BZRK

signs of consciousness.
    “I’ve seen this guy somewhere before,” one of the men said.
    “Billboards,” Sugar said. “He’s the model they use for Mountain Dew Extra.”
    “Hey, yeah. I’ll be damned. The MDE guy. Huh.”
    Nijinsky’s biots were already on the move, emerging from his eyeball to race down his cheek. A part of him thought:
this powder I’m wearing has an interesting variety of shapes
. It was probably basically talcum, although it came with an expensive name brand. It was strangely like rock flakes. All jagged and irregular. His biots clambered over a landscape of the weirdly sharp boulders.
    Maybe next time skip the powder.
    The car sped through the night. The biots sped across his skin to his lips. Here would be the tricky part. His head was swimming as the pain in his neck and head hit him full-on. Damage had been done to skin, muscle, and bone.
    Oh, yes, pain. Oh yeah, oh
shit
. Don’t show it, Shane, don’t show any sign of consciousness.
    The biots clambered down over his upper lip. And again, he regretted the goo of lip gloss. It was sticky and slowed his boys down. But now they reached the barrier between skin and mucous membrane.
    Time for tongue.
    He’d seen a tongue down at the nano once before. It wasn’t his favorite thing to see. Carefully, slowly he stuck the tip of his tongue to touch his lip.
    Through his biots he saw a dark mass coming down out of the sky.
    Imagine a tight-packed army of hooded men. They are so close together the bottoms of their hoods almost touch. And the hoods themselves are pink. Sharp at the top. Cones of waxy pink flesh.
    Imagine within those tight-packed, rough, waxy-pink cones there are things that look like tiny Styrofoam noodles, the floats you might use in a swimming pool. And alongside those segments of tube are short strings of beads. Mardi Gras down amid a serried rank of pink-hooded Klansmen.
    And those noodles and beads are the bacteria that make their home on the tongue.
    It took an effort of will for Nijinsky to send the biots rushing to leap aboard that alien landscape.
    A stab of pain and Nijinsky couldn’t hold in the groan.
    He drew his tongue quickly into his mouth, and his biots were flooded with a gush of pearlescent saliva. The tongue curled at the sides, warping the landscape.
    “He’s awake!”
    “Don’t let him touch you!”
    Nijinsky drew in breath and spit. It was a hurricane-force blast that picked up saliva and biots with it.
    The spittle flew the two and a half feet from Nijinsky’s forward-thrust mouth to Sugar’s stiff blonde hair.
    He felt the biots land as if it were his own legs absorbing the impact.
    “No!” Sugar cried. She began beating at the back of her head.
    The impact actually helped by pressing tall, rough-textured hair trees down toward the scalp.
    “What did you do?” she demanded, turning to rage at Nijinsky.
    “Did it get on you?” one of the thugs cried.
    The smart move, Nijinsky knew, the winning move for them was to shoot him right here, right now. They didn’t do that. Which meant that something was stopping them.
    They didn’t want him dead; they had some other idea in mind, and that knowledge gave him power.
    His biots were racing across the dead leaves of Sugar’s scalp, scurrying through a sort of birch-tree forest.
    Ears, eyes, nose. Which way? The nose was the easiest in terms of direct route, but the most dangerous: a sneeze could be deadly. And indeed Sugar now tried to force a sneeze, blew air out of her nose frantically.
    “Pull over. Pull over,” she cried. She pointed to an all-night Duane Reade. “The drugstore. You. Go in there. Get me . . . um . . . um, bug spray. And Purelle. Q-tips. Hurry!”
    She kept beating at her head, and indeed the forest was having unusual weather as the trees slammed down, flattened, sprang up again. Then she started scraping at her scalp with her fingernails.
    This was dangerous.
    Nijinsky kept his biots close together. He wanted a single field of view to deal with.
    The trees parted and suddenly, moving with impossible speed, was a fingernail. Sugar kept hers moderately long so that only the fingernail and not the fingertip now tore through spongy scalp skin.
    The nail was a wall of ridged, dead cells, flakes held together by the rough glue of keratin, and over that a translucent layer of clear nail polish that from his perspective seemed as thick as a sheet of ice.
    The edge of the fingernail was like a monstrous plow. It ripped up