BANG!

Head shot. A single hole drilled right in the man’s forehead. The back of his head—a crust of skull and hair and something like hamburger—hit the wall and slid down, leaving a trail.

“Go,” Keats said, barely audible.

Through the door, now in the wide-open space within the loading bay, boxes and crates and a chair and table and playing cards laid out, and a coffee mug, and flickering monitors.

“Basement,” Keats managed to say, trying to push aside the memory of tears rolling down a doomed man’s cheeks.

One of the innocents I was trying to save, Keats thought.

Now, two of the innocents I was trying to save.

They were lost and needed light. Keats spotted a bank of light switches, crossed to them, made it halfway before his stomach sent its contents burbling out of his mouth. He threw every switch, wiped his mouth, and said, “Find a way down!”

The glare of fluorescent light had the effect of casting deep shadows that if anything made the room seem darker, with every high-piled stack of crates like a skyscraper shadowing narrow alleys.

They ran then, moved forward, the young sociopath with the name of a young sociopath leading the way. Billy moved like a cop, cover to cover, gun steadied in both hands, a goddamned gamer, a goddamned game, where would the bad guys pop up next?

“Whoa. Down here,” Wilkes said, waving her own gun fecklessly toward a dark hallway.

Billy moved smoothly ahead of her. Cover. Pause. Scan. Run to cover. Pause. Scan.

A freight elevator, with buttons for up and down.

“Down,” Keats said, feeling useless and now seeing flashes of his London home, so squalid and dull all his life, but now so beloved, so needed. To crawl into his own bed …

The elevator door opened on a guard with headphones in and singing along tunelessly, yet Keats recognized the song.

“Born This Way.” An old Gaga tune.

Keats barely flinched when Billy put a bullet into the guard’s head. The bullet must have hit just wrong because it entered the forehead and blew an exit wound out through the man’s jaw.

The ricochet could have killed one of them, but no, and the man went down with such completeness that he might have been a dropped sack of garbage.

Wilkes dragged the dead man off the elevator.

Buttons. Three different sublevels. Where was Caligula? Go all the way down. Why not? Gates of hell. Keats punched the S3 button.

The elevator doors closed over smeared blood.

Billy popped the clip from the gun, counted the bullets and said, “I don’t think there are upgrades or reloads in this game.”

It struck Keats that if he had ever found a match for Caligula, it was this sad, sick little boy. It was not a good thought. His stomach was empty, and the smell of his vomit filled the padding-walled elevator as it dropped beneath them.

Keats had kept his place on Caligula’s optic nerve. He saw the sudden cessation of hammering. The visual field swirled as Caligula moved quickly.

“He’s heard us!”

“Up against the walls, hide under the blankets!” Billy yelled in high-pitched excitement.

The blankets were the padding hung to protect the elevator walls. Wilkes and Keats dived under. Too late Keats saw that Plath hadn’t moved.

Billy stood waiting, gun drawn and leveled.

Keats saw Caligula rushing toward the elevator, stopping, ducking behind cover. And then the peace of the game descended on Keats. It was live-or-die time. Win-or-lose time.

All his gaming life Keats had had this other place he could go, except that he didn’t quite go there as an act of deliberate choice, it would just happen. It would come down over him—a calm, a control, a speed of perception, an ease of decision making—blessedly blanking out fear and self-loathing.

“He’ll be to your left, Billy,” Keats said. “Behind a thick vertical pipe painted orange.”

Billy shifted stance without a word.

“He’s expecting an adult, someone tall,” Keats said, still deadly calm.

Billy nodded and squatted. His head would be lower than a grown man’s belly. Caligula would be quick, but he might hesitate on seeing a child.

“Wilkes. Give me your gun. As soon as the door opens, scream, really loud,” Keats ordered. “Like you need help.”

Caligula’s eye was steady now, lid drooping just a bit, unafraid surely, confident that no one could beat him. Keats’s biot was already busy sawing away at the massive optic nerve beneath its feet. Cutting, cutting, like trying to slice through a bridge cable with a hacksaw, but nerve fibers popped and coiled away, wildly whipping wires, and each taking with it a tiny part of Caligula’s visual field.

The elevator stopped.

The door was loud as it opened.

Wilkes screamed, “Help! Help me! Help me!”

BANG!

BANG!

Billy and Caligula fired almost simultaneously and out came Keats from behind the hanging blanket and fired wildly, BANGBANGBANG! with bullets ricocheting off pipes.

Keats’s biot sawed madly and now more shooting, and Keats was on the floor of the elevator now, crawling on his belly, aiming, squeezing off rounds, gun bucking in his hand until it banged open, out of bullets.

Billy, still standing, advanced in quickstep, running for cover, and Keats saw Caligula’s eye tracking him, saw the butt of Caligula’s gun as it bucked from recoil and heard the loud BANG! and saw Billy the Kid’s neck suddenly no longer all there.

The boy fired again as arterial blood sprayed like a cut fire hose, until his head, no longer supported, fell to one side and hung limply, and Billy fell, knees hitting the floor, then onto his back and his head bounced, barely tethered. His gun twirled across the floor leaving a blood trail.