BZRK

“What?” He sat up but only made it part of the way before powerful hands grabbed his biceps and his ankles. They flipped him over onto his belly.

“What the hell?” he cried.

“No one’s home,” one of the men said. “Yell all you like.”

A phone was thrust into his face. A video image appeared. To his horror it was the faces of Charles and Benjamin Armstrong.

“Anthony,” Charles said in a calm, measured voice. “We are not about ego. We are about peace and unity, bringing all humans together, so that all men are brothers and husbands, all women sisters and wives.”

“Listen, I’m sorry about—”

But the video was still running. It wasn’t live; it was recorded. It was a message.

A sentence.

“Your pride cost us a victory in that battle, Anthony. Your pride.”

“Let me go!”

“We love you, Anthony,” Benjamin said.

They held him, one set of powerful hands for each limb, but then the man holding his left ankle must have managed to have a hand free, mustn’t he? Because that man had a club in his hand. Bug Man could see it, glancing frantically down over his shoulder, a thick, round, polished, dark piece of wood.

“But punishment is demanded in this case,” Benjamin continued.

“However much we regret it.”

“What the hell?” Bug Man cried, and the club smashed down on the back of his thighs.

The pain was incredible. Unimaginable.

“We do love you, Anthony.”

And a second blow landed. He cried out in agony and fear.

And a third blow and every muscle in his body was twanging tight as he screamed into his pillow and one of the men holding his arms bent low, brought his ugly yellowed eyes close to Bug Man’s tear-streaming, strained face, and said, “That was from the bosses. But we lost good men last night, you little Limey piece of shit. So this last one’s from us.”

The club came down hard and for a moment Bug Man’s brain just shut down.

He felt their hands release.

He heard them leave the room and close his door.

SEVENTEEN

Plath did not dream of the night’s violence. She dreamed about her brother. In her dream he had grown up. He had a family. Two little girls and Sadie—not Plath, Sadie—was coming over for dinner, and it was all strangely televisionish, not real. The girls were perfectly pretty. Eating a cereal in a bright box: Kellogg’s Nanobots.

At first that didn’t seem strange to dream-Sadie as she walked through the scene.

The kitchen was middle American, with a refrigerator covered in children’s drawings and pictures and report cards with Straight A’s! Yay! written in red pen.

It was nothing like the home Stone would probably have had. In the dream he had a more prosaic life than he’d have had if he had lived and taken over McLure Industries.

The cereal was coming out of the box now, crawling in a swarm toward the little girls’ bowls, refilling as they spooned up the crunchy nuggets.

“I didn’t feel a thing,” Stone said.

“You must have been afraid,” dream-Sadie argued.

And behind him, back where Stone couldn’t see but Sadie could, the nanobots were crawling up over the little girls’ white arms and over their colorful dresses and up their necks and all the while the girls smiled.

“Bang and it was over,” Stone said, nodding like it was true and like he remembered it and like there was nothing at all strange about his commenting on the circumstances of his own death.

The cereal nanobots were disappearing into little pink ears and noses and eyes.

She woke up.

A knock at the door.

Someone in her bed, a chest her head lay upon. She yanked back.

“I’ll get it,” Keats said. He worked his arm, the one she’d been sleeping on, like it was numb, which it probably was. He opened the door.

It was Ophelia. If she was surprised to find them both in the same room, she didn’t show it. She had two Starbucks, two bottles of water, and a brown bag with some kind of pastry, all in one of those corrugated carriers.

“Need you both in about twenty minutes,” Ophelia announced. She even had a smile that said, “That’s an order, not a request.”

In the bag they found muffins. One looked like blueberry, the other might have been raspberry.

“I’ll take the blueberry,” Plath said. The cups were both lattes. They drained the water bottles, sipped the coffee, and wolfed down the muffins, no time for talk.

Keats reached over and brushed a crumb from Plath’s mouth.

“Probably shouldn’t …” Plath said. She meant that they probably shouldn’t do that. The touching thing that was the prelude to more. That’s what the smart part of her was saying, while a completely different part of her was wondering why he hadn’t touched her in the night as they lay side by side.

Keats looked up sharply. He nodded once, a regretful expression. Then, “What do you think is on for this morning?”

“Something disturbing,” Plath said.

Keats smiled. “Thanks for taking care of me last night.”

“I thought it was the other way around.”

Keats shook his head and looked down at the floor. “I was a mess.”

Plath said, “Yeah, you’re right. Me? I was fine.”

A small laugh. “I wish I didn’t have to call you Plath. I don’t want to think of you as a poet who gassed herself.”