Free Bzrk Apocalypse by Michael Grant Page B

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 pan-
    icked. 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
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    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 dol-
    lars had cured him of all doubt.
    The placement she’d chosen was strange. Her stepmother was
    beneath one breast, so that she seemed to be smothered by the weight
    of it. Her stepfather, 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, D.C.
    So the Mad Alice Holding Company was dissolved and a suc-
    cessor corporation formed as an Isle of Man company, exempt from
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    most supervision. And then, another stroke of unusual luck: a mid-
    size 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 Medi-
    cal, 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 indepen-
    dent 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