Berserk (6 page)

Tom suddenly remembered the shovel and the going became easier. He threw the soil behind him, not wishing to pile it up in case he had to move it again. He placed the shovel, stood on it, pressed down, bent and heaved up another load of soil. He took care not to work too close to the skull to avoid damaging it. That could be Steven down there . . . or maybe there were more, the remains of fifteen men buried deep after being killed by whatever had escaped from Porton Down.

Tom paused and looked at his hands, the mud beneath his nails, the muck already ground into the creases between his fingers. Whatever they had died from could still be here. Plague? Some dreadful chemical warfare agent? It could be eating into him right now, entering his bloodstream and revelling in this unexpected new victim. He closed his eyes. He felt no different, other than the fact that he was digging up a secret mass grave close to a biological warfare establishment.

He laughed out loud, fell to his knees and held his stomach. The shovel dropped and landed in the hole he had created, clanking against the top of the skull, and Tom’s laughter turned to tears. Tears for himself, for Jo, for Steven buried somewhere beneath him. He could turn and leave, accept the truth now that the lie was revealed, get on with his life. Or he could carry on digging. He had come this far.

My son’s corpse? Do I really want to see that? His skeleton, his skull, whatever is left of his skin?
He looked up at the sun, squinting, seeing no answers there.

“It’s madness,” he said, and the sound of his own voice startled him into action. He picked up the shovel and worked around the skull.

A few minutes later he revealed the first eye socket. Tom backed away and slid around the hole to work at the back of the skull. He had no wish to be watched. He knelt and used his hands again, and minutes later they tangled in a chain. Tom cursed as he felt the metal pinch his finger, but then he tugged gently at the chain around the skeleton’s neck, bringing the dog tags up into the sun for the first time in a decade. He did not question why they were still there, why they had not been removed, the panic that this suggested in the men who had buried the bodies. He not. Because here, at last, was a name.
could

His heart thumped as he moistened his thumb and rubbed it on the metal, cleaning away the muck. He scraped with his thumbnail, revealing the letters and numbers, sobbing as he did so. Tears blurred his vision and he wiped them away, smearing mud across his face.

Gareth Morgan. This was not his son.

Tom kept digging around the skeleton, not so careful now that he knew it was not Steven. He was sweating, his clothes stuck to his body with sweat and grime, and his heart was hammering from the exertion.

Bastards!
Anger filtered in past the shock.
The bastards, killed our sons and lied to us about it!
The significance of this weighed heavy, and the implications of what he was doing suddenly felt so much more serious. If he was captured doing this – uncovering a scandal that could very well explode the heart of the British government – what would be done? Would he simply be added to the hole before it was filled in again?

He stood, looked around, saw the buzzards still circling high overhead, then carried on digging.

Around the remains of the stranger called Gareth Morgan the soil suddenly became loose, and Tom stumbled as the dirt fell into a hollow with a rush. His foot sank in, he dropped the shovel and spread his arms, falling onto his rump beside the skull.
Mass grave,
he thought, and then the smell hit him. Wet rot, decay, age, not the smell of the recently dead but the stench of time. He leaned back and pulled his foot free, rolling across the disturbed ground away from the new hole and the smell drifting up from it. He closed his eyes and buried his face in heather, breathing in the muddy freshness of it, trying to clear the smell of his son’s death from his lungs.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Tom said, suddenly sobbing into the ground. He had no idea what he was doing. His hands clawed, fingers dug in, as if afraid that he would fall off the world if he loosened his grip. And wasn’t he doing that already? So much had changed in the last hour that he would not be surprised to open his eyes and find the world spinning the opposite way. Smelling the honest peaty smell of the ground beneath him, he wished that he had never overheard those two men in the pub.

But he had. And King had given him the map, and now here he was. Looking for his dead son.

Tom crawled back to the skeleton – revealed to its ribcage now that the soil around it had tumbled into a hollow – and stared down at what he had done. There were other bones visible down there, touched by sunlight for the first time in years. The corpses must have been piled in together, covered over with a layer of soil and heathers, and as their flesh rotted away beneath the ground it left hollows behind, dark wet spaces filled with nothing but the gas of decay and the undying echoes of their violent deaths. The skeleton called Gareth Morgan still wore the remnants of a uniform and shreds of leathery skin clung to its bones, moist and browned by the damp soil. Beneath it a tangle of bones and clothing, skin and hair, marked where other bodies had found their final resting place.

“Oh God,” Tom muttered, reaching down into the dark, “oh God, oh God . . .” He could taste decay on his tongue, sweet yet vile. He wondered whether each body smelled different in decomposition, and if so which smell was his son.

But death was the great equaliser. Personality had no part in rot. Humour or seriousness held no truck with the processes of bacteria and decay. Steven was long gone from here, yet Tom had never felt so close.

He slid forward on the wet soil, his outstretched arm sinking deeper into the void. He cried out in alarm but came to a stop, his hand closing around a clammy bone. He pushed gently but there was no give. The shovel was under his stomach, and he eased it out and used the blade to shift more of the soil above the grave. It took little effort now, and by kneeling up he found he could simply push the heather to one side like a carpet, revealing the horrors of what lay beneath.

Sunlight struck the bones and revealed their wetness. Subtle autumn heat ate away the coolness of their decade-long rest. The buzzards cried out and drifted away, perhaps sensing death even from such a height. Tom knelt among the rotted corpses of so many men and looked up, welcoming the sun on his face and the sense of his skin stretching and burning. “Jo,” he said, but she did not answer him. “Steven.” Still no answer. Tears dripped from his chin and disappeared among the bodies, perhaps cleaning small spots on his son’s bones.

Shaking his head, his whole body shivering, fear and shock and rage combining to draw his mind back from what he was doing, Tom bent over and reached back into the grave.

* * *

Richard Parker. That was not his son. He dropped the dog tags and stared at the skull of the body he had uncovered, its crew-cut of auburn hair so colourful against the stretched grey skin of its face. Here lay a million stories Tom would never know, other than the lie of Richard Parker’s violent death.

He shoved the skeleton aside and delved deeper. He encountered tangles of bones and clothing, and mud-caked hair brushed his hand as he quickly withdrew.

There were too many. He would have to start moving the bodies, them, until he found Steven.
sorting

He’s not here.

Tom shook his head. Where had that idea come from?

He crawled back and prepared to grab hold of the first skeleton, Gareth Morgan, Mr and Mrs Morgan’s son, another soldier whose family had buried a coffin filled with rocks or earth. He wondered whether this boy’s family had doubts about the story as well, and whether they too had entertained the idea of travelling to Salisbury Plain to honour their son on the tenth anniversary of his death.

Tom looked back toward the fence, half expecting to see other fathers coming at him with shovels at the ready. But he was still alone.

Gareth Morgan grinned at him. His skull was almost bare of skin, but there was a hint of a moustache still clinging beneath the hollow of his nose. Tom reached out and grasped the skeleton’s ribs, heaved, and cried out in surprise as it sprang from the ground with a brief sucking noise. He tumbled forward and threw it ahead of him. It landed with a thump and its arms spread above its head, as if relishing the sudden feel of sunlight on its wet bones.
So light,
Tom thought, and he realised he had been thinking of it as a man.

Its spine was snapped, several ribs were broken off, and one thigh bone was splintered and holed. Another violent death.

Tom moved back into the hole and dragged out Richard Parker, hands beneath the skeleton’s armpits, its legs dragging, heavy with wet clothing and the mummified remnants of muscle and skin. He pulled it across to lay next to Gareth Morgan, and the skeletons’ arms seemed to entwine, friends together again.

Back at the hole, Tom went deeper. He pulled out more bodies – some of them rotted down to the bone, some still hanging on to a leathery layer of skin or dried brown flesh – investigated the dog tags, moved the bodies to one side, going deeper still, breathing hard and trying not to pay any attention to his heart as it pummelled at his chest, demanding that he rest, cease, stop this insanity.

It was hot. He could blame his madness on the heat, perhaps.

Tom looked at his muddied hands, felt his forehead, spat in his hand and checked his saliva for blood. No disease had taken him. No chemical warfare agent had turned his insides to mush. Perhaps whatever had killed these men had been released to the air, only to bide its time before striking again. Perhaps it would wipe out the world. Right then, the only thing that mattered for Tom was the image he had built in his mind: Steven’s dog tags, muddied and cold, resting in his hands.

Leigh Joslin, Anthony Williams, Stuart Cook . . . none of these were his son. Jason Collins, Kenny Godden, Adrian Herbert . . . all strangers, all the dead sons of other families. Eight now, and there were more down there, he could see the mess of their bones and skulls and clothing, muddy and damp, he could smell their sweet smell of decay, taste the of this in the air.
wrongness

Tom caught sight of the dead men laid out in a row and looked away, unable to believe what he had done. Joslin’s head had slumped from its mounting atop its spine. Herbert was missing an arm. Godden’s ribs had been smashed, as if something had tried to get inside. Such violence, such death.

The next body he grabbed still wore hair, and dried flesh sunk in between its bones, and its eyes were pale yellow orbs nestling in its skull. Its strange, misshapen skull. Tom frowned and leaned in closer, edging to one side to allow more sunlight to enter the depression in the ground. The soldier’s skull seemed elongated, jaw distended, and his teeth must have risen from their roots because they looked too large for the head. His brow was heavy, nose cavity bulging out over the mouth in a canine aspect.

“What the hell . . . ?” Tom whispered. There was a bullet hole in the back of the skull. Perhaps that accounted for the distortion.

He reached out and grabbed the body’s legs, trying to ignore the feel of cold leathery flesh beneath his hands, clammy with moisture. He pulled. The body shifted a few inches toward him then stopped, held fast by something he could not see.

The skull had remained exactly where it was.

“Fuck!” Tom moved sideways to another skeleton, dragging it up the small slope to the expanding pile laid out on the heather above. He checked the dog tag, discarded it – another stranger – and went back for more.

Jo grabbed his hand again. She squeezed tighter and Tom cried out, a wretched exhalation of despair. He looked up at the sky and it was pure, clean, unsullied by death. But though he saw blue, and heard Jo whispering her love for him, he could still feel the slickness of the grave between his fingers.

Have I changed?
he thought.
Have I changed so much?

He rubbed his fingers together and let his wife go.

“It’s all for you,” Tom said, and he looked down again. The strange skull stared at him with its shrunken eyes. The unnatural distance between it and its departed body gave the whole tableau a surreal aspect, and Tom almost pushed the body back close to the head . . . but its limbs were too long, the ribs too narrow, and why was he doing this? Why was he playing games with himself?

“Steven!” he shouted, and as he dug down again—

He’s not here.

—he wondered when that sensation of being watched had amplified without him really noticing. The buzzards were gone, but the skin of his neck was tingling, set in motion by a gaze he could not pin down.

The weird skull grinned at him through lips shrunken back from the jaws.

“You’re dead,” he said, pulling at another skeleton, not Steven, then another, also not Steven.

And that was it. Eleven bodies excavated and spread across the heather, eleven sets of dog tags, and none of them were his son. There had supposedly been fifteen killed; perhaps Steven and the other three missing had been buried elsewhere, or incinerated, or—

Why leave the dog tags? Too dangerous? Too much risk of infection?

Down in the pit, though . . . there were more. Behind the body he could not move he saw the glint of more bones. He reached underneath and his hands touched something cold, heavy. He tugged the corpse again and heard the chink of metal on metal. He pulled harder and another body slipped from the mud, this one also headless and as deformed as the other. Its skull – left behind – also had a bullet hole behind one ear.

I’m not seeing this,
he thought,
I’ve been digging up fucking corpses and now it’s getting to me, it’s hot, Jo is worried, I’m crying and my tears are distorting everything, I’m
just not seeing this!

The dead thing slithered toward him as he pulled, connected to the first headless body by the thick metal chain, and then another, smaller corpse followed it up. Tom stood and backed away, only partially realising that he still had a hold of the first body’s mummified legs. He brought the dead things with him, two headless adults and what could have only been a child, also headless, its skull lost somewhere in that rank pit.