Bzrk (22 page)

“So, having fun so far?” Wilkes asked Keats.

He managed a faint smile. Then he turned his head and looked out of the window. They drove through darkened Brooklyn.

No one seemed to want to talk except Wilkes.

“Anyone else hungry? Doughnut places are open. We could buy a dozen assorted.”

No one answered.

“Raised doughnuts, not the cake ones,” Wilkes said. “I don’t really like cake doughnuts, although I will eat them. But for one thing, in a cake doughnut the hole is all crunched up. I believe a doughnut should have a true hole.”

She let that sit for a moment, smiling at Keats. Then said, “I like to stick my tongue in the hole.”

Keats looked a little panicky.

“How about you, blue eyes?” Wilkes asked innocently. “Do you like to stick your tongue in the hole?”

“I’m not hungry,” Keats said defensively.

Wilkes blinked theatrically, doing a double take. “Is that true, Plath? You should know him well enough by now to know whether he likes to stick his—”

“Wilkes,” Vincent said wearily.

“What? If he doesn’t, I’d be happy to train him,” she said, and laughed her odd heh-heh-heh laugh, cracking herself up. Then she looked out of the window and began digging a sharp thumbnail into the flesh of her arm. Repositioning and doing it again. And again.

Plath met Keats’s eyes and saw that he had noticed it, too.

Each of them living with the fear in their own way. Anya Violet practically defining a separate space as she refused even the slightest acknowledgment of the others. And Vincent tapping into his phone, face blank, eyes glittering, the corners of his mouth tugged downward even more than usual.

“Is it much farther?” Keats asked Vincent.

“At least an hour,” Vincent said. “If you can sleep, do it.”

Keats nodded and closed his eyes.

It didn’t fool Plath. Or at least she didn’t think it was real until Keats started snoring softly. Her immediate reaction was outrage that he could sleep at a time like this.

“I like your boyfriend,” Wilkes said.

“He’s not … whatever,” Plath said wearily. “You have one? A boyfriend, I mean?”

“Not a boyfriend,” Wilkes said. “There was this guy I would occasionally share a sweaty hour with. It was just sex. Comfort. Not love. That’s over.”

“What happened?”

“Got shot. I guess he, uh …” Wilkes shook her head angrily as her voice choked. “I guess he bled out. Because some stupid bitch ratted him out to the Armstrong Twins.”

She stared pure hatred at Anya. And Plath recoiled in shock as she understood. Renfield and Wilkes? No way. The arrogant young aristocrat and the tattooed tough chick?

Comfort. Someone to reach out and touch when night and fear closed in around you.

Wilkes dug her thumbnail again, and this time drew blood.

Ophelia drove Interstate 84 between Waterbury and Hartford. She had a gun on the seat beside her. She had two of her biots in her brain, sitting, doing nothing. She had to hope that the other two of her “children” were cared for.

She had to hope that the house of her grandfather, which she had just left, much to his surprise and concern, was safe from attack.

She had to hope Vincent and the others were well.

She had to hope that car pulling up parallel to her was not a problem. She had no illusion that she could somehow win a gunfight with a carload of TFDs.

“Na hanyate hanyamane sarire,”
Ophelia said. It meant, roughly, that consciousness was eternal, not vanquished with the death of the body.

Which was no doubt very comforting to very enlightened people. For her part Ophelia did not feel particularly enlightened. She felt cold fear.

Nijinsky had danced hard and drunk hard, and now he was considering the possibilities among the three guys who had made serious efforts to hit on him. Well, the three who were even in the game. More had taken a run at him, various twinks, bears, muscle pups. But none of them were his type.

Nijinsky liked guys with an edge. With something dangerous about them. Punks. Anarchists. Homothugs.

He checked his BlackBerry then remembered the battery had died. It needed replacing, it wasn’t holding charge as well as it used to. Well, BZRK could survive without him for a night.

Now, back to the possibilities. One was at the bar, one was dancing, one was falling down as his legs buckled. Now on his butt on the floor, down amid knees and feet, he was clawing at his chest, at the two Taser prongs that had whizzed past Nijinsky.

The music was more than loud enough to deaden the zapping sound. Where the hell? Nijinsky crouched instinctively and spun like a parody of a guy trying to look ninja.

Something hit him hard in the back of the head. Hard enough to send him staggering forward. A woman, not big, just a woman who looked like a suburban housewife, strode right through the dancers who, when they spotted the gun in her hand, backed away fast.

Nijinsky felt dizzy. There was no pain yet, just something like the echo of a massive blow. A club or one hell of a big fist. He was stunned. Unable to comprehend.

He leaned back against the bar, knocking over a stool in the process. A pair of very tough bikers made to rush the blonde woman. She swung the gun toward them with an “I wouldn’t if I were you” look.

The music died. Now Nijinsky heard cries and shouts and voices yelling that someone should call the cops.

“My name is Sugar,” the woman said to Nijinsky. She pushed the muzzle of her gun directly against his temple. “If you even come close to touching me, I’ll blow your head off. Don’t want your nasty little bugs in my brain. Now walk.”

He walked. Staggered. Out the back door. There he was clubbed again on the back of his neck. It was a hard blow, and it should have knocked him unconscious. It didn’t, but he saw the opportunity and slumped, eyes closed, head lolling.

Rough hands grabbed him under the arms and tossed him into the backseat of a car. They handcuffed him.

“You sure it’s safe to touch him?”

“As long as he’s unconscious he can’t do anything with his biots.” Sugar, in the front seat. Nijinsky kept his eyes shut. His head on his chest. Regulated his breathing. No signs of consciousness.

“I’ve seen this guy somewhere before,” one of the men said.

“Billboards,” Sugar said. “He’s the model they use for Mountain Dew Extra.”

“Hey, yeah. I’ll be damned. The MDE guy. Huh.”

Nijinsky’s biots were already on the move, emerging from his eyeball to race down his cheek. A part of him thought:
this powder
I’m wearing has an interesting variety of shapes.
It was probably basically talcum, although it came with an expensive name brand. It was strangely like rock flakes. All jagged and irregular. His biots clambered over a landscape of the weirdly sharp boulders.

Maybe next time skip the powder.

The car sped through the night. The biots sped across his skin to his lips. Here would be the tricky part. His head was swimming as the pain in his neck and head hit him full-on. Damage had been done to skin, muscle, and bone.

Oh, yes, pain. Oh, yeah, oh,
shit.
Don’t show it, Shane, don’t show any sign of consciousness.

The biots clambered down over his upper lip. And again, he regretted the goo of lip gloss. It was sticky and slowed his boys down. But now they reached the barrier between skin and mucous membrane.

Time for tongue.

He’d seen a tongue down at the nano once before. It wasn’t his favorite thing to see. Carefully, slowly he stuck the tip of his tongue to touch his lip.

Through his biots he saw a dark mass coming down out of the sky.

Imagine a tight-packed army of hooded men. They are so close together the bottoms of their hoods almost touch. And the hoods themselves are pink. Sharp at the top. Cones of waxy pink flesh.

Imagine within those tight-packed, rough, waxy-pink cones there are things that look like tiny Styrofoam noodles, the floats you might use in a swimming pool. And alongside those segments of tube are short strings of beads. Mardi Gras down amid a serried rank of pink-hooded Klansmen.

And those noodles and beads are the bacteria that make their home on the tongue.

It took an effort of will for Nijinsky to send the biots rushing to leap aboard that alien landscape.

A stab of pain and Nijinsky couldn’t hold in the groan.

He drew his tongue quickly into his mouth, and his biots were flooded with a gush of pearlescent saliva. The tongue curled at the sides, warping the landscape.

“He’s awake!”

“Don’t let him touch you!”

Nijinsky drew in breath and spit. It was a hurricane-force blast that picked up saliva and biots with it.

The spittle flew the two and a half feet from Nijinsky’s forward-thrust mouth to Sugar’s stiff blonde hair.

He felt the biots land as if it were his own legs absorbing the impact.

“No!” Sugar cried. She began beating at the back of her head.

The impact actually helped by pressing tall, rough-textured hair trees down toward the scalp.

“What did you do?” she demanded, turning to rage at Nijinsky.

“Did it get on you?” one of the thugs cried.

The smart move, Nijinsky knew, the winning move for them was to shoot him right here, right now. They didn’t do that. Which meant that something was stopping them.

They didn’t want him dead; they had some other idea in mind, and that knowledge gave him power.

His biots were racing across the dead leaves of Sugar’s scalp, scurrying through a sort of birch-tree forest.

Ears, ears, nose. Which way? The nose was the easiest in terms of direct route, but the most dangerous: a sneeze could be deadly. And indeed Sugar now tried to force a sneeze, blew air out of her nose frantically.

“Pull over. Pull over,” she cried. She pointed to an all-night Duane Reade. “The drugstore. You. Go in there. Get me … um … um, bug spray. And Purelle. Q-tips. Hurry!”

She kept beating at her head, and indeed the forest was having unusual weather as the trees slammed down, flattened, sprang up again. Then she started scraping at her scalp with her fingernails.

This was dangerous.

Nijinsky kept his biots close together. He wanted a single field of view to deal with.

The trees parted and suddenly, moving with impossible speed, was a fingernail. Sugar kept hers moderately long so that only the fingernail and not the fingertip now tore through spongy scalp skin.

The nail was a wall of ridged, dead cells, flakes held together by the rough glue of keratin, and over that a translucent layer of clear nail polish that from his perspective seemed as thick as a sheet of ice.

The edge of the fingernail was like a monstrous plow. It ripped up dead, fallen skin cells as it raced toward the biots. Jump right! The massive plow roared past. But now she was scratching her head like a madwoman. Fingernails everywhere, leaving oozing blood behind, platelets coming up out of the ground and resting in shallow furrows dug by huge claws.

Nijinsky saw a clearing ahead: the edge of her hairline. She hadn’t started scratching her face, at least not yet, so N1 and N2 bounded along through the last of the hair and out onto her forehead.

Then: luck!

A huge bead of sweat, ten times their own height, a tsunami, a crazy bead of liquid containing as much water as a swimming pool oozed up through her skin, shone in the dashboard lights, a drop, poised, quivering, like a skinless grape or a water balloon.

It would roll. And when it did it would move faster than any biot.

Nijinsky sent his biots racing toward the sweat drop, and then, rushing down, a second drop was already on the move! It would hit the first drop and join with it and then … almost too late!

N1 and N2 leapt, hit the side of the mass of water just as surface tension broke and the drop began rushing like a mountain river down toward Sugar’s eyeball.

Biots spun like socks in the spin cycle.