BZRK Reloaded Read Free Page A

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.