BZRK (BZRK 1)

“Don’t get hurt,” Plath said. His arms were around her and she felt his warmth and she was afraid, and she could hardly swallow her throat was so dry. How could it be that she was here, needing him to be with her not just here but there as well, needing him not just in the macro but down in the meat?

Plath’s biots raced through a sparse forest of arm hairs. Then beneath a sleeve, a sky made of woven ropes. Was it even the correct arm? Was it one of them? Or was she racing up the arm of some minor player, some guard or secretary?

“I’m going to tap the dog’s eye,” Keats said. And he sent his biot racing across the alien forest’s treetops.

“I don’t want to lose my mind in a Dumpster, Keats.”

“My name’s not Keats,” he said.

“Don’t tell me your name,” she whispered.

“I know yours.”

“My name is Plath,” she said, sounding more determined than she felt.

“I’m passing the bandage. It’s like a circus tent! Tape pulling at hairs. It’s …”

“You think we’d have liked each other if it wasn’t like this?” she asked.

“We wouldn’t have met,” he answered.

The Dumpster top opened. Hearts in their throats.

A McDonald’s bag dropped in, and the top closed again.

They heard street sounds, alley sounds. Conversation, shouts and laughs and normality, and none of that helped because they were a million miles away from normal.

“I’m at the head. Shorter hairs,” Keats said. “Here’s hoping this dog doesn’t have fleas or lice or … Eyelid. I’m there. Demodex. I hate demodex. These are different, though. Jesus.”

Her neck was in his face. It smelled of French fries. And he could not resist the urge to kiss that neck as he raced toward the slow-blinking eyelid and the dark pool of a whiteless eye.

She felt his lips on her neck and sighed and did not resist as she raced at full speed, two biots, two windows open in her head, one seeing the other biot pull ahead, a bug that was somehow her. She was there, there in those creatures even as she shivered from his touch.

“I won’t let you go crazy, Keats,” she said.

“Too late,” he said. “We’re already crazy.”

She twisted around and kissed him as she recognized the shift from thin, wispy body hair to the chopped, torn stubble of a shaved face.

Was she on the face of the Armstrong Twins?

And if she was, what was she going to do about it?

She kissed Keats, and felt her body respond, and wondered whether she would commit murder.

And suddenly, there it was. A room, dimly lit, and two twitcher stations with two twitchers in place, gloved, reclining, helmeted, with screens hanging, showing nanobot armies on the march.

Half a dozen faces turned to stare at Wilkes and Ophelia. The twitchers didn’t notice them at first, but others did, and the reaction was quick but not as quick as Wilkes, who started shooting BAM BAM BAM!

“Fucking die!” Wilkes shouted, and fired at men and women and screens and walls.

Ophelia ran at the nearest twitcher, a boy or young man, couldn’t see his face, but she jammed her hand up under the mask and her two biots leapt onto a pimple like Vesuvius, an angry red mound.

The twitcher turned and ripped off his helmet and a Taser hit Ophelia, dropped her to her knees as a shoe swung hard and knocked her onto her back.

“Ophelia!” Wilkes cried, and fired and fired until the slide on the gun stuck in the open-and-empty position, and then she threw it at the nearest monitor.

Someone very large knocked her