Berserk (25 page)

—they hid in her room, lying down beside the bed. Her father had slammed the door again and again, smashed a hole in the wall and fused the security lock. It pushed four heavy bolts into the door from the wall, trapping them inside, making certain that they were set apart from Lane and Sophia and the escape these two had obviously planned. They would be trapped here now until the soldiers came to let them out. He cried and raged and swore as he never had before in front of his children. His tears were for his dead wife and his son and daughter, born innocent and yet guilty of so much at others’ bidding. “Daddy, let’s go and get them!” Peter gurgled, his face distorting and growing red from the change. But her father held him and kissed his forehead saying, “No, it’s not our fight,” and more gunfire and explosions swallowed whatever else he said.

—Lane smashed against the door, screeching, his nails tearing through masonry and snagging on the metal bolts, pulling and pushing and twisting, but even his berserker strength could not bend the thick steel. He screamed through the wall at them, nonsense in his words. “Natasha!” he said, and other things, and “Natasha!” again. “He wants me, Daddy?” Natasha asked, and her father shook his head and closed his eyes in despair. The bashing and screaming continued until gunshots and explosions replaced them. There was more fighting and more death, and then it became quiet for some time, the only sounds the sobbing of her father and her little brother on the verge of rage. Natasha was petrified. But her fear, and her father’s despair, kept her from the change.

—Mister Wolf, face splashed with drying blood, pressed the pistol into the back of Natasha’s father’s head and pulled the trigger. Natasha squeezed her eyes shut, trying her best to un-see what she had seen, cast out the image of her father’s face bulging out as the silver bullet melted his brain and poured its poison through his body, and even though her brother was screaming she could still hear Mister Wolf’s voice, low and loaded, “I’ve been waiting to get rid of this scum for so long.”

—they were dragged through the courtyard by their legs, tied with steel-wired rope, and however much pleading or shouting Natasha and Peter did, the soldiers would not let go. She could see why; the bodies of their fallen comrades littered the ground, bleeding and torn and all of them dead.
No Lane, no Sophia or their children,
she thought, and the idea came for the first time that perhaps they had gotten away. Perhaps after all this there had been a chance. A chance that started in a syringe, something to calm the burn of silver and negate its poison. “Where are they?” she asked, and Mister Wolf turned to her – a little girl, that’s all she was – and struck her across the face with his pistol. She cried because her daddy was not there to protect her, nor her mummy to calm the hurt. “Shut up, bitch,” Mister Wolf said.
They got away,
she thought, and even though they had left her and her family to die, for a while she was glad.

* * *

The Plain, her brother’s cold execution, the hole, the digging and burying, she remembered all of that, and Tom could barely comprehend the cruelty. In his sleep – where his dreams were Natasha’s memories, steered and controlled and yet going only one way – he cried out, trying to shout at Cole for the terrible things he had done. “One more bullet!” he said, and it was Natasha’s voice begging the soldier to kill her rather then bury her alive with her dead family. But Mister Wolf looked and saw only what he had been told to see: monsters. No little girl, no dead family, only monsters like those that had murdered his friends and comrades. And bury her he did.

* * *

You see?
Natasha asked.
You see what they did to us, Daddy?

Tom came around quickly, rising out of the dream and back to desperate reality. Though the feeling of dread had gone – blossomed into the violence and terror of Porton Down – the dream had left him with a sense that all could never be right with the world again. He had seen terrible hidden things that he had never suspected existed. He was privy to awful secrets. And his wife . . .

Daddy, we have to go,
Natasha said. She moved in his arms.

Tom gasped and tried to push her away, but the front seats prevented her from going any further. She moved on his lap, her limbs and body twisting slowly as if performing an endless stretch. Her face had come away from his chest, her mouth bloody, dried lips pulled back from her teeth like those of a hissing dog.

“Are you coming back to life?” he said.

I was never quite dead.

“What are you doing to me?”

Only good. Helping you.

“Helping me so that I can help you?”

Of course,
she said, and her honesty made him hate himself.
And helping you because you don’t deserve what has happened. None of us do. We berserkers were wronged by Mister Wolf, and now he has done wrong to you as well.

“You want revenge?” Tom asked, thinking of Jo lying on the back seat of their ruined car . . . the image distant, like a faded black and white impression of crystal-clear reality.

I want to be safe,
she said. Tom tried not to look down at her face, but he could not help himself. He thought of the little girl she had been in the dream, confused and frightened and forced to watch her mother gunned down, her father and brother executed in front of her. He cried. They were dry tears, sobs heaving at his shoulders and reminding him of the pain lying dormant in his back, waiting to be reawakened. She was helping him. She was making him better. Whether by doing so she was making him into something else entirely, it would not do to consider right now.

“Let’s go,” he said. “In then out again. Food, drink, toilet, and then we’ll go to meet them. Lane and Sophia. We’ll go to them and they can take you Home.”
And I’ll find Steven,
he thought,
and will he look like those things that were chained up at Porton Down? Those people, living food, chained to the wall for the berserkers to have at whenever they felt hungry?
“Will he?” Tom asked out loud, but Natasha did not answer.

He looked down at the girl in his arms – the corpse which had started to move – and opened the car door.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The latter years of Tom’s life had been dominated by the loss of his only child. Since then he had spent a long time thinking about what this meant, and how he had changed, and how Steven’s death had affected everything. He had come to realise that there are times that pin your life to the curtained agenda of the universe. These vital moments – not necessarily moments, but instances that dictate the course of your life – can be few and far between, or many and varied. They can be significant happenings, or apparently inconsequential events. They set the course of your future and paint the route of your past, and your present pivots around them.
defining

When Tom climbed from the car with Natasha in his arms there came one such moment. A policeman passed by just as Tom nudged the car door shut with his hip. He was tall and thin and tired-looking, but his eyes changed as they passed over Tom and Natasha. Became more alert. Became
aware.

A second later the policeman looked away, frowning, and rubbed at his temples as he passed through the sliding doors into the service station, as if trying to massage a memory back into his tired mind.

She’s in them as well!
Tom realized.

A mother passed by towing two children by their arms. All three looked at Tom and what he carried, and all three looked away again, the children ceasing their struggles and complaints.

In their minds, just like she’s in mine.

Yes,
Natasha said,
except you know me.

Tom walked on, crossing the car park and skirting between cars. In a couple of vehicles he saw people glancing at him and then away again, slight frowns creasing their brows. A man tightened his grip on a steering wheel, knuckles as white as his face. A woman picked up a book and opened it, scanning its upside-down pages. He approached a group of teenagers wearing baggy jeans and baseball caps, laughing and joking and cursing their way up their pack’s pecking order. He paused, Natasha’s weight shifted in his arms, and he doubted her. She silenced his doubt when the teenagers fell quiet, all six of them looking down as if comparing their sneaker brands.

Tom walked by, passed through the sliding doors into the services, made for the toilets. More people ignored him, and he felt a thrill at what was happening. He felt invisible. He was invulnerable, even though the bullet in his back was grinding against a bone, injecting his spine with a pain that even Natasha could not swallow whole. Services had always struck Tom as impersonal places where nobody really cared; now, he was as far away from the centre of attention as he had even been.

Once in the bathroom he went to the farthest cubicle, locked the door and sat on the toilet seat. His legs and arms began to shake and he had to set Natasha down, resting her back against the closed door. The blanket fell from her face and he closed his eyes, not wishing to see the mummified features that seemed to have changed.
Were her eyes really that open before?
he wondered.
Was her mouth really that wide?
Natasha was not with him right then, and he hoped she could not hear his thoughts. He would have hated for her to hear the disgust he could not keep from his mind.

“I need to clean up,” he said. His voice called her in from wherever she had been and the body in the blanket shifted slightly, settling. Tom looked away.

He grabbed wads of toilet roll and went about cleaning the blood from his back.

“You were controlling those people,” he said.

No, just giving them other pictures in their heads.

“Some of them looked confused.”

It depends on what pictures I give them.

“What pictures do you give me?” he asked, trying to remember what Jo sounded and smelled like, unable to do either.

Soon you can mourn,
Natasha said.
Soon.

“You’re controlling me—”

No, Daddy! Just giving you different pictures.

Tom unrolled some more toilet paper and dabbed again at his wound. Most of the blood had dried into a hard crisp across his back and buttocks, and he would need more than dry tissue to remove it. But he was more concerned about the wound itself. It should have killed him. He knew that Natasha was doing something to ease the pain, giving while she took, but the fact that he could find nothing of the hole other than a scabbed mess of ridged skin and blood brought him back to Natasha’s memory of the attack on the house. In the boat on the return journey, she had looked at her family and seen their wounds already healing. That was a berserker thing, and now it was happening to him.

Tom cleaned up as best he could, used the toilet, then left the bathroom. Natasha cast herself about again and eyes were averted, comments died on lips, attention flowing away from Tom and Natasha as if they were the opposite pole to everyone else. In the shop he picked up some food and drink and a couple of t-shirts. He paid the girl behind the till, trying his best to catch her eye, but she looked anywhere but at Tom. He hefted the weight in his arms but the girl did not look. She put his change on the counter instead of dropping it in his hand, turned away from him and ran her fingertips down a rack of cigarette packets, as if the truth to life itself was printed alongside the government health warnings.

“I’m going now!” Tom shouted. Music continued to play through speakers hidden away in the ceiling, people still chattered and ate and stretched road stiffness from their limbs, slot machines pinged and flashed and lured people in . . . but none of it touched Tom and Natasha. They were ghosts, and by the time they left Tom guessed they would be little more than a niggle in the mind of even the most observant traveller.

Back at the BMW he lowered Natasha into the front passenger seat and strapped her in without thinking. Easing into the driver’s seat, fingers stroking the key in the ignition, he looked sideways at the girl. She remained still, and all he could see of her was a matted clump of hair protruding above the ratty blanket.

“You’re a little girl,” he said. “You’re not a corpse anymore.”

“Thank you, Daddy,” Natasha said, her crackling voice muffled beneath the blanket.

He turned the key and started the car, and as he pulled back onto the motorway Natasha was a presence beside him as never before.

* * *

Cole had never understood the true meaning of frustration until now. The last ten years had been a period of dashed hopes and rekindled fears, and each time he had felt close to tracking down the escaped berserkers something had come along to scuttle his plans. He realised now that he had never really been close at all; it was always his mind telling him that he was, giving subconscious meaning to the life he was leading and the things he had done to get there. The memory of people dying by his hand was not an easy one to live with, and it was only the importance of what he was doing that kept him going. He had been angry, yes, and impatient, and disappointed that most leads seemed to lead nowhere. But true frustration had not been a part of his life, not like he felt it now. This was heart-pumping, sweat-inducing, ball-shrinking angst, a burning desire to get moving tempered by the certainty that to stay here was his best hope. Every second he hung around the garage – still ignored by the mechanic, still Someone Else’s Problem – Tom and Natasha drew further away. He opened his mind to the berserker bitch but there was nothing, no sign that she was there, no indication that she was even listening for him anymore. With every breath and heartbeat he lost them some more.

Cole burned his fingers lighting a cigarette, stupidly pleased at the distraction. Pacing the forecourt of the garage was pointless, so he went around to the back, looking for a suitable landing site for a helicopter. It was quiet around there, deserted, a field strewn with old car parts and oily engines like machines’ tombstones. Too dangerous for a helicopter.