LITMIR.BIZ

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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 AmericaStrong 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

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