Bzrk Apocalypse Read Online Free PDF Page A

somehow it never
    seemed to distract him —
    Keats waved his hand up and down in front of her face.
    “Sorry,” Plath said, and snapped back to reality. “I was consider-
    ing. The boat. Yeah, it was both crude and ineffectual.”
    “Armstrong wouldn’t come at us that way,” he said. “If they knew
    where we were, they’d deploy nanobots. There have been servants in
    and out of the house, we had a doctor in when I got food poisoning;
    there were opportunities for infestation.”
    “Or they could have targeted some of Stern’s people and bounced
    the nanobots to us from them. I mean, if you know where two mem-
    bers of BZRK are, you try to wire them, you don’t try to kill them.” She glanced over her shoulder upon saying the word BZRK , pronounced
    with vowels intact: “Berserk.”
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    BZRK APOCALYPSE
    Keats nodded, tore off another piece of bread, sopped up more
    gravy, and popped it in his mouth. Plath could imagine the scene
    down at the m-sub. The teeth would be impossibly huge, scaly not
    smooth, massive mountainous gray boulders dropping from the sky
    and rising from below to crush and—
    I have to stop this. I have to get control of my thoughts.
    Too easy to let that consciousness of another universe take over
    her mind. Too easy to go from distraction to revulsion. She had to be
    able to be with another human being without always picturing that
    other, stranger reality.
    “Maybe it was something totally different,” Noah suggested.
    “Maybe there was a fuel leak on the boat. Maybe we’re just overreact-
    ing.”
    “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.
    29
    MICHAEL GRANT
    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.
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    BZRK APOCALYPSE
    He didn’t say that to his mother, of course.
    He walked down the cereals aisle searching for Cheerios, maneu-
    vering 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