“Okay, I’m wiff you. I’m in. All the way.” What alternative did he have? “So, I’ goin’ to tell you, Burnofshhky didn’ shound righ’. Too happy. He’shh got shomething goin’ on, I know tha’ old fart.”
Lear was curious. “What could he be up to?”
“SRNs. The gray goo.”
“No,” Lear said confidently. “We wired him up. Nijinsky wired him.”
“And Nijinshhky’s dead. So you don’ know wha’ going on in hi’ head anymore. I wired the presiden’ and guessh wha’, shuicide wa’ not par’ of the plan for her.”
Lear was pensive. She could become coldly rational when she needed to, Bug Man had learned. She would make a fascinating case for some psychiatrist some day, he thought mordantly. Or a whole hospital full of psychiatrists.
Out of her mind but still able to plan the end of the world. Then again, who else but a crazy person would even want the world to end?
“Charles, Benjamin,” Jindal pleaded. “There’s one stairwell still clear. But we have to go now!”
“Hundreds of steps?” Charles asked wistfully. “My brother and I, walk down hundreds of steps?”
“We can carry you,” Jindal said. “We—” He stopped, because his inclusive wave, meant to indicate the security men, now included no one. The security men had fled.
Still left in the Twins’ sanctum were the Twins themselves, Jindal, Wilkes, and Plath. And the gasping, dying body of Noah Cotton, the former Keats, now on his back in a wide pool of his own blood.
“Will you drag us down the stairs, faithful Jindal?” Charles said. “No, I don’t think we’ll allow that. Instead …” he shouted, “a drink, if you please!”
The building was shaking now, successive waves of it—an artificial earthquake as small explosions and gouts of flame made their way inexorably upward, floor after floor.
“The gray goo,” Benjamin said. “How many SRNs do you have, Burnofsky? The flames have not reached your lab yet. Yes, better the gray goo. The best possible outcome. Apocalypse!”
“Fetch me a bottle, Jindal,” Burnofsky said, “and I’ll tell your bosses all about it.”
Plath realized she was kneeling in Noah’s blood. She was looking in horror at his brain, a pulsing pink mass that swelled out from the bullet’s hole. Wilkes took her hand, but Plath felt nothing. She knew she had to look away, but it felt like abandonment to look at anything but her lover.
He had loved her. Had she ever really loved him in return? How could she know? From memories that had been tampered with, in a brain still coping with violation? That truth was no longer entirely recoverable. Nothing was. Everything that she knew and remembered, everything she felt, had to be mistrusted.
On the big monitor, cameras showed gift shops and labs, darkened bedrooms and banks of computer servers. The Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation went on, largely untouched, even as its headquarters burned.
Plath seemed to make up her mind. “We’re leaving,” she said.
“The hell you are,” Benjamin snarled.
Plath looked at him, not afraid to meet his furious gaze. “I’m going to find and kill Lear.” But she made no move toward the door.
“Lear doesn’t matter, not anymore,” Charles said. “I’m afraid I no longer have the will to resist my brother. The self-replicating nanobots will be released. They will scour this planet, and sooner or later, they will find Lear.”
Jindal had found a bottle. Burnofsky uncorked it and took a drink before offering it to the Twins. “It’s not up to you, Benjamin, it’s up to me.” He revealed the remote control in his hand. “I push this button, and the world begins to die.”
“Give it to me,” Benjamin demanded. “We paid for your work. They’re ours, those little machines of yours, ours!”
Burnofsky laughed. “Hitler’s bunker. I’ve been trying to think what this reminds me of, and that’s it. With the Russians closing in, there was Hitler in his underground bunker still handing out orders. Like he had an army to command. Dead man rapping out orders.”
“You treacherous, degenerate—”
“Shut up,” Burnofsky said. He gave them a wave, a tolerant gesture. “It’s over for you boys. All over but the punishment phase.”
There was an awful groan of bending metal, a shriek that was felt as much as heard. A crack split one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. The power went out. The monitor went dark.
Emergency lights came on, casting dark shadows softened only slightly by a full moon hovering just over a nearby apartment building. “Plath, now,” Wilkes pleaded. “You said it. We have to go. Keats will … we can’t help him.”
But still Plath couldn’t move.
“Call that number back! I’ll speak with Lear!” Benjamin cried, motioning for the phone. “I want to tell her what we’ve done! I want Lear to know!”
Wilkes grabbed Plath’s arm and began to physically pull her away.
“We? We?” Burnofsky demanded, erupting in fury. “We, you freak? We? No we. No we. Me. Me! I did it! They’re mine and they’re blue, the blue goo not the gray, and do you know why they’re blue?”
He was in Benjamin’s face now, gripping the remote in his hand, spit flying from his lips.
Charles and Benjamin took a step back.
“Because that was the color …” A sob stopped Burnofsky. “Because … her eyes …”
“Is this about your nasty little girl?” Benjamin demanded, sneering.
“Damn it, Plath. Sadie! Come on!” But now even Wilkes could not look away.
“Did you …?” Burnofsky asked. “Did … you …?” He got control of himself again, and laughed. “You make this easy. I have something for you.”
Burnofsky drew a small object from his pocket. He held out a glass vial. It looked empty but for a hint of blue.
Charles knew instantly. “Get that away from us, Karl.”
“These are special,” Burnofsky said. “A special project I’ve been working on, just for the two of you.”
“Someone stop him!”
“It’s easy to program the SRNs with time codes, kill switches.… Much harder to program them for a particular, um, diet. Yes, a particular diet. But it’s doable. I have them that can eat only steel. Others that consume only hemoglobin. Cool, huh?” Over his shoulder, he said, “Run away, Sadie. Run while you’re able. I loved your dad. He was a good man. A good man. So run away. Save yourself if you can. Get far from here. You may survive for a while, until my babies come for you.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Now! Now!” Wilkes yelled.
Plath rose from Noah’s blood. Her knees and shins and hands were soaked, red.
“Noah,” she whispered. She touched his face, still sweating, still gasping like a dying fish.
“Go,” he said. “For me. Go.”
Plath tore herself away. No way she could survive trying to carry Noah. They would both die. Someone had to live to ensure that Lear did not.
Plath and Wilkes fled the room they’d never expected to leave alive.
“What corner did he say was still clear?” Wilkes asked.
“Southwest,” Plath answered. “Southwest.”
“Which is …”
“This way.” Plath led the way, first from the cathedral vastness of the Twins’ lair and back out into the entryway they’d come through. She considered the elevators and rejected them. Even if they just used them to get down a few floors, there was no knowing what they’d open onto. Past the easy way out, into a stainless-steel kitchen area, through a gloomy and oppressive formal dining room that looked as if it had never been used.
They pushed out through a narrow door into a similarly narrow hallway, then followed red exit signs to what a push confirmed was a stairwell.
There was smoke in the stairwell.
“Not too bad, we can breathe,” Wilkes said. “At least up here.”
“No other way,” Plath said, and plunged unhesitatingly down the concrete stairs.
“Great, sevent
y floors,” Wilkes said. “Here’s where it would have been a good thing to work out.”
“It’s all downhill,” Plath said.
They ran and tumbled and occasionally tripped down the stairs, half a floor, a landing, a turn, down another flight. Over and over again.
The smoke grew thicker but not yet enough to choke them, just enough to make their throats raw and their eyes sting.
Plath was quicker, but she waited for Wilkes to catch up when she pulled too far ahead. Down and down. Then, on the fortieth floor, a woman banged back the door, took a wild-eyed look at them, and raced away as though they were trying to catch her.
Down and down and down, and by the twenty-first floor the smoke was wringing hacking coughs from their throats and watering their eyes.
A massive shock hit the building and knocked them both off their feet. Plath came up with a skinned knee and bruised forearms. Wilkes was worse off. She had twisted her ankle and could only hobble.
“You need to go on ahead,” Wilkes said. “Go, go, I’ll be fine.”
Plath took her arm. “I left Noah. I’m not leaving you. Come on. Run now, hurt later.”
They hobbled and slid and tripped, floor by floor, tears streaming down their faces. The last six floors were agony. Smoke was everywhere, searing their lungs. The heat of the fire turned the stairwell into an oven. At some point Plath simply stopped thinking, stopped even feeling anything but pain.
The last two floors were crowded with people—yelling, choking, pushing, panicking.
And all at once there was air.
Plath, still holding Wilkes by the hand, fell out onto the sidewalk and into light; rough hands grabbed her, pulled her away, a voice yelling, “Move, move, move, it’s coming down!”
They staggered on, not even sure what direction they were headed, stumbling into other refugees. A fire hose was spraying blessed cold water, and only then did Plath realize that some people were on fire, their clothing smoking, their hair crisped.
Glass was everywhere on the sidewalk and streets. Red lights flashed. Smoke billowed, but was caught by a breeze that cleared most of it at street level.
A block away they stopped, gasping, and sank down onto the concrete.
“Okay?” Plath asked.
“Alive,” Wilkes answered.
Plath smeared smoke from her eyes, blinked away tears and tried to look up at the Tulip.
Fire licked from windows. Smoke poured everywhere, the whole building a chimney now.
“We have to move farther.”
“Can’t,” Wilkes gasped.
“Like hell you can’t.” Plath stood, hauled Wilkes to her feet and, taking the girl’s weight on her shoulder, hobbled and ran with memories, too-sharp memories, of what happened when skyscrapers burned.
“Burn and fall, burn and fall,” Lear crooned as she watched flames and smoke wreathe the Tulip, dividing her attention between the real-world vista from her window and the TV coverage.
It was split-screened now on the news: half showed the remaining, yet-to-be rounded up loons from the Hollywood premiere; half showed the Tulip aflame. The crawl along the bottom was all about the Plague of Madness.
“Good title, that,” Lear commented. “Makes people think it can spread. Yeah. And it can, hah.”
Bug Man said nothing. This was his future now. He would live or die at Lear’s whim. Or she might just let him go crazy.
Three windows were open in his head. None of them showed much at the moment, just glimpses of the biots themselves. It was different than twitching nanobots, more intimate. You had only to think and the biot would move. No wonder BZRK had been so tough to beat. No wonder Vincent had ended up drooling nuts.
“Oh, look look look!” Lear pointed, as excited as a little child. “It’s starting to buckle. Look! Look! You can see rebar starting to stick out the side there. My dad came through in the end, I guess.”
“Your dad?”
“Yeah,” she said, almost fondly. “My dad. You must have heard of Caligula. Of course that’s not his real name. I gave him that nom de guerre. Caligula, yeah. Yeah.”
“Caligula’s your father?” He forced himself to quash the urge to say that this explained a lot.
His mouth hurt terribly. He had finally been allowed a couple ibuprofen swallowed with cold water, which had sent lightning bolts of pain shooting from his broken teeth but was already clearing up his speech. Now Bug Man was drinking raw bourbon, no ice, no water, no nothing, because it just didn’t seem to matter anymore if his brain was dulled. What was he holding out for? He was owned, body and soul. He was her slave. He was her dog.
“Mmm,” Lear said. “Was. Past tense. He killed my mother, you know. He tries to pretend it was me, yeah, like I could have done it. Like I could have killed her. Like I could have found her unconscious, yeah, and the cleaver, and thought … no. Yeah. But if I had, wouldn’t I have a tattoo of her?”
Bug Man nodded wearily, as if this proved her case.
“Adoptive parents, yeah, that’s different,” Lear said. “You saw them.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s going,” Lear said. “It’s going. Oh, this will be the best. Get me a drink. I want to toast the Armstrong Twins as they die.”
“What have you done?” Charles demanded, aghast.
“Revenge is a dish best served cold,” Burnofsky said. “And you know what? Even with the fire below, I feel chilly.”
“Damn you, what have you done?” Benjamin yelled, desperation breaking his voice.
“My final work of genius,” Burnofsky said. “I programmed my SRNs to respond not just to a time signature, or even a specific energy source. I programmed them with a map. A topographical program.”
Charles began to scratch his chest, the place where his chest became Benjamin’s.
“Yep, it will itch at first,” Burnofsky said. “Then it will burn. And then, it will really start to become quite unpleasant.”
“What have you done? Tell us! What have you done?”
“I’ve granted your secret wish,” Burnofsky said. “You’ve lived with each other every single minute of your lives. Neither of you has ever been separate. Well, now you will be. The topography is you.”
“What?” Charles cried. “We’ll die!”
“Well, yeah,” Burnofsky allowed. “But not right away. Hey, I’ve put a lot of thought into this. You don’t think I’d make it easy for you. Has my life been easy? No, it has not.” He dropped the jocular tone. “You bought my soul, you two. You bought my soul …”
Benjamin tore at the buttons of their tailor-made shirt, exposing pink flesh with an angry, vertical red rash in the center. He clawed at it then whinnied in horror as his fingernails came away trailing ribbons of flesh.
“… and then you let me be mind-raped. My brain. It’s all I had after I killed her, my intellect. Oh, God, and still, still, do you know what they did to me? Do you know what BZRK did? When I think of her …”
“They’re on my back!” Charles cried.
“… I get turned on. Did you know that’s what they did to me with their wire? Crude. They thought, Well, we will just sort of reverse polarities on old Burnofsky’s brain. Like an old Star Trek, did you boys—”
“I can’t reach, I can’t reach!” Charles cried as he flailed madly, trying to reach his back with his hand, but that had never been possible.
“Ever watch that show? They were always reversing polarities. All bullshit. But that’s all Nijinsky had. Crude and cruel. A man should do penance for his crimes. A man should pay. A man should suffer, not feel pleasure.”
“We don’t deserve to suffer!” Charles shouted.
“No,” Burnofsky drawled. “You two? No, it’s not like you enslaved a ship full of people and did to them just what BZRK did to me, right? See how you’re not going to win that argument?”
“We’ll give you whatever you want,” Charles said, and then cried out in pain and grabbed at his rear in what would in other circumstance
s be almost comic.
“Up your butt, are they? Right on schedule. There’ll be a couple million of them by now.”
“We’ll give you anything! Anything!” Charles pleaded.
Burnofsky looked sick, like a man on the edge of vomiting. He stood wearily, old bones popping with the effort, and stepped closer, just out of reach of Benjamin’s grasping claw of a hand. “Anything? Will you? Then give me back my little girl.”
“She had to die; it was treason!” Benjamin raged. “She was a filthy, treacherous, little—”
Burnofsky punched him. It wasn’t much of a punch, just enough to start the blood draining from a reddened nose.
“Give me my daughter. Give me my pride back. Give me back my own brain. Do all of that, and I’ll stop them.” Then, he laughed—a sudden, strange noise. “Kidding. They will carry out their programming and—”
The floor tilted suddenly, a 10 degree pitch that sent the Twins sprawling. Burnofsky staggered but remained standing.
“My apocalypse,” Burnofsky said, holding the deadly remote control aloft. “Not Lear’s, not yours. Mine.”
“You’re insane!” Charles wailed.
“You think?” He drained the last of his bottle and smacked his lips. “Who wasn’t insane in this?” His eyes fell on Noah’s twitching body. Noah made an incoherent sound. The tilting floor had sent the pool of blood trailing off like rivulets on a windshield. “Him, maybe. Seems like a decent kid. Maybe even sane.”
The Twins were wallowing back and forth like a cockroach on its back, trying to roll over so they could stand. Noah’s blood met Benjamin’s elbow and soaked his shirt.
The smell of smoke had been growing more noticeable, and now it could be seen, too, pouring in from two directions as well as rushing past the windows like some gravity-defying waterfall.
The Twins were screaming now, fighting each other to scream, lungs pumping out of sync, heart hammering. Screaming as the nanobots used their flesh to create more nanobots, millions of little worker ants carving tiny slices of flesh, busy little hog butchers carving a living pig.
Against all odds, slipping in blood, their own and Noah’s, the Twins managed to get to their feet.