BZRK: Apocalypse
Page 95

I wasn’t brave enough to love you, Noah.
Bitch-slap me? Me? Me? Me?
Incoherent sounds came from Lear’s mouth between manic twitches. The doctor and Stillers laid her down on the floor.
“I’m giving her blood thinners,” a funny, funny voice said, coming from her mother’s screaming mouth, the cleaver in Lystra’s hand, yeah, die yeah, slap me?
Me? Meeeee? Meeeee?
The helicopter had a top speed just ten knots slower than the sleigh. The sleigh pulled away but with painful, painful slowness.
And the sleigh was definitely not faster than cannon or missiles.
The missile grazed the cockpit with a fiery tail and exploded a hundred yards ahead. The sleigh’s computers were fast, but not fast enough at one hundred sixty miles an hour to avoid the ice and stone thrown up in the explosion. It was like driving full speed in a hailstorm with golf ball–sized hail.
But the sleigh survived, rocking wildly from side to side.
“Okay, we get one shot at this, kid,” Suarez said. “Be ready!”
Suarez hit the brakes. The sleigh slowed in a storm of ice particles, the helicopter roared by overhead, and Bug Man pushed the button.
The recoil was unexpected, as was the inundation of smoke and flame as the missile launched from the sleigh and curved into the sky, seeking a heat source.
The missile flew harmlessly past the helicopter—which now, ominously, turned to come back. It came on cannon blazing, blasting ice on its way to killing Suarez and Bug Man.
Suarez spun the sleigh and shot back toward the valley.
“You know there’s a big giant hole up ahead there, right?” Bug Man yelled.
“Yeah. We’re going to see what this toy can do.”
The distance was not great. The helicopter was a half mile behind. Suarez could only hope the chopper pilot wouldn’t risk firing on her own people.
Out into nothingness, out over the lip of the valley, the sleigh shot out into midair. And fell. The engines roared, trying frantically to push enough air downward to slow the descent. It worked, but not well.
The sleigh fell, faster and faster, and Suarez grunted and switched the thrust from vertical to horizontal once again.
The sleigh bolted forward and fell even more rapidly.
Ahead, a patch of blue.
Just feet from the plastic dome, Suarez kicked all the thrust back to lift. The force of it bent the dome, then the sleigh broke through the plastic and with a loud crash slammed into the pool, snapped a diving board, and rode up and over a chaise longue to stop just inches from breaking through the far end of the dome.
The engine died then and the sleigh lay inert, back half trailing in the shallow end, front end tilted up.
“I gotta get this game,” Bug Man said.
Tara Longwood—the chopper pilot—gave a thumbs-up to her weapons officer and took a victory pass over the wet sleigh below.
Then she turned the helicopter back, scanning for any other targets. There was still a sleigh at the top of the cliff, but last she’d seen, the pilot, Babbington, was running like a scared rabbit.
However … She frowned and pointed. A green Sno-Cat sat steaming within a few yards of the sleigh.
“One of ours,” the weapons officer said. “Must have just come up from Forward Green.”
Tara nodded. She saw a dark-haired man climb into the sleigh’s cockpit before she flew on around, circumnavigating the valley, looking for trouble.
By the time she got back to the sleigh and the Sno-Cat, she had heard a panicky babble of voices in her earpiece, coming from the ground. The dark-haired fellow in the sleigh was waving his arms, trying to attract her attention.
A young woman and another man were carrying what could only be a body toward the Sno-Cat.
Tara brought the chopper in low, ready to help ferry the wounded now that the fight was over. She landed, and the young man in the sleigh trotted toward her, seemingly unconcerned, waving as he came on.
She slid the side panel of her cockpit open. “What is this?” she asked.
And Vincent shot her in the face.
THIRTY-THREE
Plath woke slowly. She was a drowning person, fighting her way up toward air and light, but it was so far, and her arms were so heavy.
Then, all at once, she was awake. A doctor was beside her. And to her utter amazement, Vincent, Wilkes, and Bug Man were standing before her. There was also a Latino woman she had never seen before.
“Where am I?” Plath asked.
“You’re still here, in the valley,” Wilkes said.
Plath stared. Looked left and right. It could have been a room in any well-appointed, new hospital. She saw her leg, swathed in rigid webbing over bandages. It hurt like hell. Her arm hurt as well, but not as bad.
Her face felt raw, as if it had been sunburned. Something was wrong with the bandaged hand. She saw bandages over the stubs of her amputated little and ring finger.
Her head hurt. But she was alive.
In her mind, she saw three windows.
She took a deep breath, drank some water through a straw, answered the doctor’s questions, and said, “What’s happened?”
“Later,” Wilkes said. “We had you brought around so that, uh … there’s a pretty big question, and we think we need to ask you.”
“Wait. Are we—”
“We’re in charge,” Vincent said. “We’re running this base now. Suarez here can fly a helicopter, and do a few other things, and—”
Wilkes broke in to say, “And with Lear out of the picture, all her wired-up zombies here didn’t exactly know what to do.”