BZRK

Ophelia searched the semiconscious and definitely-not-going-anywhere TFD and came up with a Taser, a walkie-talkie, and a gun.

She handed the gun to Wilkes, who tossed her toy away and said, “I think this one’s real.” Then, “I think I broke my big toe.”

They looked around and saw that they were in a room with nothing but a chair and two more doors. One was easily opened and turned out to be a bathroom. The other was swipe card–protected, and a further search was needed to turn up the guard’s card.

“Well,” Ophelia said. “We shouldn’t have made it this far.”

“No, I don’t think Vincent expected us to. I think we already moved from C-plus to a solid B.”

“I’d say it was lucky, but now we’re really in it.”

“Distract and disrupt,” Wilkes said. “Right?”

Ophelia drew a shaky breath. “If there are twitchers on the other side, they’re the target. Shoot them or infest them and get the hell out.”

“A little of both?” Wilkes said.

“Bang-bang, jab-jab, run like hell.”

“Let’s rock it, sister.”

Keats was marooned on the beagle’s fur. The hand was gone, and Plath’s biots with it.

“Don’t worry about me,” Keats urged. “Go!”

Plath sent her biots racing across the farmland of the palm. A biot leg brushed a sweat blossom and popped it like a water balloon.

“I don’t know if it’s him. Them.”

They were panting in a freezing, filthy alley, Keats holding both her arms. She leaned back against graffiti-scrawled bricks. They breathed the steam of each other’s mouth.

“Keep moving. Toward the light. That’ll probably take you to the head. The head is the target.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll find another way,” Keats said.

Sirens. Maybe not about them at all. This was New York, after all, and sirens weren’t exactly rare.

“We can’t go too far, but we can’t stay here, either. They’ll have Armstrong people on the streets, and cops, too,” Keats said, feeling and sounding desperate. “Where can we go?”

“There,” Plath said, pointing at the yellow sign of a car rental agency across the street.

“What?”

“Rent a car. Drive around the block.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Okay. Wait. We’re too young.”

“Goddamnit,” Plath cried as her biots ran from palm prints to land where the ground, deeply creased with valleys, rose up all around her, warping, buckling. The hand was closing, and her biots were in darkness, running around a circular landscape, going where? Going where?

“There,” Keats said. He pointed at a Dumpster. He pulled Plath along with him. He lifted her with hands at the waist, feeling too much contact and at a really inappropriate moment as her behind went so close to his face. He piled in after her. It was dry at least, as most of the tossed-out Chinese food had frozen stiff during the cold night. That would change as their body heat thawed the worst of the garbage. But the smell wasn’t as bad as it might be.

Keats pulled the lid over them, and they lay huddled together in the filth.

“Maybe he’ll pet the dog again,” Plath said.

“Maybe,” Keats answered.

They were spooning in garbage. Their biots were a few hundred yards and a universe away.

From the sky came hands. Keats saw the fingers again, reaching down toward the raked forest where the wound was. Fingers. Then, floating down from the sky, a huge tubular opening, like the world’s biggest fire hose. Like the water pipe they buried under the street.

An eruption of crystalline goo vomited from the tube and landed in wondrous spirals on the injury.

“They’re working on the dog,” Keats said. “Now I’m seeing a bandage. Like a white blanket the size of a city block.”

“I’m off the hand. Up the arm,” Plath reported.

“I want to get to you,” Keats said. “I don’t want you doing this alone.”

“Don’t get hurt,” Plath said. His arms were around her and she felt his warmth and she was afraid, and she could hardly swallow her throat was so dry. How could it be that she was here, needing him to be with her not just here but there as well, needing him not just in the macro but down in the meat?

Plath’s biots raced through a sparse forest of arm hairs. Then beneath a sleeve, a sky made of woven ropes. Was it even the correct arm? Was it one of them? Or was she racing up the arm of some minor player, some guard or secretary?

“I’m going to tap the dog’s eye,” Keats said. And he sent his biot racing across the alien forest’s treetops.

“I don’t want to lose my mind in a Dumpster, Keats.”

“My name’s not Keats,” he said.

“Don’t tell me your name,” she whispered.

“I know yours.”

“My name is Plath,” she said, sounding more determined than she felt.

“I’m passing the bandage. It’s like a circus tent! Tape pulling at hairs. It’s …”

“You think we’d have liked each other if it wasn’t like this?” she asked.

“We wouldn’t have met,” he answered.

The Dumpster top opened. Hearts in their throats.

A McDonald’s bag dropped in, and the top closed again.