BZRK (BZRK 1)

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.