Bzrk (20 page)

“This isn’t a game to the Twins, kid.” He slurred it.

“Yeah, well, as long as they keep you in dope, right?”

Burnofsky made a small laugh. Then he leaned in, too close, and said, “Yeah. Exactly. That’s my price. And yours is thinking you’re a big man, and that piece of ass you go home to every night. And Jindal? He’s an actual true believer, a true hive mind, Nexus Humanus sucker. And One-Up? More like you. More about ego. We all have a drug.”

“And Twofer? I guess they’re the dealers.”

“See, you’re not so stupid,” Burnofsky said.

The back of Bug Man’s legs hurt. The bruises made it hard for him to walk without limping. He had cried for the first time in … how long? A long time. Oh, definitely, he had cried, Anthony Elder, he had cried into his pillow and told Jessica to stay away.

They had lain him out like a little punk and whacked his ass.

Now here he was planning to take down the biggest target in the world. Final briefing. Final prep. And instead of getting what was his due, to swagger in as big as an elephant’s balls and have everyone kiss his ass, he’d had to hobble in like a cripple.

“Two ways forward now, Anthony,” Burnofsky said. “Rebel or excel.”

“What the hell are you babbling about?”

“You turn against them. Or you show them your true worth.”

“Rebel? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? AmericaStrong thugs would be down on me and really fuck me up. Maybe kill me.”

“Not maybe, Anthony.”

He was so sure that it made Bug Man take a step back. It was true. He saw it in the old man’s rheumy eyes. The Twins would kill him. And Burnofsky knew this with absolute certainty.

Because.

Because he’d seen it happen.

“Who’d they kill?” Bug Man pressed. “Somebody stood up against them? Who? You tell me. You tell me who it was.”

“She was as good as you.”

“Who’s this ‘she’? ”

“It runs in families, this talent we have, Anthony. This girl, Carla, yeah, lousy name to stick on a girl. Named after her father.”

Burnofsky’s pale, whiskered face was ghostly. And yes, right then, with the scientist’s face too close and the stink of booze sweat coming off him, and drilling into Anthony with those needle-hole pupils, yes right then Bug Man remembered that Burnofsky’s first name was Karl.

“Stood up to them, see, when she realized what was going on, what the real game was.” Tears were leaking out of Burnofsky’s eyes. “About your age. Like most twitchers. Gamer kid. They had her lace some juicy bacteria. The Twins had a grudge, see. A woman named Heidi Zulle, a shrink. You’ve heard rumors about the
Doll Ship
?”

“Some kind of …” Bug Man didn’t have the right word for it.

“A floating house of horrors, and Zulle was in charge of using drugs and so-called therapy to keep the victims in line. She had a change of heart that coincidentally came after the Twins had her … well, suffice to say, something much worse than they did to you, kid. She tried to give the
Doll Ship
’s location up to an intelligence agent. She failed, and then she ran, so, no more Heidi Zulle.”

“The Twins took her out?”

“They had Carla do the job. But they didn’t tell her what she was doing, what she was delivering. And I was there, too, and I didn’t know. Flesh-eating bacteria, a sac of it. “And, well, that was too much for Carla.”

“Christ.”

“You think you’ve seen some shit down in the meat, Bug Man? You’ve never seen that, or anything close.” Burnofsky shuddered. “Carla was a twitcher. Like you. But see, Anthony, she was still a human being. Unlike you. You? You don’t even know how many died in the stadium, do you? Doesn’t matter to you, because you’re a bloodless, amoral little piece of shit. All that matters to you is that you got spanked.”

The truth dawned on Bug Man. The truth of what Burnofsky was telling them. And the why of it.

“They want you to tell me this,” Bug Man said, and his voice cracked. “You’re threatening me.”

Burnofsky laughed delightedly. “Like I said: you’re a smart kid.”

“They killed your daughter. And you’re still their bitch?”

“Everyone dies,” Burnofsky said. “Some die clawing at their eyes in agony as the bacteria eat their brains and eyes from the inside out. Others … others die happy, floating on waves of soft, warm pleasure. That second death? That’s what Carla had. That was my price. That’s what her loving father got for her.”

“And you lecturing me about the dead. You should kill yourself, old man. You should kill
yourself
.”

“What makes you think I’m not?” Burnofsky asked dully.

They stared at each other until Bug Man could not look into those eyes any longer.

“Now. I believe we have a meeting to attend, Anthony.”

NINETEEN

On the screen was a diagram.

Across the top of the diagram were five boxes containing the names MORALES, TS’AI, HAYASHI, BOWEN, and CHAUKSEY.

Bug Man knew these were respectively the leaders of the United States, China, Japan, the United Kingdom, and India.

His first thought was that the Twins had pulled back a little. No Germany, France, or South Korea. It bothered him just a bit, because the plan had been to take down every head of state whose country had serious nanotech. This was a pullback. A pullback meant nervousness, and nervousness in others had a way of making Bug Man nervous.

Helen Falkenhym Morales. President of the United States.

Beneath the box with her name was a line of attack. A pathway. The trick as always was to get from point A to point Z. Fortunately there weren’t that many letters. “A” was the deputy director of the FBI, who was already an asset. “B” was a Secret Service agent who was not on the presidential protection detail but was a friend of the FBI guy. They played a weekly game of squash.

Easy transfer, there.

“B” led in turn to his Secret Service mentor, “C,” who was definitely on the presidential detail and would be in New York with the president.

“C” might be enough. He might make physical contact with POTUS at some point. But the more reliable path was from “C” to “D.”

“D” was the president’s “body man,” although in this case it was a “body woman.” Her name was Liz Law, a name that should have made her some kind of superhero. She was the first person to see Morales in the morning and the last to see her at night.

To reach Liz Law was to reach the president, period.

A,B,C,D.

E.

Four jumps.

Some of the others had it tougher. The path to the Chinese president was seven steps. Some had it easier. The path to the British PM was three steps. Someone had quickly replaced the dead Liselotte Osborne in that pathway.

Bug Man blinked, defocused the chart, and looked around at the room. Jindal was the briefer. He was standing at the ready, twirling a laser pointer nervously in his hand.

The various lead twitchers were around the table.

Kim. An Asperger’s case if ever there was one. Skinny Korean kid, looked about twelve, although he was probably seventeen. He tended to avoid eye contact. And any physical contact. And would occasionally interrupt the conversation with some totally off-topic remark. A good twitcher, methodical, careful.

Dietrich. He was maybe twenty-five, a German with hair so thin and light it seemed to float on a breeze of its own, a sort of thinning blond halo. Behind his back people called him Riff-Raff, after the butler from
The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
An Armstrong Twins true believer. Dude had totally drunk the Nexus Humanus Kool-Aid and licked the bottom of the glass. He was barely good enough as a twitcher, and Bug Man would not have wanted Dietrich covering his ass down in the meat.

Alfredo, now he had potential. He came from some tiny island in the middle of the ocean. The Azores, whatever those were. His family had raised bulls for the street bullfights they had there. He had made a name for himself in online games, where he had a tendency to reach the top level in half the time it took anyone else. A pretty good twitcher, Alfredo, but volatile, capable of losing it entirely when someone crossed him.

And then, there was One-Up. She was sixteen, a white girl from some Oklahoma suburb. She could have been a beauty but meth had destroyed her teeth, and now that she was clean she had a bad set of veneers. It gave her a startling, too-white, too-bright shark smile.

One-up was tough and fearless and dangerous. All the love and energy she had once put into finding meth to smoke and deal she now devoted to the game. She was weird, obsessive, as thin as a classroom skeleton, and probably clinically insane. But Bug Man had fought alongside her once, going up against Kerouac and someone they didn’t know, and bottom line? The girl had game. She had taken over the Bowen target during the reshuffling when Burnofsky got bumped off the POTUS.

There was one other person in the room. She was sitting in a corner, wearing khaki slacks and a pink pima-cotton shirt. She had blonde hair—a bit stiff—one leg crossed over the other, hands on the arms of her chair. She was a white woman with a pert little nose and sculpted eyebrows. Sugar Lebowski, operational head of AmericaStrong, AFGC’s tough-guy division. Some called her the Little Lebowski, although there was nothing laid back or cool about her.

She hadn’t been there for Bug Man’s beating. But she had sent the order and chosen the men, and sat there with her pink-lipsticked mouth smiling pertly as they reported what had gone down.

Bug Man nodded at One-up and ignored the others.

Feeling self-conscious, he took the seat at the head of the table while Burnofsky took what was either the other head or the tail of the table.

Kim had the Indian PM; Alfredo was on the Japanese; Burnofsky had the Chinese now; and Dietrich, who had been warming up to go after the German, was now prepping to fill in for anyone who pulled up sick or failed.

The pain of sitting was excruciating. The bruises ached and burned. The muscles twanged.

Jindal started to give a rundown, using his laser pointer. And listening with half his brain, Bug Man began to stew. Things were not quite what they had seemed. Yes, the POTUS was a slightly bigger target than the Chinese president, but the path to the Chinese dude was seven jumps. So while the Twins had given Bug Man the honor of the prime target, they had given Burnofsky the harder job, at least in terms of navigating the pathway.

Jindal started the briefing. It was all very official sounding. Very Defense Department. But these weren’t colonels and generals listening. One-Up was playing a game on her phone. Dietrich was acting way too enthusiastic. Alfredo seemed to be catching up on his Facebook messages.

Burnofsky seemed about to fall asleep, nodding off, catching himself.

Bug Man played his role. He stared with great focus at Jindal. But his mind was on the pain in his legs. It was also on what Burnofsky had told him. Was it a warning? Yes. But what kind of warning? He was trying to manipulate the Bug Man, but to what end?

What was it the man wanted in the end? Did Burnofsky want Bug Man to go rogue and end up as dead as his own daughter?

Beneath all of that was the raw emotion. The humiliation. Bug Man wondered how many of the people sitting at the table knew that he had been smacked down by the Twins.

Were they all secretly smirking at an imagined image of his crying? The first one who gave him a wrong look …

It was time to put them in their places. Time to remind them who he was.

“You done talking, Jindal?”

Jindal stopped in midpoint, started to say something, decided to say something else, which was, “I’m all done.”

“All right then,” Bug Man said. “Everyone’s already heard I came real close to taking Vincent out. The only reason I didn’t was stuff up in the macro.” He glared at them, daring them to argue. One-up might have smirked a little. Maybe. And then, with an effort, he forced himself to meet the gaze of Sugar Lebowski.

“Yeah. That’s right, Sugar, a fuckup in the macro.” He spit the words at her, defiant.

She looked back at him like she was looking at one of her rumored three ex-husbands.

“Seems like none of Sugar’s boys can handle the Top Hat Man, the BZRK macro hitter,” Bug Man said.

Would she argue?

No. She would not. Because in the end she was replaceable. And the people in this room—especially Bug Man—were not. The world was full of thugs. But a great twitcher?

“Point is,” Bug Man allowed generously, “I probably still could have made a kill on Vincent. I had him. But I wasn’t focused. I wasn’t on my game, right?”

Yeah, they were looking at him with respect. Yes, they were. All except Burnofsky, because Burnofsky knew what had gone down. And Sugar, whose complexion was darkening toward angry red.

Well, time would take care of Burnofsky, time and the opium or the booze. Or maybe Bug Man would take care of him one day. And Sugar? He’d get in her head some fine day and wire her up. Maybe make her think she was itching night and day. Make her shred her own skin.

Bug Man stood up because his legs hurt too much to keep sitting on this poorly padded chair. All eyes were on him, even Burnofsky, who seemed sleepily amused.

“We all come from gaming, right? Every kind of platform. Games. So then we get the chance to play the ultimate game. Anybody here ever played anything half as good as twitching? Ever remember any game environment half as cool as being down in the meat?”

Nods of agreement moderated by indifference and distraction, about as much close attention as you were ever going to get from this crowd.

“Someone told me I needed to stop thinking about all the stuff up on that board like it’s just a game. It’s all serious now, all heavyweight. Real.”

He looked right at Burnofsky, leaving no doubt who he was talking about. “Yeah, that’s all bullshit. We all came for the game. We win by remembering
it’s a game
. What happens up in the macro? Who gives a shit about that unless it gets in the way of the game?”

He pointed at the board. “See that? It’s a game plan.
Game
, my brothers and sisters. Just a game.” He paused for dramatic effect. “But it’s one hell of a game. And we’re going to win it.”

Plath washed herself very carefully. With a washcloth and a bar of soap while standing at a sink in the narrow, unpleasant little bathroom that had been designated for her and Keats.

The eyes that stared back at her were crawling with vermin.

Footballs of pollen, all bright as Skittles, and eerie green fungi clung to hairs that grew from a fallen-leaf forest floor of dead skin.

She knew because she had seen all of that on
him.
On his face, his mouth, his eyes. She had seen him for what he was and knew that he had seen her in the same way.

Up in the macro he might have a hard, smooth chest and strong shoulders. Up in the macro she might be able to imagine touching him in those places. Up in the macro she could imagine kissing lips that down there, down in the nano, looked like aged sepia-toned waxed paper, like a wall of yellow-tinged—

She shuddered and closed her eyes, closed the lid tight,
Oh, good,
visiting time for demodex.

“Aaaahhhhh,” she cried, and scrubbed with the washcloth. She scrubbed at her eyelashes, scrubbed her face, couldn’t even really think about the rest of her body because God only knew what monsters crawled and clanked around the rest of her square miles of dead-surfaced flesh.

Think of yourself as an ecosystem.

You’re a rain forest.

You’re an environment. A world. A planet inhabited by life-forms
more alien than anything invented in science fiction.

She threw the washcloth down and had to resist the urge to use her fingernails to scrape every inch of her skin.

It wouldn’t help. It would just create some new horror, ripping the trees from the soil, piling the dead skin in clumps, revealing blood-tinged undersoil, exciting the rise of lymphocytes rushing to close off contamination while bacteria propagated and viruses—thankfully they were too small to be seen even down at the nano—rushed to squeeze inside her, spread through her blood, and eat her alive.