Benjamin tore at the buttons of their tailor-made shirt, exposing pink flesh with an angry, vertical red rash in the center. He clawed at it then whinnied in horror as his fingernails came away trailing ribbons of flesh.
“… and then you let me be mind-raped. My brain. It’s all I had after I killed her, my intellect. Oh, God, and still, still, do you know what they did to me? Do you know what BZRK did? When I think of her …”
“They’re on my back!” Charles cried.
“… I get turned on. Did you know that’s what they did to me with their wire? Crude. They thought, Well, we will just sort of reverse polarities on old Burnofsky’s brain. Like an old Star Trek, did you boys—”
“I can’t reach, I can’t reach!” Charles cried as he flailed madly, trying to reach his back with his hand, but that had never been possible.
“Ever watch that show? They were always reversing polarities. All bullshit. But that’s all Nijinsky had. Crude and cruel. A man should do penance for his crimes. A man should pay. A man should suffer, not feel pleasure.”
“We don’t deserve to suffer!” Charles shouted.
“No,” Burnofsky drawled. “You two? No, it’s not like you enslaved a ship full of people and did to them just what BZRK did to me, right? See how you’re not going to win that argument?”
“We’ll give you whatever you want,” Charles said, and then cried out in pain and grabbed at his rear in what would in other circumstances be almost comic.
“Up your butt, are they? Right on schedule. There’ll be a couple million of them by now.”
“We’ll give you anything! Anything!” Charles pleaded.
Burnofsky looked sick, like a man on the edge of vomiting. He stood wearily, old bones popping with the effort, and stepped closer, just out of reach of Benjamin’s grasping claw of a hand. “Anything? Will you? Then give me back my little girl.”
“She had to die; it was treason!” Benjamin raged. “She was a filthy, treacherous, little—”
Burnofsky punched him. It wasn’t much of a punch, just enough to start the blood draining from a reddened nose.
“Give me my daughter. Give me my pride back. Give me back my own brain. Do all of that, and I’ll stop them.” Then, he laughed—a sudden, strange noise. “Kidding. They will carry out their programming and—”
The floor tilted suddenly, a 10 degree pitch that sent the Twins sprawling. Burnofsky staggered but remained standing.
“My apocalypse,” Burnofsky said, holding the deadly remote control aloft. “Not Lear’s, not yours. Mine.”
“You’re insane!” Charles wailed.
“You think?” He drained the last of his bottle and smacked his lips. “Who wasn’t insane in this?” His eyes fell on Noah’s twitching body. Noah made an incoherent sound. The tilting floor had sent the pool of blood trailing off like rivulets on a windshield. “Him, maybe. Seems like a decent kid. Maybe even sane.”
The Twins were wallowing back and forth like a cockroach on its back, trying to roll over so they could stand. Noah’s blood met Benjamin’s elbow and soaked his shirt.
The smell of smoke had been growing more noticeable, and now it could be seen, too, pouring in from two directions as well as rushing past the windows like some gravity-defying waterfall.
The Twins were screaming now, fighting each other to scream, lungs pumping out of sync, heart hammering. Screaming as the nanobots used their flesh to create more nanobots, millions of little worker ants carving tiny slices of flesh, busy little hog butchers carving a living pig.
Against all odds, slipping in blood, their own and Noah’s, the Twins managed to get to their feet.
With a sound of screeching metal and shattering glass, the Tulip sagged farther and Burnofsky staggered forward and was flattened against the glass windows. The floor now tilted up and away from him. But he still held the remote.
Then Noah began to slide, his movement lubricated by his own blood. He slid straight toward Burnofsky.
With a sound like wood being split, the window behind Burnofsky cracked but did not shatter. Burnofsky tried to push himself away, to reach something, anything he could grab, but his feet were slipping on the same blood that bore Noah’s body straight toward him.
And then Noah made one desperate reach and grabbed the rolling bottle of vodka. He grabbed it and dug his heel in—slipping, sliding, but the angle helped him to rise, just a little, just enough, just enough to hurl the bottle.
The bottle smashed into the cracked window.
Burnofsky in a moment of terrible awareness pressed his thumb on the remote control, but missed the button. The remote was in his hand, but awkwardly held. He reached with his free hand to straighten it, and the window blew out.
Burnofsky went flying, flying through shattered glass, falling on his back toward the street far below. Noah had plowed into him, and for a moment the two of them were tangled in midair, grotesque acrobats trailing red.
Burnofsky fell and squeezed, but the remote was in the air beside him, falling, and his hand was held in the slippery grip of the boy with blue, blue eyes.
Madness and death, Noah thought. It was funny.
He laughed as the sidewalk rushed toward him and obliterated all that he was.
The Twins staggered into the hanging monitor, where Charles managed to grab on, powerful fingers gripping slippery steel and glass.
Charles Armstrong saw his face, their faces, in the hanging mirror they used to speak eye to eye.