BZRK (BZRK 1)

The dogs separated for a split second and BAM!

The gunshot was loud, too loud for a public park, and the German shepherd squealed and stumbled and the beagle cowered and Wilkes screamed as a good dog owner would when someone’s just shot her dog.

“What did you do? What did you do?” she screamed, and rushed to the dying animal.

One of the TFDs pulled out a wallet, peeled off a couple of bills, and let them drop on the dead dog. Another gathered up the beagle, and all together they beat a hasty retreat.

It was not until then that Plath and Keats were sure they were on the right dog.

Like any two concerned passersby might, they trotted over to Wilkes even as they ran their biots fearfully into the beagle’s fur.

“You okay?” Keats asked Wilkes.

She held up two one-hundred-dollar bills. “I’m fine. But Hitler Hound here is looking a bit out of it.”

“Hitler Hound?” Keats asked.

Wilkes shrugged. “It seemed like a good name for him. I’m sorry for him, but damn, he was a crazy-ass dog. He tried to bite me. And C-notes are always welcome.”

Plath was disgusted. “Yeah, you can get something else tattooed.”

“Drop dead, sweetie,” Wilkes said with a derisive look. “I don’t happen to be a billionaire. And you two need to start walking toward the AFGC building. You don’t want to be out of range.”

They left Wilkes to deal with the dead animal and walked the block and a half to the Starbucks nearest the AFGC building.

“Do you see that?” Plath asked as they sat with lattes and muffins.

“What?”

“It’s a bite. Where the other dog … I think you’re too far away, I don’t see you, but it’s almost … awe-inspiring. The flesh, it’s like it was peeled back. Like the edge of a meteor crater or something. The hairs are all twisted. There are pools of spit, I guess that’s what it is. And things swimming in the spit. And the blood … it’s, I …”

She was looking straight at him, but beyond him, too, and he was likewise looking through her and seeing not the wound but what looked like a far-distant mountain that he hoped was the beagle’s nose.

“We probably shouldn’t be talking. It sounds crazy,” Keats said.

“This is New York. Crazy doesn’t draw much attention. I need to get away from the wound. They’ll dump disinfectant all over it.”

She sipped her coffee. “What if I can’t find you? It’s like looking for someone in a hundred acres of woods.”

“Just remember the hair points to the back end of the dog. We want the front.”

Keats sent one of his biots to thread its way, like a monkey going hand over hand, up through the flattened hair, up into the light.

Biots did not have long-distance vision. At least not what would pass for long distance in the macro. They could see distant patterns of light and dark and some limited color, but not the detail of a face.

What Keats could see from his fur-top perch was an endless, undulating sea of fur, each individual hair clearly visible within the immediate circle but with distance turning spiny, horizontal hairs into a smear of brown and white. Twisting his biot around, he could form the picture—through insect and humanoid eyes—of a promontory, a peninsula, that ended in a massive black rock the size of Mount Rushmore.

The nose.

Their target.

“I’m on the head,” Keats said across the table. “I can see the wound. It looks like something plowed through the fur. If you can see the wound, you’re not far from where I am. Just walk against the direction of the fur.”

He looked up, into what felt to him like the sky. What he saw was a pale green cloud, larger than any object he had ever seen in real life. And it seemed to wrap itself around the forest of fur, but in one place ceased to be green and became a brown color. It enveloped the entire horizon.

“I think we’re being carried by the black one. The black TFD in the green shirt,” Keats said. “I can’t really see. Just shapes and colors. It doesn’t make much sense.”

Sounds were too large somehow to make much sense of, either. Like earthquake rumblings, but too confused to decipher.