Bzrk

by Michael Grant

  The shrill sound of the saw seemed now to come from a great distance.

  Noah unsaw everything beyond the frames of the monitors.

  He unfelt the fear.

  He detached himself from the chair and the Velcro and the pinching of his nose and ear and unremembered his brother, and stopped feeling or thinking …

  He leapt, came down behind the closest of the tiny robots and stabbed it with his needle-sharp leg and fired into the face of the man with the axe while racing across the sphere and flexing his spider legs and flying and pivoting to land on a bumpy gray wall that instantly attacked him with sticky fuzz balls and another shock and he kicked off a graffitied New York City wall and fired in midair and the businessman with the machine pistol never even aimed died with a bullet through his neck, arterial blood pumping.

  Another shock! But it was happening to someone else. Some other Noah’s cheek was twisted in spasm, and some other eye was blinded by tears.

  And the chain saw had ripped its way all the way through the chair leg; it was catching on the last half an inch, but that, too, was someone else’s problem.

  Noah was batting away fuzz balls and pushing his way through a crowd and a spray of acid, and suddenly both monitors went blank. And up came that disturbing logo.

  Noah was first aware that he could barely see for the sweat and tears in his eyes.

  And then he felt the pinch of the clips, even as Dr. Pound removed them.

  And the silence now that the chain saw was switched off.

  Noah sucked in a shaky breath. He looked down at his right leg. The saw was all the way through the chair leg, with the other three legs bearing the weight. And a red line had been drawn on the quivering muscle of his calf, not deep, just enough to draw blood.

  Dr. Pound moved with calm deliberation, removing the head band, ripping apart the Velcro.

  “I can imagine you’d very much enjoy punching me in the face,” Dr. Pound said.

  You have no idea, Noah thought.

  But the emotion faded, pushed aside by stronger feelings and needs. Pride. Curiosity. The rush of survival.

  “How did I do?” Noah asked.

  Dr. Pound sighed. To Noah’s amazement, he laid his hand gently on Noah’s sweat-matted hair. “Young man. I’m not meant to know your identity. But the family resemblance is unmistakable.”

  “You knew Alex?”

  Dr. Pound smiled wistfully. “I knew a fellow who called himself Kerouac. Who bears a resemblance to you, though he is older and more fit.”

  Alex.

  “He was very, very good,” Dr. Pound said.

  “Yeah?”

  “But you, young nameless boy, if you are to live, you will need to be even better than he.”

  NINE

  Sadie’s arm still hurt. Now it also itched. And it chafed. Five days after it had been shattered she still couldn’t use it. But the healing was much further along than it would have been for anyone else.

  The McLure company clinic had skills that were not present anywhere else. Specifically, doctors who had been trained in the use of therapeutic biots. Three biots had started work almost immediately on the broken bones. Three biots carrying bladders of stem cells that were injected close to the two major breaks.

  The biots were then extracted and reloaded with a second, then a third round. Then they began to shuttle titanium strands, laying them into the microscopic spaces between the two sides of the breaks, like rebar in concrete. The biots next began the tedious job of hauling bladders of what amounted to superglue. This was used to stabilize the break so that the bone could grow easily over and around the titanium and repair without enduring repeated mini-fractures.

  In a few days Sadie’s arm would be fully functional. In two weeks it would be as strong as it had ever been.

  The medical biot runners sat in easy chairs in separate rooms to avoid any distraction. Even so they worked only three hours at a time to minimize the stress.

  The stress. It seemed to be age-related; that was the preliminary conclusion: the strangeness of the nano world tended to overwhelm less flexible minds. Shorter version: it creeped people out being down in the meat.

  If Sadie had stayed in the clinic, they’d have set to work in the depths of her brain. Doing the work her father had once done. Keeping her alive.

  But now, Sadie was in a very different place. No longer at the campus in New Jersey. She had told Stern to let her go, and after some demurral, he had.

  She’d had the McLure driver drop her at the Park Avenue apartment, but she’d gone in only to change clothing and pack a small bag.

  She had heard from Vincent.

  So now she was at Madison and 26th Street. Not one of the more exotic or interesting street corners in New York. There was a small square called Madison Square Park. It was a rectangle not a square, and not much of a park. But it was a place you could be at night, at midnight just to be melodramatic, without worrying too much about your safety.

  She waited, by herself, with a scarf covering the bottom third of her face and a hat pulled down over her hair.

  There weren’t that many pictures of Sadie in circulation—Google turned up only three. But she was, if not famous, then certainly notorious now. The sole surviving McLure. A potential focus of the needs of a media currently still obsessing over the stadium tragedy. She wanted not to be recognized. And she wouldn’t be, not in an empty park at night with steam leaking through her scarf.

  She was cold. It was cold and the wind made her broken arm ache and her eyes run. She stood with one hand pushed deep into her coat pocket and the other hand—gloveless because she’d forgotten she would want gloves—sticking out of a sling.

  A boy came up. Handsome boy. No, a beautiful boy, and older than she, maybe eighteen, nineteen. Tall and slender, Mediterranean but with a nose and mouth and brow and expression that did not say “descended from Spanish fishermen,” but rather, “descended from the sorts of people who once upon a distant time rode around on tall horses trampling peasants.”

  He came to her. Raised one eyebrow and looked down at her with disappointment and said, “Are you a friend of Vincent’s?”

  She disliked him immediately. Not the kind of dislike that might later give way to attraction. The kind of dislike that might, with some effort, remain mere dislike and not harden into contempt.

  In fact, he was Luis Aragon, the middle of three sons of a Spanish land developer who had once been shockingly rich but was now only rich. But Luis had left his name behind in trade for the name Renfield.

  “I suppose I am,” she said.

  “Follow me,” Renfield said.

  She made no move as he spun on his heel and walked away. It took him perhaps fifteen steps to realize he was walking alone. He came back at double speed. He seemed torn between bewilderment and anger.

  “Hey,” Sadie said, “I don’t take orders. Sometimes I take requests.”

  Renfield blinked. He drew himself up and back, the better to turn his long, straight nose into a sort of targeting device, lining his eyes up to look down at her.

  “You have a car? Or are we walking?” Sadie asked.

  The boy’s eyes went instinctively to a black Audi A8 idling and exuding exhaust smoke. She started walking. The boy hurried to keep up.

  “What’s your name?” Sadie asked.

  “You must call me Renfield. In the car you will be blindfolded. And you will be prevented from removing your blindfold. If you refuse, you will remain here. These are not suggestions: these are facts.”

  He had an accent. Yep. A definite cultured, eliding, peasant-trampling sort of accent with too many soft th sounds. Also, he had rolled the r in Renfield. Beyond that she had no idea where the accent came from, just that he was not American born.

  The urge to say GFY was overwhelming. Sadie was not in a happy or patient frame of mind. She’d gone from terror to loss to pain to this park and this arrogant snot of a human being. And if Renfield had been looking at her, he
would have seen all of that, including an unpacked GFY, in her eyes.

  A liveried driver climbed out to get the door. Sadie was there before him, shot him a smile, and hopped in.

  Twenty dark minutes later the car stopped and the engine was turned off and the blindfold was removed and she was staring at a graffiti-tagged Dumpster. In a narrow alley courtyard, the kind of place where someone might have squeezed in a couple of cars they didn’t love too much.

  She let the driver get the door. Climbed out. Still cold. Still New York. Sooty red brick and rusted-iron fire escapes all around and above and a smell of well-aged garbage.

  Renfield thumbed a text on his phone.

  “Where are we?” Sadie asked.

  Renfield refused to answer. A door opened without spilling much light. “Come on,” he said.

  Sadie followed Renfield into a warmer interior. The door closed. Someone was standing behind her and the hair on the nape of her neck tingled.

  A second door opened, and she stepped into bright lights and white walls and a space no larger than a small walk-in closet. Renfield was not with her. No one was with her. There was a stainless-steel push-door slot on one wall.

  “Welcome,” a disembodied voice said. “The next hour will not be very pleasant for you, I’m afraid. But it is necessary.”

  Noah was in a yellow cab heading from JFK International to an address in lower Manhattan.

  He had never been to America. He’d never really been anywhere outside of London.

  He was tired and excited. And scared. And wondering if he was caught up in some elaborate practical joke.

  He’d been given an iPad with a video briefing, which he had watched on the plane. And now his head was full of horrors. But also excitement. Because his life was school and a shabby room barely bigger than a closet and a mad hero of a brother and a sad, gray wraith of a mother and a nearly invisible, beaten-down father, and a beaten-down life with nothing really on the horizon but a job he would hate and more of the same, thus and forevermore.

  So maybe he was a fool to enlist with scarcely a question in some mad enterprise to stop an even madder enterprise. But the alternative was the grind that would grind on until it had ground him down.

  That’s why Alex had gone off to war. Because why the hell not? His exact words when he’d told Noah he was enlisting: “Why the hell not? Get a job in a pub or an office and have the same shit life as mum and dad? Why the hell not enlist?”

  Now Noah had enlisted. Because why the hell not?

  And because somewhere out there in this absurdly tall city, there was someone who called himself Bug Man. In Noah’s imagination he saw himself going to see Alex again someday and telling him, “I took out the Bug Man, brother.”

  Noah knew that fantasy was pathetic. He didn’t fool himself much, Noah; he was hard and honest with himself. He never told himself the stories other boys would, nonsense about growing up to play professional sport or winning Britain’s Got Talent and having money and girls and toadies.

  He wasn’t going to university; he wasn’t going to become a rich banker or whatever; he was destined, aimed, targeted like a smart bomb at a life of drudge work in a mind-numbing job and damned lucky if he could get that much and hold on to it.

  He had passed Pound’s test, and he had seen the greedy gleam in Pound’s eye. For the first time ever, probably the last as well, Noah had something valuable.

  He had five hundred nice, crisp dollars in his pocket, dollars with their obscure mystical symbolism and compact shape. He had an address on a slip of paper. And he had, by way of inheritance, a mission.

  “First time, kid?” the cabbie called over his shoulder.

  “First time,” Noah said.

  “I gotta pull over to take a whiz.” The cab rolled to a stop in front of a blearily overlit store with neon beer signs and posters in the grimy, barred glass front.

  The driver stepped out, leaving the meter running. Seconds later the door of the cab opened and a girl slid into the seat beside Noah. She was an odd creature, dressed in a style that might be called post-Goth or thrift-shop chic. She had a tattoo of dripping flames beneath one eye. Her features were unrefined, like any girl Noah might see back in his own neighborhood. Somehow he’d expected all New York girls to be models.

  “This cab is taken,” Noah said. “We haven’t stopped, the driver just—”

  “Yeah, the driver took a hundy to let me in. All set up in advance, blue eyes. Speaking of which, you have a little schmutz on your eye.” She peered closely at him, reached across the seat, and with one finger appeared to wipe something from the corner of his eye.

  “A hundy?”

  “A C-note. A hundred-dollar bill. A hundy.” She waited, obviously expecting something more. “You’re not going to ask what schmutz is?”

  “I guessed it was crumbs or something.”

  “Good guess, English Boy.”

  Noah frowned. She didn’t seem the least bit threatening, but she was definitely unsettling, and he supposed, given that she was somewhat provocatively dressed and very forward, that she might be a prostitute. “Excuse my asking, but are you a tart?”

  “You mean a hooker? Nah. Although … if I was, what would you pay?” She had a grin that was more on one side of her mouth than the other and bordered on crazy. And when she laughed it was a sound like, “Heh-heh.” Not mirthful, more like a verbal placeholder for a real laugh.

  Noah did not have an answer, and this widened the girl’s grin.

  “Relax, English. I’m all up in your eyeball checking you out. Looking for bugs, looking for bugs. You’re probably safe enough, you’ve been watched since the other day, and you’ll get the full going-over later. This is just a sort of quick peek.”

  “I’m completely lost,” Noah said.

  The driver came back, carefully avoided looking at the girl, and the cab pulled away from the curb. The girl carefully scanned the sidewalk and the empty street with a professional eye.

  “You only think you’re lost, English.” Again, the sardonic nonlaugh. “Pretty soon you’ll be so lost you won’t even know what universe you’re in.”

  Sadie squinted against the harsh light.

  “Vincent?” she asked. The voice didn’t sound quite right to be him. But neither was it Renfield. It sounded female, but low enough maybe to be a boy.

  “I’m going to ask you to disrobe. And to place all of your clothing in the wall slot on your right. Then we will ask you to stand still while we run a series of scans.”

  “Vincent already checked me out. He put a biot on me,” Sadie said.

  “He also withdrew that biot, and it’s been several days.”

  The voice was irritatingly reasonable. She kind of hated it. She shrugged and took off her scarf, coat, and boots. She pushed them through the slot.

  “How far are we going here, disembodied voice?”

  “Everything, please.”

  “I’d better not find pictures on the Internet, disembodied voice,” Sadie muttered.

  “You may call me Ophelia,” the voice said.

  “You’re a girl?”

  “I am,” Ophelia answered. “I’ll turn the voice masking off.” Then she said, “Is that better?”

  The voice was no longer impersonal. It was definitely female. “Yes, actually. I’m not modest, but the light in here is very unflattering.”

  “I’m beginning the scans now,” Ophelia said. “You’ll see different colors of light. You’ll hear various sounds, some a bit loud. Just stand where you are.”

  “Okay, Ophelia.”

  It lasted longer than she expected. Long enough to become boring. And long enough for her to become resentful.

  The thing with Sadie was that even though she was no sort of snob, not arrogant toward other people, she had lived a life with very little discomfort. What unpleasantness she’d had to endure had been of a medical nature—the diagnosis and early attempts at treatment for her aneurysm—which just doubled her impatie
nce now. Because everything about this felt medical in a sort of alien-abduction way.

  Finally the white light returned. She flinched.

  “Sorry, I should have brought the lights up slowly.”

  “What now?”

  A door opened. A young woman stepped in. She was in her early twenties. She had black hair, long, but drawn back into an interesting knot before continuing on down her back. Her skin was dark but not from the African sun. She wore what looked like a very tiny sapphire brooch between her eyes, not a piercing but an appliqué. She had pretty eyes, but otherwise she was plain. She was carrying a handled shopping bag. She held it out to Sadie.