BZRK

Armstrong people on the streets, and cops, too,” Keats said, feeling and sounding desperate. “Where can we go?”
    “There,” Plath said, pointing at the yellow sign of a car rental agency across the street.
    “What?”
    “Rent a car. Drive around the block.”
    “Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Okay. Wait. We’re too young.”
    “Goddamnit,” Plath cried as her biots ran from palm prints to land where the ground, deeply creased with valleys, rose up all around her, warping, buckling. The hand was closing, and her biots were in darkness, running around a circular landscape, going where? Going where?
    “There,” Keats said. He pointed at a Dumpster. He pulled Plath along with him. He lifted her with hands at the waist, feeling too much contact and at a really inappropriate moment as her behind went so close to his face. He piled in after her. It was dry at least, as most of the tossed-out Chinese food had frozen stiff during the cold night. That would change as their body heat thawed the worst of the garbage. But the smell wasn’t as bad as it might be.
    Keats pulled the lid over them, and they lay huddled together in the filth.
    “Maybe he’ll pet the dog again,” Plath said.
    “Maybe,” Keats answered.
    They were spooning in garbage. Their biots were a few hundred yards and a universe away.
    From the sky came hands. Keats saw the fingers again, reaching down toward the raked forest where the wound was. Fingers. Then, floating down from the sky, a huge tubular opening, like the world’s biggest fire hose. Like the water pipe they buried under the street.
    An eruption of crystalline goo vomited from the tube and landed in wondrous spirals on the injury.
    “They’re working on the dog,” Keats said. “Now I’m seeing a bandage. Like a white blanket the size of a city block.”
    “I’m off the hand. Up the arm,” Plath reported.
    “I want to get to you,” Keats said. “I don’t want you doing this alone.”
    “Don’t get hurt,” Plath said. His arms were around her and she felt his warmth and she was afraid, and she could hardly swallow her throat was so dry. How could it be that she was here, needing him to be with her not just here but there as well, needing him not just in the macro but down in the meat?
    Plath’s biots raced through a sparse forest of arm hairs. Then beneath a sleeve, a sky made of woven ropes. Was it even the correct arm? Was it one of
them
? Or was she racing up the arm of some minor player, some guard or secretary?
    “I’m going to tap the dog’s eye,” Keats said. And he sent his biot racing across the alien forest’s treetops.
    “I don’t want to lose my mind in a Dumpster, Keats.”
    “My name’s not Keats,” he said.
    “Don’t tell me your name,” she whispered.
    “I know yours.”
    “My name is Plath,” she said, sounding more determined than she felt.
    “I’m passing the bandage. It’s like a circus tent! Tape pulling at hairs. It’s . . .”
    “You think we’d have liked each other if it wasn’t like this?” she asked.
    “We wouldn’t have met,” he answered.
    The Dumpster top opened. Hearts in their throats.
    A McDonald’s bag dropped in, and the top closed again.
    They heard street sounds, alley sounds. Conversation, shouts and laughs and normality, and none of that helped because they were a million miles away from normal.
    “I’m at the head. Shorter hairs,” Keats said. “Here’s hoping this dog doesn’t have fleas or lice or . . . Eyelid. I’m there. Demodex. I hate demodex. These are different, though. Jesus.”
    Her neck was in his face. It smelled of French fries. And he could not resist the urge to kiss that neck as he raced toward the slow-blinking eyelid and the dark pool of a whiteless eye.
    She felt his lips on her neck and sighed and did not resist as she raced at full speed, two biots, two windows open in her head, one seeing the other biot pull ahead, a bug that was somehow her. She was there, there in those creatures even as she shivered from his touch.
    “I won’t let you go crazy, Keats,” she said.
    “Too late,” he said. “We’re already crazy.”
    She twisted around and kissed him as she recognized the shift from thin, wispy body hair to the chopped, torn stubble of a shaved face.
    Was she on the face of the Armstrong Twins?
    And if she was, what was she going to do about it?
    She kissed Keats, and felt her body respond, and wondered whether she would commit murder.
    *
    And suddenly, there it