BZRK (BZRK 1)

Caligula marched Vincent like a prisoner through the glass doors, out onto the sidewalk, leaving Plath and Keats behind with a panting, shattered-looking Anya glancing around wildly, wondering if there was an escape, any escape.

Anya was, Plath realized, almost old enough to be her mother. And Plath, and a boy she’d never known before, were suddenly in the position of having to shoot the woman if she tried to run.

Vincent’s biots dragged themselves away.

Bug Man’s nanobots were in pursuit.

The chase was long, but now it was reaching a desperate point. Now V1 and V2 were stepping onto the eye. He had stayed on muscle fiber as long as he could because there he was at par in terms of speed.

But the time was up. Now he had no choice but to back onto the orb itself, and when the nanobots followed they’d be beyond the macrophages, out onto a slick, smooth surface—as slick as anything in the human body. They would drop to their wheels and trail their legs and outrun Vincent in a matter of seconds.

Vincent felt Caligula’s gun pressed against his ear.

“I’m going to lose,” Vincent whispered.

“Can’t help you down there in the meat,” Caligula said, his voice grating, then rising to yell, “Hey! Assholes! This is Vincent. You want him? I’ll trade you for free passage outta here!”

The window in the SUV lowered.

Vincent saw a man talking on a phone. Tense. Waiting for some kind of answer.

The small car lowered a window as well. A muzzle emerged, aimed at them.

Something appeared in the air. An object the size of a baseball, but dull steel. It flew from Caligula’s hand, right through the window of the SUV.

Caligula pivoted, fired, BAMBAMBAM!

A cry from inside the small car.

A shout of panic from inside the SUV.

Caligula yanked Vincent down with him as he dropped to the pavement.

The grenade exploded inside the SUV.

Nanobots had their wheels in contact with the eye, and V2’s legs were slipping, and the windows blew out of the SUV, and the doors exploded outward, and three nanobots were on Vincent’s crippled biot, stabbing and stabbing, and Vincent felt it as if each stab was in his own guts.

He cried out and Caligula fired again at the small car and yelled, “Get out here, now!” and waved his arm and Vincent saw Keats and Plath and Anya all running, and a fourth person, too.

A fourth person.

A Goth street girl with a weird tattoo on her eye.

Keats missed a step as he recognized her: the girl from the cab.

“The woman!” Caligula yelled to the newcomer as Vincent felt a terrible pain deep inside himself and Keats yelled, “Right eye, right eye!” and the Goth girl, Wilkes, jabbed a finger hard into Anya Violet’s right eye, and Anya cried out in pain and tried to bat the girl away.

V2 leapt over the ripped and dismembered body of V1, reckless, heedless, not giving a damn now, because this was the end, so all in, Vincent knew, all in.

The biot killed two nanobots before losing its legs. Both of Vincent’s biots were now almost immobile. Two of their total twelve legs were still attached.

Nothing left but the stingers in their tails and the tiny beam weapons. But without legs neither was of much use.

Eight nanobots surrounded the two dying biots.

“Can I get a withdrawal? Can I get a withdrawal?” Bug Man yelled. “What’s happening in the macro?”

“A bunch of dead people is what’s happening,” Burnofsky reported.