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.”
“You’ve been unconscious for eighteen hours,” the doctor said. “I gave you a stimulant to wake you up. But it won’t last long, the pain will get worse, and you’ll be better off asleep for a while longer while your body recovers. You’ve been through a lot.”
“Why did you wake me up?” Plath asked Wilkes.
But Wilkes looked pleadingly at Bug Man. “Okay, this is some very bad shit to deal with. But the gray goo, Burnofsky’s babies, we’re not sure … I’m seeing stuff that may be caused by self-replicating nanobots. But very small scale so far. And it could be I’m wrong.”
“And there’s the Floor Thirty-Four virus,” Vincent said. “Maybe it never escaped the Tulip. But maybe it did. The whole final tranche of Lear’s victims have biots. We stopped the process before they were killed off. That’s thousands of people with living biots who would suffer madness if the Floor Thirty-Four virus were to get loose.”
“Not to mention all of us,” Bug Man said.
“Uh-huh.” Plath wanted very badly to go back to sleep, and the doctor was right; the pain from her shattered knee was stalking her.
“The thing is, there’s only one way to stop the gray goo, and to make sure the Floor Thirty-Four virus never escapes,” Vincent said in his dispassionate voice. “Nuclear.”
“What? Wait, um, I’m lost, here. I don’t exactly have an atomic bomb on me, oh, damn—Doctor, can I at least get an ibuprofen or something?”
“If it’s out there and we don’t stop it, the whole world dies,” Wilkes said. She put her hand on Plath’s forehead and held the cup so she could take another sip of water. “Bug Man has an idea.”
Bug Man nodded uncertainly, not quite sure about how Plath would receive what he was about to say. “Listen, we stopped the biot crèches. The madness has stopped, but man, half the world is burning. Millions … you know. Nobody’s in charge. But people know what it means if a window all of a sudden opens up in their head. And we still can control the crèches, we can still, you know …”
“Why would we?” Plath asked. Her head was throbbing. Her mouth felt like flannel, and nausea tickled the bottom of her throat.
“Because we need someone to blow up New York City,” Vincent said. “Lear had good records, good data. We can pinpoint guys with access to nukes. Americans, Russians, French, Brits. And Bug Man realized that when the biots quicken—when they’re born, you know—they see. And they could read. We can bring biots online, and we can show them a message.”
“What message?” Plath asked.
One by one they looked to Bug Man. “Do it, or we kill your biots. Do it, or we take out your family. We explain, as much as you can, you know … the whole thing. But if we don’t stop this, we’re all dead. Us last of all, down here on the ice. But everyone. The whole human race. The whole planet.”
Plath felt tears welling in her eyes. “You woke me up for this? To vote on—”
“Not a vote,” Wilkes said. “We already took a vote. You’re in charge, Plath. Sadie. Suarez will run security, and eventually we’ll unwire some of these people, but right now, it’s on you.”
“Vincent?” Plath pleaded.
He looked away, ashamed. “It’s on you, Plath. Whatever you decide.”
In the end it was a Chinese missile that did it. The Chinese general responsible, once certain that his family was safe, tied a rope to a tree in one of his favorite countryside spots, and hanged himself.
There were very few functioning governments still left to do useful things like tally up the death toll of the Plague
of Madness. But later, historical estimates would set the count at two hundred ten million, in thirty-six countries.
Four million of those had come as a consequence of Plath’s order. But, in the end, Burnofsky’s gray goo did not make it off Manhattan. The human race was saved. Life on planet Earth would go on.
In the weeks that followed, Plath drank much more than she should have, sitting in the living room of what had been Lear’s house. She shared the house with Wilkes, Vincent, and Bug Man. She tried not to drink before lunch, but she often failed. She tried to stop, but not very hard. Wilkes made efforts to get her to move on, but the very words died on her lips when she looked into Sadie McLure’s haunted eyes.
Once, and only once, had Plath gone to look at Lear.
Lear sat chained in the dungeon that had once held Suarez. Plath had asked for the door to be opened so that she could see her. See the monster. The mass murderer.
But Lear had not responded to Plath, had seemingly not noticed that she was there.
Plath stopped using that name, and reverted to Sadie. She had tried and mostly succeeded in accepting Noah’s death. But she could not reconcile herself to what had happened, what she had done, to New York City.
Four months on, Wilkes found her on the floor, choking on her own vomit after drinking an entire bottle of Lear’s bourbon. It was terribly clear that Sadie McLure would, sooner or later, manage to kill herself in expiation of her sins.
Wilkes would not allow that. She went to Vincent, and to Bug Man, and slowly, so very gently, the biots went to work. And little by little, Sadie McLure forgot.
TWO YEARS LATER
The woman was probably in her early fifties but looked much older. She was dressed in clean but tattered clothing, layers of it, as if she had to be ready for any sort of weather. In the pocket of her patched coat she carried a crumpled black trash bag to use as an umbrella. London was out of umbrellas.
“That’s her,” a street kid said, jerking his chin and holding out his hand. “That’s old Mrs. Cotton.”
Sadie pressed a small gold bar—no bigger than a segment of Kit Kat—into his hand and said, “If you lied to us, kid, we’ll find you.”
The “we” in question included seven uniformed, heavily armed men who had fanned out on both sides of the street. London had quieted since the worst of the Madness, as it was commonly called, but it was still a wild place where street gangs ruled many neighborhoods. The “we” also included Wilkes, now somewhat changed as well. She still bore the strange flame tattoo beneath one eye, but she had grown out her hair into a simple blunt cut. She was dressed in a zippered black jumpsuit and carried a machine pistol over her shoulder.
Sadie waved Wilkes back a few steps and moved closer to Mrs. Cotton, keeping pace with her.
“I’m not a danger to you, Mrs. Cotton,” Sadie said. “I’m here to tell you about your son.”
The woman stopped. She turned a scarred and ravaged face to Sadie. Such signs of abuse were common among the survivors of the Madness. Sadie could only imagine what this woman had endured.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Sadie McLure.” The name obviously meant nothing to Mrs, Cotton, and Sadie was relieved. A lot of stories were going around the newly revived Internet. There were even ridiculous rumors that Sadie McLure had actually ordered New York City destroyed. “I knew your son.”
“Alex? You were a friend of Alex?” The woman peered skeptically at Sadie.
“No, ma’am, Noah. In fact … we were close. I was with him at the end.”
Sadie led Mrs. Cotton to a small coffee shop, a place the older woman would never have been able to afford on the starvation pension and ration coupons the shaky government was able to pay her. But Sadie had gold, and gold made many things possible.
They bought weak coffee—or at least part of the hot brew was coffee, with just a bit of wheat chaff. And they each had a biscuit.
“Were you his girlfriend?”
“Yes,” Sadie said.
Silence. Nothing but the munching of the dry cookie. The sipping of coffee. Then, “How did he do? At the end?”
“Mrs. Cotton, Noah died a hero.” Sadie did not elaborate. Mrs. Cotton did not seem to need it, and the truth was that Sadie’s memories of Noah at the end were disjointed. Parts of what she thought she remembered seemed unrealistic. Parts of her memory seemed to fit poorly with other memories.
Wilkes stood a distance away, close enough to smell the coffee and overhear snippets of the conversation whenever the room was quiet. She had, of course, been involved in rewiring Sadie. She and Vincent had written a heroic end for Noah, an ending in which he single-handedly took down the Armstrong Twins and stopped Burnofsky.
There were elements of truth—a good wiring always rests best on a foundation of some truth. But it was still a work in progress, connecting images of Noah to heroic pictures gleaned painstakingly from Sadie’s memories of movies and books.
“Your son saved the human race,” Sadie said, and believed it, mostly.
Mrs. Cotton nodded grimly. “He was always a good boy.”
“Yes. I loved him.”
Mrs. Cotton’s composure broke then, and tears filled her eyes. “I couldn’t … I didn’t know how to reach him.… He had this job in New York.…”
“It was an important job. He was an important boy. Man, actually. Because he was definitely a man by the end,” Sadie said.
“I’m glad you told me this,” Mrs. Cotton said, though her face was anything but happy. “Did you tell him?”
“Did I tell him what?” Sadie asked.
“Did you tell him that you loved him?”
Sadie took her hand and squeezed it gently. “Yes. I told him that I loved him. I told him that many times.” Sadie glanced at Wilkes, who blushed and looked down. “He loved me, and I loved him. I think that memory is all that’s kept me alive.”
Sadie sat for a while longer with Noah’s mother and left her with enough small gold bars to take the edge off her poverty.
She and Wilkes walked down streets that still showed the bullet holes, the fire scorches, the wreckage of the Plague of Madness. But London had suffered this badly before in its long history and knew how to put itself back together. Crews were at work. There were police on the streets. Life was slowly returning.
A century would pass before New York City could say the same.
“Now what?” Wilkes asked.
“How much of what I told that woman was true?” Sadie asked.
Wilkes met her gaze and waited, saying nothing. Finally she said, “Now what?”
They were in front of what had once been a pizza restaurant, but was now burned out and choked with rubble.
“How long has it been since you had a decent pizza, Wilkes?”
“Long, long time,” Wilkes acknowledged, peering into the restaurant. “I think those ovens may still be usable. Of course someone would have to clean the place up. Get the gas working again.”
“You have something better to do?” Sadie asked. She stepped over the threshold, bent down, and grabbed hold of a broken table. “Help me with this.”
TWELVE YEARS LATER
Three windows were open in Sadie McLure’s brain.
Her three biots sat immobile in the glass vial she wore on a chain around her neck.
When business was slow at Poet Pizza, she would sit in a corner booth with her old friends, Anthony and Wilkes. Their daughter would tease the cooks while their baby son chuckled on his father’s lap.
Ten thousand miles away to the south, Michael Ford, once known as Vincent, supervised the skeleton staff that maintained what had become, in effect, a prison.
A prison with a single prisoner. Who sat in her cell, chained to the wall, screaming.
“Meeee? Meeee?”
MICHAEL GRANT likes to tell stories that will leave readers entertained, excited, and afraid to turn out the lights. He likes to make up characters who become like family members to his readers—and then
kill them. He likes to take readers to places they would never have imagined but can never forget. Michael Grant has no hobbies, he doesn’t take vacations, he is not particularly friendly or charitable. He just wants to grab readers and leave them wrung out, trembling, and begging for more. Which, according to just about everyone who’s read a Michael Grant book, such as BZRK, BZRK Reloaded, and the Gone series, is exactly what happens. Michael is on Twitter @TheFayz, in case you want to talk to him. He lives in Marin County, California, with his wife, Katherine Applegate, their two children, and far too many pets.
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