Bzrk (33 page)

Army Pete was a mediocre twitcher and a first-rate smart-ass. But he knew enough as he surveyed the scene—the bloody boy on the floor and, far worse, the terrifying spectacle of a handcuffed Charles still trying to beat a raving Benjamin—to avoid favoring everyone with his wit.

“Got a twitcher chair? I can’t do shit without my gear.”

“Damn!” Sugar yelled. “Get a chair up here. Now!”

Army Pete started to object, but no one heard him for the rush of TFDs racing to comply. Or at least racing to get the hell out of the Tulip.

THIRTY

“I’m with you, Vincent,” Nijinsky said.

With him on the street, holding his friend, propping him against a wall.

And with him now as his two fresh, undamaged biots ran to the rescue.

“Too late,” Vincent whispered.

Nijinsky stared across a half centimeter of space that felt like a city block, at Bug Man’s forces. Two of the nanobots were slowly, maliciously dismembering Vincent’s biot.

Nijinsky felt each ripped limb through the shuddering form of his friend.

Eleven of Bug Man’s nanobots.

Two of Nijinsky’s biots.

Maybe. Maybe. But Nijinsky was not Vincent. He would almost certainly lose, and if he lost, then he would be where Vincent was now: a shattered man, helpless and vulnerable.

Bug Man did not attack. Bug Man did not want this battle, either. He didn’t need it. By now his spinners would be deep within the president’s brain.

The two of them stared at each other through alien eyes, Bug Man and Nijinsky.

Nijinsky made his lead biot open its arms in supplication.

Bug Man’s nanobots stood still for a long minute, doing nothing at all.

Then they lifted the body of Vincent’s second biot and shoved it through the fluid. It floated on the current, and Nijinsky was able to grab what was left.

Carrying the legless, eyeless, mutilated body, he turned and ran away.

Up in the world of streets and skyscrapers, Vincent said, “Jin … Jin …”

“Yes, Vincent.”

“Take me to Anya.”

When they found her, Plath had two pins left, and no more than a single long strand of wire.

She had built a cat’s cradle of pins and wires in Benjamin’s brain. It extended across roughly one square centimeter of the hippocampus. It would take an experienced nanobot twitcher no time to find her, but quite a while to actually reach her.

But in the macro her time was up. Someone had finally had the sense to question the two bums who had flushed Keats. And some bright AmericaStrong thug had decided it was time to take a closer look at the Dumpster.

The lid flew open and powerful hands dug down into the trash until one of those hands closed over an ankle.

Then there were loud cries and warnings, and Plath was hauled bodily up and out, dropped onto the ground, and kicked once very hard in the stomach.

In the elevator going up to the Tulip they decided she needed roughing up. She took a backhand to the face that split her lip. They didn’t want the bosses thinking they had gone soft.

The elevator door opened onto a scene of wild contrasts. Within the soaring heights of the Tulip the Twins had built a world. Offset layers of platforms hung overhead—bedrooms, bathrooms, display rooms—each connected by a short, double-width escalator. The ground floor was thirty-six thousand square feet, most of it sunk in gloom. But she had glances of amazing things back in the unlit distance: what could only be a tank, an entire carousel, a Predator drone hanging from wires, large animal cages, a firing range.

But the space directly before her, the corner of the cavernous room, was what fascinated. Half a dozen TFDs. A woman who looked as if she had just stepped out of the J. Crew catalog by way of a spa. A massive desk that had been overturned so that she could see the screens built into its surface, and see a nano battle raging, and an entire Christmas tree of police and fire department lights at the UN, and other things she didn’t recognize.

She saw them, the Armstrong Twins, as broad as two men, tall, powerfully built, but fused together in a way that made the mind rebel.

TFDs were manhandling a massive chair, like the world’s highest-tech La-Z-Boy. Others were hauling monitors, trailing wire, searching for an electrical outlet.

Keats sat on the floor. The beagle sniffed at the pool of his blood.

The TFDs threw her down beside Keats.

“You didn’t have to bring the chair up here,” a kid in an army jacket objected. “I could have run it from downstairs.”

“What?” the J. Crew woman demanded.

Army Pete shrugged. “Dude, I just needed someone to act as a pathway. One of your guys could have come downstairs; I could have put my boys on him, right? And then—”

He fell silent in the face of Sugar’s blazing fury. “You could have told me.”

“I figured you understood how—”

“Communists,” Benjamin wept as if it was the saddest word in the world.

Keats, sitting in his own blood just a few inches from Plath, held her gaze, and then looked over his shoulder. Plath followed the direction of his eyes. She saw his hands, bound as hers were with a plastic tie.

His wrists were red. He was using the gruesome lubrication to work his hands free. Plath saw cuts. The meat of one thumb was lacerated deeply. But his hands were almost free.

Charles yanked at his own captured arm and almost hit himself with the chair. “You can let me up now, Ms. Lebowski,” he said. “I have control of myself. I won’t harm my brother.”

Sugar Lebowski, Plath realized. Nijinsky had briefed them all on her. She almost smiled now recalling his description of: “a bleached, Botoxed, boob-jobbed suburban mommy with a stick up her ass and a gun in her purse.”

“Yes, sir,” Sugar said. But Plath heard hesitation.

Keats saw her. He tried to show nothing, but Keats didn’t have a poker face. He was afraid for her. He was sad to have failed in his brave effort to save her.

She wanted to tell him that she would rather be here with him than alone. She wanted to tell him that she would share his fate. That she was no more afraid than he was.

But the truth was that she was sick with fear. Her limbs were stiff. She couldn’t stop blinking. Her lungs were unable to draw enough breath, as though she were being squeezed in a vice. The corners of her mouth were weighted, her tongue was a foreign object, her hands trembled.

She saw then the livid bruising and battered lips of the right half of the Armstrong Twins. Benjamin. She remembered that. He was the right half.

He was shaking. He was yanking the shared head. His eye was wild, not with rage but with some unreadable emotion.

Charles was straining to look complaisant, to seem normal. It was a sort of Janus mask, and like that mythical, two-faced Roman god, Charles and Benjamin were striving to look in different directions. They were facing the same way but seeing very different things.

So she was in Benjamin’s brain.

She had twisted enough circuits to push him to malfunction. She had knocked him off the rails. Her biots were like a computer virus, disrupting and confusing, firing off synaptic signals that went to the wrong places.

That knowledge did not make her less afraid.

Charles looked past Sugar and her hesitation and saw Plath. “You would be Sadie,” he purred.

Every eye turned. Except for Benjamin.

“It will be a great pleasure to welcome you to our great work,” Charles said.

“Never,” Sadie managed to whisper. Then finding her voice, she said with more force. “Never.”

Charles smiled. “Soon many of the world’s most powerful leaders will join our cause. Do you imagine that you will resist? No, no, little girl, we’ll manage to change the way you think about things.”

An almost imperceptible nod from Keats.

Deep inside Benjamin’s brain, P1 and P2 held their last pins.

Plath stabbed deep with the first pin.

Benjamin’s whole body shuddered. He cried out, “No, Charles! No! No! Stop it!”

Charles looked as if he’d been the one stabbed. His eye widened, and his brow shot up.

On the screen a biot was being dismembered.

Plath played out the last of her wire, ran with it and the final pin. Her biots leapt across wires already laid, and each time they did the new filament touched and signals flew and Benjamin cried out, “I’m pushing as hard as I can, as hard as I can, he’s still breathing!”

“Someone silence him!” Charles demanded. “Ms. Lebowski, you silence my brother!”

The wire played out. The spinnerets failed. Plath wrapped the frayed end around the final pin.

“Die old man! Die!” Benjamin raved.

And Plath sank the last pin.

Benjamin’s body arched in a seizure so powerful that his legs smashed the bottom of the desk. The screens went dark. His arm shot out into the air, hand clenched into a claw.

Plath heard the sound of bone cracking.

She pulled the pin out.

“We’re walking out of here,” she said.

Paul Johntz stepped behind her and pressed a gun muzzle against the top of her head. “He spazzes out again, you take a bullet.”

“I’m the one doing it,” Keats said. “Leave her alone.” It was heroic, but also unconvincing.

A gasping Benjamin wept with a child’s sobs.

Charles, aghast, stared in horror at Plath.

“Which is faster?” Plath asked. “The bullet? Or the biot?”

“Listen to me,” Charles grated. “Mr. Johntz, you are now head of AmericaStrong. Here is what you will do: order your men to arrest Ms. Lebowski. Then you will—”

Plath stabbed the pin into Benjamin’s brain and again came the seizure, choking off Charles’s speech as the shared face strained and the shared neck twisted and the single spine seemed almost to form a C.

Benjamin’s teeth cracked.

Sugar Lebowski said, “I can get you out of here. But it will cost you.”

“A million?” Plath asked.

“Twenty,” Sugar said. “I have kids. Disappearing isn’t cheap.”

“Done,” Plath said.

“No one is going anywhere,” Johntz snapped.

Keats kicked with his bound legs and all the force he could command. His feet hit Johntz’s ankle. The fall wasn’t immediate; the man took a stagger step to the side and Sugar Lebowski was up like a cat. She drew the belt from her skirt and whipped it around Johntz’s neck from behind, all the while yelling, “Everyone back, everyone back, stay out of it!” to the remaining TFDs.

But Johntz was too big to go down. He was straining to turn the pistol to point at Sugar, who grunted like an animal as she put all her slim weight into choking.

Keats levered himself up and hopped, splashing through blood, grabbed the TFD’s gun hand and twisted it to aim the muzzle at the man’s head.

For several terrible seconds they fought. Sugar slowly choking the strength out of her deputy, Keats twisting as he tried to stay on his feet. Then, a loud explosion.

Johntz had a quizzical look on three-quarters of his face, and a gaping hole for the rest. He dropped instantly.

The other TFDs had stood by, paralyzed, not knowing who was in charge. Army Pete said, “Damn.” He held his hands up in a “Not me” gesture and backed toward the door.

Keats held on to the pistol as the man fell.

Sugar Lebowski had part of Johntz’s brain in her blonde hair. She unwrapped her belt from the dead man’s neck and with shaking fingers threaded it back into her skirt.

“We need to get our bugs,” Keats said. The gun was still in his hand. It felt good, not bad in his grip. It felt like safety.

“It will take me ten minutes to get back out of them,” Plath said. “Do I leave them like that?”

“Like that” meant sweat pouring off the Twins, who were held in the grip of Benjamin’s seizure. No one could live for very long under that strain.

Plath was asking Keats if she should kill Benjamin Armstrong—and most likely his brother, too, because it was impossible to imagine how one could die and not the other.

“We’re not them,” Keats said. Then, doubting his own words, said, “Are we?”

Plath went to stand over the helpless monsters. Monsters? What other word could be used?

Monsters from birth. Feared and hated by all who saw them.

Feared and hated now by her, too, and for good reason.

The skin between the two faces, the place where the flesh had been glued together in the womb, was raw. The force of the seizure had nearly made Benjamin tear his head away from his brother.