BZRK Reloaded (5 page)

A rebel group: misfits, borderline personalities, freaks, and definitely
geeks. Who signs up to fight when the choices are death or madness?
No one joins a group calling itself BZRK expecting a country
club. But among the far-flung cells of BZRK some were more conventional than others, and none was more stable, more normal seeming,
than BZRK Washington.

Their safe house was on Capitol Hill, the somewhat dubious
residential neighborhood near the Capitol Building where the U.S.
Congress convened.

Fifth Street, Southeast, just off Independence Avenue. It was a
narrow, two-story row house painted a muddy maroon color, with
dirty windows in cream-colored frames.

But unlike their New York counterparts, BZRK Washington
enjoyed a very pleasant interior environment. They had a gourmet
kitchen. They had brand-new faux deco bathrooms. The plumbing
worked. The heating worked. In summer even the air-conditioning
worked.
There were five bedrooms in all, each rather small, but all pleasantly if blandly furnished. The living room had become the common
meeting room where the six members could lounge on comfortable
couches or decamp to the formal dining room.

There was a crystal chandelier in that dining room.
The kitchen was small but very nicely appointed, with a sixburner restaurant-quality gas stove top, a double oven, and a massive
Sub-Zero refrigerator that dwarfed the rest of the room.
The kitchen was the domain of Yousef, who called himself
Andronikus after the mad Byzantine emperor. He was …But it really
doesn’t matter what Andronikus was, because as he stood stirring the
couscous he had three minutes left to live.
Four other members of the Washington cell of BZRK were also
present. They were sipping teas and sodas—no booze or wine or beer:
house rules—while waiting for the food.
They had put in a long day narrowing down the possible locations of a certain Bug Man.
Bug Man, they knew, would want to work within range of the
White House and not be forced to rely on AFGC’s often-unreliable
signal repeaters. That meant a half-mile radius for his base of action.
Probably. No one knew for sure.
But there would also be a separate abode of some sort. Living
twenty-four hours a day in an office attracts attention from building management. So, two possible locations: an office near the White
House and a hotel.
They were running facial-recognition software on CCTV footage, but no one had a good picture of Bug Man. All they knew was
that he was a male black teen. That would lead nowhere.
But from Lear had come a solid lead. It seemed the Armstrong
Fancy Gifts Corporation had a long-standing corporate discount rate
with Hyatt Hotels. If they had Bug Man living at a Hyatt, that narrowed it down to seven likely hotels.
To find an office location they had gone back through occupancy
permits and subtracted tenants who had been in place for more than
a year. They searched the “for lease” ads for offices within the target
area. They focused on those that had the greatest degree of privacy,
with no shared facilities.
The list was not that long. They had fairly quickly come up with
nineteen possible locations. They expected to have the exact location
within three days. And with the CCTV facial-recognition software
focusing on Hyatts, they expected to have the hotel pinned within a
day or two.
Which was amazing work and really almost as amazing as the fact
that AmericaStrong—a division of Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation—and the ETA had already narrowed the BZRK cell’s location
down to one address.
Just one.
Around the corner from the house on Fifth Street SE, what
looked exactly like a Washington, DC, police SWAT team had assembled. This excited only mild interest from passersby—it was hardly
the first time they’d seen a SWAT team. Even the passing patrol cops
shrugged it off.
“What’s that?” This from the kid—everyone called him the kid.
Not The Kid, like it was some kind of cool nickname, just the kid.
So he had taken it as his nom de guerre, his alias. Except he called
himself Billy the Kid, because why not? Maybe Billy the Kid wasn’t
clinically crazy, but he was crazy. Not insane: but crazy.
Billy’s real name was André. His mother had been Guatemalan.
His father had been African American. The result of this interesting DNA mash-up was a boy of only medium height, with dark skin,
a flat nose and lush, long, almost girlish—in fact, no almost about
it—straight black hair. The combination worked perfectly to make
him feel excluded from both the African American and the Hispanic
communities of Washington, DC.
André had interested, observant eyes. Nothing scary, there, just a
birdlike quickness. His two front teeth stuck out a bit, which gave him
a sweet childlike look and were the only physical feature he shared in
common with the real Billy the Kid.
No one called him Billy the Kid. He had not found a way to mention that he shared buck teeth with the famous gunman.
Andronikos didn’t call him Billy, either. Andronikos hated people looking over his shoulder as he cooked. Which is the last data
point about Andronikos, other than the fact that as the front door
was beaten in with a battering ram, and the back door was kicked
in, and black-suited “SWAT cops” came rushing into the room yelling, “Police, down, down, down!” Andronikos reached for a butcher’s
cleaver and was shot in the chest, head, neck, again in the chest, and
again in the head.
The hole in his neck sprayed like a fire hose.
Billy the Kid didn’t so much drop to the floor as find himself
knocked to the ground. Andronikos’s hand dragged the couscous pot
down with him, although he was dead before he hit the floor.
The couscous—little pearls of wheat, along with boiling hot
water—sloshed onto Billy as he fell and Billy screamed because the
heat was instantaneous and the “cop” waited until Billy was on the
floor trying desperately to crab walk backward away from the couscous and the blood and now the blood-red couscous and BAM! BAM!
The cop was shooting again.
At him? At him? At a thirteen-year-old kid?
A bullet grazed his side.
From the other room, continuous gunfire. Like a jackhammer. A
wall of noise. Screams. Shouting and BAMBAMBAMBAM!
The cop stepped in the red couscous and slipped. He fell to one
knee.
Billy grabbed the pot. It was a heavy iron pot, but the weight was
nothing to him because adrenaline and fear and the crying need for
survival make the heaviest pot weightless.
He swung that pot and hit the cop’s helmet.
The cop slipped a little more.
The hand that held the gun, that hand, he had landed on that
elbow and that made it hard to shoot and his body armor made him
awkward and he slipped again; suddenly it was all Call of Duty to
Billy. He slammed the pot down with all his strength on the gun hand.
The gun fell from the cop’s nerveless grip.
BAMBAMBAMBAM!
They were still shooting in the other room. And screaming.
Someone actually yelled, “What the fuck?” Except that the f-bomb
ended abruptly in gunfire.
Not real cops, Billy realized through the blood-mad rage that was
falling over him, and he grabbed the gun and had to use both hands
to get a grip on it and pointed it at the visor of the stunned man and
the “cop” knew he was done for and he raised his visor so that Billy
saw his face and it was a middle-aged man, a little pudgy, with a silly
mustache and he was starting to say something when Billy pulled the
trigger and a big hole peppered with powder burns appeared in the
upper lip of the cop, taking out one side of his mustache.
Billy was up and running for the back door but bullets were flying
like crazy there, so he pivoted, saw the massacre in the main room,
and somehow lost all conscious thought.
The original, historical Billy the Kid was a good shot. His namesake was better. Billy could aim and he could shoot. His skills had
been honed in hundreds of hours of first-person shooter games: Call
of Duty, XCom, Rage, Battlefield. So he knew to be quick but not
rushed. He knew that accurate was better than fast. He knew not to
aim for the bodies covered in Kevlar, but to aim for the face. The
visors would provide only limited protection.
He did not waste ammunition.
BAM! and the gun kicked in his hand and a cop fell and BAM!
and another visor shattered and the cop dropped to his knees and
his gloved hand pawed the air and Billy ignored him because he was
nothing but a computer graphic and a kill and he was done and there
should be a ka-ching! a point on the screen.
There was no screen. Part of him understood that because no
game had yet managed to create the smell of blood, lots and lots of
blood, which had a sort of salty, briny smell and an unctuousness
about it, not to mention the smell of bowels loosening and bladders
emptying and, of course, gunpowder smoke.
The cops, well, they couldn’t call for backup because of course
they were not cops at all but AFGC thugs masquerading as ETA
agents, and there weren’t all that many of those to call on. Not yet.
Ten of them had burst through the doors.
Five were still alive. But one of those had been wounded by
“friendly fire,” and was pumping his life out through a hole in his
thigh.
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.

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.