Bzrk (17 page)

SIXTEEN

“He’ll be okay. Vincent, I mean. He’ll be okay.” Nijinsky looked somewhat the worse for wear. His hair was short of perfect, and his collar was limp. He almost flopped into the chair.

Plath had showered. The water had run red and she’d stayed in there quite a while, crying where the others couldn’t see her.

She sat now beside a solemn, shell-shocked Keats. He still had blood splatter on his face. He still smelled of gunpowder.

Anya was … somewhere … with Ophelia. Caligula had disappeared. Wilkes sat a little apart, noisily devouring a bag of spicy Doritos.

Renfield’s head in the plastic bag had been taken away to be incinerated, obliterating any evidence of nanotechnology.

“Two of Vincent’s four biots are injured and lame for the time being,” Nijinsky said. “They’re back in crèche; they’ll likely recover. Wilkes’s biots also were roughed up. But she went two against eight with the Bug Man. Saved Vincent and made it out alive.”

Nijinsky made a little salute, which Wilkes saw but did not acknowledge. She ate mechanically, stuffing the chips in her mouth, eyes looking at nothing.

“You both got thrown in the deep end tonight,” Nijinsky said, not quite apologizing. “It must have been tough.”

“It was a bloody nightmare,” Keats shot back. He blinked. Drew a little further into that diffidence of his and added, more quietly, “Still is.”

“Yes, and more to come,” Nijinsky said.

“Not tonight,” Plath snapped, and was gratified that Keats nodded in support of her.

“Got that right,” he said.

Nijinsky waited, letting the silence calm them both down. Plath felt like someone had rubbed her entire body with sandpaper. Like she’d been shot up with speed. Like a screaming rant was at the tip of her tongue just waiting to be released.

Ophelia came in. “She’s under control,” she said without elaboration. She was carrying a bottle and a tray of mismatched and not-very-clean glasses. She set them down in front of Nijinsky. He poured a whiskey for himself and for Ophelia. He looked speculatively at Wilkes, Keats, and Plath.

Plath accepted a glass. Following her lead, so did Keats. Wilkes joined last. She snatched the glass angrily.

“To Renfield,” Nijinsky said.

Five glasses tapped and five shots went down with varying degrees of gasping and coughing. The liquid fire spread through Plath’s stomach and radiated out through her body.

“I hope he is with his God,” Ophelia said.

Wilkes shook her head, but still said, “He wasn’t all bad. Just kind of a dick.”

But something was off about her cynicism. A false note. And Plath saw her turn away quickly to hide some emotion.

“Now,” Nijinsky said briskly, “as bad as this has been, we have big things to deal with. With Vincent at half strength we need you two trained and ready. Your biots are being kept dark and cold. Below a certain temperature they become dormant. You may still experience flashes, but you should be able to sleep. So. Go do that. Sleep for a few hours. Then training starts.”

“What if we don’t want to train?” Plath demanded. “What if we just want the hell out of this asylum?”

Wilkes made a sardonic sound. “Honey, you are already all the way in. There is no out for you.”

Nijinsky did not dispute that. He said, “Go. Sleep.”

Plath wanted to sleep. It was dark in the room. The window was too dirty to see through, and even though she guessed it must be morning out there, somewhere, only a faint gray penetrated to highlight peeling paint on the high ceiling.

She could feel her biots, still, as a sort of nagging presence in her brain. Like a child crying in another room. But at least she was no longer looking out through their eyes.

She felt numb, almost dead inside, and raw and angry outside. She wanted to smash her fist into the wall. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to throw open the door and just run, run right the hell out of this horrible place. And she wanted more of the whiskey.

She wanted her mother. And her dad. And her brother.

And she wanted the boy in the next room, because even if her mother and dad and brother were still alive, they would never be able to understand what had happened to her.

But he would. Maybe. Keats.

They had set it up this way, of course, Vincent and Jin. Probably not through some grand conspiracy, they had just known that two terrorized teenagers given poets’ names would reach out to each other.

She wondered if his door was locked.

She wondered if she tapped, just softly on the wall, would he hear her? So softly it wasn’t even a tap. So softly she could deny it?

She barely touched knuckles to wall.

A louder but still quiet tap at her own door.

He had come. Instantly. He’d been lying awake, too. He’d been waiting for her summons.

But still, she could just … not. She could just not respond. And he would go away, because he wasn’t a guy who would push at her, was he? How could she know? She’d known him a few hours and barely spoken.

But she knew.

Plath got up and went to the door. She composed her face and opened it.

Keats stood in sweatpants, bare feet, and a T-shirt. “I’d like to talk to someone,” he said. “I’d like to talk to you, I mean.”

Again, she liked him, because what he had done was pretend she hadn’t tapped on the wall. He was letting her deny that neediness if she chose to.

“Come in. I’d show you around, but there isn’t much to see.”

He took the sole chair. She sat on the edge of her bed. She was in a man’s T-shirt, legs bare, socks on her feet. He was probably seeing too much—the T-shirt was white aside from a faded logo. And he was noticing, but she didn’t care.

“What have we got ourselves into?” he asked.

We.

Ourselves.

Plath had no answer. Words seemed too small.

“I guess we’re not supposed to tell our real names,” Keats said.

She shook her head. No.

“I’m from London.”

“I love London.”

“You’ve been?” He smiled shyly, delighted to find something they had in common.

“My mother was English.” She watched to see if he noted the past tense. He did.

“Wish we were there?” he asked.

She let go of a small, abrupt laugh. “God, yes. Or anywhere.”

“Euro Disney?”

The suggestion was so perfectly absurd she started giggling. And that brought a smile, a real one, to his lips, and his blue eyes lit up even brighter than before.

“Really, any of the major theme parks,” she said through laughter. “I’d go see the giant ball of twine in Kansas.”

“Is that real?” he asked.

Suddenly serious she said, “Dude, I no longer feel qualified to say what’s real and what isn’t.”

He looked down. “Dude. Well, my America visit is complete. I’ve been called ‘dude.’ ”

She took up the bantering tone. “How have you liked America so far?”

“Oh, it’s about what I expected,” he said.

That unleashed an almost hysterical burst of laughter from both of them.

“You suppose they’re watching us?” Keats asked, looking up at the ceiling.

“I hope so. That way they’ll be able to see this.” She held up the middle finger on both hands and stuck them in the air.

“So,” he said, faltering a little, “would you go out with me sometime?”

“That depends. What did you have in mind?”

“We get something to eat. See a movie.”

“I shot that man.” The words were out before she knew they were coming. A sob escaped behind them. And quiet tears.

“Yes.”

Neither had anything to say for a long time after that. Both sat in the dark, perched awkwardly on the edge of chair and bed.

Finally Plath yawned. “If I asked you to stay with me tonight … I mean, if I said I wanted you to lie next to me and sleep. Could it be just that? Could it just be that we—” Her voice broke and she couldn’t speak.

“You mean could we just be here together because we’re both scared to death? And hurt? And don’t have anyone else?”

She nodded. “Yes. That.”

She lay back on her narrow bed. He came and lay down beside her. Only their shoulders and thighs touched. For a while they lay staring up at peeling paint. And then, finally, sleep took them both away to terrifying dreams but also to a degree of oblivion.

In Brooklyn, a similar scene.

Though Jessica did her programmed best, the Bug Man just lay in his bed staring at the ceiling.

He had beaten Vincent. That much he owned. No matter how Burnofsky sneered. No matter how much the Twins may have raged—at least in Bug Man’s imagination, because they didn’t call.

He had beaten Vincent.

He had.

Would have finished him off, too, except for stuff that happened in the macro. Which was not Bug Man’s fault.

The reports that came in from the lone survivor of the McLure building massacre mentioned a Taser. That’s what had kept Bug Man from finishing Vincent.

Macro stuff. Up
there
. Not down in the meat. Down in the meat Bug Man had taken Vincent out.

Damn right.

Whatever Burnofsky had to say.

Within a millimeter of dragging a still-living biot off the field. God, that would have made Burnofsky depressed to the point of suicide. And the Twins? They would have kissed his butt with their nasty freak mouths.

He could have messed with a captured biot until Vincent admitted that Bug Man ruled the nano.

Ruler of the nano.

So cool.

That would have been …

He heard sounds coming from outside his room. His mother getting up to go to work. His aunt would sleep another hour.

Bug Man rolled out of bed and pulled on his clothes.

“What’s the matter, baby?” Jessica asked.

“Nothing.”

“Come on, sweetheart, I can—”

“Shut up,” he snapped. Then in a gentler voice, “Look, just leave me alone, okay? Just …” He left her and went to the kitchen.

Bug Man’s mother was a mother-looking woman. She was overweight; she didn’t dress fancy; her hair was done once a week at salon run by another black woman from Britain, although she was from somewhere to the north, Newcastle or whatever.

His mother was watching the coffee brew. Just standing there.

“Hey, Mum,” Bug Man said.

She looked at him with a critical eye. “You got in late last night.”

The small TV on the counter was tuned to a cable-news channel. The sound was off. The picture was some jittery new bit of video from the stadium. It showed the plane hitting the stands. Still. Even now.

“Yeah. There was a … you know, screw-up. A thing that happened.”

“You didn’t get fired, did you?”

“No, no, nothing like that.” He reached past her to snag a mug and filled it with coffee though the pot wasn’t fully done. He added milk and sugar, lots of sugar. “They actually love me at work. I think I’m, like, their best guy. Tester. You know?”

His mother shook her head slowly, not to what he’d said, but to what she’d seen on the TV. “Kind of person who would do something like that. Savages.”

For a moment—but just for a fleeting moment—Bug Man almost connected that word
savage
to himself. Almost made a link between the horror on the screen and his own actions. But it passed and left no trace.

“No, they love me at work,” he repeated, hoping she would hear it this time.

“Just make sure you remember how lucky you are to have that job. So many people out of work.”

“Yeah. Well, I’m good at it. That’s why they have me. Because I’m the best.”