Michael Grant - BZRK

The author wishes to thank two amazing bands, The Methadones and Shot Baker, for permission to reprint some of their lyrics

First published in Great Britain 2012

by Electric Monkey – an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

239 Kensington High Street

London W8 6SA

First e-book edition 2012

Copyright © The Shadow Gang 2012

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

The digital experience that accompanies this book was created by The Shadow Gang in conjunction with the author (www.theshadowgang.com)

ISBN 978 1 4052 5993 4 (hardback)

ISBN 978 1 4052 6430 3 (trade paperback)

ISBN 978 1 7803 1078 7 (ebook)

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

For Katherine, Jake and Julia

Oh, that way madness lies;

let me shun that.

King Lear

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright The author wishes to thank two amazing bands, The Methadones and Shot Baker, for permission to reprint some of their lyrics First published in Great Britain 2012 by Electric Monkey – an imprint of Egmont UK Limited 239 Kensington High Street London W8 6SA First e-book edition 2012 Copyright © The Shadow Gang 2012 The moral rights of the author have been asserted The digital experience that accompanies this book was created by The Shadow Gang in conjunction with the author (www.theshadowgang.com) ISBN 978 1 4052 5993 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4052 6430 3 (trade paperback) ISBN 978 1 7803 1078 7 (ebook) www.egmont.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Dedication For Katherine, Jake and Julia

Epigraph Oh, that way madness lies; let me shun that. King Lear

One

Two

Three

Four

Artifact

Five

Six

Artifact

Seven

Eight

Nine

Artifact

Artifact

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Artifact

Artifact

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Artifact

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Artifact

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Artifact

ONE

A girl sat just three chairs down from Noah talking to her hand. To the back of her hand, actually, as she spread her fingers wide. Her fingertips were painted alternately red and gold, but not with fingernail polish, and not strictly on the fingernails. Rather, it looked as if she had used a can of spray paint.

She explained to the back of her hand that she was, “Perfectly all right. Perfectly all right.”

Noah thought she might have been pretty, but it was hard to really assess her face or body when his glance was drawn so irresistibly to the rope burn around her neck.

She started screaming when the orderlies came for her. They had to lift her up bodily, one on each rigid arm. Her mother, or perhaps older sister, stood with her hand over her mouth, wept and echoed the girl’s own speech.

“It’ll be all right,” said the sane one.

“I’m perfectly all right!” cried the crazy one.

The girl kicked her chair across the floor, and shot Noah a savage look from eyes edged red.

Noah Cotton. Sixteen years old. He had brown hair that defaulted to bed head without any effort on his part. His lips were full and downturned just a little, as if prepared for sadness. The nose was strong and sharp, a damned-near-perfect nose. But of course it was those blue eyes that drew you in. Where had he gotten eyes that blue? They looked unnatural. Like someone wearing tinted contact lenses. And Noah would turn those bright, unnatural blue eyes on you, and you wouldn’t know whether you were looking into profound depths or maybe just into a very crazy place.

Well, if the answer was, “A very crazy place,” then he would fit in perfectly with his location, which was the waiting room in the central hall of The Brick.

This place weighed down on him. Maybe it was the history. In the eighteenth century it had been called the Lord Japheth LeMay Asylum for the Incurably Mad. By the mid-nineteenth century that had been softened a bit to become the East London Asylum for the Insane.

Today it was officially called the East London Hospital for the Treatment of Serious Mental Illness.

But no one called it that, at least not outside the facility itself. Out in the world it was called The Brick.

It was a redbrick architectural monstrosity that had grown—metastasized, maybe—over the course of more than two hundred years. It wasn’t all brick. Some of the towers and wings were stone. Some outbuildings were flaking, painted plaster over ancient half-timbered walls. But the massive hall, with its fraternal twin towers, the Bishop and the Rook—one tall and pointed, the other squat and intimidating—were all in soot-encrusted red brick.

Noah was doing his best not to feel the echoes of the mad girl’s cries, but the waiting room was about as schizophrenic as many of the patients: ancient oil paintings, a vaguely off-kilter black-and-white tile floor, yellow walls that were probably someone’s idea of cheerful, and furniture from a rummage sale. Then, to top it all off, there was the chandelier, which had to have been plundered from some gaudy palace during a long-ago colonial war. It cast a light that was excellent at creating shadows, so that even the space under the chairs looked as if it might be the dark lair of tiny monsters.

Noah was here to visit his brother, Alex. His much older brother, Alex. Age twenty-five, ex-army veteran of Afghanistan, Royal Highland Fusiliers. (Motto: Nemo Me Impugn Lacessit— No One Assails Me with Impunity. Or the alternative version—Do Not Fuck with Us or We Will Hurt You.) Shoulders you could break a cinder block on, disciplined, up every morning to run ten kilometers in whatever weather London had on offer.

Alex Cotton, who had earned the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross for basically having balls so big he had taken out three Hajis in a machine-gun nest while literally carrying a wounded comrade on his back.

And now . . .

Noah’s name was called. An attendant, a swaggering thug with fat legs, a Taser in one pocket and a leather-covered sap sticking out of the other, led the way. Past office doorways. Through a reinforced glass and steel security door.

Through a second security door.

Past the control center where bored guards watched flickering screens and discussed sports with their feet up.

Through a third door. This one had to be buzzed open by an attendant on the other side.

And here the screams and wails and sudden shrill, rising cries and gut-wrenching sobs began. The sounds leaked through steel doors of individual rooms: cells, in reality.