Bzrk (27 page)

“This jacket is hot. I think I’ll wear a summer dress. Something sleeveless.” The voice was not recognizable, not even through the sensors of the two nanobots specially modified to detect sound waves. Even with the best “Big Ears” a nanobot rendered every voice into a high-pitched whine.

But the droll sense of humor was that of the president of the United States.

“That would certainly draw the media, Madam President.” The second voice was Liz Law, the president’s body woman, who at that moment unwittingly carried a small but potent army.

“In April I had the honor of meeting with the queen. Goddamnit. In April I had the honor of meeting with Her Majesty the queen.” The president was practicing her toast. “Her Majesty. Her Majesty the queen.”

In the end, it had been easy for Bug Man.

He had made all the jumps along the pathway. Down in Washington, and then back in New York. Like a passenger plane making multiple stops, or a flea hopping from dog to dog. Now all his boys—twenty-four fighters, four spinners—were ready and primed and quivering with readiness on Law’s finger.

Nanobot optics had strengths and weaknesses. Biots saw in greater resolution; it was one of their strengths. Biots were insanely quick at detecting movement and had a connection between sight and mind and action that made them superior to nanobot fighters one-on-one.

But nanobots were machines, and had the advantages of machines. For one thing their visual data could be combined to form macro images. Line a dozen or so nanobots up in a row, point their optics in the same direction, and the computer at the base station could form those smaller images into a larger one. Nanobots produced digital data, and digital data was, as always, wonderfully manipulable.

It was complicated, using the optics that way, and doing it meant keeping a large percentage of his force stationary, which Bug Man did not like. No twitcher did. But sometimes it was worth it.

Worth it now as he saw the actual face, the familiar jowly chin all the comics joked about, the sleepy/smart eyes, the stiff, brown hairdo, the slightly too-hip earrings, all of it. Probably the most recognizable face on Earth.

It was only a flash, that image, because Liz Law’s fingers were moving, fussing about. So Bug Man saw a dish and a desk and a sleeve and a cloth used to wipe something from that sleeve, and the presidential face again, then a window …

“In April I had the honor of meeting with Her Majesty the queen. When my good friend, Prime Minister Bowen, joined us, Her Majesty pointed out … What is it, Tom?”

A new voice, male, too far away to be understood. It spoke briefly. “That’s good news,” the president replied. “Good work, Tom. Tell the Speaker that seven percent is fine.”

Bug Man was in a storefront dental office directly across First Avenue from the UN. On the outside the office looked a lot like a tavern. On the inside it looked a lot like a tavern after an epic drinking contest, because the dentist, receptionist, hygienist, and two unlucky patients were stacked like firewood against a back wall, passed out after being shot full of a narcotic that would guarantee a nice, long sleep.

A sign on the front door pleaded illness and asked patients to call to reschedule.

AmericaStrong techs had moved the twitching gear into the two examination rooms, and now monitors hung from bungee cords above the dental chairs, and wire, gathered by Velcro ties, spooled onto the immaculate floors. Bug Man sat in the chair in Exam Room A while Burnofsky sat in Exam Room B.

Somewhat to Bug Man’s irritation, Burnofsky had also made it along his pathway and was now positioned aboard the Chinese leader’s assistant/girlfriend.

The president was at the Hilton Manhattan East hotel, barely a block from the dental office that was itself just a block from the UN. Bug Man would have direct linkage all the way through, from the reception at the hotel to the UN.

By the time the woman reached the podium he expected to be busy wiring her brain.

The Chinese UN mission was farther away, up 40th Street in a sleek new office tower built by the Chinese as a statement of their ambition to be seen as the world’s
other
superpower. At that distance Burnofsky had to use signal repeaters. Bug Man wished him nothing but static.

It would not be enough for Bug Man to succeed; Burnofsky must also fail. Then Bug Man would stand unequalled atop the twitcherverse.

The POTUS had moved to a smaller room. The picture swirled dizzyingly as Liz Law’s finger swung by her side and then soared up into space to take something.

Bug Man saw a sky of fibers, each like a bridge cable.

A garment.

Was it the president’s? Was it time?

But then the fibers zoomed away, off into the distance where they rested on the presidential shoulders.

“Just let me get that, Madam President,” Liz Law said.

Bug Man could see the president’s face clearly in the serried ranks of nanobot optics. Had he missed his moment? Fear swelled within him. What would the Twins do if—

But no, now the hand was rushing toward the president, touching, smoothing, and
now, now, now!

Bug Man’s army raced across fingertips and leapt. He could see the picture of two dozen nanobots falling, like an insect army platoon jumping out of an airplane.

The ground—those same fibers—rushed up at him.

With twenty-eight tiny impacts Bug Man’s forces landed on the lapel of the president of the United States.

TWENTY-FIVE

Ophelia went straight up to the gift-store clerk and asked, “Do you take MasterCard? I mean, I know you have to take Visa, right? Because it’s the UN? Visa? Get it?”

While Ophelia distracted the clerk, Wilkes went to the book rack, bent back the pages of several paperbacks, pulled out a lighter, and set fire to as many of them as she could get to before the clerk yelled, “Hey, what are you doing! What are you doing?”

Wilkes smiled, and Ophelia turned, walked quickly to a shelf of stuffed toys and kid’s books, and deployed her own lighter.

“Oh, my God, what are you doing?” the clerk cried, waving her hands as if frantic fingers would solve the problem. And now the handful of other patrons in the store had to choose between screaming, running, screaming and running, or trying to corral the obviously crazy woman and girl.

Wilkes reached under her skirt, up into the waistband of her tights, and pulled out something that looked exactly like a pistol. In fact it was plastic and therefore had gone through security without a problem. And if the patrons who now raised their hands and said things like, “Whoa, whoa, take it easy,” and backpedaled, had taken the time to examine the gun, they’d have spotted it as a fake.

But when a crazy person is waving a gun at you, sometimes you don’t search for serial numbers.

Ophelia set fire to a bunch of glossy commemorative picture books, and a nice oily smoke was coiling up to the ceiling.

Alarms began jangling.

Sprinklers came on fitfully, spitting and then spraying water over all the tacky merchandise.

To her credit the clerk did not flee, so Ophelia reluctantly smashed a snow globe against the back of her head, and she and Wilkes pushed around the counter, into the back room, and through the door that led to the storage area. It was a fairly compact space full of flimsy cardboard boxes, most with Chinese as well as English markings.

The obvious back door opened onto a blank, overlit hallway that presumably went on to find a loading dock or freight elevator somewhere.

“That’s not it,” Ophelia said.

“It has to be here. Has to be,” Wilkes said. “Otherwise we’re just going to jail for arson.”

“And assault,” Ophelia added, still holding the snow globe.

They raced around the perimeter of the small storeroom, pushing boxes away, knocking things over. Out in the shop there was yelling, and an authoritative voice saying, “What’s going on here?”

“Two crazy women!”

“Where did they go?”

And the sound of a walkie-talkie and the UN guard calling for backup and ordering the loading dock closed down.

“Here!” Ophelia hissed. There was a space not blocked by boxes, where the wall was covered by a suspiciously large poster of former UN chief Ban Ki-moon.

“No one cares that much about Ban Ki-moon,” Wilkes agreed. She tore the poster down, revealing a very ordinary door protected by a very unordinary passkey system.

They had been briefed on this. And they’d been told that if all they did was start a fire and draw cops and firemen, that would probably be enough.

“That would be a C-plus,” Vincent had told them.

But now with the adrenaline pumping, neither of them wanted to take a C-plus.

Wilkes banged loudly on the door.

Nothing.

She kicked it with her boot, and out in the shop a second guard must have arrived because there was a worried, conspiratorial conversation.

They had seconds left.

Then, a muffled voice through the door. “Who is it?”

Ophelia glanced at Wilkes, who deepened her voice and said, “It’s Bug Man. Open up.”

“He’s English,” Ophelia whispered.

“It’s fooking Bug Man, open the bloody door, I have to use the loo!” Wilkes yelled.

“Use your swipe card,” the muffled voice answered.

“I lost the bloody thing, didn’t I? Now open up, you tosser!” She sounded a bit like Rupert Grint. Or at least an American’s version of Ron Weasely.

To their mutual amazement, the door opened, revealing a TFD in characteristic polo shirt and chinos.

Wilkes jammed her fake gun under his chin and pushed him back.

Ophelia slammed the door closed behind them. Then, as the TFD was just beginning to notice that the so-called gun didn’t feel as though it was made of steel, Ophelia smashed him in the face with the snow globe, which broke and sent fake snow and plastic representations of the UN Building tumbling down his front.

It didn’t knock the TFD out and he was recovering fast and realizing he was in trouble and the gun wasn’t real and that he had maybe just forfeited his own life, so he came back swinging hard, wild, and half blind.

Wilkes gave him a Doc Marten testicular adjustment, punched him, and Ophelia punched him and it was a melee. The TFD went down on his back but with his hands around Ophelia’s throat, so Wilkes just started kicking him in the side of the head.
Crump!
Crump! Crump!
Again and again.

Ophelia was able to pry his hands off her neck, but Wilkes never stopped, not until the side of the man’s head was red and bits of bone were showing.

“Enough, enough,” Ophelia gasped.

Wilkes buried a boot into him once more, a sort of final “And stay down” move.

Wilkes, Ophelia decided, was a girl with some issues.

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.

They heard street sounds, alley sounds. Conversation, shouts and laughs and normality, and none of that helped because they were a million miles away from normal.

“I’m at the head. Shorter hairs,” Keats said. “Here’s hoping this dog doesn’t have fleas or lice or … Eyelid. I’m there. Demodex. I hate demodex. These are different, though. Jesus.”

Her neck was in his face. It smelled of French fries. And he could not resist the urge to kiss that neck as he raced toward the slow-blinking eyelid and the dark pool of a whiteless eye.