No irony in his gaze. He was dead serious. Someone had definitely sold this boy a complete bill of goods.
“Okay, which still leaves the question of what you do to pass the time?”
He shrugged, and Suarez detected a softness in him. I’m going to try not to kill you, she thought.
“I don’t suppose there’s any way I can get a shower? You know, hot water? Soap?” She mimed it for him, mimicking the movements of a bar of soap over her body, not lasciviously—that would be too obvious and set off alarm bells. Just … enough. She just wanted him to connect his boredom with the mental picture of a reasonably attractive woman taking a shower. Let him stew on that for a while. Activate the twin male instincts of protection and predation.
Later, when the time was right, there would be the metal pail.
“No shower,” he said in a voice just a tiny bit lower than it had been. “I could maybe get you a deck of cards.”
“I would be very grateful.”
The explosion came as the elevator rose, an impact that knocked Keats, Plath, and Wilkes to their knees. Not an explosion that would bring down a building. Smaller.
But the elevator stopped moving, and the door did not open. The backlit buttons went dark. The overhead light snapped off, replaced by an eerie emergency light.
“He blew up the elevator doors down there,” Keats said, offering his hand to Plath.
She spurned it and jumped to her feet. “We have to get out of here.”
A second explosion, more distant this time. The second elevator.
“He’s cutting himself off,” Keats said.
“He’ll die with the explosion,” Plath said. Then, softly, “Maybe that was the plan all along.”
Wilkes had started trying to pry open the elevator doors. Keats and Plath jumped in, jamming splintering fingernails into the gap. Slowly, inch by inch, the door opened. They were between floors, but with an open space of several feet.
Plath went through first, boosted by Keats. Then Wilkes. Together they hauled Keats after them.
They were on the ground floor—the lobby floor, polished marble. Security guards were a swarm of uniforms and plainclothes tourists from Denver, though minus the parkas. All were armed. In seconds there were a dozen weapons pointed at the three of them.
“One move and we shoot,” a woman snapped.
“No need,” Plath said. “I’m Sadie McLure. We need to talk to the Twins.”
“And in the meantime, there’s an assassin down in the basement preparing to blow this whole place up,” Keats said.
Nervous glances went back and forth.
“Hey, dumb asses,” Wilkes said. “Shoot us or beat us up or whatever, but there is an honest-to-God stone-cold killer down there.”
“He’s wedged a car jack behind a gas pipe,” Keats said. “In a few minutes high-pressure gas is going to start pouring into the basement.”
“Leave his eye,” Plath ordered. “Find an artery.”
Keats’s eyebrow shot up at the tone of command. Plath, who had seemed almost to be comatose, now sounded like her old self.
“Kill him?” Keats asked. He searched her eyes, not sure what he wanted the answer to be. In this very building Plath had refused to kill the Twins. She had refused to commit cold-blooded murder.
Many had died since then. Much had changed.
They had just ripped m-sub yards of wire from Plath’s brain, and parts of her gray matter were as raw as a skinned knee. If she gave the order, who and what would be behind it? What would be her motivation? How much responsibility would she bear in the end?
And if she said—
“Kill him,” Plath said.
And if she said, Kill him, would he obey?
“Get them up to Jindal. Cuff ’em, keep guns on them, any bullshit, shoot ’em,” the woman in charge snapped.
The three remaining, active members of BZRK New York were cuffed and hustled to the main bank of elevators.
“Has he blown the pipe yet?” Plath asked Keats.
“I don’t know, Keats said. “I’m no longer on the optic nerve.”
Plath and Wilkes both knew this meant he had sent his biot to kill Caligula.
“And the last of the righteous succumbs to the darkness,” Wilkes said mordantly, and added, “Heh-heh-heh.”
· · ·
Lystra Reid laughed like a mad thing, and to Bug Man’s amazement actually executed a somersault, as crazy as the terrifyingly unhinged actors and producers and agents and whoever now baying like wolves in the streets of Manhattan, chased by cameras that broadcast the images all over the world.
She led the way to a limo and held the door open for Bug Man, who tumbled in, shaken.
“Jefuf Chri’!” he cried.
“No, no, no, no goddamned made-up, bullshit divinities!” Lystra yelled exultantly. “Jesus Christ and Zeus and Mohammed and whatever the hell you want, yeah, they didn’t write this game!” She fell into the seat beside him. It was as if she was drunk or high. She was cackling. “Fuck your gods, Bug Man, I’m god now! Yeah! This is my fucking world!”
Bug Man had seen some crazy in his life. He’d spoken with the Armstrong Twins, and those boys were crazy. He’d hung out with Burnofsky, not exactly a paragon of sanity. But, he thought, this chick is nuts. Once you start calling yourself “god” you’re all the way into crazy.
Berserk.
BZRK.
He was crying without quite knowing why, unless it was just some kind of overload. Too much. Too much crazy. The whole world was going crazy, and this madwoman was making sure of it.