Cars. Parking lots. Driving around in a cab. Inside about a thousand offices. They could be any of a million places, and she had to find them. With eleven guys.
Two street people were arguing loudly over who had rights to the cans in a bin. Sugar went up to them and said, “Shut up, assholes.” She held up a hundred-dollar bill, and that got their attention even through the haze of booze and schizophrenia. “A hundred bucks if you find me this girl.” She had a picture on her phone and gave them a five-second look. “Find her in the next ten minutes and you can drink for a week. Go!”
To her men she said, “One-Up said they were sitting in a coffee shop, so they are probably still at street level. If they had an office, they’d have been there to begin with. So get every hobo, bike messenger, street vendor, cabdriver, doorman, and building security guy. Offer them a hundred. If that doesn’t work, offer them a thousan
d. Get me that little bitch.”
The explosion threw Wilkes clear into the shop. She slammed into a stand of T-shirts. She was burning, tights curling, hair crisping, blouse smoking. She slapped at the fire on her legs and yelled, “Ophelia! Ophelia!”
There were bodies everywhere, some moving, some not. Choking, oily black smoke filled the shop, a thousand times deeper and more intense than what had resulted from her own little exercise in pyromania. The smoke was like a falling ceiling, pressing down, squeezing the air into eighteen inches near the floor.
Wilkes lay flat, rolled over to put out any remaining flames on her body and crawled like a demodex, worming her way across the floor. She swarmed over debris, over bodies, yelling, “Ophelia!” with less and less breath. The choking started then, the coughing that ripped at her throat and sent her into chest-wracking spasms.
She found two stumps burning like torches and knew, just knew, it was Ophelia. Her feet were gone. Her legs were the wicks of candles.
Wilkes gagged on smoke, vomited, wept, grabbed at UN souvenir T-shirts and pressed them over burning flesh that smelled like gyro meat on a spit.
She crawled to Ophelia’s head. Ophelia’s eyes were open, wide, indifferent to the smoke, staring in horror. That look, those staring, terrified eyes were worse than the burning limbs.
“They’re dead!” Ophelia wailed. The smoke pressed down so low over her face that the exhalation of her horror formed spirals and eddies.
“Get …” Wilkes said, but that was the limit of her powers of speech, her throat was swelling, her stomach was retching again.
“Dead! Gods, no. No! Nooooo!” Ophelia screamed.
Wilkes knew she wasn’t talking about the people who had just died.
“Ah! Hah-hah!” Ophelia raved. She made a barking sound. Like a seal. And then she started thrashing, flailing her arms, kicking her mutilated legs, screaming and screaming until finally the smoke choked her down to guttural, coughing grunts.
Wilkes gave up then.
Enough.
A terrible sadness swallowed her up. Goddamnit, Ophelia deserved to live.
Then through slitted, weeping eyes she saw the toes of boots, black-and-yellow rubber legs, and down through the smoke like a demon god came alien bug eyes and a black helmet with a red shield and the blessed initials FDNY.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Keats had heard Vincent loud and clear on the stupidity, the futility, of any decision just to send biots running around blindly.
Biots didn’t have the speed or the senses to go careening off on their own. There had to be a pathway.
He was on a dog’s nose. In a room that almost certainly held the Armstrong Twins, but others as well. He couldn’t see anything but shapes as huge and as distant as the clouds.
He could hear vague voices like distant thunder.
That was what he had to go on. Clouds and thunder as he rode around on a dog’s nose that looked like some alien, dry lake bed of parched mud.
No way to do anything useful. No way to save himself or Plath.
And then he spotted the flea. That clanking, armored, Transformer-eyed monster. No time to think.
He raced his two biots toward it, tearing back along the dog’s snout, full out, as fast as they would run. The flea didn’t notice him. The flea didn’t give a damn. The flea had no predators in its life aside from some distant dog collar. It was intent on finding the red-red kroovy, as they said in Clockwork Orange: blood. Only blood. And the biots weren’t a source.
He ran up to the side of the flea as it tapped a slow spurt of corpuscles, sucking them up into its mouthparts, and the biots leapt.
They hit spiky legs and clambered madly up, their own legs thrashing, up over the powerful, spring-loaded haunches and slam!