Bzrk (4 page)

Bug Man had no friends. Not in this life. Not in this job. And plenty of people would put a knife in his back. Paranoia? Hah. Paranoia was common sense.

He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and, with a deep, bracing breath, opened the door.

Sure enough, Jindal was waiting with a high five. Jindal was … well, what was he, exactly? A sort of office manager for twitchers? He saw himself as being in some kind of position of authority. The twitchers saw him as the guy who made sure the fridge had plenty of Red Bull.

Thirty-five years old, grinning ingratiatingly at a sixteen-year-old kid in a hoodie. Sucking up. Even doing a little dance move, like he was trying to impress the Bug Man with a flash of ghetto. Bug Man was from Knightsbridge, a pricey neighborhood in London. He was not from the Bronx. But what did Jindal know? Any black face had to be ghetto.

“The damn signal repeater on the blimp went weak on me, Jindal,” Bug Man said, a little too loud over the music in his ears. “I was down to eighty percent.”

Let’s see if Jindal wanted to dance about a glitchy repeater. Bug Man pushed past him.

But Burnofsky was a different thing. Couldn’t really just blow off Burnofsky. He might be a sixty-year-old burnout with a six-day growth of white whiskers and a drunk’s chewed-up nose, but Burnofsky had game. No one was a better twitcher than Anthony Elder aka Bug Man, but if there was a close number two it was Burnofsky.

After all, he had created the game.

Bug Man pulled out one earbud. The band was going on about watching the company that you keep. Burnofsky was making that twisted, sneering face that was his most pleasant expression.

“S’matter, Bug? You don’t want to see the video?”

“Bugger off, Burnofsky. I need a slash.”

Burnofsky must have already been hitting the Thermos where he kept his chilled vodka. He grabbed Bug Man’s shoulder and spun him around. “Come on, kid. Don’t you want to see the macro? This is an accomplishment. A great moment for all of us.”

Bug Man knocked the old drunk’s hand away, but not before being exposed to a high-def visual of devastation. Looked like a camera angle from that same blimp, too steady to be a helicopter. Smoke and bodies.

Bug Man turned away. Not because it was too terrible to see, but because it was irrelevant. “I just play the game, old man.”

“The Twins will want to thank you,” Burnofsky taunted. “You going to tell them to ‘bugger off,’ too? I mean, you struck a major blow today, kid. Grey McLure and his kid are charcoal briquettes. You’ve stepped up to the big times, Anthony: you’re a mass murderer now, up in the macro, not just shooting spiders down in the meat. And we’re all one step closer to a world of perfect peace, happiness, and universal brotherhood.”

“I just want to be one step closer to the loo, man,” Bug Man said.

“It’s called the restroom in this country, you little British bastard.”

He started to move away, but Burnofsky stepped suddenly closer, put his bloodless, papery-fleshed hands on Bug Man’s neck, pulled him close, and breathed eighty-proof fumes into his ear. “You’ll grow up someday, Anthony. You’ll know what you did.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “And it will eat you alive.”

Bug Man shoved him back, but not so hard as to knock him down. “How stupid are you, Burnofsky?” Bug Man grinned and shook his head. He pointed a finger at his own temple. “I just rewired that pilot’s brain. You think I won’t rewire my own? You know, if I ever feel the need?”

That shut Burnofsky up. The old man took a step back, frowned, and waved his hand like he was trying to block the sight of Bug Man’s smooth face.

“The macro is all micro, old man. You drown your conscience in booze or whatever it is you smoke that makes you smell like roadkill …” He saw Burnofsky glance nervously back at Jindal. So: Burnofsky thought that was a secret, did he? Old fool. “You do what you have to do, Burnofsky. It’s not my business, is it? But I have a better way. Snip snip, wire wire. I mean, you know, if I ever get old and soft in the head like you. Now: I either go to the toilet or pee on your leg.”

FOUR

Sadie McLure had passed out in the ambulance on the way to the ER.

She’d awakened in bits and pieces, in flashes of light, and hovering faces, and tiled ceilings and fluorescent fixtures rushing by overhead. Images of green scrubs, masks, tubes, and shiny metal instruments.

Like a dream. Not a good dream.

Sharp, breathtaking pain from her arm when someone jostled it.

And with the scrubs came the black suits. Security. Protect the McLure. That was her now:
the
McLure.

A stab of pain that was not from any nerve ending, a stab like a cold knife wielded by her own soul.

Then muzzy relief flowed through her veins as the opiates arrived to take the edge off.

Sleep. And terrible nightmares of falling into an oozing mass of burning flesh. Like overcooked marshmallow. And it wasn’t her father or brother burning but her mother, who hadn’t burned, who had died in a bed like this one, her insides eaten by cancer.

Sadie woke. How much later? No way to know. There was no calendar or clock in the room. What there was was a man in a black suit, white shirt, black tie, and an earpiece. He was sitting in the chair, legs crossed, reading a graphic novel.

He would have a gun. He would also have a stun gun. And probably a second gun in an ankle holster.

Sadie’s body was one massive bruise. She did a quick inventory and decided, yes, every single inch of her hurt. Inside and outside, she hurt.

She was on her back, head slightly elevated, a needle taped to her right arm. A clear plastic bag hung beside the bed.

Her left arm was wrapped in hard plastic sheathing, bent into a lazy L and suspended from a wire.

Something had been inserted in her urethra. It hurt, but at the same time she had the feeling it had been there for a while.

“Who are you?” she asked. It sounded perfectly clear in her head, but she had the impression it came out as a whisper.

The man’s eyes flicked up from his book.

“Water,” Sadie gasped, suddenly overwhelmed by the sensation of thirst.

The man rose quickly. He came to the bed and pressed a button. The door opened within seconds, and two nurses came in. No, a nurse and a doctor, one was wearing a stethoscope.

“Water,” Sadie managed to say in a semicoherent voice.

“First we have to—” the doctor said.

“Water!” Sadie snapped. “First: water.”

The doctor took a step back. She would not be the first or last to take that step back.

The nurse had a drinking bottle with a bent straw. She let Sadie swallow a little. A blessing.

Nurses,
Sadie remembered. That’s what her mother had said as she lay dying. Doctors can all go to hell; nurses go straight to heaven. Not that Birgid McLure took either heaven or hell literally.

Alone.

Sadie was alone. The realization scared her.

Just me,
she thought.

She thought she might be crying, but she couldn’t feel tears, only the need to shed them.

A second guy in a black suit was in the room. Older. The corporate security chief. Sadie knew him. Should remember his name, but she didn’t. A third man, sleek in very expensive striped suit, might as well have had “lawyer” tattooed on his forehead.

The corporation was swinging into action. Lawyers, security, all of it too damned late.

She had a stupid question to ask. Stupid in that she already knew the answer. “My Dad. And Stone.”

“Now isn’t the time,” the nurse said kindly.

“Dead,” the security chief answered.

The nurse shot him a dirty look.

“She’s my boss,” the man said flatly. “She’s McLure. She asks a question, I answer.”

The doctor was busy reading the chart. The nurse peered at Sadie, as if measuring her courage. She was Jamaican, maybe, judging from the accent. Or from one of those other islands where they do cool things to the English language.

She gave a slight shrug and let Sadie take another blessed, blessed sip of water.

“I need to know how soon I can move her,” the security chief said. Stern. That was his name. Something Stern. He had one of those faces that always looked as if he had just come from shaving. His tie was neat, but the collar was twisted a bit sideways around his neck. And although he was trying hard to look impassive, the corners of his mouth kept tugging downward. His eyes were red. He had cried.

“Move her?” the doctor yelped. “What are you talking about? She has a compound fracture of the ulna and radius, a concussion, internal bleeding—”

“Doctor,” Stern said. “I can’t keep her safe here. We have a place. Our own doctors, our own facilities. And air-tight security.”

“She needs an MRI. We need to see if there’s any brain damage.”

“We have an MRI machine,” the lawyer said, oozing confidence. A Harvard Law voice. A voice with which you were simply not allowed to argue. “I am Ms. McLure’s temporary legal guardian, and her attorney. And I think Ms. McLure would rather have our own doctors. And frankly, you and this hospital would rather not have the media camped outside twenty-four/seven.”

Stern looked at her. He was careful not to be too obvious, but Sadie intercepted the look and understood.

No, it would not do to have strangers looking inside her skull. They might see something they’d have a very hard time understanding. So, Stern knew. Useful.

“Take me home,” Sadie said.

Stern nodded once. “Yes, Ms. McLure. Home.”

There was a park not far from Noah’s home, but it was drizzling and threatened to go to full-on rain, so he and his two mates, Mohammed and Little Cora, kicked the football around in the partial shelter of two high walls.

Noah dribbled it, did an agile
pedalada
, and back-heeled it to Mohammed.

“I can, too, do a fuckin’ Chilena,” Little Cora insisted, referring to a bicycle kick that involved somersaulting to kick a ball out of the air. Little Cora felt no sentence was complete without the modifier “fuckin’.”

“You can do it once, maybe,” Mohammed insisted. “Then you fall on your head, and it’s six weeks in hospital.”

Little Cora charged at him, took the ball, and kicked it with impressive power and very poor aim at the nearest wall. It struck the bars on the back window of a pizza restaurant and took a wild bounce toward a motorcycle locked to the fence. The fence separated the alley from the train tracks, and just as Mohammed started berating Little Cora, a train went roaring past obliterating the banter.

Noah grabbed the handlebar of the motorcycle and righted it before it could topple over. Then he went after the ball, which had rolled some distance.

A young man got there first. He stopped the ball, dribbled it a bit just to show he knew how, and kicked it away from Noah and back to his friends.

The man was Asian—Chinese, Noah guessed—and startlingly handsome. Definitely not someone from this neighborhood.

The man said, “Noah?”

And that froze Noah where he stood. His friends moved closer, slowly, protective but wary.

There was nothing threatening about the man. He didn’t bare his teeth, he didn’t move farther forward. He met Noah’s gaze easily.

“Who’s asking?”

“I’m looking for Noah Cotton.”

An American accent, at least Noah thought so.

“That’s me,” Noah admitted with a blend of defiance and indifference. He was a city boy, Noah, bred for wariness.

The American was in his early twenties, tall, especially for someone of Chinese background, thin, immaculate. He wore a long, navy cashmere coat over a dark suit, over an expensive white shirt held at the neck not by a tie but by a sort of white floral pin.

“My name is Nijinsky,” the American said. “I’m a friend of your brother.”

“Nijinsky. That sounds Russian.”

Nijinsky shrugged and smiled, offering a glimpse of amazingly perfect white teeth. “It’s an odd name, I must admit. Most people call me Jin.”

“Why are you looking for me?”

Nijinsky looked down, gathering his thoughts. Or at least acting the part of a man gathering his thoughts. Then he said, “Well, Noah, Alex asked me to look in on you if … if anything ever happened to him.”

Noah’s breathing suddenly felt labored. “Yeah?”

“Yes. Your brother was doing very important but very dangerous work. He had a special talent, you know.”

“He was out of the army. Quits with all that.”

“This isn’t about the army.”

Noah stared at him, and the man looked back with black, almond eyes fringed by girlishly long lashes. His expression was open and frank. Like he was hiding nothing.

Nijinsky glanced meaningfully at Mohammed and Little Cora, who had strayed ever closer.

“It’s all right, guys,” Noah said to his friends. “Too wet out, anyway. Tomorrow, eh? After school.”

Little Cora had never been one to take a hint, but Mohammed was. He grabbed her arm and said, “Come on, then, LC.”

“I’m taking my ball,” Little Cora said belligerently, but she followed Mohammed down the alley and around the corner.

“What happened to Alex?” Noah blurted.

“You mean—”

“You know bloody well what I mean, don’t you?” Noah interrupted.

The outburst brought no anger to Nijinsky’s expression, just compassion. “I know that Alex suffered a sudden, complete mental breakdown. Almost overnight he went from being a normal, if perhaps intense, person to being what people might call a raving lunatic.”

Now Noah’s chest was pounding and he was breathing hard, too much emotion pushing out from where he’d buried it. “I saw him, you know? Twice I went to see him. Right? In that awful place. They have him chained up like a fucking dog!”

Nijinsky nodded. Nothing more.

The rain came on in a wave, rushing down the alleyway. Nijinsky pulled an umbrella from his coat pocket and opened it seconds before the first fat drops hit. He stepped closer, to cover Noah as well, but Noah wasn’t having it. He stepped back into the rain, letting it beat on his bare head and shoulders.

“He’s sitting there in that place, just babbling, just, just …”

“What does he say? When he’s babbling?”

“Nano nano nano. I know, it sounds kind of funny, doesn’t it?”

“No. It doesn’t, Noah. What else does he say?”

Noah shook his head. “Something about a bug man.”

And there, at last, that tightening of Nijinsky’s impassive eyes, that twitch of his upper lip. And the warm compassion flowing from Nijinsky was, just for a moment, a cold front.

Noah had not missed that split second of something dark. Sadness? No, although maybe that was part of it.

Fury. That was it. Fury. But quickly extinguished.

“Anything else?” Nijinsky asked. And now he wasn’t bothering with the mask. He knew that Noah had seen some little bit of truth in his eyes. The bullshit was over. Truth was on its way.

“Yeah,” Noah said. “This word. He started screaming it. Just screaming it like a … like a …” He couldn’t talk for a moment. Too much. Too fast. He pressed his back against the wall, partly shielded from the worst of the downpour.

“Berserk,” Nijinsky said quietly.

Noah’s heart froze. His eyes snapped up. “What the hell does it mean? What is it? And how did you know?”

Nijinsky sighed. “What is it? It’s an organization. I’m part of it. And so was Alex.”

He waited and watched as Noah digested this. And as the truth dawned on Noah. “Are you here to …” He couldn’t finish the question. It seemed absurd, and if he asked it, it would be embarrassing.

“Your brother had a very special skill. A very rare skill. Sometimes it runs in families. If you have this skill, then we may want to talk further. If not, then we will part ways and you’ll hear nothing more from us.”