BZRK: Reloaded

Nijinsky drove from New York down to DC. Down the Jersey Turnpike. Night traffic, cars zooming past the rented van, his eyes bleary, attention fading, eyes peeled for a Starbucks because he needed a serious jolt of caffeine.

A triple cappuccino. Yeah. That would get him most of the way. He was fantasizing about it. Imagining the foam, the bitterness underneath it . . .

There was a loud bang. Not the first, but still startling. The madman shackled in the backseat kicked at the seat and growled.

Strange, Nijinsky thought mordantly. He would have pegged Vincent as a quiet sort of crazy. Not a kicker. Not a growler.

Anya Violet was beside Vincent, occasionally laying a soothing hand on his arm, saying little.

Wilkes rode shotgun. She seemed nervous.

“I don’t like going through Maryland,” she muttered.

“It’s not a very big state,” Nijinsky said.

“Big enough,” Wilkes said. “This is where I come from. Where I had my …you know.”

“Ah,” Nijinsky said. “I forgot it was in Maryland.”

“What was in Maryland?” Anya asked.

Nijinsky shot a look at her in the rearview mirror. “Not your concern, Doctor.”

“Arson and attempted murder,” Wilkes said with relish. “Arson. True. Attempted murder? Not true. I had a sort of disagreement with the football team at my school.”

“Disagreement?” Anya asked. She was bored, ready for a story.

“They thought they could rape me and I couldn’t do anything because I was just the freaky chick and who would believe me? They were right that no one would believe me. But they overlooked the fact that I could set the bleachers in their gym on fire. And also their locker room.” She smiled a dangerous smile. “Yeah, that was our disagreement.”

Anya asked from the dark backseat, “Did you get them?” There was a hard edge to her voice.

“I wasn’t out to kill anyone. Like I said: the attempted murder charge on me is crap. Arson, sure. Molotov cocktails. You know … Hey, you would, right? Weren’t they a Russian invention? Then you probably know: you get wine bottles and fill them with gasoline and stuff a rag in.”

No one said anything. So Wilkes added, “The trick is you have to break the bottle after you light the rag. That was the hard part, actually. It’s easy to get them burning, but it’s not like in the movies where stuff just blows up. They’ll just burn like a candle unless you throw them and smash them.”

“Yeah,” Nijinsky said, because he couldn’t think of what else to say. He was fully awake now. That was good.

“I kind of had to side-arm them up against the metal bleacher support poles. Easier in the locker room because they had barbells. Those broke the hell out of the bottles.”

“Good for you” Anya said, garbling the r sound with her Russian accent. “Take back what is yours: pride.”

Nijinsky glanced up in the rearview mirror and saw her smiling. Was he the only sane one in the van?

“Anyway, I’m not popular in Glen Burnie, Maryland,” Wilkes said.

Which was the point when Nijinsky’s phone lit up with the text from Keats and Plath. “Read this to me,” he told Wilkes, and handed her the phone. Then added, “Please.”

“Have taken AFGC guy possible name Burnofsky. Instructions?”

Wilkes read him the text and burst out again with her weird, hehheh-heh laugh. “Go Keats. Capturing some bad guys. I’d do Keats in a heartbeat. What about you, Jin? You hot for our English friend?”

Nijinsky veered toward an exit that suddenly presented itself. They parked at the far, dark end of a Hardee’s parking lot. Nijinsky sent a text to Lear.

“Can’t make that decision yourself, Jin?” Wilkes asked. He sent a text back to Keats. Hold him. Awaiting instructions.

He decided against answering Wilkes’s barbed remark because he was asking himself the same thing. Would Vincent have handled that himself? Was this an example of Nijinsky being the wrong person?

He glanced at the navigation system as Vincent once more yanked on his chains and said something like, “Hurrrr!” Forty minutes to go, and that was if there was no traffic.

He was in a van with a crazy girl, a raving lunatic, and a woman who probably wanted to kill him. In the parking lot of a Hardees. In the middle of God knew where in the dark. Waiting for instructions from a man or woman or for all he knew computer program to tell him to live or die, kill or be killed.

People were pulling into the drive-thru, getting burgers and fries and shakes. Normal people with normal lives. A family, two fathers and their two girls sat in a Subaru wagon, pointing at the neon menu, and Nijinsky thought for a moment that in another universe that could be him.

How in hell had he ended up here, doing this, with these people? He had wanted a little adventure, a sense of doing something mysterious and important. He wasn’t even a gamer; he had come to BZRK because of a chance meeting with Grey McLure at some stupid society party where Nijinsky had been invited as eye candy.

Somehow he had fallen into conversation with McLure, and before he knew it he was telling McLure his life story.

“You’re too smart to just walk around looking good in a tux,” McLure had said.

“Maybe, sir, but that’s my skill set.” At the time he’d halfway thought McLure was hitting on him. He wouldn’t be the first straight guy to consider a little experimentation.

But no, that wasn’t it. McLure had found something genuinely interesting in Shane Hwang, underwear model and party tux-wearer. Finally he’d asked McLure straight out why he was paying attention to him.