Bzrk (32 page)

“Later they’ll remember us,” Vincent said. “You need to look to your macro security, Jin. They’ll find you.”

“Goddamnit, Vincent, focus on keeping your biots alive.”

Vincent shuddered. Nijinsky saw it, a sort of spasm that twisted the impassive features into a human expression of fear.

Nijinsky was sick inside. His biots were running so fast he was in danger of getting lost. His light organs couldn’t glow far enough ahead. It was like driving at a hundred miles an hour on a dark, back-country road with dim headlights.

Vincent stopped moving.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Vincent cried. “Oh, oh, oh.”

The hollowed-out look in Vincent’s face told Nijinsky all he needed to know.

“No, no, no,” Nijinsky cried, and put his arms protectively around Vincent as Vincent’s eyes filled with tears and he began a low, soft moaning.

TWENTY-NINE

“Yeah, fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” Bug Man cried.

The dead biot—so very dead, split into two barely connected pieces, dead, and floating legless, dead, through the fluid—was a miracle.

He had lost half his force doing it, and the chiasmic chamber was dotted with legs and sensors and wheels and unidentifiable pieces of circuit and metal skin. The Bug Man logo floated by one of his screens, but none of that a mattered: he had killed one of Vincent’s biots.

It froze him for a moment.

No one had ever killed one of Vincent’s boys.

No one! Only him. Only Bug Man.

“Oh, fuck yeah.”

He could take his time now, minimize risk, because unless Vincent was Clark Kent, he was sucking wind right now and more distracted than he had ever been before.

Bug Man quickly took stock. He had eleven active fighters. All his spinners were safe.

Eleven to one, and the twitcher, the mighty Vincent, was somewhere gasping and wheezing like he’d been gutshot.

Vincent’s remaining biot had managed to propel itself to the upper surface. It was hanging from a neuron bundle, staring down at the eleven nanobots that now rose slowly through the goo.

“I’ll be gentle, bitch!” Bug Man exulted. “Hah-hah!”

He would form a perimeter on the surface first. Keep four of his nanobots floating, just in case Vincent launched off again.

He had him surrounded.

Hell, yes, he had Vincent surrounded. And Vincent’s biot seemed almost helpless. It stared with its insect eyes and with its human eyes, and it did nothing, not a damned thing, as Bug Man’s nanobots closed the ring.

Keats’s biots tore across the cellular floor toward something towering and dark.

As it happened he was facedown now on that very floor, though to him it was smoothly polished wood—very, very different in the macro than what he saw in the nano.

In fact he was bleeding on that floor. Blood flowed from his nose and formed a pool that oozed around his cheek and the side of his mouth. Each time he breathed out through his mouth a red bubble formed. He saw a reflection of his eye in the dark pool. The eye looked scared.

“My brother is … he’s not feeling well,” Charles said.

Keats could not see his biots, of course. But he looked in every direction, trying to match up what he saw with his eyes and what he saw in his brain.

Nothing.

Well, not nothing exactly. He saw three legs beneath the desk. Three legs wearing identical shoes. One left, one right, one … neither. The leg in the middle was thinner, but it wore not only the identical shoe in a smaller size but an identical sock and identical trouser leg.

He couldn’t see anything above the knee. And he doubted that he wanted to.

“Egg scramble, bamble!” Benjamin yelped suddenly. “What … what did I just do?”

Plath’s nanobots were somewhere in Benjamin’s brain, that much was instantly clear to Keats. And in a second or two the Twins would realize what had happened. A few seconds after that they would begin to torture him to find out where Plath was.

Or maybe kill him, if they concluded he was the twitcher.

And they would bring in their own twitcher with nanobots to go in after Plath’s biots.

He had to get to her. Had to. But his biots were racing toward what might be a table leg for all he knew.

More men were coming in now. He could hear them in the macro. And far more important, he could feel the vibration in the nano. The vibrations. Coming from his right, from the door.

Which meant … which meant the biots were moving toward the Twins. Or toward Sugar. Or toward any of the forest of legs that now rushed past him, over him, security guys, guns in hand.

“We don’t need more of your thugs, Sugar, we need a goddamned twitcher!” Charles bellowed. The three feet pressed against the floor. The chair was pushed back. This time the Twins rose successfully.

The biots were close now, close to a wall a hundred feet tall, a wall with a long, horizontal cave beneath it.

It had to be a shoe. Or a table leg. No, a shoe.

“We have Army Pete in the building,” Sugar said, desperately. “He’s downstairs. We need to get him up here to place his nanobots and then—”

“He’s a third-rate hack!” Benjamin snarled.

“Our best guys are—”

“Get him!” Charles said.

“You, you, and you: get Army Pete. Drag his ass up here and make sure he’s loaded up,” Sugar said, relieved to be snapping orders again.

“The army was filled with communists in those days!” Benjamin ranted.

The biots were in the open-sided cave formed by the shoe. Had to be that. Had to be a shoe, didn’t it?

The ceiling above K1 and K2 was creepy in its normality. It looked like a vast quilt—plastic fibers woven together as if by a million tiny seamstresses. It had the look of basketwork, almost uniform, weird in its unnatural uniformity.

And suddenly that ceiling was coming down fast. Keats made his biots leap and twist. Biot legs clutched strands of neoprene and scampered upside down toward light at the end of the toe.

The shoe flattened as the Twins walked. It seemed as if the biots must be crushed, but there was a pattern in the sole and Keats sent his creatures diving into a long, straight channel, then forward again.

He couldn’t help but stare as Charles and Benjamin walked. Left. Right. Drag a nearly limp middle leg. Left. Right. Drag.

The center leg had some movement, but it was as if it was numb. It moved in a jerky sequence all its own, out of synch and thus hauled along, scraping toe across the floor.

They were coming to Keats.

The left foot stepped in Keats’s blood. Corpuscles surged up and around the biots, finding them even in the depths of the channel. The biots powered on through their creator’s own blood, red Frisbees clinging to spiky feet and clustering on biot bellies.

“Make him sit up,” Charles ordered. “Remove the gag.”

Instantly, rough hands grabbed Keats and hauled him almost to his feet before slamming him on his butt.

The feet were immobile. The biots rushed over and through blood to the end of the channel and turned the corner onto the toe, and Benjamin said, “I don’t feel right, brother.”

Keats stared up into the faces of the Twins.

He knew better than to be horrified by mere deformity. He’d had a teacher once with paddle arms no more than twelve inches long, a birth defect, and so he knew not to stare, and he certainly knew better than to shudder and pull back and lose for a moment his ability to take a breath.

But this was something out of a nightmare. This was no mere deformity. This was Satan playing with DNA.

Charles’s eye glared pure hatred at him. Benjamin’s eye was filling with tears. And the third eye, soulless, dead, devoid of spark, wandered before at last focusing on him. He saw the brown iris contract.

“You’ll tell me now where the girl is,” Charles said in a low voice.

Keats should have said something pithy and defiant. He didn’t. His mouth wasn’t working.

“You’re a handsome one, aren’t you?” Charles asked. “My brother and I have not had that particular advantage in life. Tell me, boy: What’s it like to have that face? What’s it like to have women look at you and admire you?”

“Speak up!” Sugar said. Her voice betrayed her own fear. And someone, Keats didn’t see who, buried a toe in his kidney and made him cry out in pain.

“Do you have a knife, Ms. Lebowski?” Charles asked.

“A knife? I … No, sir.”

“I do,” a male voice said. There came the snicker-snack sound of a Swiss Army knife opening.

“Promote this one; I like a man who is prepared,” Charles said to Sugar. “Give the knife to Ms. Lebowski. Ms. Lebowski, what part of a man’s face attracts you?”

“I … the … the eyes,” Sugar stammered.

Biots were on top of the shoe now. Too far. They would never climb that towering body in time to do any good.

“No, we can’t take his eyes, Ms. Lebowski. How would he be able to appreciate what had happened to his face if we took his eyes?” The faces, the eyes, scanned the surface of Keats’s face and focused at last on his nose.

“Will the girls think he’s pretty with his nose cut off, Ms. Lebowski?”

“Jesus … I,” she said.

“Let him feel the blade,” Charles said, his voice guttural now.

Sugar pressed the blade against the side of Keats’s nose. He could see it. He could feel it. His heart hammered in terror. He tried to twist away but powerful hands imprisoned his skull.

“No, no, don’t do it, miss,” Keats begged.

“Then tell me where to find the McLure,” Charles grated.

The knife would slice through flesh. It would cut his nose and hesitate at the cartilage but it would cut and cut away and his nose would fall to the floor, a useless piece of dead flesh and he would forever—

“Now!” Charles roared. “Tell me now!”

“I don’t know where—”

“Cut off his nose! Cut him! Do it!”

“I—” Sugar said.

“Cut off his nose or you’ll lose your own!”

“He’s a kid!” Sugar begged.

“I don’t know where she is!” Keats pleaded.

“Don’t hit me, Granddad!” Benjamin cried.

“Shut your mouth, Brother! Cut him now!”

But even as Charles bellowed, his body was jerked away. The Twins stumbled back, and through eyes filled with tears, Keats saw Benjamin flailing madly, swatting at something no one but he could see.

“Brother!” Charles cried.

It was a lunatic dance, two halves of the joined body struggling, staggering, slipping in the blood.

The Twins stumbled back into the desk, which scooted away so that they fell hard on their behind, and Keats felt the impact through his biots and the blade slid away from Keats’s nose, and Benjamin, in a child’s voice, kept saying, “Communists!”

Then Charles roared in frustration. He swatted at his brother’s head but couldn’t reach. He swatted with arms too short to reach across the width of his own body and shouted, “Control yourself! Control yourself!” as he lost the last of his own control and now flailed, tried to pull himself up and ended in knocking the whole desk over.

Pens and phone and dog treats and a soft-drink bottle all slid to the floor. The touch-screen desk lay on its side, still displaying the battle inside the president.

Charles got his hand on the drink bottle, holding it awkwardly by the fat end, and jabbed it now, hit his brother’s face with it, and blood gushed suddenly from Benjamin’s mouth even as he kept yelling, “Communists! Communists!”

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

Charles bashed his brother’s mouth. A tooth bent inward and gushed blood. The lips were jagged and red.

“He’s going to hurt Benjamin,” Sugar said. “We have to stop it.”

She moved fast, whipped out plastic ties, the same as the ones that held Keats, grabbed Charles’s hammering hand and using her full weight, pushed it down.

“Get off me, you cow!”

“Standing orders, sir: we step into a fight between you two. Your own orders.”

“He’s let them take him. They’re inside him, and he’s let them do it. He’s weak! He’s always been weak!”

She put her knee on the hand, yanked the chair close, and fastened Charles’s hand to the crossbar.

“Following your own orders, sir,” Sugar pleaded, but she didn’t look as if she believed it. She was darting glances at the door, like she was counting steps, like the elevator door a hundred feet away was the doorway to paradise.

Benjamin was weeping now, blubbering like a baby.

“He’s here!” one of the TFDs yelled, and Army Pete, a teenaged boy wearing a droopy army surplus jacket, was practically hurled into the room.

Sugar said, “What the hell took so long? You, twitcher! You’re going in.”