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First published in Great Britain 2013
by Electric Monkey – an imprint of Egmont UK Limited
The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London, W11 4AN
Copyright © The Shadow Gang 2013
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First e-book edition 2013
ISBN 978 1 7803 1491 4
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.
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EGMONT
Our story began over a century ago, when seventeen-year-old Egmont Harald Petersen found a coin in the street. He was on his way to buy a flyswatter, a small hand-operated printing machine that he then set up in his tiny apartment.
The coin brought him such good luck that today Egmont has offices in over 30 countries around the world. And that lucky coin is still kept at the company’s head offices in Denmark.
For Katherine, Jake and Julia
“I am not a brave man.”
Grey McLure started a war.
In his own words,
he tells us why.
Contents
Praise for the BZRK
I should destroy this. There’s no such thing as secure data. Once a thing is written it will somehow escape. But I can’t. I never knew my father wrote anything about himself.
Mr Stern recovered this from a laptop my father once used. A long time ago, now. Or seems a long time ago to me.
This was his story. Mine, too, though at the time I understood almost nothing of what was happening. But this is how . . . well, it’s at least part of how everything began.
My father, Grey McLure. Burnofsky. Lear. Even Caligula. It’s all here. And I could trash can it all, wipe it clean. Except that these are my father’s words, and he’s talking about my mother and my brother. And he’s talking about me. And I find now that every word is infinitely precious.
Soon secrecy won’t matter. Soon very little will matter. But love will matter as long as anything. And I loved my dad.
I am Plath. My enemies have come to fear that name, and I revel in their dread.
But once I was just Sadie. Sadie who loved her dad.
I am not a brave man.
I am not well-armored against fear. Fear now rules my world, or perhaps I should say ‘fears’ plural; unless you believe that all fears are only one fear, the big one, the fear of death.
I don’t believe that. To me, fear is granular. Fear is specific. Each fear has its own smell and taste, its own picture and face.
The great fear for me now is not death. The great fear is madness. The destruction of a creature smaller than the full stops on this page can drag me down, helpless, like being sucked into a whirlpool.
I fear that madness. I fear it so badly that I shake from it as I write this.
The things I have seen. And touched, though not with my own hands.
We live in a series of comforting
