Читать книгу Bzrk Apocalypse - Майкл Грант - Страница 8

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.