Berserk (31 page)

Lane pulled himself upright, seeming to exert a massive effort to do so. His arm wavered, and then lowered. He dropped the pistol. “Your . . . last . . . chance,” he said, and the final word transformed into a roar.

Higgins looked at Tom for the first time, then down at Natasha nestling in his arms. “You have no idea,” he said, and then he raised his pistol and shot himself through the mouth.

Lane and Sophia were upon him before his body hit the ground.

* * *

Tom retreated back into the unit as the berserkers took their fill. He carried Natasha with him and settled her in an old rocking chair, its reupholstered seat and back torn up by bullets. The chair moved for a couple of seconds, and then kept moving. Even above the sounds of ravenous feeding from outside, Tom could hear the subtle creaks of the girl’s torso bending and stretching.

Daddy,
she said, her voice uneven and strained.
Daddy!

The chair rocked.

Tom felt sick, as if he had eaten a handful of uncooked meat. The taste in his mouth was one that should have never been there. He looked at his hands but there was no sign of blood, and for that he was relieved.

Natasha did not look as though she could be alive; her face was frozen, hair still matted with mud, limbs and body dried and stiffened by time. And yet her joints had begun to work, and every small movement in one limb seemed to encourage movement in another.

The chair rocked.

She shifted as if every bone in her body were broken, a fluid motion that seemed to feed upon itself. Now that she had started, Tom wondered whether she would ever stop.

“What is it?” he said, but he knew, and she said,
You know.
“I can’t help you,” he said. “I can’t take you out there while they’re—”

You don’t need to take me out.
Her mental voice was a pained whine, and her real voice came as a low rattle: “Daddy . . .”

He knew that she was right. And he knew what she was doing to him. He supposed he had known from the beginning, and as he turned from her he saw the body of the dead woman, her face ruined and her legs blown off, and he could not tear his eyes away.

“Daddy!”

His back flared with pain, and Tom could do nothing but return to Natasha. He lifted her from the chair, sat there himself and settled her in his lap. She was heavier than before, and her teeth seemed sharper, her suckling mouth more eager. He looked down at where she gnawed at his chest, saw his blood bubbling there, and closed his eyes.

In his mind he saw more murder at the hands of the berserkers. But this time the memories were his own.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Cole had found a navigator inside his head. While he drove he waited for Natasha to visit him again, entice him on to whatever fate she believed awaited him. He was happy to follow. This was his life, and the lives of everyone he had ever loved, known, met, seen, heard or killed. This was history being written, being created here and now. One bullet from his pistol could change the world. All he asked for was a chance.

So he had wandered the streets of his mind, passing through sunlight and looking to the shadows. They hid many things and some of them he saw and knew: ghosts of friends, the wraiths of the people he had killed. But none of them harmed him, none of them frightened him, because they were all of his own making. Natasha did not project herself into their images and steer them to attack. The woman from the MX5 was there, but was a product of his own memory. However much he felt disturbed at her being in the dusky alleys of his mind, he knew that she was all him. He saw her black panties and pale milky thighs, and that was the final sight he’d had of her, that was all, there was nothing else in the memory. Nothing like Natasha had made for him.

He moved on, passing through intersections where his life had changed or may change in the future. He saw no street names and decided that he had to name them himself. In the next couple of hours perhaps he would make a whole new map of his life, draw it fresh purpose, a totally different emphasis. He was a murderer and that would never change, but the justification he sought lay in those blank street signs, buried at crossroads he had yet to reach.

People watched him from the buildings lining these long roads, and they were the unknowns he was trying to save. None of them knew of Natasha, or Lane, or the others; none of them were aware of the danger they were in every second of every minute of their lives. None of them realised that there really monsters. The fact that they would never appreciate what Cole was about to do did not concern him in the slightest. He was not acting for fame and fortune; he would be signing no book deals; he would appear on no talk shows.
were

And then, driving north on the motorway, waiting for Natasha to return and tell him where she was, Cole felt a shadow beneath the streets. It moved quickly, passing under his feet as he looked up at the faceless masses staring from the skyscrapers of his soul. He looked down at the road and saw that he was standing on a manhole, edges rusted into the frame but its promise still obvious.

He did not want to go down there.

The shadow burrowed away to the left, shattering windows and cracking façades above, and Cole followed on the surface, turning left from the motorway and following the road in his mind’s eye. He ran faster as he drove faster, keeping an eye on the road and his mind on the shadow where it thundered on ahead. It was not Natasha – he could not feel those slick fingers in his mind, and even if she were hiding down there in his darkest subconscious he would know her – but he did not question its presence. Perhaps as she had refined her ability to communicate in those long years below the ground, maybe he had too, in that confused decade just gone by. Perhaps his hate for her was so strong that it had torn itself from him, taking on a shadow of its own true existence. The thought that he may be following his own disembodied hatred did not concern him at all.

The shadow urged him left again, and as the sun settled, so the streets of his mind lost focus.
Nearing something dark,
he thought.
Closing in on the terror.

The shadow disappeared and Cole wailed, scraping the car against an old stone wall. But then he saw light other than the setting sun, and he knew that he was there.

Down in a shallow valley, at the edge of a spread of industrial buildings, a ball of fire blossomed into the sky.

* * *

“We’re leaving.” Someone nudged Tom’s shoulder and he jerked awake. For a second he had no idea where he was. He’d been dreaming of blood and death and the stink of bodies turned inside out. Awake now, relief washed through him, but the stench and taste returned when he remembered what had happened, and what was still happening.

He had to pull Natasha away from his chest, wincing as her teeth brought a small flap of skin with them. He gasped, she sighed and turned her head to face him.
Can she really see me?
he thought.

Not yet,
Natasha said, stroking smooth fingers through his mind.
But soon.
He looked away from the girl’s face.

Sophia was rearranging her clothing, trying to hold it together in the places where it had stretched and torn. She wiped blood from her mouth and chin.

“Where are we going?” he asked. “Are we going Home?”
Home!
Natasha said, excitement lightening her voice.

Sophia frowned. Shrugged. “Just get up and come with us,” she said. “This place will be swarming soon, and we’re in no state for another fight.”

Tom so wanted to ask about Steven, but something held him back. As he climbed from the rocking chair he saw Lane and Sophia helping their children into a Range Rover, holding Dan and Sarah beneath the arms and shoving on their rumps. Dan especially seemed to be having trouble climbing into the vehicle, and twice he slipped and tumbled back out, only to be caught by Lane. He had not reverted as fully as Lane and Sophia. His legs were still lengthened, though thin, and his head was enlarged, forehead wide and sloping. He saw Tom watching and growled at him. Lane turned also and gave Tom a withering look.

Tom looked down at Natasha, averting his eyes.

We’re not immortal,
she said, but Tom had his doubts. He had seen the bullet holes in Dan’s naked body, still leaking blood, one or two seeming to emit small tails of smoke or steam. If all that did to him was make it difficult to climb into a Range Rover, then perhaps they really were immortal.

“You wake after ten years in your grave and tell me that?” Tom asked.

“Come
on
!” Sophia called.

Tom started to carry Natasha from the wrecked business unit when the telephone rang. Normality beckoned on the end of the line, either someone with a work request, or perhaps the dead couple’s babysitter, ringing to tell them that their son had just taken his very first steps or spoken his first word. Steven’s first word had been Mama. Tom paused. He had no intention of answering the phone, but for a few precious seconds it took him away, seeming to instill a sense of peace over the terrible scene.

But the call would never be answered, and sometime soon the caller would learn the truth.

As he walked across the car park Tom tried not to see the bodies. Whatever strangeness had overcome him earlier – and really he what it was – had faded into disgust. He could still hear the roar and crackle of fire as the Chinooks and the BMW burned, the flames sparking and snapping as they consumed ammunition or exploded air pockets. The stench of cooking meat hung in the air. Tom’s mouth watered. He stepped on soft things but did not look down.
knew

“They’re taking us Home,” Natasha said, her true voice suddenly smoother than it had ever been before. In that voice Tom heard emotion that he had never suspected her of possessing. She was a child coming back to life, a child going Home, and she needed him so much.

“Yes,” he said. “And there I’ll find my Steven.”

He climbed into the Range Rover, took the cargo space with Natasha, and everyone fell silent as Lane drove them away from the cooling dead.

* * *

I don’t need you any more, Mister Wolf. My new daddy has taken me to them, and you’ve lost, you’re wasted, you’re a piss in a lake. Nobody will ever know of you, Cole. Nobody will ever understand what you were doing. You’re a murderer, and you’ll be caught and put in prison. You’ll die in there. And I wish it could be more. I wish you could meet Lane and Sophia again. And their children, remember them? Mister Wolf, I so wish you
could see what has become of their children. They’d like you. Maybe raw, maybe just breathed on by a flame. But they’d like you so much.

They’re thriving. I hope you remember that. Living the life they were always meant to live before you bastards caught us and put us away. We’re back, Mister Wolf. Back where we belong. And now we’re going Home.

“Stupid little bitch. little bitch! You think you’re all there is? You think you’re the centre of all this? There’re too many parts, too many involvements for there to be any one centre. You’ve led me on for so long, do you think I’m just going to give up? Do you really, honestly think I don’t have my own ways and means? Natasha, sweetheart, I’ve got a magazine full of bullets here for you, and now that I’ve found my shadow I’ve also found you.”
Stupid

There’s nothing for you to find, Mister Wolf. We were always the shadows in the night. You took away our history, but we’ve won it back. Now fuck off, you pathetic man. Fuck off and kill some more women.

“You sound so confident, but you can’t see everything, can you? Can’t see past my shadow. It’s hiding things from you. Hiding what I can see. I’ll see you very, very soon.”

Cole’s shadow rose up and filled the night, and he and Natasha could talk no more.


* * *

“We going Home, aren’t we?” Natasha said, her voice a whisper in the silence. Dan was sleeping, and Sarah leaned back in her seat as her wounds healed. In the front seats Sophia and Lane glanced at each other.
are

“Home?” Lane asked.

“Home,” Natasha said, louder this time. “The place berserkers come from. The place we were always meant to find again. You’ve come from there, haven’t you? That’s where you’ve been, isn’t it? And you’re taking us back there now.”

Back Home,
Tom thought.
Back to Steven. But if that’s the case, why am I so terrified to say his name?

“Oh, Natasha,” Lane said, “your mother really did talk such shit.”

In his arms, the girl turned to face Tom.
Daddy?
she said in his mind. And suddenly Tom knew.

“Where’s my son?” he asked. Sophia turned in the passenger seat and looked back at him, and for once there was something other than dismissal in her eyes. It may have been regret.

That was when the Mondeo swerved around a bend in the road and struck the Range Rover head-on.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The shadow within had smothered him. Everywhere he looked, above and below, blackness held him within its embrace. He coughed and heard nothing. He sniffed and smelled nothing. The shadow had surged from his underground and flooded the byways of his consciousness, and it was only as a hazy light began to grow ahead that Cole realised he was being protected.

The shadow changed slowly from black to an oppressive, milky white, and Cole panicked. He could hardly breathe or move. If he opened his mouth he felt something – not the shadow – trying to force its way in. He pushed forward, attempting to pull away from the thing’s grasp, but it held him fast; again, it was not the shadow. He was not sure whether he was even conscious, but the pain suddenly bit into his thighs again, the bruising raw and loud, and he started to find sense.

Airbag. It had been the last thing on his mind when he swung the car around the corner and saw the Range Rover heading his way. He’d had maybe two seconds to react.

Must be them.

I’ve got the initiative
. . .
I’ve got the surprise
. . .