, then added, as if an afterthought, “Yeah.” She had moved to place her back against the railing and was watching with detached interest. At least she wasn’t taking a picture to tweet later.

“Ambulance is on the way,” Nolan reported.

And Sandra thought, Well, he certainly won’t sleep with me now . But that thought came and left in a heartbeat, because something else was happening on that eerie picture-in-picture view in her head. She was seeing a falling drop of liquid that must have been a million gallons. It was far bigger than the terrifying bugs with her face smeared across them, her eyes; those nightmare insects with her own damned eyes.

The drop landed. It swept around the two bugs, engulfing them. And instantly it began to eat away those insect legs. It chewed burning holes into those insect carapaces. It burned away those distorted reflections of her own face like an old-time filmstrip jammed in a projector that bubbles and caramelizes and is gone.

The picture frames in her head blinked out.

They were gone as fast as they had come.

Sandra stood now, seeing only through her own eyes, seeing only what was real.

She laughed. “Hah-hah-hah-hah. Hahahahahahahah!”

And then she screamed. “Ahhhh! Aaaaaahhhh! You’re devils! Devils!”

Nolan moved to grab her because she was climbing awkwardly onto the table. She slipped, skinned her knee against the edge, stared down at the blood and shrieked, shrieked like a mad thing.

She snatched up a knife. Not a very big knife; just a dinner knife with a point and modest serrations. She stabbed it into Nolan’s thick bicep.

The strong man screamed, a more feminine sound than one might have expected.

“Hah! Hah, devil!” Sandra yelled, happy at the sight of his blood, fascinated.

Wade and Quentin backpedaled, making sure to keep the table between themselves and the long shot for Best Actress.

In Sandra’s eyes they were not backing away, they were coming for her, with their fangs out, and claws for fingers, and liquid fire dripping from their eyeballs—it was all about the eyeballs, it was there, in the eyes, the demons.

Sandra Piper turned the knife around and stabbed it into her belly. It didn’t go far. It drew blood, but just a stain the size of a quarter.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Quentin yelled.

“No, no, stop that, stop that this instant,” Wade said.

Nolan made another move—this time wary—to take the knife from her.

Sandra spit at him. “Hah!” she yelled, and stabbed the knife into her own eye. Her left eye. Pulled it out bloody and clotted with viscous goo.

Cries of horror, and now even she could see that they were backing away, the devils. It was working. Hah! Run, devils, run!

She then stabbed the knife into her other eye and pushed it through cracking bone, pushed it until the hilt was stopped. Then she twisted the knife around as if she was trying to churn her own brain.

Her knees gave way. The knife dropped from her hand.

“Stupid Mission project,” she said. Then fell onto her back, laughing and howling, laughing and howling. “Devils! Dev—”

It was Lystra Reid who took the knife from her. And Lystra who placed a napkin over the bloody craters in her face.

Not that Sandra Piper could see that.

TWO

Her name was Sadie McLure. She had indifferently styled brown hair and smart, skeptical brown eyes that could take on golden highlights and even suggestions of green in certain lights. She had freckles on her cheeks and across the bridge of her nose. She’d never liked the freckles, they seemed to be accompanied by the word “cute” and she didn’t like people thinking of her as cute. Cute was a belittling word.

The cute freckles had a second outpost on her chest, and a lesser presence on her shoulders. But all her freckles were now almost hidden by a rich, deep tan.

Her name was Sadie McLure, but in certain company she called herself Plath, after the great and tragically suicidal poet.

It was her nom de guerre. Her BZRK name. The name that defiantly acknowledged that there were only two possible fates in her future as a member of BZRK: death or madness.

She had a net worth expressed in billions of dollars. She had a small but effective private army in the form of McLure Labs security under a Mr Stern. (She must have heard his first name at some point, but what had stuck was the Mr And the Stern.)

She had seen terrible things, Sadie had. As Plath she had done terrible things, too, and had terrible things done to her.

She was sixteen years old.

A month had passed since that bizarre and fateful day when the Doll Ship had burned down much of the Hong Kong harbor waterfront. A month since the president of the United States had blown her own brains out on nationwide TV after being (correctly) suspected of murdering her husband.

A month since Sadie, as Plath, had sent her biots into Vincent’s brain, one armed with acid to burn the biot-death madness from him.

The great advantage of biots over their mechanical competitors, the nanobots, was the closeness of the connection between twitcher and biot. That was also the greatest disadvantage because that same connection meant that the loss of a biot sent its creator on a downward spiral into madness.

Vincent had spiraled following the loss of one biot and serious injury to a second.

From a desperate desire to save Vincent, Sadie had undertaken a grim mission to cauterize parts of his brain. But at this moment that terrible day was compartmentalized, if not forgotten, and Sadie was doing something that was not at all terrible. She was on a white-sand beach beneath palm trees. A picnic was laid out on a woven mat of the kind the locals used. There was cold fried chicken, cold lobster and a bowl of vanilla-spiked fruit in the local Madagascar style.

There was also a bottle of white wine, now empty, and a bottle of vodka, now partly empty.

And there was a boy.

He was as naked as Sadie. His name was Noah, though like Sadie he sometimes used a nom de guerre: Keats.

Whether they were Plath and Keats or Sadie and Noah, she was on top and he was inside her. They were both smiling because the ash from the joint in Sadie’s mouth had landed on the very tip of Noah’s nose and when she blew it away it made him sneeze. Which struck them both as funny, so they laughed, and that physical convulsion had interesting side effects.

“Laugh again,” Noah said.

“Not yet,” Sadie said.

“You’re torturing me.”

“I’m teaching you endurance,” she said, voice slurring.

“I’m standing right at the very edge of a cliff,” he said, and his eyes closed and his smile became dreamier. “If you laugh . . . or even move at all . . . or even breathe deeply, I’ll go right . . . mmmm . . . over . . . the edge.”

“You’re going with a cliff metaphor?” she asked, and giggled.

Which was all it took.

She watched his face while his body arched and thrust and shuddered and finally subsided. His expression was more animal than human in the first seconds, and the sounds he made were definitely not witty banter. Or even half-drunk and quite stoned banter. But then that feral look softened into the kind of expression you’d see on the face of a saint in a Renaissance painting.

And then he laughed, too.

And opened his blue, blue eyes and said, “Don’t go yet.”

He remained inside her, in more ways than one. He was also inside her brain, and not metaphorically. A tiny creature smaller than the full stop at the end of a sentence—a creature built from an exotic stew of DNA that included Noah’s own—was deep within Sadie’s brain. This was a biot . One of his, Noah’s biots, because biots were nothing if not unique to their creator. It was designated K2. Keats 2. His other biot, K1, was in a tiny vial stuck in the buttoned pocket of his shorts, which were . . . he looked around . . . over there, somewhere.

K2 had the job of maintaining the fragile latticework painstakingly built around a bulge in an artery in Sadie’s brain. Left alone, the aneurysm might never pop. Then again it might pop at any moment, which would almost certainly kill Sadie, perhaps over the course of pain-filled hours.

Noah had worked with scarcely a break over this last month to strengthen the Teflon casing around the deadly bulge. It was tedious work. Fibers had to be carried through Sadie’s eye, down the optic nerve, up and down the soggy hills and deep valleys of her brain—quite a long trip for a biot—then carefully threaded in place. Basket-weaving.

All the while a sort of picture-in-picture was open in Noah’s own mind, an artificially color-enhanced but grainy picture. Imagine a 3D special effects movie but with the color flattened out and stripped of nuance, all shot through a dirty lens.

Noah knew Sadie with an intimacy that was impossible for people who did not travel down in the meat . When she became aroused he could feel the artery beneath his biot’s six legs pumping faster, harder.

But it was not just the relatively monotonous, liquid-encased surface of the brain that he had seen up close. He had at various times, in the course of more than one desperate mission, crawled across her eyes, her lips, her tongue.

She kissed his mouth and then the place just beside his mouth and then his neck. Then she rolled off onto the blanket and looked toward the food.

“You didn’t . . .” he said.

“No.” She struggled to find the right tone. Unconcerned but not indifferent. Nonchalant, not like it mattered. Then tried switching to a sexy purr. “But I loved every minute. That’s not the only thing in the world, you know.”

“It’s not?” he asked, trying to be funny.

“Want some lobster?” she asked, deflecting him. She didn’t like talking about sex. The effects of weed and wine were ebbing, leaving her tired and groggy. She could be cranky in a minute if she let herself.

There were things nagging at her. Distractions. She wanted to keep pushing them away, but self-medication had its limits and all those niggling worries would resurface, frequency and intensity increasing. She had pushed it all away for a month and now “it” was pushing back.

“I do want some lobster, I absolutely do,” Noah said.

“Then trot on over there and get me some, too.”

He sighed. “It’s always something with you. Undress me. Make love to me. Feed me lobster. You are so demanding.” He stood up and she saw that half his hard, lean behind was coated with sand. She lay back, head resting on one hand, enjoying that particular sight, and the view beyond. They were in a secluded lagoon on the western edge of the island, facing the much larger island of Madagascar, which was a blur of green ten miles off.

A quarter mile to both north and south, armed men—fashionably attired in white Tommy Bahama shirts and automatic rifles—watched for any threat to their privacy. Just out of sight behind a rocky point, a yacht crewed by ex-soldiers rolled in the gentle swell and kept a radar lookout over the area.

Noah brought her pieces of lobster on a small china plate.

“We’re out of wine,” he said.

“Good. Time to sober up, anyway.”

“Is it?” he asked. “Why?”

She sat up and reached for her T-shirt. He interrupted her with a kiss and gently stroked her breasts as if saying good-bye to them. “I quite like these,” he said.

“I guessed that. Can I put on my shirt now?”

“I suppose.” He started to dress as well, shorts, a T-shirt, sandals. He reached down and pulled her to her feet.

“I’ll call for our cab,” Sadie said. She pressed the talk button on a handheld radio—there was no cell phone reception this far up-island.

Five minutes later, as they packed up the picnic, a glittering white cabin cruiser appeared around the point.

The captain gave a little toot-toot on the horn and the boat blew up.

It took a few seconds for the flat CRUMP! of the explosion to reach them. It took a bit longer for the debris to splash into the water.

And just like that Sadie and Noah were Plath and Keats once again, running now, food and blanket forgotten. McLure security men were tearing along the beach from north and south, assault rifles in their hands, yelling, “Get under cover, get under cover!”

The boat burned for a while—there was no possibility of anyone having survived—and then it slipped beneath gentle waves that were a very similar color to Noah’s eyes. The pillar of black smoke was smothered. A black smudge rose until it was caught by a breeze and blown away over the island.

Vacation was over. The war for the human race was back on.

THREE

The roll that had begun was accelerating. The ship’s ballast had shifted decisively. It rolled onto its side, sending the flame shooting hundreds of feet into the air.

The inside of Benjaminia was a slaughterhouse—dead marines, many more dead residents hung from bloody catwalks. The sphere turned on its axis, and floors became walls. Bodies fell through the air.

Like the turning drum of a dryer, the sphere rolled on and now people clinging to desperate handholds fell screaming and crashed into the painted mural of the Great Souls.

Water rushed in through the opened segments.

The blowtorch submerged but burned on and turned the water to steam as the Doll Ship sank, and settled on the harbor floor.

When the Doll Ship sank the Armstrong Twins had found themselves in Hong Kong’s Victoria harbor.

They could not swim. With some effort, and if they felt in a cooperative mood, they could manage to walk, dragging the useless third leg. But swim?

It was Ling who had saved their lives. Tiny, ancient, birdlike Ling. She had cupped her hand beneath their chin and churned the filthy water with her legs. She’d sunk beneath the waves repeatedly, rising each time to gasp in a single breath mixed with salt water, to cough and gag, and yet to keep her legs churning, until a fishing boat had come to the rescue.

They would find a way to reward Ling. They had vowed that. She had saved their lives and very nearly died herself.

The Armstrong Twins had made their way from Victoria harbor to Vietnam, where they had financial interests and owned a small but useful number of local government officials. From there they’d made their way to Malaysia, to the Sarawak state on the island of Borneo.

The Armstrong facility there was involved in mining rare earths. And it did a bit of logging, as well, all very eco-friendly, with careful replanting programs and all of that. Whatever it took to avoid too much scrutiny. The Armstrongs were good corporate citizens out of self-interest.

But this facility was not strictly about mining or logging. It was built of three elements: there were two identical buildings, each a crescent, facing each other across an elongated oval that formed an enchanting tropical garden, a sort of tamed version of the surrounding rain forest.