BZRK Reloaded Read Online Free PDF Page B

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She could have gone off to find Keats’s biots, down there, down in
the meat. Her biot—P2 as it happened—was resting comfortably on
the back side of her left eyeball. Occasionally she would move her biot
as a dutiful lymphocyte came oozing along to clean up whatever this
alien monstrosity was.
Had she wanted to, she could have had her own biot help Keats.
But a biot face …Well, it was bad enough to know precisely, exactly,
what vermin crawled the surface of Keats’s skin. She didn’t need to see
the bizarro-world distortion that was his biot’s face.
She liked his face quite a lot. The too-blue eyes had at first seemed
almost feminine, but a gentle face did not signal weakness, at least not
in Keats.
As for his mouth, well, she had always liked that, the quirky little
dip in the middle made him look wryly amused. How would he look
when he was where Vincent was now?
Not madness. Not that. Death is better.
A lousy, filthy, depressing, badly lit bathroom. But a good water
heater at least.
She closed her eyes and aimed them up into the spray. Take that,
my demodex. Hah, I bet a few of you lost your grips and are now
sliding down my cheeks. Hah! How will you like it if you go swirling
down the drain?
Soap, soap, soap, everywhere. Shampoo and soap and Purell. No
one showers like a twitcher, she thought, and realized that was an
aphorism that very few people would understand.
A voice made her jump.
“Showering off the shame?”
Wilkes. She was using the toilet.
Definitely: when she got her inheritance, it would be time to generously agree to pay for a higher-class rental somewhere. Anywhere.
Just because they were crazy didn’t mean they had to live like animals.
“Oh, that’s a loooong silence,” Wilkes said. “You didn’t do it, did
you?”
“Not your business, Wilkes,” Plath snapped.
Wilkes had an odd laugh. Heh-heh-heh. “That’s confirmation.
I can’t believe after all the looks and the Bella Swan lip biting—and
poor Keats awkwardly adjusting his jeans any time he sees you bend
over—that nothing happened. Jeez, Plath, what are you holding out
for?”
Suddenly, the shower curtain was pulled back and there stood
Wilkes in a faded High School Musical T-shirt. Her spiky hair was
less spiky, her strange tattoos almost green in the light of the cheap
fluorescent bulb.
“You have a nice body,” Wilkes said. “He’s going to like that. You
know, if you ever actually …Turn around, let’s see the butt.”
“Wilkes, I say this with affection: drop dead.” Plath pulled the
shower curtain closed again and heard Wilkes’s laugh. Heh-heh-heh.
“If you don’t want him can I borrow him?”
Plath was about to yell a heated “No!” But that would just egg
Wilkes on. And anyway, it’s not as if Plath had the right to say no.
And not as if Keats would ever say yes to Wilkes.
“Don’t stay in there too long,” Wilkes said on her way out. “Scrub
all you want: you can’t get them all.”
Something you HAVE to see. That was the message Farid sent, using
all-caps for HAVE, not his usual style, that.
    Farid Berbera was not a member of BZRK. Farid Berbera was a
member—if you could even use that inaccurate term—of an older
organization. Anonymous had been around since Farid was a kid. He
was no longer a kid, although at seventeen he wasn’t quite a grown-up,
either. Not in the eyes of his father, the acting Lebanese ambassador
to the United States. Not in the eyes of his mother, the public relations
assistant at that same Washington, DC, embassy.
    And truthfully, not in is own eyes, either.
Farid Berbera, tall, thin, amazing black hair, unfortunate nose,
and eyes like Sal Mineo—he’d had to look that up, Mineo was way
before his time—was scared.
    Farid had once hacked the computers of the Food and Drug
Administration because the FDA was stalling a pot-based therapeutic
drug. That was not why he was scared.
    “Have to see?” ChickenSteak had written back. “If