BZRK Washington was dead. All dead. It was down to Billy and four fake cops who all aimed their weapons at him.
He dived around the corner.
Two of the cops chased him. It was a mistake on their part because damn, this is part of every first-person shooter game ever, as they rushed he popped out and BAM! and a split second later, BAM! and that was two plexi visors with neat little holes and blood gushing out beneath.
With that Billy turned finally and ran. Out the back door.
He climbed, scrabbled, rolled over the wooden fence into the backyard of whoever the hell lived back there. The back door was locked but not so locked that a nine-millimeter round through the door handle and a hard kick wouldn’t open it.
Through a strange, unoccupied home with a startled kitty on the back of the couch. Out onto Sixth street.
He stood there, panting. They weren’t pursuing him. No one was after him. He was covered in blood. There were no sirens. People figured it was the cops, so what are you going to do, call the cops and tell them cops are shooting up a house?
He couldn’t go anywhere covered in blood. So he jogged on nervous energy to Independence Avenue, which, if you follow it far enough, will take you all the way down to the Capitol and beyond to the Mall and the Washington Monument and all of that. Except Billy didn’t go that way. He turned left and trotted back to Fifth Street SE and saw the very official-looking SWAT van and trotted on to the house, and came in through the shattered front door and saw one of the fake cops weeping and shot him in the spine where he had no body armor and another turned and opened fire, very undisciplined, and shot the wall and the clock and Billy put one right in his throat.
One more came rushing down the stairs yelling, “Aaaarrrgh!” to keep his courage up and Billy couldn’t see his visor so he shot him in the knee and finished him off when the cop tumbled down the landing.
That last one was a shock. He had thought he only had two left. What was the count? Was there anyone else?
Billy climbed the stairs. The grazing bullet wound in his side was burning like fire.
He found the last AmericaStrong fake cop behind one of the beds in a bedroom. The man had removed his helmet. He had lost his gun in the madness. Defenseless.
The man was young. He had very, very pale skin. He had very, very large brown eyes. He stared at Billy the Kid. He was shaking.
“Don’t,” the man said.
“You started it,” Billy said.
“I’m sorry about …about . . .” the man said, and waved in the direction of downstairs.
Billy thought he seemed okay. “You smell,” Billy said.
“I pooped.” The man laughed. It was a short, sharp sound.
Billy’s sights were leveled at the man’s face.
“Who did this?” Billy asked.
The man shrugged, but he couldn’t hold it together well enough to lie. “I’m just, look, I used to work for AmericaStrong, now I’m ETA.”
“ETA? Estimated Time of Arrival?”
“Emerging Technologies Agency,” the man said weakly, as though he didn’t expect to be believed. Or that he would be alive another thirty seconds. “My name is Joey. Joey Lamb. I …I didn’t …I don’t … Don’t shoot me, kid.”
“Billy. Billy the Kid.”
“Okay.”
“Look, it’s game over, right? I won. So just, I don’t know, run away.”
Joey Lamb stood shakily. He had pooped all right.
“Okay, now, just leave,” Billy said. “And don’t call anyone. And don’t come back.”
Joey ran. Billy heard him clatter through the house. He heard the front door slam back on its hinges.
Billy went downstairs. He went through the pockets of his friends, harvesting credit cards and driver’s licenses. He piled the laptops and the cell phones together and placed them all in a plastic trash bag.
Then he found some clean clothing, laid it out in the blessedly blood-free bathroom, and took a shower. It took a long time for the water to run clean.
Burnofsky stood up, heard his bones creak and his knees snap. Old age was coming on fast. But it wouldn’t be old age that killed him.
He walked from his office out into the main lab floor. It occupied three entire floors of the Armstrong Building. It was a huge space, very white with pink accents, designed to be functional but also pleasant and innocuous. Like everything the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation did in secret, it was designed to look as if it could not possibly conceal anything dark or sinister.
The lights were bright but soft. The walls bore huge plasma screens showing pastoral scenes, like slow-changing murals, a mountain stream would slowly give way to a strand of unpopulated beach, which in turn might, after an hour or so, switch to a field of flowers waving in the breeze.
The murals followed the time of day. As the sun would set outside, so the sun would set over mountain and beach and field. When full night fell the screens would light up with time-lapse pictures of crazily zooming car lights crossing the Golden Gate bridge, or shots of the aurora borealis, or moonlight on a river.
It was really quite a lovely place to work while designing the end of the human race as it had heretofore been.
Structural integrity required the floors to have some strength, so gazing up Burnofsky looked through a loose-woven web of white tiled catwalks with pink railings and the occasional green contrast. This allowed some of the larger pieces of equipment to rise through the floors, but also created smaller, more intimate spaces.