Wait until they realized how hopeless it was. How powerless they were. Wait until they saw the little sore on their ankle become a bleeding hole and endured the agony of being eaten alive, consumed, like a beetle being swarmed by fire ants. It would be like leprosy on fast forward. It would be like flesh-eating bacteria on meth.
Sure, maybe in places there would be pockets of a few scattered humans who would hold out for as long as six months. But it wouldn’t matter. The nanobots would eat the algae out of the sea and every oxygen-producing plant on the land and then, inexorably, the atmosphere itself would become fatal to life.
Dirt. Water. That would be planet Earth. Just dirt and water and a vast, inconceivably vast swarm of nanobots. Mindless. Without soul or sin. Efficient, relentless, unstoppable killers without malice, without meaning, without moral judgment. Without guilt—that most destructive, weakening, sickening, disabling of emotions.
Yes, his babies would obliterate without guilt.
He pulled up the picture he’d found of Lystra Reid and gave it the finger.
“Game, set, match, Lear. Death or madness? I got a little hint for you, sweetheart. The answer is death. Death, brought to you by Karl Burnofsky.”
Out in the lab he heard a disturbance: raised voices, a bustling movement, chairs scuffling. The door to his office was locked. He drew the pistol.
Someone banged hard on his door: a cop’s knock.
“Damn,” he said. “I’d have liked to hit a billion first.”
“Burnofsky! Come out here. The bosses want you.”
“I’m busy,” Burnofsky yelled.
“Don’t think they care, Dr. B. You’ve got about ten seconds.”
The Twins wanted him, did they? Well, why not? It would be worth a laugh. And he had something special for them, just for them, something ever so special.
“Give me a second!” he yelled. In his desk, all the way at the back, he found the little vial he’d prepared against this very moment. He slipped it into his pocket along with the remote control that could unleash Armageddon and opened the office door for what he suspected would be the last time.
The area within the force field continued to fill with his children.
Keats had his biot back on Caligula’s optic nerve. He was again seeing what the killer saw. Caligula seemed to be sitting, perhaps with his back against a wall. His legs were stretched out before him. He stared at his missing fingers, bleeding freely, unbandaged. He leaned down to rub a spot of mud from his boot, glanced at the timer—six minutes and nine seconds—then apparently coughed as his head jerked violently and his hand came up to his mouth.
Just six minutes until the natural gas flooding the basement would achieve sufficient density that a spark would bring down the entire building. The gas was invisible dynamite being stacked, ton upon ton. Caligula’s eye glanced toward the ruptured pipe. He had a picture of something in his hand, a photograph of a serious little girl slumped in a busted-webbing lawn chair outside a shabby trailer. There was a Ferris wheel in the background.
Caligula coughed again and drew something out of his bag. Keats saw a small steel cylinder, a clear plastic hose smeared with Caligula’s blood, and a clear plastic mask with elastic straps. It reminded him of the lecture aboard an airplane: Should there be a sudden loss of cabin pressure … Caligula pulled the mask on, and now the plastic partly filled Keats’s view. Caligula was determined to wait out the—
No, he was up, up and staggering, but not toward the rupture, or toward the elevators. Keats saw a steel door. Caligula’s eye went to the handle, then his hand as it touched the metal of the door.
“He knows your guys are burning through,” Keats said dully.
“Jindal!” Charles yelled in response.
Jindal talked into his phone and reported, “They say they’ll be through any second.”
Caligula glanced back toward the bomb. Glanced at the gun in his hands. Suddenly they trembled. He seemed to be struggling to hold on to the weapon; his mutilated hand was still bleeding freely, but even the fingers on his good hand looked stiff, uncooperative.
The gun fell from his grip. The picture, too, was facedown on the floor.
“He’s having a stroke,” Keats reported. Go on, he told himself, just keep watching. Until the end. Be the good boy. No freaking out, no last-minute pleas. Tough, that’s how his brother Alex had always been. “He’s stroking out from the artery I cut.”
Sadie was looking at him, her eyes ashamed, horrified.
“Not your fault,” he said to her. “None of this is your fault.”
“But it is,” she said.
“He’s picked up a crowbar. His fingers can barely hold it. He’s dropped it. He’s staring at it.”
“For God’s sake, evacuate the building!” Plath shrieked at the Twins.
Burnofsky, disheveled but animated, came in with guards on either side. His rheumy eyes sparkled. “Ah, ah, ah!” he said on spying Plath and Keats and Wilkes. “So, that’s the panic.” He seemed pleased and relieved.
“Help me get these idiots to evacuate the building,” Plath pleaded. “Caligula’s flooding the basement with natural gas. In six minutes this whole place goes up!”
“Is that true?” Burnofsky demanded, squinting hard at the Twins. He glanced at the monitor. The cameras in the basement had been redirected, searching for Caligula. A grainy image showed him walking, dragging one leg, then collapsing on the floor.
Keats had never been inside the brain of a dying man. There was nothing to see on the optic nerve, nothing changing in his immediate environment. But the eyelid no longer blinked as often, and it seemed to be drooping, partly obscuring the view.
If Caligula died before the explosion, then Keats would have been his killer. His biot might sit for several minutes in a dead man’s brain before the explosion killed his biot and plunged him down into the dark hell of madness.
How would it feel, he wondered. How would it feel to no longer be himself?
Keats’s throat was dry. His breathing was shallow. He was afraid. First would come the razor edge of madness, to be followed by an explosion that—
A brilliant flash of light from Caligula’s eye.
The same bright flash filled the monitor that had been trained on Caligula. The camera aimed at the exterior where the men had been wielding the cutting torch went dead.
“They burned through!” Jindal cried.
“System,” Charles yelled, his voice cracking. “Sublevel two, northeast corner stairwell cameras!”
Blank nothing, dead cameras.
“System, sublevel one, northeast corner!”
Here, too, the cameras were blank. A shudder communicated itself up the length of the Tulip to Keats’s feet, like a minor earthquake. A glass fell from a shelf and shattered.
The fire killed Caligula instantly. Then it began to burn through his flesh, boiling the blood in his veins, sloughing away charred skin, burning its way to his heart, to his lungs. To his brain.
· · ·
“Fire in the lobby!” Jindal reported, phone to his ear.
“They can put it out!” Burnofsky yelled. “They have to put it out!” His relief was all gone now, all gone, as his brilliant mind frantically calculated the damage that could be done to his nanobots by a burning building.
“The southwest corner stairwell is still clear,” Jindal said. “Gentlemen, we have to get you out of here!” This to the Twins, who seemed paralyzed.
“Anyone who wants to live, get out of here!” Plath yelled, pulling away from Keats.
A window in Keats’s mind went dark and then disappeared. Keats felt strange, very strange. Not upset. Just … alone …
“Wilkes! Run!” Plath pleaded.
“Not without you and blue eyes,” Wilkes said.
… alone in a strange landscape.
“No one moves!” three different security men yelled at once, waving their guns in a bewildered effort to assert control.
“It blew up e
arly,” Plath said, looking to the Twins. “The explosion was only limited, but it’s still burning, and there’s an open gas line feeding that fire. We may still get out.”
Burnofsky yelled, “System: show Burnofsky lab!”
Such strange images. Flashing pictures of his old room in London, of playing football in the alley, of the island. Of Sadie. Of the dark, looming monster that seemed now to be emerging from her, bursting from her flesh, a dark, terrible beast …
Burnofsky’s lab was untouched. He saw assistants going about their business, clueless.
“Evacuate the building!” Charles yelled.
“No!” This came from Benjamin. Jindal stutter-stepped and stopped.
Keats saw it all. The Twins were a glowing two-headed dragon, with liquid fire bleeding from Benjamin’s lips. Burnofsky melting, somehow melting, and Keats felt the laughter rise in him, rise and fill his chest and come burbling out of his mouth. He pulled against imaginary chains, yanking his arms against nonexistent restraints.
“Noah,” Sadie pleaded, helpless, knowing what was happening to him, knowing that he was spiraling down.
A part of Keats—a fading, weakening remnant—watched it all from very far away, a shadow of his mind, watching himself slip, slip, slip.… It was all very, very clear, very, very clear to Noah, Noah like the guy with the ark, the one who liked animals, all clear, they were all devils, all of them. Mad, each of them, mad as … mad as …
A whimpering voice, Noah’s own voice, but not operated by him, no, a voice mewling and laughing and crying out, “Kill me, kill me, it’s what you all want, isn’t it?”
In that moment, a final becalmed moment, the last sane vestiges of his mind took it all in, and his laughter was not yet the laughter of the insane, but the knowing, cynical laughter of one who sees everything clearly, if only for a single second in time.
He saw Benjamin and Charles as what they were, two rejected, despised, sad little children forever bound together, neither able to feel even a moment’s freedom.
He saw Burnofsky, so desperate for redemption from suffering that he would bring down the whole world in a fit of self-loathing.
And Sadie, Sadie his love, her brain a tangled mess, wired, unwired, but even before that crippled by a dead mother, a dead brother, a dead father, and corrupted by wealth and power and crushed by responsibility. Mad. Her, too: mad.
They were all mad. They always had been.
Crazy people had gotten their hands on deadly toys. The end was inevitable.
And me, too, he thought. As mad as any of them, believing that there could be love and honor in the midst of it.
They had all tried to armor themselves against this final moment, but their defiance had been its own lie: there was never a choice between death and madness. It was always to be both.
And then, with a strangled cry in his throat, Noah attacked.
TWENTY-SIX
Lear watched, hands behind her back, lifting herself up on the balls of her feet, bouncing with anticipation. When she first saw the fire burst from the ground-floor windows and setting a passing man alight, she let out a happy squeal.
But then, when the Tulip still stood, she clenched her fists and began to curse. “Fucking useless old man. Useless old man,” she said. “Trying to say I killed her, and now look! Look!”
When Bug Man did not move from the couch, she took two long steps, reached down, grabbed the neck of his T-shirt, and dragged him to the window.
“Iff’ burning,” Bug Man said.
“It’s not supposed to burn, it’s supposed to explode! The gas was supposed to explode! The whole thing should be toppling over!”
The TV was on, showing a sea of flashing red lights around the theater, with cutaways to eerie vignettes of cops tackling a naked, raving rock star, or Tasering a man in a business suit carrying a severed arm, the remnants of the lunacy at the premiere.
“Blow up! Blow up, blow up, blow up, blow up!” Lear raged, banging the plate glass with her fists.
As if on command a huge fireball erupted from the windows of the third floor.
“It could still fall, yeah,” Lear said, nodding, reassuring herself. She bent to a tripod-mounted telescope. “Can’t see anything through their dark glass. Are you scared yet, you freaks? Are you wetting yourselves, you freaks?”
Bug Man had had enough, more than enough. He had to get away. He shot a look toward the door. Did she have guards out there? If she died, he went mad … if she was telling the truth about a dead man’s switch … but there wasn’t anything he could do about that, and he could not be here watching all this. He could not be with this crazy witch raving and pounding on the glass like an infuriated ape in a cage.
He stepped back, back, turned, and ran for the door. Locked.
“Really, Bug Man?” Lear asked in a mocking voice. “Really? You think you get to run away?”
“You ’ave to le’ me go,” he pleaded.
She ignored him and crowed wildly as another burst of orange flame billowed out from the base of the Tulip. “It’ll collapse. Has to. The fire will melt the girders, has to, yeah. Damn, I want to see them when it happens.”
“You coul’ talk to them.”
Lear’s eyes lit up. She grinned. “What?”
“I know Burnofsshky’s number. He’ prob’ly there. He worksh late.”
She grabbed Bug Man’s bicep and propelled him to a laptop. “Do it! Do it and I’ll … I’ll get you new teeth. Any color you want.”
Bug Man opened an app, punched in the number, and hit Connect.
Keats rushed at the Twins, hands clawing the air, animal noises coming from him.
Plath shoved Wilkes aside to put herself between Keats and his intended victims. Keats never seemed to notice her. He ran right through her, sending her sprawling.
It was on her back, stunned by the violence of his assault, that Plath—Sadie McLure—saw three security men turn, as if in slow motion, and raise their guns.
BANG! BANGBANG!
Keats twisted, turned, stood …
BANG! BANG!
… fell.
A terrible scream rose from her mouth, echoed by Wilkes as they both fell more than ran toward Keats.
“No, no, no, no, no!” Plath cried.
“You fucking assholes! You murdering assholes!” Wilkes screamed.
Keats lay on his back. Three bullets had struck him in the side of his chest, in his upper arm, in the side of his head. He was not yet dead, eyes glazing, dark blood like ink pumping from him to form a pool on the floor, his mouth working like a beached fish, gasping.
“Oh, God, Noah! Oh, God, Noah!”
He tried to speak but only managed to form a blood bubble. He grunted, the sound of a dying beast. He breathed heavily, looked at Plath, grunted again. He blinked, just one eye, almost as if he was winking. Blood found its way out of his ears, out of his nose.
Plath tried to cradle him in her arms, tried to hold his head, but when she did, a part of his skull came away and she screamed. Wilkes, her own hands red, took Plath’s hand and kept saying, “He’ll be okay, he’ll be okay.”
A siren was screeching, up and down the scale, up and down in Plath’s head, but it was only her own screams.
A cell phone rang.
Plath stared at Noah, his eyes still so blue, his eyes open, his lips no longer the parchment landscape she had seen through biot eyes, now only the lips that had kissed her. They were moving silently.
Plath’s entire body was shaking. She heard nothing, and for a while she saw nothing. The world was lost to her. Only Wilkes’s arms around her connected her to reality.
The sound of a phone ringing. And going to voice mail.
“I hate people who get my hopes up,” Lear said. But she was distracted by a third eruption of flames. This one blew the windows out of half the lower floors. A shower of crystal fell through yellow flames, pursued by billows of smoke.
Bug Man dialed again. This time, the call was answere
d.
“Kind of a bad time, Anthony,” Burnofsky said.
“Lear wan’ to tal’ to th’ Twinshh,” he said.
“Oh, does she?” Burnofsky said, his voice flat. “A little late for talk, I think. Hey, Anthony?”
“Wha’?”
“I never hated you, Anthony,” Burnofsky said.
Bug Man had no idea how to respond to that, so he simply handed the phone to Lear after pushing the Speaker button: he wanted to hear.
“Who is this?” Lear demanded.
“Well, well, if it isn’t Lystra Reid. Or should I say ‘Lear’?” Burnofsky said.
“Is this one of the Twins?”
“This is Burnofsky. Dr. Burnofsky. But you can call me Karl.”
“Give me the Twins.”
“Well, we’re all kind of busy panicking and getting ready to die,” Burnofsky said. “Hey, just out of curiosity, Ms. Reid, did you ever figure out what the Twins were up to on Floor Thirty-Four?”
Burnofsky heard the silence of confusion. Then, “What are you talking about, you old fool?”
“Their secret weapon. A virus that preyed only on cobra DNA. Like the cobra DNA that forms part of the biot genome. Ironic, don’t you think? They were going to obliterate all biots, and now, hah! Now you’re the one killing biots.”
“Shut your filthy mouth, you disgusting drunk,” Charles said, now as furious as his brother.
“Oh, I’m sorry, am I embarrassing you, boys?” Burnofsky laughed. “Don’t worry, the final laugh will be on Lear.”
Bug Man heard shouts and cries in the background. A female voice was crying, “Noah! Noah!” Then it stopped. The line went dead.
Bug Man could see flames behind windows on the tenth and twelfth floors of the Tulip.
On the street below, the first fire engines were pulling up, but Bug Man doubted there was anything they could do. The Tulip was doomed.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay what?”