BZRK

much as they took, cursing, screaming, shooting, the stink of gunpowder and blood, machinery holed.
    Vincent was on his face, on the floor, deaf to everything but the loudest noises.
    And there, amid the crazy, he saw Keats. Keats with hands trembling and yet doing the exact right thing, somehow knowing, picking up the Taser that had fallen from Renfield’s hand as Renfield fell, and now Keats looking right at Vincent and Vincent nodding and the Taser jolt hitting Anya’s body.
    Light traveled from the Taser’s firing points to Vincent’s eyes and he sent his biots leaping clear as a split second later the Taser’s charge sent the nerves beneath his spider legs into spasm.
    Nerve fibers twitched, yanked the legs from nanobots, hurled others into flesh walls. What seemed like meters m-sub became mere centimeters m-sub as the spasm contracted nerve and wracked muscle.
    Vincent sent both his biots, half-crippled, but not dead just yet, no definitely not dead, straight into the confused mass of nanobots, plowed bodily into them with all the speed they could manage and kept thrashing ahead, dragging the macrophages with them, scraping them off in the tangle of thrashing titanium.
    The biots erupted through the platoons of nanobots that now added the goo of macrophages to their difficulty unraveling themselves.
    Aftershocks, spasms, as Anya’s nerves tried to gain control.
    V1 was down. Legless now. Immobile.
    Vincent saw it, turned V2 to grab it with his pincers and kicked backward, hauling V1 after it, macrophages eating into it still.
    *
    Bug Man stared in horror. He was down to twelve active visuals. Maybe three or four of the blind nanobots were still functioning, but he had a choice now: take a few seconds to replatoon them or just send them all pell-mell after the retreating Vincent.
    The tectonic shock—Bug Man still had no idea what had caused it—had made a mess of his forces.
    “Looking a little rough there, Anthony,” Burnofsky drawled. “Maybe time for a little macro help of our own, eh?”
    That decided it. No way Bug Man could let Vincent escape. He’d started with a twenty-four-to-two edge. He would never live it down if he lost now.
    Mass attack
, Bug Man ordered. A banzai charge. A solid wall of nanobots. They surged toward the retreating biots.
    But they’d have to leg it. The cleverness of summoning the macrophages was clear now: the spongy, brainless monsters made it impossible for him to switch to wheels.
    Race on: wounded biot, pulling its twin away, versus nanobots.
    Bug Man knew he would win the race, would eventually catch up, even without wheels. But how many of his nanobots were still functioning? How many would be tripped up? Was this a banzai charge or a kamikaze attack?
    “Tell them to shoot Vincent,” Bug Man said, grinding out the words.
    “You tell them, boy genius. You give the kill order.” He held a phone to Bug Man’s ear.
    *
    Macrophages ate into Vincent’s biot flesh as he motored backward, dragging his other biot. The nanobots would catch him. He was moving too slowly. If he dropped V1 . . .
    And if he didn’t . . .
    Renfield’s biots would turn the tide. Where were they? What the hell was keeping Renfield?
    Vincent turned to see, and there was Renfield, on his back, arms splayed wide, head lolled to one side. Vincent could see him. Renfield would not be rescuing anyone.
    There was a shoe blocking Vincent’s field of view.
    Then a gun jabbed his ear. Cold steel.
    “Freeze, motherfucker,” a stressed voice said. “And I mean all the way down in the meat. Or die.”
    *
    Plath still had the gun in her hand. She had never fired one before. The noise—so much louder than in the movies—and the kick—so much more satisfying than she’d have guessed—had surprised her.
    And the horrifying fact that it had worked.
    She had aimed, squeezed the trigger, and sent a lead projectile through the air to smash flesh and bone.
    The man she had shot now sat in a pool of blood flowing from his groin. She had made that happen.
    And yet even as she stared in horror her head was filled with the nightmarish vision of awful, lurching, spiderlike monsters, grainy and gray, and tumbling madly around on a plain that had tilted up without warning.
    Vincent was facedown. A man in a blood-splattered parka held a gun to his head.
    Keats took her arm, squeezed hard, and propelled her toward the door.
    Renfield lay in a dark-red lake.
    Dead and dying men sagged against equipment. Smoke