“I’m holding on to the tree. It looks like dead leaves down there on the ground.”
“Dead skin cells. Some folks think they look like fallen leaves. Other people think they look like shredded cardboard. Anyway, doesn’t matter. You’re down in your boyfriend’s stupid pseudo-beard. No offense, Keats.”
Keats reflexively stroked the sparse hair on his chin.
“It’s dark!” Plath yelled. “Stop that,” she snapped at Keats.
“Okay, well, this is unexpected,” Wilkes said. “We’re going to need to get some coffee or tea or whatever.”
“Coffee?”
“Yeah, honey, you got a long walk ahead of you. Up the chin, around the mouth, bypass the nostrils—you do not want to go in there—and meet me up by the eye. As slow as you’ll be, probably half an hour before we even get to go eye-skating.”
Wilkes waited, grinning. When Plath just stared blankly, she said, “Eye-skating. Ice-skating. Right?” Then she sighed. “We’re BZRK, it doesn’t mean we have to have no sense of humor.”
So they sipped coffee.
And Keats and Ophelia had some, too.
And from time to time Keats would stare at Plath as if she was a monster. He was inside her. Ophelia had led him through her eye and into her brain.
From time to time Plath would look at Keats, needing reassurance that he was actually, still, a human being.
At one point Wilkes grabbed a powerful magnifying glass and scanned Keats’s face. The light she used was like a break in clouds that lets streaming sunlight through. “There you are. Either you or a wandering mite. No, it’s you. You’re just under his left eye.”
Plath had been told about the demodex. Warned about the demodex. But still she screamed.
Like some awful crocodile mated with a dinosaur. It was smaller than she was, but not small enough. It was long, tapered from the front where its six legs stuck out, stubby, more like paddles than legs.
Plath stopped breathing.
Then breathed again, too hard, too fast. The demodex was moving. A tiny insect mouth seemed to be questing toward her.
She reared back.
“Are you sure it won’t … It’s like …” She didn’t say what it was like. Because it was not like anything she had ever seen or experienced. A living thing, its deformed baby legs motoring slowly and inefficiently. It was chewing a fallen leaf. No, a dead skin cell. Eating it contentedly.
And yet it was impossible not to imagine it as a predator. A reptile, a monster from another planet.
It was too small to see with a human eye. Too small even for a magnifying glass, smaller than a dust mite, smaller than her biot.
But size alone did not reassure. A wild boar is small, a mad dog is small.
“Aww, isn’t he cute?”
She heard Wilkes’s voice and realized that somehow she was seeing what Plath was seeing. Which could only mean …
Plath’s biot eyes looked up and saw a creature far more terrifying than the demodex.
It towered over the skin-eating monster. Spiky antenna from a smooth, green head. A long, narrow body with three tall legs on each side. The head was topped by a pair of compound eyes that wrapped down the side of the head like Princess Leia’s buns.
Where the mouth should be was a sort of proboscis, a tube, hollow and with something viscous dripping from the end, like mucus from a cold sufferer.
It had arms like a mantis. Dangerous and powerful. They ended in small asymmetric claws that had one short and one long pincer.
But it was the eyes …
The human eyes, smeared across that insect face, staring soulless from beneath the compound insect eyes. That was what finally obliterated Plath’s careful self-control and let her scream.
And scream.
And there, suddenly, a hand on her shoulder, Nijinsky standing behind her.
Nijinsky looked at Wilkes. “Is she seeing you?”
Wilkes nodded.
“You should have warned her.”
“Is that what my biot looks like?” Plath gasped. “Does it … does it have my eyes?”
Wilkes grinned. “Beware, Plath,” she said, mocking, and not in the jokey way she’d been before, but with an edge of aggression and anger. “It’s a weird world down there in the meat. And the weirdest thing of all is us.”
“It wasn’t me,” Burnofsky said, first thing, first words out of his mouth when he next saw Bug Man. He grabbed the kid and pulled him into a side room, out of sight, out of sound, and looked him in the eye and said, “I don’t like you, Anthony, but it wasn’t me.”
He smelled of booze. His pupils were the size of pinheads. So drunk and high. Nasty old geezer.
“This isn’t a game to the Twins, kid.” He slurred it.
“Yeah, well, as long as they keep you in dope, right?”
Burnofsky made a small laugh. Then he leaned in, too close, and said, “Yeah. Exactly. That’s my price. And yours is thinking you’re a big man, and that piece of ass you go home to every night. And Jindal? He’s an actual true believer, a true hive mind, Nexus Humanus sucker. And One-Up? More like you. More about ego. We all have a drug.”
“And Twofer? I guess they’re the dealers.”
“See, you’re not so stupid,” Burnofsky said.
The back of Bug Man’s legs hurt. The bruises made it hard for him to walk without limping. He had cried for the first time in … how long? A long time. Oh, definitely, he had cried, Anthony Elder, he had cried into his pillow and told Jessica to stay away.
They had lain him out like a little punk and whacked his ass.
Now here he was planning to take down the biggest target in the world. Final briefing. Final prep. And instead of getting what was his due, to swagger in as big as an elephant’s balls and have everyone kiss his ass, he’d had to hobble in like a cripple.
“Two ways forward now, Anthony,” Burnofsky said. “Rebel or excel.”
“What the hell are you babbling about?”
“You turn against them. Or you show them your true worth.”
“Rebel? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? AmericaStrong thugs would be down on me and really fuck me up. Maybe kill me.”
“Not maybe, Anthony.”
He was so sure that it made Bug Man take a step back. It was true. He saw it in the old man’s rheumy eyes. The Twins would kill him. And Burnofsky knew this with absolute certainty.
Because.
Because he’d seen it happen.
“Who’d they kill?” Bug Man pressed. “Somebody stood up against them? Who? You tell me. You tell me who it was.”
“She was as good as you.”
“Who’s this ‘she’? ”
“It runs in families, this talent we have, Anthony. This girl, Carla, yeah, lousy name to stick on a girl. Named after her father.”
Burnofsky’s pale, whiskered face was ghostly. And yes, right then, with the scientist’s face too close and the stink of booze sweat coming off him, and drilling into Anthony with those needle-hole pupils, yes right then Bug Man remembered that Burnofsky’s first name was Karl.
“Stood up to them, see, when she realized what was going on, what the real game was.” Tears were leaking out of Burnofsky’s eyes. “About your age. Like most twitchers. Gamer kid. They had her lace some juicy bacteria. The Twins had a grudge, see. A woman named Heidi Zulle, a shrink. You’ve heard rumors about the Doll Ship?”
“Some kind of …” Bug Man didn’t have the right word for it.
“A floating house of horrors, and Zulle was in charge of using drugs and so-called therapy to keep the victims in line. She had a change of heart that coincidentally came after the Twins had her … well, suffice to say, something much worse than they did to you, kid. She tried to give the Doll Ship’s location up to an intelligence agent. She failed, and then she ran, so, no more Heidi Zulle.”
“The Twins took her out?”
“They had Carla do the job. But they didn’t tell her what she was doing, what she
was delivering. And I was there, too, and I didn’t know. Flesh-eating bacteria, a sac of it. “And, well, that was too much for Carla.”
“Christ.”
“You think you’ve seen some shit down in the meat, Bug Man? You’ve never seen that, or anything close.” Burnofsky shuddered. “Carla was a twitcher. Like you. But see, Anthony, she was still a human being. Unlike you. You? You don’t even know how many died in the stadium, do you? Doesn’t matter to you, because you’re a bloodless, amoral little piece of shit. All that matters to you is that you got spanked.”
The truth dawned on Bug Man. The truth of what Burnofsky was telling them. And the why of it.
“They want you to tell me this,” Bug Man said, and his voice cracked. “You’re threatening me.”
Burnofsky laughed delightedly. “Like I said: you’re a smart kid.”
“They killed your daughter. And you’re still their bitch?”
“Everyone dies,” Burnofsky said. “Some die clawing at their eyes in agony as the bacteria eat their brains and eyes from the inside out. Others … others die happy, floating on waves of soft, warm pleasure. That second death? That’s what Carla had. That was my price. That’s what her loving father got for her.”
“And you lecturing me about the dead. You should kill yourself, old man. You should kill yourself.”
“What makes you think I’m not?” Burnofsky asked dully.
They stared at each other until Bug Man could not look into those eyes any longer.
“Now. I believe we have a meeting to attend, Anthony.”
NINETEEN
On the screen was a diagram.
Across the top of the diagram were five boxes containing the names MORALES, TS’AI, HAYASHI, BOWEN, and CHAUKSEY.
Bug Man knew these were respectively the leaders of the United States, China, Japan, the United Kingdom, and India.
His first thought was that the Twins had pulled back a little. No Germany, France, or South Korea. It bothered him just a bit, because the plan had been to take down every head of state whose country had serious nanotech. This was a pullback. A pullback meant nervousness, and nervousness in others had a way of making Bug Man nervous.
Helen Falkenhym Morales. President of the United States.
Beneath the box with her name was a line of attack. A pathway. The trick as always was to get from point A to point Z. Fortunately there weren’t that many letters. “A” was the deputy director of the FBI, who was already an asset. “B” was a Secret Service agent who was not on the presidential protection detail but was a friend of the FBI guy. They played a weekly game of squash.
Easy transfer, there.
“B” led in turn to his Secret Service mentor, “C,” who was definitely on the presidential detail and would be in New York with the president.
“C” might be enough. He might make physical contact with POTUS at some point. But the more reliable path was from “C” to “D.”
“D” was the president’s “body man,” although in this case it was a “body woman.” Her name was Liz Law, a name that should have made her some kind of superhero. She was the first person to see Morales in the morning and the last to see her at night.
To reach Liz Law was to reach the president, period.
A,B,C,D.
E.
Four jumps.
Some of the others had it tougher. The path to the Chinese president was seven steps. Some had it easier. The path to the British PM was three steps. Someone had quickly replaced the dead Liselotte Osborne in that pathway.
Bug Man blinked, defocused the chart, and looked around at the room. Jindal was the briefer. He was standing at the ready, twirling a laser pointer nervously in his hand.
The various lead twitchers were around the table.
Kim. An Asperger’s case if ever there was one. Skinny Korean kid, looked about twelve, although he was probably seventeen. He tended to avoid eye contact. And any physical contact. And would occasionally interrupt the conversation with some totally off-topic remark. A good twitcher, methodical, careful.
Dietrich. He was maybe twenty-five, a German with hair so thin and light it seemed to float on a breeze of its own, a sort of thinning blond halo. Behind his back people called him Riff-Raff, after the butler from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. An Armstrong Twins true believer. Dude had totally drunk the Nexus Humanus Kool-Aid and licked the bottom of the glass. He was barely good enough as a twitcher, and Bug Man would not have wanted Dietrich covering his ass down in the meat.
Alfredo, now he had potential. He came from some tiny island in the middle of the ocean. The Azores, whatever those were. His family had raised bulls for the street bullfights they had there. He had made a name for himself in online games, where he had a tendency to reach the top level in half the time it took anyone else. A pretty good twitcher, Alfredo, but volatile, capable of losing it entirely when someone crossed him.
And then, there was One-Up. She was sixteen, a white girl from some Oklahoma suburb. She could have been a beauty but meth had destroyed her teeth, and now that she was clean she had a bad set of veneers. It gave her a startling, too-white, too-bright shark smile.
One-up was tough and fearless and dangerous. All the love and energy she had once put into finding meth to smoke and deal she now devoted to the game. She was weird, obsessive, as thin as a classroom skeleton, and probably clinically insane. But Bug Man had fought alongside her once, going up against Kerouac and someone they didn’t know, and bottom line? The girl had game. She had taken over the Bowen target during the reshuffling when Burnofsky got bumped off the POTUS.
There was one other person in the room. She was sitting in a corner, wearing khaki slacks and a pink pima-cotton shirt. She had blonde hair—a bit stiff—one leg crossed over the other, hands on the arms of her chair. She was a white woman with a pert little nose and sculpted eyebrows. Sugar Lebowski, operational head of AmericaStrong, AFGC’s tough-guy division. Some called her the Little Lebowski, although there was nothing laid back or cool about her.
She hadn’t been there for Bug Man’s beating. But she had sent the order and chosen the men, and sat there with her pink-lipsticked mouth smiling pertly as they reported what had gone down.
Bug Man nodded at One-up and ignored the others.
Feeling self-conscious, he took the seat at the head of the table while Burnofsky took what was either the other head or the tail of the table.
Kim had the Indian PM; Alfredo was on the Japanese; Burnofsky had the Chinese now; and Dietrich, who had been warming up to go after the German, was now prepping to fill in for anyone who pulled up sick or failed.
The pain of sitting was excruciating. The bruises ached and burned. The muscles twanged.
Jindal started to give a rundown, using his laser pointer. And listening with half his brain, Bug Man began to stew. Things were not quite what they had seemed. Yes, the POTUS was a slightly bigger target than the Chinese president, but the path to the Chinese dude was seven jumps. So while the Twins had given Bug Man the honor of the prime target, they had given Burnofsky the harder job, at least in terms of navigating the pathway.
Jindal started the briefing. It was all very official sounding. Very Defense Department. But these weren’t colonels and generals listening. One-Up was playing a game on her phone. Dietrich was acting way too enthusiastic. Alfredo seemed to be catching up on his Facebook messages.
Burnofsky seemed about to fall asleep, nodding off, catching himself.
Bug Man played his role. He stared with great focus at Jindal. But his mind was on the pain in his legs. It was also on what Burnofsky had told him. Was it a warning? Yes. But what kind of warning? He was trying to manipulate the Bug Man, but to what end?
What was it the man wanted in the end? Did Burnofsky want Bug Man to go rogue and end up as dead as his own daughter?
Beneath all of that was the raw emotion. The humiliation. Bug Man wondered how many of the people sitting at the table knew that he had been smacked do
wn by the Twins.
Were they all secretly smirking at an imagined image of his crying? The first one who gave him a wrong look …
It was time to put them in their places. Time to remind them who he was.
“You done talking, Jindal?”
Jindal stopped in midpoint, started to say something, decided to say something else, which was, “I’m all done.”