“Wha’ nef?” he asked, both to humor her and because he needed to know.
“Stop mush mouthing,” Lystra snapped. “I’ll tell you what next, yeah. Next, we get back to the apartment to watch the Tulip blow up,” she said, and winked conspiratorially. With her hands she made a sort of finger explosion and said, “Boom! Crash! Tinkle tinkle tinkle. Woosh! Screams! Cries! It’s Nine/Eleven all over, but now, yeah, the whole fucking world is going nuts! Crazy president. All the big brains? Crazy! Crazy prince. Crazy Pope! Everyone you know, yeah, is insane! And then, ah-hah-hah!”
“Then … what?” Bug Man asked.
“Then the Tulip comes down. And then, yeah, then, yeah, then the rest of them. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. The code is all laid in. The crèches are ready. Grow ’em, kill ’em. Grow ’em, kill ’em, yeah. Biot fucking apocalypse, Bug Man! Madness! Have you had blood drawn? Then I have your DNA, bitches. And, yeah, I have your biot. We can do sixteen thousand at a time. Sixteen thousand an hour. Day one? Three hundred eight-four thousand! A million, yeah, in sixty-two and a half hours. Everyone from big to little. Everyone from great to small. Everyone from rich to poor. The grocery clerk? Berserk! The train driver? Berserk! The guy, yeah, in a missile silo somewhere in Shitheel, Nebraska? Berserk! Cops? Berserk!”
She reeled back against the leather seat. Took a deep breath. Like she was overwhelmed by the vision in her head. “Every continent. Every country. I have twenty-nine million samples, yeah. One out of every two hundred and forty-one people on planet Earth. Berserk. Yeah.”
She seemed spent. Drained. But still wondering, still amazed. “It will take seventy-five days to do them all. But it won’t hold together for that long, yeah. Governments fall. Religions fail. It all comes down. Chaos. Mass insanity. The end. How many die in the end? Don’t know, don’t know, yeah. Maybe all of them, yeah. Whole new game then, yeah? Whole new game, right? My game. Adam and fucking Eve. Genghis Khan. Hitler. Stalin and Mao and what’s his name? Fucking Attila. My game. Yeah.”
The limo stopped just a block away from the Tulip. Lear bounded out with Bug Man on her heels. They raced for the elevator up to her posh apartment.
Bug Man felt a sick dread settle over him.
He didn’t see where this was any kind of game. This was just plain murder. Murder on a massive scale.
Lystra was excited, fumbling the keys at first. Then she led the way to the window, tapped the remote that opened the curtains and did a game-show-model move, like she was presenting the Tulip as some sort of prize.
Then Lystra fell silent. She was thinking something over. Bug Man could practically see her arguing with herself as her head tilted slightly this way, slightly that way.
“Yeah,” she said to herself, finally. “Yeah. Call him. Call him, yeah.”
Keats’s biot raced away from the partly cut optic nerve, six legs milling through the fluid, impeded but only slightly by sticky macrophages coming to dumbly check out the damage he had done.
It was like a wild nighttime drive down a back country road, somehow. His illumination in fact lit up very little, just the nerve and a suggestion of deeper brain ahead.
An artery, that’s what he needed, and there were a lot of them in the brain. None would kill instantly; that’s not the way it would work. Instead, blood would pour into the brain itself, depriving some tissue of oxygen, putting pressure on other tissue. The result would be a stroke or series of strokes and yes, maybe death, but not quickly.
Quickly enough to stop him blowing up the building? No way to know. He couldn’t see through Caligula’s eye anymore. Any moment could bring a fireball, a terrible shudder, and a falling floor beneath his feet.
They’d been taken to see Jindal, a worm of a man who kept rocking back on his heels, then forward onto his toes, trying to look taller than he was. He had snapped out a set of superfluous instructions to his security people, but they were already vectoring armed men toward the sublevels.
“You need to evacuate the building,” Plath said.
“Hah. Just what you’d want if this were all a ruse. Just what you could be after, no? I think so. I think we’ll wait until—”
The phone chirped. He grabbed it, listened, face darkening. “The freight elevators are blown. The doors are jammed. They may be booby-trapped.”
“I’d bet on it,” Plath said.
“Caligula was keeping the elevators to use for his own escape,” Keats said, walking it through in his own mind. Elevators stopped at the loading bays, from there to the alley, and off he would go. In five minutes he could be clear of the blast and any police cordon.
Jindal’s forehead creased. And he may have started to sweat just a bit.
“Evacuate the building!” Plath yelled. “We’re not here because we want to die, we’re trying to save innocent people!”
Innocent people, Keats noted. So there was still a Sadie somewhere inside Plath.
Jindal shook his head slowly. “If I’m wrong and the place blows up, I’m dead. If I’m wrong and I evacuated the building, the Twins will …” He shook his head doggedly. “There are worse things than dying.”
“Yes, but none are really as permanent,” Wilkes said.
“Take us to the Twins,” Plath said urgently. “If you don’t have the balls to make a decision, take us to the Twins!”
“Now, you bloody fool!” Keats added.