BZRK

by boxes, where the wall was covered by a suspiciously large poster of former UN chief Ban Ki-moon.
    “No one cares that much about Ban Ki-moon,” Wilkes agreed. She tore the poster down, revealing a very ordinary door protected by a very unordinary passkey system.
    They had been briefed on this. And they’d been told that if all they did was start a fire and draw cops and firemen, that would probably be enough.
    “That would be a C-plus,” Vincent had told them.
    But now with the adrenaline pumping, neither of them wanted to take a C-plus.
    Wilkes banged loudly on the door.
    Nothing.
    She kicked it with her boot, and out in the shop a second guard must have arrived because there was a worried, conspiratorial conversation.
    They had seconds left.
    Then, a muffled voice through the door. “Who is it?”
    Ophelia glanced at Wilkes, who deepened her voice and said, “It’s Bug Man. Open up.”
    “He’s English,” Ophelia whispered.
    “It’s fooking Bug Man, open the bloody door, I have to use the loo!” Wilkes yelled.
    “Use your swipe card,” the muffled voice answered.
    “I lost the bloody thing, didn’t I? Now open up, you tosser!” She sounded a bit like Rupert Grint. Or at least an American’s version of Ron Weasley.
    To their mutual amazement, the door opened, revealing a TFD in characteristic polo shirt and chinos.
    Wilkes jammed her fake gun under his chin and pushed him back.
    Ophelia slammed the door closed behind them. Then, as the TFD was just beginning to notice that the so-called gun didn’t feel as though it was made of steel, Ophelia smashed him in the face with the snow globe, which broke and sent fake snow and plastic representations of the UN Building tumbling down his front.
    It didn’t knock the TFD out and he was recovering fast and realizing he was in trouble and the gun wasn’t real and that he had maybe just forfeited his own life, so he came back swinging hard, wild, and half blind.
    Wilkes gave him a Doc Marten testicular adjustment, punched him, and Ophelia punched him and it was a melee. The TFD went down on his back but with his hands around Ophelia’s throat, so Wilkes just started kicking him in the side of the head.
Crump! Crump! Crump!
Again and again.
    Ophelia was able to pry his hands off her neck, but Wilkes never stopped, not until the side of the man’s head was red and bits of bone were showing.
    “Enough, enough,” Ophelia gasped.
    Wilkes buried a boot into him once more, a sort of final “And stay down” move.
    Wilkes, Ophelia decided, was a girl with some issues.
    Ophelia searched the semiconscious and definitely-not-going-anywhere TFD and came up with a Taser, a walkie-talkie, and a gun.
    She handed the gun to Wilkes, who tossed her toy away and said, “I think this one’s real.” Then, “I think I broke my big toe.”
    They looked around and saw that they were in a room with nothing but a chair and two more doors. One was easily opened and turned out to be a bathroom. The other was swipe card-protected, and a further search was needed to turn up the guard’s card.
    “Well,” Ophelia said. “We shouldn’t have made it this far.”
    “No, I don’t think Vincent expected us to. I think we already moved from C-plus to a solid B.”
    “I’d say it was lucky, but now we’re really in it.”
    “Distract and disrupt,” Wilkes said. “Right?”
    Ophelia drew a shaky breath. “If there are twitchers on the other side, they’re the target. Shoot them or infest them and get the hell out.”
    “A little of both?” Wilkes said.
    “Bang-bang, jab-jab, run like hell.”
    “Let’s rock it, sister.”
    *
    Keats was marooned on the beagle’s fur. The hand was gone, and Plath’s biots with it.
    “Don’t worry about me,” Keats urged. “Go!”
    Plath sent her biots racing across the farmland of the palm. A biot leg brushed a sweat blossom and popped it like a water balloon.
    “I don’t know if it’s him. Them.”
    They were panting in a freezing, filthy alley, Keats holding both her arms. She leaned back against graffiti-scrawled bricks. They breathed the steam of each other’s mouth.
    “Keep moving. Toward the light. That’ll probably take you to the head. The head is the target.”
    “What about you?”
    “I’ll find another way,” Keats said.
    Sirens. Maybe not about them at all. This was New York, after all, and sirens weren’t exactly rare.
    “We can’t go too far, but we can’t stay here, either. They’ll have