BZRK Reloaded

by Michael Grant

  But what could she do? How could she stop MoMo from loving her right out of the White House?

  Later she would recall that question.

  Later she would ask herself how she had decided on the terrible answer.

  But at this moment all she saw was that it would have to be a single swift blow. No second chances.

  She pressed close to her husband. She kissed him. She ran her fingers through his wet hair, held both sides of his head tight, and with every muscle in her body smashed the back of his head against the tile wall.

  MoMo sagged to the floor. Blood came with surprising force, more than she would have imagined.

  She left the water running, stepped from the shower, crossed to the bathtub, and began filling it with hot water.

  It took a couple of minutes before there was enough water in the tub.

  MoMo groaned in the shower. Nonsense sounds, not words, but still she had to hurry.

  She slid back the shower door, knelt down, put her hands under his arms, and dragged him the five feet to the tub. That much was easy: he was wet and soapy, and the floor was tile.

  The harder part was pushing him up over the side of the tub. For the scenario to work it would have to seem as if he’d slipped and smashed his head against the side of the tub. It would be a long night of making sure that bloodstains were in only the exactly right places. The president would be scrubbing.

  She manhandled MoMo into the rising water in the tub. Now he was moaning and moving feebly, like a sleepwalker, like a drunk, uncoordinated.

  He splashed into the tub.

  His eyes fluttered open as she ground the bloody wound against the back of the tub.

  “Mwuh?” he managed to say.

  Mustn’t leave handprints. Had to do this right. She pressed her palms against his chest and leaned her weight on him until his head was completely submerged.

  His dark eyes blinked, seemed to gain awareness for just a moment, and his arms came up out of the water to push back . . .

  Too late. His lungs filled.

  He vomited into the water.

  And then she no longer had to hold him down. MoMo wasn’t going anywhere.

  It would be a tragedy. The nation would mourn. She would get a ten-point sympathy bounce in the polls.

  Her secrets would be safe.

  A sob heaved up from inside her. She loved him. She loved him with all her heart.

  And she had just murdered him.

  In an office in a building on the 1800 block of Pennsylvania Avenue, a very short distance from the White House, Bug Man tore the gloves from his hands.

  He was shaking.

  He felt sick. He climbed out of the chair, made it five steps on the way to the very nice executive bathroom before falling to his knees, gasping as if he’d been running a marathon.

  He had been.

  Down in the meat, down in the nano, he had been racing his exploding-head-logo nanobots, laying wire like some demented lineman from elements of the president’s ego, her self-image, to images of MoMo.

  Bug Man had long since cauterized a number of areas storing what might be called ethics or morality. In fact, they weren’t that, they were memories of books, sermons, lectures, and—much more powerful—the images of victimization from her childhood in San Antonio that formed the basis of her core decency.

  Like most politicians, and all presidents, she had a strong ego. She’d always had well-developed instincts for survival, what some would describe as ruthlessness. But it had been balanced by pity, kindness, fellow feeling, love.

  Bug Man had needed a less moral, more ruthless person. He had needed her simplified—the better to manipulate, the better to convince her to give Rios and his brand-new government agency free rein to quash any unhelpful investigations, to oppose any international action.

  So Bug Man had made her that. He had needed her to be suggestible to paranoia; he had needed to be able to plug that heightened aggressiveness and ruthlessness into pictures of any and all whose actions might threaten the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation.

  Yes.

  Well.

  Brains are subtle things. Some miswiring had created the twitches and tells that had alerted MoMo to changes in his wife. The president’s heightened aggression combined with weakened restraint had led now to murder.

  But for the last desperate minutes Bug Man had not been trying to get Helen Falkenhym Morales to kill her husband MoMo. He’d been trying to stop her.

  Once he’d seen where she was going he’d tried—way too little, way too late—to make her see MoMo as an extension of herself.

  The only result was that later, too damned late, she would feel remorse. Guilt. Which would only create its own problems.

  Bug Man was on his knees, blood pounding in his face, stomach churning with fear, waiting for the call.

  When his phone did ring it still startled him.

  He wondered how long he could go without answering. He wondered if he could keep from vomiting again. Or crying.

  “Yeah,” he whispered into his phone.

  “Oh, Anthony.” The voice was not the ranting fury of the Armstrong Twins. It was Burnofsky. “Anthony, Anthony: what have you done?”

  “Jesus Christ!” Bug Man wailed. “I didn’t know the crazy bitch would—”

  Burnofsky laughed his parchment-dry laugh. “Watch what you say. Washington is full of big ears.”

  “What am I …What do . . .” He couldn’t even frame the question. His breathing was short and harsh. “The Twins . . .”

  “Past their bedtime, fortunately. The only one watching the video feed was me.”

  It was a sign of how frightened Bug Man was that he welcomed this news. He despised Burnofsky, but he was terrified of Charles and especially Benjamin Armstrong.

  “But there will be no hiding this, of course,” Burnofsky went on.

  Bug Man cursed, but there was no anger left in him. All was cold knife-steel fear now. The Twins—Charles and Benjamin Armstrong, those freaks—were not patient with underlings who screwed up.

  The things they could do to him …An earlier error had been punished with a beating delivered by AmericaStrong thugs against Bug Man’s legs and buttocks. He still couldn’t sit in a chair without a handful of Advil. Now he had endangered everything.

  “I’m a twitcher; I’m a fighter, not a goddamned spinner,” Bug Man pleaded with the phone. “I took down Vincent himself. I took down Kerouac before him. I’m the best. I’m important. They can’t kill me! This is—”

  “Mmmm,” Burnofsky said, amused, gloating, already seeing in his opium-addled brain the price the Twins might demand. “You’re screwed, Anthony my young friend. There’s only one person on this green Earth who can save you. Do you know who that is, Anthony?”

  Bug Man was trembling. Even now, no anger. Anger would come later, along with self-justification, but right now, with his face inches from the floor and his whole body feeling sick, Bug Man could only moan.

  “Who, Anthony? Who can save you now, you arrogant little Limey shit? Say the word.”

  “You,” Bug Man whispered.

  Silence stretched as Burnofsky absorbed his rival’s defeat. Then the older man said, “Go limp. Power down. Go to your hotel, screw your girlfriend, but do nothing else until I tell you.”

  The phone went dead. Bug Man rolled onto his side and cried.

  TWO

  Keats, whose real name was Noah, had not intended to go to Plath’s room, but there he was. He knocked.

  “Yes,” she said. Not “Come in,” just “Yes.” Knowing it was him.

  He stood framed by the doorway.

  “You look like hell,” she said.

  “So do you.”

  And then they simply went for each other. They clutched and tore at each other, bruised each other’s lips.

  Noah’s fingers dug into a handful of Sadie’s dark hair, and Sadie’s hands fumbled to push his shirt over his head, and his tongue was in her mouth, and her
breasts were pressed almost violently against his hard chest.

  They were alive when they should be dead, and sane when they could be mad.

  So afraid. So lonely.

  Vincent’s lunatic howl was fresh in Keats’s mind, still echoed in his ears, and the sight of Nijinsky breaking down in tears, and the awful memory of his big brother, of Alex, shrieking like an animal, chained to a cot in a hellish mental ward screaming, “Berserk! Berserk! BERSERK!”

  Keats had imagined that their first time making love would be a study in tenderness. But this was not tender. They could hardly keep from hurting each other. They needed something that was not horror. They needed something that was not drenched in despair.

  They needed not to hear Vincent howling like a dog.

  Noah gasped and pulled back suddenly. He pushed Plath’s greedy hands down against the pillow.

  Her eyes were confused, wary. “Don’t stop,” she said and her voice was not pleading, it was a snapped order. She expected to be obeyed. She could do that voice when motivated.

  “You’re leaking,” Keats said.

  “What?”

  “It’s not bad, not yet.”

  She understood him, then sat up, put a hand to her head. As if she could feel it. “Damn it.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed.

  Keats looked at her. She closed her eyes, absorbing the frustration, then snapped her gaze up at him, blazing.

  But as he looked at her face he also saw deep inside her. Not in some metaphorical way. He had eyes inside her, all the way down inside her brain.

  Down in the meat.

  Plath had an aneurysm, which had been serviced first by her father’s biots—before he had been murdered—and were now served by Keats’s own biots. Two tiny, nightmarish creatures, neither as large as a dust mite, neither visible to the unaided eye. Each had six legs, a tail that could deliver a venomous sting or drip acid. A spear for puncturing the metal shells of nanobots.

  There was a rack of pins only a few molecules thick slung on the biot’s back. A spinneret at the rear oozed with webbing wire.

  Biots were built of several different DNA strands: scorpion, spider, cobra, jellyfish, and human. The DNA of a specific human, in this case one Noah Cotton: Keats.

  That DNA connection tied the biot to its creator, like a finger was tied to a brain, like a sort of detached limb, a body part controlled by his own mind. Move left. Move right. Jump. Strike. Run away.

  Live.

  Die.

  The human DNA was most evident in the face of the biot. In addition to blank, soulless insect eyes, each biot also had structures that looked like human eyes, almost. Human until you looked closely and saw that these were as blank and soulless as the spider eyes.

  The intimate connection had a very major downside. A biot wasn’t just a limb, it was an extension of the mind of its controller/ creator. Lose a biot and you would lose your mind.

  That was why Vincent howled. Bug Man had beaten him in battle and killed one of Vincent’s biots.

  Noah kissed Plath, a kiss that was full of regret, and she accepted it passively.

  Down deep inside her brain where a scalpel could never reach, Keats’s biots, K1 and K2, stood atop the Teflon fiber barrier that had been built so painstakingly around the aneurysm. It was a bulging artery, a thin spot, a swelling, like an overinflated balloon where the blood might break out at any moment and tear apart the drum-tight membrane to flood and destroy the brain tissue around it.

  Pop.

  A blown aneurysm could lead to anything from strokes to localized brain death to all-over, whole-body death.

  The membrane was leaking. From Keats’s position it was a floor not a wall—gravity meant very little at the nano level. A floor that was gushing tiny red Frisbees, like a jet of licked cough drops. These were the red blood cells, platelets. They shot up in a jet from a tiny tear in the artery wall and floated off into the cerebral–spinal fluid, where blood was normally not allowed.

  Within that garden hose of platelets were things of a paler color that looked like animated sponges, wads of mucousy goo—the white blood cells, the pale soldiers, the defenders of the body.

  Keats saw this through two sets of biot eyes. The biots saw each other as well. And all the while, up in the macro, he was looking at Plath as she stood, and he gazed with intense regret on the curve of her breasts, and the narrowness of her waist, and saw—at least in his imagination—many other details as well.

  It was painful, wanting her this badly.

  Keats’s two biots scampered to the stash of titanium fibers. The fibers looked a little like strands of razor wire, each only about half the length of the biot itself. The jagged edges allowed them to be woven together. But care had to be exercised to avoid cutting into the artery wall and making things far worse.

  “Can’t you do two things at once?” She leaned into him and he did not pull away. Her open mouth met his and her tongue found his and he was breathing her breath, and his heart was pounding, pounding crazy crazy crazy.

  His body, his bruised, battered, painfully taut body, did not really give half a damn about doing the responsible thing but wanted very much, very excruciatingly much, to just do, and it was almost beyond his power to restrain himself and if she kept that up then things were going to move forward to the next step, a step he wanted to take more than he had ever wanted anything else in his sixteen years of life.

  His words were a rasp and a groan. “Not those two things. No. Not at once.”

  He held her back, his hands on her arms, and really why the hell were his arms taking sides with his brain when his body so clearly, clearly, clearly had other ideas in mind?

  “I don’t want to be paying attention with half my mind,” he managed to say.

  Plath liked that. She didn’t want that to be his answer, but she liked it anyway. Yes, he wanted it to be important. He wanted it to stay with him forever. Keats was always …She stopped herself in midthought. She didn’t know what he was always, did she? She barely knew him. They had met just weeks ago. Not a single second of that time had been anything like normal. It had been lunacy from the start.

  We take the names of madmen, because madness is our fate.

  Terribly melodramatic, that. Ophelia had denied that it was hopeless. Ophelia, who lay now, presumably in FBI custody, with her legs burned off.

  And Vincent was the proof. Vincent, their pillar of strength. The best of BZRK, if there was a best.

  How long until this beautiful, sweet boy with the sometimes difficult to understand English accent would be raving like his brother, Kerouac?

  How long until he was howling like Vincent?

  How long until she was alongside them?

  He wasn’t the only one who wanted this, he wasn’t by any means the only one. She wanted him, all of him, not later, now. But that meant all of his attention, too, she supposed.

  She was arguing with herself now, and either way she was losing. Plath was not good at losing.

  Down deep inside her brain, Keats lifted the first of the fibers and slid one end into the weave. The platelets were pouring out, a fire hose of flat red discs. His biot bent the fiber against the current, pushing the flow aside, and shoved the loose end down, held it down while his second biot came running up with a second fiber. The platelets battered the biot’s head, a Nerf machine gun.

  “How bad is it?” Plath asked.

  “Not bad,” he reassured her. “Just an hour’s work.”

  Plath smiled crookedly, and they both felt the moment slip away.

  “You realize we may never get the opportunity again?” Plath asked him.

  “Horribly aware, yes,” he said.

  She laid a palm softly against his cheek. He closed his eyes. He couldn’t help it. He had to close his eyes because he could not look into her eyes or notice the tremor in her lips or the pulse in her throat or any of a hundred things that would destroy his ability to focus on saving her.

  She kept
her hand there. “I’m afraid,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  “I told you before: I’m not the kind of girl who falls in love.”

  He shrugged. “I’m the kind of boy who does.”

  “It will make it so much worse,” she whispered. “Aren’t you afraid of that pain?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then let’s not. We can make love without being in love, Keats. We can be …We can be fighters together. Side by side. We can be friends. We can do, whatever, we don’t have to be in love.”

  He said nothing, half his focus already gone, trudging dutifully with his titanium fibers as platelets swirled around him.

  “You don’t need me here,” she said, frustration turning her voice cold. Actually angry at him for focusing on saving her life, angry at him, she supposed, for being able to resist. Or just angry at life in general.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said flatly.

  It took Keats closer to two hours to squeeze off the flow of blood. Then another twenty minutes to carefully check his work.

  He fell asleep fully clothed, and though he would have loved to dream of her, exhaustion shut him down.

  “Difficult news,” Burnofsky said. Burnofsky brought that news to the Twins right away, middle of the night. There could be no concealing it. The best he could hope for was to save Bug Man’s life and leave his own plans intact. That above all: his own plans.

  To that end he’d hoped to convince the Twins to take a victory lap, to take a tour of foreign facilities or even a vacation aboard their floating house of horrors, the Doll Ship.

  Bug Man had forced his hand and disrupted Burnofsky’s timetable. In a few hours, by morning at latest, the news of the first gentleman’s death would be out. It would be seen as a tragic accident by the general public—but the Twins would know better.

  If he was going to keep things running, he, Burnofsky, would have to get the Twins under control. Not easy. Never easy and harder now. Charles still saw reason. But Benjamin . . .

  Burnofsky took the elevator up to the Tulip. The Tulip was the pinnacle, floors sixty-three through sixty-seven, of the Armstrong Building, headquarters of the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation. It was the pink polymer, one-way transparent, nanocomposite-walled home and office of the Armstrong Twins.