BZRK

elevator to come. Plath and Keats, waiting, staring at the call button, both self-conscious with their pistols, both with heads swirling with images of tumbling monsters.
    “Oh shit!” Keats cried at one point. “I just saw color. The thing. Just like a flash of color.”
    “Still gray scale here,” Plath said.
    Keats looked at the crèche still in his hand, shook his head, irritated at his own stupidity, and slid the thing into the back of his jeans, where it should be safe so long as he didn’t sit down. Or get shot in the rear.
    The elevator had come, and Plath had punched the button for the lobby.
    “What do we do when the door opens?” Keats wondered aloud.
    Plath had no answer. Or rather, she had one, but she didn’t want to say it. The gun weighed a hundred pounds. The grip was slick with sweat.
    They passed the tenth floor.
    The seventh.
    “I take this side, you take that side,” Keats said. “I’ll go first. As soon as the door is wide enough.”
    Plath nodded curtly, not trusting herself to speak, and not minding, for once in her life, that someone had basically told her what to do.
    Third floor.
    The elevator slowed.
    Took a slight bounce.
    Through the doors came the sound of a gunshot.
    Plath wondered if she had wet herself. Wondered why it mattered, and the door opened and Keats shoved through and
BAM!
    And she stumbled after him.
    Caligula stood there; Vincent and Anya leaned against a massive marble pillar.
    “What the hell are you shooting at?” Caligula asked. Not angry, just curious.
    “I . . .” Keats said.
    The lobby lights were low, but still plenty of light to see two McLure security guards dead. Someone had shot them and dragged them out of the line of sight from the sidewalk outside. They were behind a stand-up billboard for an event at the Museum of Modern Art, sponsored by McLure Industries.
    As Plath emerged all the way from the elevator she saw two other bodies in the one Caligula had taken.
    “Cops are on the way. Bad guys are on the street outside.”
    “Is that them?” Plath nodded at an SUV and a compact car steaming exhaust out at the curb.
    “Yes. We’re going to go and take the little car.” With a fluid motion Caligula grabbed Vincent, held him at arm’s length, and put a gun to his head. “Let’s go.”
    Caligula marched Vincent like a prisoner through the glass doors, out onto the sidewalk, leaving Plath and Keats behind with a panting, shattered-looking Anya glancing around wildly, wondering if there was an escape, any escape.
    Anya was, Plath realized, almost old enough to be her mother. And Plath, and a boy she’d never known before, were suddenly in the position of having to shoot the woman if she tried to run.
    *
    Vincent’s biots dragged themselves away.
    Bug Man’s nanobots were in pursuit.
    The chase was long, but now it was reaching a desperate point. Now V1 and V2 were stepping onto the eye. He had stayed on muscle fiber as long as he could because there he was at par in terms of speed.
    But the time was up. Now he had no choice but to back onto the orb itself, and when the nanobots followed they’d be beyond the macrophages, out onto a slick, smooth surface—as slick as anything in the human body. They would drop to their wheels and trail their legs and outrun Vincent in a matter of seconds.
    Vincent felt Caligula’s gun pressed against his ear.
    “I’m going to lose,” Vincent whispered.
    “Can’t help you down there in the meat,” Caligula said, his voice grating, then rising to yell, “Hey! Assholes! This is Vincent. You want him? I’ll trade you for free passage outta here!”
    The window in the SUV lowered.
    Vincent saw a man talking on a phone. Tense. Waiting for some kind of answer.
    The small car lowered a window as well. A muzzle emerged, aimed at them.
    Something appeared in the air. An object the size of a baseball, but dull steel. It flew from Caligula’s hand, right through the window of the SUV.
    Caligula pivoted, fired,
BAMBAMBAM!
    A cry from inside the small car.
    A shout of panic from inside the SUV.
    Caligula yanked Vincent down with him as he dropped to the pavement.
    The grenade exploded inside the SUV.
    Nanobots had their wheels in contact with the eye, and V2’s legs were slipping, and the windows blew out of the SUV, and the doors exploded outward, and three nanobots were on Vincent’s crippled biot, stabbing and stabbing, and Vincent felt it as if each stab was in his own guts.
    He cried out and