BZRK

“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!”