An Oscar-winning producer launched himself at a New York police officer, pushed him to the ground, and yanked the gun from the startled cop. The first shot struck a film critic in the chest, a fact that he found funny until he fell over dead.
“Time to get out of here. Guns are dangerous,” Lystra observed.
Bug Man stared at her, looked around at the madness, and back at her. At the wild glee in her eyes.
“I know how they feel,” Lystra said without even a hint of compassion. “I’ve been there. I’ve been crazy. It’s kind of … amazing, really.”
She turned and walked quickly away, ignoring the well-dressed lunatics rushing by, dancing, twirling and attacking each other with fists and fingernails.
Bug Man followed her, because Bug Man had nowhere else to go.
The trick was to pop the natural gas pipeline in a way that would not cause a spark. Caligula was not interested in suicide.
Power saw and small explosive charge were both ruled out. And he didn’t just want to open a smaller release valve—it would take forever for the gas to build up. He needed a rupture in one of the main lines. He needed the gas to come roaring in, thousands of cubic yards of it.
He had disabled the local safety cutoffs. The next cutoff covered an entire six-block area—this rupture would probably trigger it eventually, but not quickly enough.
He had brought a car jack with him, the simple, screw-type device, capable of lifting a car off the street. More than enough if he could just find the right position.
He needed a place where the pipe was rigid. Like right … there … where it emerged from the concrete foundation. And just two feet from that point there was a junction, a sort of flange—he wasn’t exactly familiar with the terminology. Perfect. If he could just get the jack between the concrete wall and the pipe standing eight inches out from same. He pulled the jack from a bag and looked at it critically. It would be a tough squeeze. The jack, even screwed all the way down, was ten inches tall. So he either had to find another place, or he would have to chip away some of the concrete to make room.
He sighed and retrieved a chisel and a rubber mallet. Slight delay, that was all.
“He’s in the basement,” Keats said. “I can see what he’s doing. He’s chipping away at something with a chisel. There’s still time.”
They were outside the Tulip. In the alleyway behind. Staring at various doors—two loading bays, a smaller door, a door a few dozen yards away that was vented so probably contained electrical equipment.
No clue.
There was the front door, out on the street, but that was guarded. Their weapons were: one little kid with a Colt .45.
No. Wait. There was a second weapon: the biot in Caligula’s head.
Keats could blind the killer.
Or he could maybe slice through an artery and kill or cripple Caligula.
Rewiring was not going to happen in the few minutes remaining to them. There would be no time for subtlety. And if Keats moved his biot farther into Caligula’s brain, he would have to detach from the optic nerve and would no longer be able to see what Caligula was doing.
How long to blind one eye? And could he reach the other eye in time to truly stop Caligula? Or would he be better off diving down deep, finding a fat artery, and sawing away?
Keats felt sick inside. He had no plan. He had a Goth chick, a wild street kid with a gun, a biot, and Plath, who might or might not be entirely okay.
“What do we do, pretty blue eyes?” Wilkes of course, jumpy, nervous, eyes darting everywhere with manic appreciation of their hopeless plight.
The door beside the second loading bay opened. Light spilled out. A man in silhouette yelled, “Hey, move along, you three.”
Before Keats could react there was a loud bang and a flash. A cry of pain. The man in silhouette was visible for a millisecond in the flash. He was younger than his voice, maybe twenty-five, uniformed. A security guard. A minimum-wage grunt with a hole in his chest that leaked dark blood onto khaki.
Billy was moving, leapt up the four concrete steps, and grabbed the door as the man fell back.
“Jesus!” Keats cried.
Wilkes was quicker, just seconds behind Billy. She grabbed the door, freeing Billy, who calmly knelt and took the dying man’s gun.
Keats and Plath followed, Keats feeling as if he was in a dream. Two biot windows were open in his head, one showing the damned bulge in Plath’s brain, the other watching the rise and fall, rise and fall of mallet on chisel.
Billy was already proffering the guard’s pistol to Keats, buttforward. Keats stared at it. Wilkes took it.
Keats stepped over the guard. He was crying softly and holding his wound with one hand while fumbling for his radio with the other.
He couldn’t be left alive to raise the alarm.
Wilkes and Billy both looked at Keats expectantly. Waiting for his order. Plath seemed mesmerized.
On me, the responsibility, Keats thought. It had been so quick, somehow, getting to this point, the kill-or-be-killed point.
Billy must have seen the answer in Keats’s eyes. He squatted and pressed the muzzle directly against the man’s heart, muffling the sound as much as he could.
BANG!
And blood sprayed across Billy’s face.
“It’s okay,” Billy said. “I did it before. Just another first-person shooter, right?”
Keats felt like throwing up. He felt a flash of fury at Plath. Shouldn’t she have made the decision? Shouldn’t the guilt be hers to bear?
The guard was motionless now. But all was not still. They were in a short hallway—barely painted drywall, weak overhead lighting, second door now opening fast, someone coming through expecting trouble, gun already leveled and—