BZRK

claws and . . .
    She walked beside Keats, a hundred yards away from their biots on the dog. They were pretending to be young lovers because that was a good cover, two teenagers with their arms interlocked, occasionally bumping together deliberately and smiling, and maybe a butt grab here or there, the way a young couple might do walking through Central Park on a cold but clear fall morning.
    But she was also down on that dog’s muzzle, the one being walked by the girl with the strange black-flame tattoo beneath one eye.
    The dog in question was on a choke collar, and yet Wilkes could barely hold him. He was a dog rescued from a dogfighting ring. He had not yet been resocialized. He was still savage and vicious and looking for prey.
    Plath and Keats, two biots each, were side by side in the thicket just above the animal’s upper gumline.
    The target was a beagle being walked by two TFDs, with two more TFDs scowling at passersby. One wore a plastic bag over his hand, ready to pick up the beagle’s poop should the beagle decide to go.
    They formed a loose triangle: Wilkes with the tugging, snarling German shepherd; and the AmericaStrong TFDs with the beagle; and the two young lovers enjoying the unlikely sunshine.
    They saw it and felt it at the same time. Saw Wilkes accidentally drop the dog’s collar. And felt in their biot legs the sudden lurch as the beast went tearing across the grass.
    And then.
    “Fuck!” Plath yelled, not because of anything up in the normal world.
    A huge, armor-plated monster, as big as an elephant, had just dropped out of the sky.
    “Jesus!” Keats echoed at the same instant.
    It rested on four articulated legs although it may have had more. It was a dinosaur, a clanking science-fiction monster, a nightmare. The hind legs vibrated with pent-up energy.
    It was narrow, as though it came presquashed. Like a football with most of the air let out. The body seemed made of armor plates with rapier-like hairs directed toward the rear. The head was the true nightmare: a helmet with two blank eyes that did not turn or look or even seem to notice the biots that must have been themselves no bigger than dogs to the towering, mighty, indestructible flea.
    It was impossible to believe the sense of energy contained within that prehistoric monster. It made the biots vibrate.
    It was, in every way, the physical embodiment of something evil.
    “It won’t bother us,” Keats said. “Just . . . Just . . . Oh my God!”
    The German shepherd hurtled toward the clueless beagle.
    The flea knelt down as if in some pagan prayer, until its mouthparts touched the dog’s flesh. And then, like bent, distorted scimitars, began sawing—not stabbing but sawing—into dog flesh.
    “Don’t look at it,” Plath said, not following her own advice because the lovey-dovey act up in the macro could not be sustained while their biots were in the shadow of this grotesque, quivering thing.
    “We need to be ready,” Keats said. “We’ll only have a few seconds.”
    And then the blood began to flow. Tiny red cough drops oozed from the hole the flea had made. It was a slow geyser of red marbles, red Frisbees, red that should be a liquid but seemed more like wet gravel as the flea sucked it up, and it was almost impossible to look away or to prepare for the fact that—
    Impact!
    The German shepherd hit the beagle like a ton of bricks.
    “Now, now, now!” Plath cried, and she would have been seen and heard by the TFDs except that they suddenly had a dog fight on their hands.
    The German shepherd’s huge mouth clamped onto the rolling, howling, terrified beagle, and the flea was almost forgotten as the impact jolted the four biots.
    “Go, go, go, go!” Plath said, and her two biots, with Keats’s right behind, raced toward the gumline, which had been a sort of ashen ridge just beyond the edge of the forest of fur and was now something apocalyptic. The black gums writhed madly, as if they were watching a magma field in a terrible earthquake.
    And that ridge of flesh was now shoved into a whole hair planet, a writhing hallucination of close-packed hair and huge comets of saliva, and then, for no reason, the flea leapt! It flew up and out of sight with such incredible speed that it was if it had been shot out of a cannon.
    “Jump!” Plath urged.
    They jumped.
    But to their shock, gravity wasn’t where they thought it would be. The German shepherd had rolled the beagle all the way over, and the biots were falling but