Berserk (12 page)

Hands, feet, more muttering and cursing into the night, and now he could see the top of the fence, curved over and sharp. Difficult to negotiate at dusk with all his senses about him, now, at night, his head still spinning, it would be almost impossible.

“Go over now, or find where Roberts got in,” Cole muttered. His arms and legs were already starting to shake from the tremendous strain, and sweat cooled on his skin. He swung one leg up and caught it quickly over an upright. He slipped and a curve of metal sliced at his jeans, tearing them and scratching the skin beneath.

He had no choice. If he tried to find the way Roberts had come through or under the fence, he would lose him – and Natasha – forever.

Cole snatched at the curl of a fence upright, feeling the keen edge slice his palm. He scrambled over, trying his best to avoid more cuts, but his tiredness cost him mistakes. He fell down on the other side, landing heavily on his back, neck bent to save his head from another impact. The wind was knocked from him, and seconds that seemed liked minutes passed before he hauled in a huge breath. The movement brought pain with it – from his gashed hand, cuts on both legs, bruised back and still-bleeding head – but Cole shut it all out. He stood, scampered down the bank and ran to the Jeep, ignoring the pouty feel of the flesh of his shin. He hauled open the door, bloody hand slipping on chrome. The clasp of the storage compartment beneath the driver’s seat passed through his fingers several times, and he had to wipe his hand across his jacket to clear the blood before he could get a firm grip. The .45 felt heavy, cool and good in his palm, calming the pain. He checked the pistol had a round chambered and a full magazine, then dropped it onto the passenger seat.

“Now let’s find out where you’re going on holiday,” he said, smiling as the Jeep grumbled to a start. He tried to convince himself that the smile was because he was in action again. But behind all that lay an intense relief that he was heading away from the Plain. The Plain and that terrible grave, uncovered now, evidence of a past atrocity laid bare to the moon’s timeless gaze. He pulled away, and the more distance he put between himself and the pit, the better he felt. Calmer. More assured.

He tried not to think of what might lay ahead. If he had let his mind probe the future – if he had known what was to come, or even guessed half of it – he may well have eaten a bullet there and then.

* * *

In the dark, with everything that had happened weighing down and distracting him, Tom lost his way. The landscape looked totally different at night. The road signs read the same, but behind them the darkness skewed direction, and any sense of where he was or where he was heading soon vanished. He drove on regardless, trying to maintain the same direction, because he knew that the man would be coming.
Mister Wolf,
Natasha had called him, a little girl expressing little girl’s fears. In her voice he had heard true fear, but something else as well, something he could not quite place. Something wrong.

He came to a T-junction, and both ways lay villages whose names he did not recognise. He chose left because it felt closer to the direction he should be travelling. The road soon curved to the right and straightened, and Tom pressed his foot down, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the pit he had opened in the ground.
Opened a can of worms now,
he thought, and that inspired images of squirming things in the meaty wetness of a corpse.

The landscape became more hilly, trees and hedges bordering fields, mostly bare and stubbled after the harvest. Tom wondered briefly what else may lay hidden beneath the surface of the world around here, just waiting to be discovered. What other secrets did Porton Down own? He had read tales of disease and radioactive elements being released so that scientists could chart their progress across the British Isles. Perhaps even now Tom’s skin was aglow with radioactivity, changing, cells mutating and readying themselves for the cancer they would eventually welcome in. Or maybe, after unearthing so much horror, he was a carrier for some bizarre bug or chemical, a trace of which had been buried along with those it had killed. A chemical conjuror of nightmares, perhaps, turning his brain to mush even as he tried to escape with a bundle of twigs and rags—

But no, none of that fit. Everything King had told him felt right, and Natasha seemed to be the proof of that. The living proof? He was still unsure. She spoke to him, but she was cold and hard, a mummified
thing.
And she had mentioned the bullet still within her . . . the silver bullet . . .

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” Tom slammed on the car’s brakes and the vehicle slewed to a halt across the road. He had seen no other traffic since leaving the Plain, and a collision was the least of his worries right now. He turned and grabbed the map book from the back seat, switching on the interior light. If Mister Wolf was closing in, Tom would present him with a fine target. But he had no choice. He was completely lost, and he had to find his way back to the cottage.

And what then? Flee with Jo, letting the maybe-dead Natasha guide them with silent words in his head?

“Cross that one when we come to it,” he said, flipping the pages of the road atlas. He found the hamlet where they were staying, the area of the Plain he had just come from, and eventually he located the village he was now heading toward. Not that far out of his way, he was pleased to see. Lost and found again. He grunted, closed the book and moved off.

Maybe half an hour and he would be back at the cottage. Then he would have some explaining to do.

* * *

Natasha remained silent for the whole journey. There was no feeling that she was probing at his mind, no sense that she was about to speak at all, and Tom wondered again at that bullet still inside her, and how his moving her had shaken it loose. What a cruel, ridiculous irony that would be: unearthing a ten-year-old corpse that spoke to him in his head and told him that his son could actually still be alive, only to have it die on him because he had moved it. How he would laugh at the fates that planted one on him. He tried to speak to her in his mind and out loud, but there was no hint of a response, and he soon felt foolish doing so.
that
Not as if anyone’s watching,
he thought. But after tonight, he would never feel certain of that again.

It took twenty minutes to drive to the cottage, not half an hour. A whole slew of possible scenarios hit him as he approached the corner and turned into the driveway:

The police are inside, comforting Jo and liaising with their station, passing on news of the search underway on the Plain. Tom pulls up in his car – only twelve hours late – and whatever apology he offers, he cannot hide the filth on his clothes, the mud beneath his fingernails, the blood in his hair. And just then the officers receive a call about a mass grave turned out on Salisbury Plain and one of them goes to search the car, glances into the back seat, approaches the boot . . .

Or perhaps there is no one there and Jo is sitting up alone, nursing yet another cup of hot sweet tea as she awaits his return. She is angry and scared and afraid of being alone, so afraid, she has always told him that, and in a way he thinks it is Steven’s death that brought her own mortality screaming down upon her. And Tom’s as well, because it is his death she fears the most.
I never want to be left alone,
she often tells him, and in that statement are implications that they refuse to discuss. But he often thinks to himself that she never will be alone, because if anything happens to him she will ensure that she follows soon after. So she is there, staring at the door and waiting for it to open, and at the back of her mind is that growing fear . . .

Or maybe Mister Wolf is there already, somehow knowing where to wait for Tom. And perhaps Jo is lying dead in the kitchen, her blood staining the flagstones black and the look on her face something Tom will never see. Because Mister Wolf is a hunter, a killer, and as soon as he has Tom in his sights he will shoot. Natasha will find her death at last. And Steven, wherever he may be . . .

But there was no vehicle in the driveway, and the cottage lights blazed, and even before Tom had stopped the car Jo was out of the house and flinging herself at his door, hauling on the handle and leaning in as he applied the parking brake, hugging him, hitting him, cursing at him and screaming how much she loved him, how worried she had been, and never once did she ask where he had been or why he had returned so late.

“Jo,” Tom said, tears coursing a surprising hot streak across his cheeks. “Are you feeling better?”
We need to move,
he thought, but here was his beloved wife. He had made her like this, and he owed her this moment.

“I was so worried!” she screamed into his neck, unable or unwilling to lift her head and lose contact with him. Tom felt her voice pressing against his skin, finding his flesh and bones whole and revelling in that. She moved back slightly then, her apparition of her husband now made flesh, and Tom’s heart broke at the sight of her face.

She must have been crying for a long time. Her eyes were puffy and red, her face swollen and sore from the tears. Her mouth was turned down at the corners, as if the weight of her fears had been acting on her with a terrible gravity. She was still wearing the night-clothes he had left her in, and they were rumpled and creased, smelling vaguely of must and fear.
I can smell the fear on my wife,
Tom thought, and fresh tears came to his eyes.

For a while, he forgot about the thing in the boot.

“I’m so sorry, Jo,” he said, reaching out and hugging her back down to him. She shifted position so that she was sitting on his lap in the car, bent low, her head resting on his shoulder so that her hot face pressed against his neck and cheek once again. “I love you honey, really, I’m so sorry if I frightened you. Time ran away with me, just left me. And I got lost on the way home, and I didn’t know what to do, I had no idea what I was
doing
!”

“You smell,” she said, “like mud and earth. You stink. You’re filthy! Oh Tom, I was so terrified that you’d never come back!”

Tom’s idea about lying to his wife – about the car having a puncture, and him knocking himself out changing it – had fled the moment he saw her. In truth he had no wish to lie to her about anything, not any more. And with that certainty came a sense of excitement at what he had to tell her next.
Steven,
he would say,
Jo, I really think he might still be alive.
But he did not have the chance to speak. Jo hugged him tight, squeezing the air from him, keening like a dog welcoming home its long-lost owner. And Natasha, so silent for the whole journey, chose that moment to make herself known again.

Daddy!
she screamed,
he’s coming! Mister Wolf is coming!

Tom glanced past Jo’s head at the rear-view mirror and saw that Natasha was mistaken. Whether or not she could have spoken up earlier was something he did not think about until much later, but right then all he knew was that she was wrong. Mister Wolf was not coming; he was already here.

The Jeep was parked in the drive entrance, blocking any hope of escape out onto the road.

He’s here to hurt me, Daddy!

The driver’s door was opening.

Please don’t let him hurt me
. . .
it hurts so much already!

And as Tom opened his mouth to speak to his wife for the last time, the shooting began.

* * *

To begin with, Cole was aimless. He drove simply because he had to drive. Sitting in his Jeep waiting for inspiration to hit would have felt even more useless than just driving for the sake of it. So he powered along country lanes, taking lefts, rights, or heading straight on at junctions, trying to imagine which way Roberts had come. He slowed down and turned his lights off intermittently, looking for signs of other car headlights in the countryside around him. There was nothing.

He drove fast, because slow would have felt even more hopeless.

Blood was pooling in his boot, squelching at every gear change. His jeans rubbed at the gash on his calf, and each contact was like the touch of a white-hot iron. He needed stitches, he knew, but that would have to wait. And the cuts on his hands were causing him more problems, the sliced left palm in particular. They smeared the steering wheel with blood, and every time he changed gear his hand slid around the gear stick, threatening to slip off. He wiped his hands on his jeans and jacket, but that only aggravated the wounds and exacerbated the bleeding.

I’ve really hurt myself,
he thought.
Done some real damage.

He drove on. At a T-junction he turned left without thinking, simply because there was nothing else to do. And inside, he searched for Natasha.

She would not be out in the open, in those parts of his mind that he knew so well. She would be
below.
Down in the dark, hidden away, rooting around like the devious little bitch she was. So he hunted for her, running through the familiar streets of his consciousness, heading off down alleys he did not recognise. There was graffiti on walls, but he could not read it. Letters swam in and out of focus. He thought they were a language he did not know, speaking of things he could not understand. Much as this disturbed him, Cole was used to it. He often felt like a stranger in his own mind, and like everything else that was wrong with life, he attributed it to Porton Down.

He sought further, deeper, inviting Natasha in even though he hated the sense of her in his head. Especially this Natasha, newly risen from the ground with a shout instead of a whisper.

“How does the air feel on your skin, monster?” he said. “Are you lonely without the bones of your kin to keep you warm, vampire?” Like all berserkers she despised the word vampire, he knew, but it was more out of vanity than anything else. She hated for her berserker clan to be thought of as anything other than unique. “Wrinkled dry dead thing, crying like a baby when I chained you up with those vermin you called mother, father, brother.”