BZRK Reloaded by Michael Grant Read Free Book Online Page B

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