Bzrk

by Michael Grant

  Wilkes lay flat, rolled over to put out any remaining flames on her body and crawled like a demodex, worming her way across the floor. She swarmed over debris, over bodies, yelling, “Ophelia!” with less and less breath. The choking started then, the coughing that ripped at her throat and sent her into chest-wracking spasms.

  She found two stumps burning like torches and knew, just knew, it was Ophelia. Her feet were gone. Her legs were the wicks of candles.

  Wilkes gagged on smoke, vomited, wept, grabbed at UN souvenir T-shirts and pressed them over burning flesh that smelled like gyro meat on a spit.

  She crawled to Ophelia’s head. Ophelia’s eyes were open, wide, indifferent to the smoke, staring in horror. That look, those staring, terrified eyes were worse than the burning limbs.

  “They’re dead!” Ophelia wailed. The smoke pressed down so low over her face that the exhalation of her horror formed spirals and eddies.

  “Get …” Wilkes said, but that was the limit of her powers of speech, her throat was swelling, her stomach was retching again.

  “Dead! Gods, no. No! Nooooo!” Ophelia screamed.

  Wilkes knew she wasn’t talking about the people who had just died.

  “Ah! Hah-hah!” Ophelia raved. She made a barking sound. Like a seal. And then she started thrashing, flailing her arms, kicking her mutilated legs, screaming and screaming until finally the smoke choked her down to guttural, coughing grunts.

  Wilkes gave up then.

  Enough.

  A terrible sadness swallowed her up. Goddamnit, Ophelia deserved to live.

  Then through slitted, weeping eyes she saw the toes of boots, black-and-yellow rubber legs, and down through the smoke like a demon god came alien bug eyes and a black helmet with a red shield and the blessed initials FDNY.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Keats had heard Vincent loud and clear on the stupidity, the futility, of any decision just to send biots running around blindly.

  Biots didn’t have the speed or the senses to go careening off on their own. There had to be a pathway.

  He was on a dog’s nose. In a room that almost certainly held the Armstrong Twins, but others as well. He couldn’t see anything but shapes as huge and as distant as the clouds.

  He could hear vague voices like distant thunder.

  That was what he had to go on. Clouds and thunder as he rode around on a dog’s nose that looked like some alien, dry lake bed of parched mud.

  No way to do anything useful. No way to save himself or Plath.

  And then he spotted the flea. That clanking, armored, Transformer-eyed monster. No time to think.

  He raced his two biots toward it, tearing back along the dog’s snout, full out, as fast as they would run. The flea didn’t notice him. The flea didn’t give a damn. The flea had no predators in its life aside from some distant dog collar. It was intent on finding the red-red kroovy, as they said in Clockwork Orange: blood. Only blood. And the biots weren’t a source.

  He ran up to the side of the flea as it tapped a slow spurt of corpuscles, sucking them up into its mouthparts, and the biots leapt.

  They hit spiky legs and clambered madly up, their own legs thrashing, up over the powerful, spring-loaded haunches and slam!

  The flea’s legs fired, and the jolt was so powerful it snapped one of K1’s legs and impaled K2 on a flea spike.

  Keats cried out in pain, feeling it almost as much as his biots did.

  “What is it?” Plath whispered.

  “Muscle twinge,” Keats lied, and, oh, God, he could barely manage that, because the power of that jump was staggering and impossible. The flea accelerated like a bullet from a gun. It tumbled as it flew, somersaulted at jet-fighter speeds, but was almost instantly slowed by the pressure of air rushing past like a tornado. It landed by falling and twisting through a forest of trees to hit rough dog skin again.

  The whole jump had lasted maybe a second. It was almost impossible to process.

  Keats knew he had to get off the dog. He also knew the flea would jump toward the smell of more blood. Unless a way could be found to cause it to jump randomly, in a flight response.

  The key had to be the spiky sensory hairs.

  Each biot grabbed two of the spikes and yanked.

  A second explosion and the flea hurtled upward, twisting and tumbling, and this time when it landed it didn’t kneel to feed. It trembled slightly. It was bothered by the stimulation of the hairs.

  Keats could feel it quivering, already gathering strength for another jump.

  He yanked madly at the hairs, and this time the flea shot upward as before, but when it came down, it missed its grip. The flea rolled down the side of the dog like a tiny boulder.

  Spinning, biots hitting hair, air, hair, air, hair, air—until suddenly it was all air and the flea was falling free of the dog.

  The flea hit the floor and bounced, not dead but slow to right itself. Keats jumped his biots clear of the tiny monster and landed on an endless plain of Swiss cheese that seemed trapped beneath two feet of rippling, translucent glass.

  It took Keats a while to decide he was on a wood floor. The wood itself—beneath the transparent protective coating—was like a honeycomb, with millions of smaller, roughly rectangular holes, and here and there, larger holes like cut arteries. At the nano it was a desecrated graveyard—a living thing that had been sawed open and imprisoned beneath polyurethane. It was impossible not to believe the glassy sheet would open and he would fall into those holes.

  The flea was upright behind him. A vast shape was moving away, a wobbly mountain. The dog probably. Maybe.

  Plath was talking to him. In the macro. For a moment he’d lost contact. He’d forgotten the girl in his arms.

  “People are coming,” she whispered.

  And suddenly there were voices right next to the Dumpster, hands touching, fumbling at the lid and a hard voice saying, “We find her we split it, right?”

  And Keats knew right then, knew what he had to do. “Don’t argue,” he said, and rolled over swiftly atop Plath, pushed her rudely down into the trash, bucked back upward, rising like some vengeful swamp creature, just as the cover on the Dumpster flew back.

  “Aaarrrrggh!” Keats yelled.

  Two startled faces, bearded, filthy, gaped as Keats kicked off, cleared the edge of the Dumpster and fell more than jumped onto the two men. The three of them went down hard, and Keats was the first up.

  He panted, bent over, winded by the sudden violent movement. The two street people stared in amazement.

  “Looking for me?” Keats gasped.

  “It’s the bitch we want,” one said.

  “She’s gone,” Keats said.

  “The woman said there were two of them,” the first street person reasoned. The second one was apparently not talkative. “Get him!”

  Keats set off at a run. The day had not come when he couldn’t outrun a pair of unhealthy old dudes in ill-fitting sneakers.

  He tore down the alley toward the street. One of his pursuers, the talky one, was pushing a shopping cart piled high with cans and assorted junk.

  No problem staying ahead of them, he just had to make sure they didn’t give up and go back to check the Dumpster. At the same time he was scanning the honeycomb floor and spotting something absurdly tall, a vast, dark shape on the horizon. It reached up to heaven.

  Keats burst out onto the street as both biots raced toward that tall distant object. As soon as he hit the sidewalk he knew he had made a mistake. Two men in khaki slacks and down jackets spotted him, spun, and took off in pursuit. They were a hell of a lot healthier than the street people.

  Keats ran on two surfaces. On concrete blocked by bodies. On a sheet of ripply glass over honeycomb. He felt like he was flying. He felt like he was racing against himself. He covered meters and micrometers, saw skyscrapers ahead, one measured in hundreds of feet, and one likely no more than three.

  He plowed straight through two guys walking side by side and looking down at
their BlackBerries. He kicked through an A-frame sign advertising a Chinese menu. He could hear his pursuers panting into headsets, “It’s the male, it’s the male! Heading west down Forty-third!”

  And that was not good because it meant there were others playing the game of Catch-a-Keats.

  A body to his right, crossing the street, practically hurdling the cabs as they blurred past.

  It’s the test, he realized with a shock of recognition. Dr. Pound’s test. Only he had no weapons.

  Wham!

  Keats went flying into a wall, bounced, hit the ground face-first, skinned hands and knees and cheek and they buried him in bodies, knees in his back, arms twisting behind him, plastic handcuff ties cinching his wrists.

  An SUV screeched to a halt, bumped up onto the curb, its wheel inches from his face.

  “Let me go! Let me go! Get off me! Police! Police!” Keats yelled, but then a rubber ball was forced into his mouth. Duct tape went swiftly around his head locking the gag in place.

  They picked him up and threw him roughly into the backseat.

  The crowd at the UN was going to be run through security, that much was definite. What looked like a major terrorist strike at the UN? That meant everyone on the plaza was getting ID’d and eyeballed by suspicious cops. Already Nijinsky was hearing people mutter about 9/11.

  Mounted police were moving in, ready to chase down any runners. The horses clip-clopped and snorted. Tall-seated men with visored eyes looked down at Vincent and Nijinsky and the various demonstrators—and security people pretending to be demonstrators.

  That wasn’t good. Both BZRKers had fake IDs—good ones that would pass casual scrutiny and even make it through a superficial computer check. But a deeper check would reveal them as fake. And that would be trouble.

  But nothing like the trouble down in the nano.

  The president of the United States, Helen Falkenhym Morales, was a battleground.

  The Secret Service, upon learning of the situation at the UN, had moved her out of the reception into a safe room at the same hotel. An entire wing of rooms, as well as the rooms below and above the president’s safe place had been emptied.

  Plainclothes agents with pistols were joined by armored agents with submachine guns, nerves all a-twang, and God help the chambermaid who wandered inadvertently into that perimeter.

  But it didn’t matter.

  The cluster of nanobots, platooned, was right ahead. Bug Man had sent his spinners scurrying away to relative safety. If he lost his spinners he lost, period.

  “Banzai,” Vincent said, just loudly enough for Nijinsky to hear, and sent his biots rushing into the nanobots.

  The nanobots were spreading to left and right in the vast chamber of the chiasma. The fluid environment slowed V3 and V4 a little, like running into a headwind. But it also meant Bug Man couldn’t drop wheels and ramp up his speed, which left the biots the faster of the two.

  Bug Man would try a pincer. He would pull back the center and send the wings around like the claws of a crab.

  Vincent wasn’t having it. He charged until he was at the midpoint between the scurrying wings, noted that the nanobots on the right were slipping and sliding, gaining weak purchase on tight, slick terrain, and pivoted toward them.

  V3 and V4 each stabbed a nanobot in the com-stack. That was better than ripping them open: it was faster and it would leave Bug Man wasting time trying to restore visuals.

  The biots clambered right up over the two blinded nanobots and sat atop them. The biots were longer, so their tails and heads hung off fore and aft, which meant two useful things: Bug Man would have to climb up over the legs of his own blind nanobots to get at Vincent— a notoriously difficult move, especially if you were platooning.

  And by climbing atop the useless nanobots, Bug Man’s visuals would be confused. Nanobot sensors would have a hard time making sense of the tall pile of arms and torsos.

  But that wasn’t slowing the Bug Man down. He had a move of his own. Two nanobots ran up and stopped just out of reach of Vincent’s stabbing and cutting arms. Then two other nanobots used the stopped nanobots the way a gymnast uses a mini-trampoline to vault.

  Two nanobots came soaring down at V3 and V4, lances out.

  “Heh,” Vincent said to no one. “Nice.”

  The police had formed a cordon and were now passing people through a small gap. Get your IDs out. Get your stories straight.

  Sure enough, three supposed demonstrators flashed what had to be NYPD or FBI IDs and were passed through to stand with the officers and point out the suspicious.

  One of them pointed at Nijinsky.

  “Shit,” Nijinsky said.

  Vincent collapsed the legs on the left of V3 and the right of V4 and rolled the biots over the legs of the blinded nanobots.

  Bug Man’s aerial attack missed, and he slammed into the blinded nanobots, stabbing his own creatures.

  A net wash: two of Bug Man’s boys dead, but time wasted and time was not his friend.

  Time to swim.

  He pushed off into the transparent fluid. Biots were not good swimmers—their legs could motor away, but the result was more of a churn than a swim. Twisting the claws with each stroke could give it some additional forward momentum, but not much. The only comfort was that nanobots were even worse.

  The biots floated just above the massed nanobot army.

  “You look familiar,” a cop said to Nijinsky. And just in time Nijinsky’s fingers slid from the fake passport in his inner coat pocket to the real one.

  “Well, I do some modeling,” he told the officer, a short, powerfully built woman.

  The male officers scowled.

  “Where have I seen you?”

  Nijinsky shrugged. His biots were racing to catch up to the battle raging deep within the president’s brain. He was not Vincent—experiences on multiple levels at once tended to make him a bit slow and distracted.

  “You mean …” he said as his biots dodged around a sticky cluster of macrophages.

  “Like what do you model?” she asked, getting less friendly by the second. She flipped open his passport while Vincent, behind him, waited with seeming calm and a slightly puzzled expression. “Simple question, Mr. Hwang. What do you model?”

  “Oh. Well, I guess most people recognize me from the Mountain Dew billboards.”

  The cop shook her head. “No, that’s not it.”

  “Armani underwear?”

  She crinkled her forehead at him, comparing face to photo. “Were you ever in a movie?”

  Yes, he had been in a movie. But he wasn’t happy about it. And the cop had been playing with him because she was grinning, and he could see that she was anticipating enlightening her fellow officers.

  “Yes, Officer,” he said, “I—”

  “It’s sergeant,” she corrected, and pointed at the stripes on her sleeve.

  “Sergeant,” he corrected tersely. “I was in the last Saw movie.”

  “What happened to you in that movie?” Now the other cops were grinning, knowing there was a funny coming.

  Nijinsky sighed. “I was castrated by a chain saw.”

  “Ouch,” one of the men said.

  “Must have been after you did the underwear ad, huh?” the woman asked, enjoying the moment immensely, although to her credit she avoided guffawing.

  “I’m so glad I can be comic relief, Sergeant,” Nijinsky said as his biots dug through the meninges of the president and pushed their way into the brain itself.

  “Did you see anything suspicious, Mr. Hwang?”

  He shrugged. “There were a bunch of sirens, we looked around, and someone said there was a fire.”

  “And why did you come to the UN today?”

  Time to take a chance on getting Vincent out with him. “I’m actually on a date. My friend here,” he indicated Vincent, “is a big fan of President Morales. I told him we wouldn’t be able to see anything. But …” Nijinsky shrugged.

  Vincent carefully led a flo
ating nanobot and fired the fléchette gun this biot carried. The pellets were slowed instantly, but with extraordinary luck they might jam a joint on the nanobot.

  The cops checked Vincent’s ID and asked him the same question, but then the sergeant said, “Go on, Mr. Hwang. You’ve suffered enough.”

  “Ouch,” a second officer said.