Michael Grant - Bzrk Apocalypse

“And then?”

“I felt the impact and my only thought was that I should pull the car forward. Yeah. Undo my mistake.”

“Right. And in the process you ran over both of your parents again. That’s your story. You’re sticking to that?”

“How can I do otherwise? It’s the truth.”

No, they had not believed her. No one believed her. People who knew Lystra Ellen Alice Reid scoffed at the notion that she had panicked. Panic? Lystra, panic?

But in the end the cops couldn’t prove a thing.

There wasn’t a lot in the way of a social services department in Tulsa, but a shrink was tasked with testing her.

“She’s a very difficult subject,” he had reported. “Hard to test. Her IQ is very high—very smart, very quick—so she knows how to answer, how to avoid setting off alarm bells. But my instinct tells me she’s concealing something. At times I got the impression she might be hearing voices. Phantom voices. She may just be traumatized. Or she may be schizophrenic but with enough control to hide it.”

Lystra was the sole heir to a million-dollar life insurance policy that was doubled due to the fact that the death had been an accident. Double indemnity, they called it.

Two million dollars. She’d been unable to touch it until she was eighteen, and at that time other family members had petitioned the court to examine her psychologically again.

The court had found her legally sane.

The voices in her head had congratulated her on the finding.

On her eighteenth birthday, Lystra had filed papers to form the Mad Alice Holding Company. And she’d gotten her first tattoo. She’d told the tattoo artist, “I want my adoptive parents, like in this picture. But I want them to be screaming.”

The tattoo artist had been reluctant, but an extra thousand dollars had cured him of all doubt.

The placement she’d chosen was strange. Her adoptive mother was beneath one breast, so that she seemed to be smothered by the weight of it. Her adoptive father, also screaming, was beneath the other.

Once both tattoos were complete, they began to speak to her. They wept, sometimes. Other times they threatened. She heard their voices so very clearly. If she stripped off her shirt and her bra she could see their mouths moving as they cried out in pain and despair.

But they could be useful, too, the talking tattoos. It was the dead Mr Reid who suggested using her inheritance to buy a small, failing medical testing company outside of Washington, DC.

So the Mad Alice Holding Company was dissolved and a successor corporation formed as an Isle of Man company, exempt from most supervision. And then, another stroke of unusual luck: a mid-sized competitor in the medical testing field had suffered a catastrophic hacking that had spilled the records all over the Internet.

Lystra Reid bought the stricken company and brought in the best security people around to ensure that a similar fate would never befall her. The result was a medical testing company, Directive Medical, which had never suffered a successful break-in, while—not so strangely—security problems plagued her competitors.

At the age of twenty-four, Reid controlled a third of the independent medical labs in North America, as well as significant portions of other markets around the world.

It was amazing what you could learn from data-mining the health records of more than two hundred million people worldwide. You could, for example, learn that the wife of a brilliant medical researcher named Grey McLure had a rare cancer. And you could learn that this McLure fellow was suddenly in a desperate search for living cell samples. And with just a bit more work you could discover that he was also looking for a wide range of animal tissue samples for a very secret project of some sort.

Lystra hung up the phone, indifferent really to the current spreadsheet drama from her office. It didn’t matter. There was no future to worry about. She swallowed the last of the bourbon and stood up to stretch. The marina was nestled between Tiburon and the adjoining Belvedere Island. Unpretentious yet extremely expensive homes rose on a cute little hill to her left and up the longer, wooded slope of Belvedere to her right. Looking south through the forest of masts she could see San Francisco. Fog was rolling out, revealing the city, all muted pastels and off-whites.

It was all in all a beautiful location, with sailboats and ferries and container ships passing by in review. A genteel, civilized, prosperous place.

And all of it about to come to a terrifying end.

It had been good to watch Janklow go mad; he had annoyed her on more than one occasion. She wanted to get a few tastes of the madness out here in the real world—before the final chapters, which would force her to hide out and watch it as well as she could via electronic means. The personal, real-world experiences would help her to enjoy the next step.

“All done?” the waiter asked, coming to clean her table.

“Soon,” she said.

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