Berserk (16 page)

He did not have time . . .

Natasha is drawing me on because while I’m still hot after them, Roberts will keep on going
. . .
I take this BMW and that fat bitch will be on the phone to the police in seconds
. . .
I could kill them. Slurry pit. Be ages before they were found
. . .
And just what is it Natasha has? How is she ‘improved’?

The woman was glancing back and forth from him to the boy. Cole looked at him, back to her, then to the farmer. “Oh for fuck’s sake!” he said. He put the gun back in his pocket. “You – John – go and get me the car keys and I’ll be on my way.”

“Don’t you move, John!” the woman said. She had edged back into the doorway and reached inside the room, and Cole expected her to bring out the shotgun at any moment. Then he’d have two choices – run, or shoot her. That was somewhere he didn’t want to get to.
Ten seconds ago I was thinking about killing them and throwing them in the slurry pit, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I?
But unless something changed very soon, that’s just where he would be. Run, or shoot.

“Shit.” Cole looked around the farmyard, saw a herd of cows looking out from a barn with sad faces. Back to the woman. She was farther into the house now, and maybe her hand had already found the gun. The boy stared at his mother, wide-eyed. John, the fat farmer, turned in circles, seemingly at a total loss.

And every second Natasha grew farther away.

Cole pulled the gun and shot one of the cows.

The herd panicked, perhaps more at the blast of the gun than because one of their number was thrashing on the floor of the shed, its skull ruptured and pumping blood into the shit-covered yard.

From the house Cole heard the clatter of the dropped shotgun. Janet disappeared inside.

“John, get me the car keys,” Cole said, already running across the yard. He guessed he had a few seconds before the woman gathered her senses. The reality of the gunshot would have muddled her mind. The sight of the cow dropping and sprawling in its own bloody shit had been enough to send her running, and Cole knew from experience that people unused to violence took time to react to it. Even if she had gone for the phone, her hands would be shaking too much to use it.

He leapt straight up the steps into the kitchen, almost tripping over the dropped shotgun, carrying on through to the hallway where he found Janet fumbling with the phone. He snatched it from her hand, dropped it and shot the connection box from the wall at her feet. The gunshot deafened him, and he barely heard her scream. She stared at him wide-eyed and petrified, and yet there was still a glint of defiance in her eyes, a look that said,
I’m scared shitless, yes, but give me a minute and you’ll regret ever having found this place.

Cole believed her, and he could not help but be impressed.
This is the sort of person I’m fighting to help,
he thought, and the realisation was yet more validation for what he was doing, and what he had already done. He heard the crack of Nathan’s neck and the woman scientist pleading for her life a second before he shot her, and he saw justification for those actions in this woman’s hearty defiance.

He showed her the gun, waved it once in front of her face and then left the house, picking up the shotgun and plucking a set of car keys from a hook by the back door.

The farmer and his son were standing together by the BMW, staring wide-eyed at the doorway. As Cole emerged the farmer muttered something unintelligible, tears coming to his eyes.

“I shot the phone box from the wall,” Cole said. “To be honest, I think it would take more than a silver bullet to kill your missus. Now, I’m going. I’m guessing you have mobile phones, or another phone elsewhere in the house, but I’d really appreciate it if you held off using it to call the police. I won’t waste time pleading with you, but I’ll say this: I could have shot you all. I could … have shot … you all. That way I’d ensure that I got away, and it would give me a lot more time to catch the man I’m after. And the more chance I have of catching him the better it is. For everyone. Am I getting through? Comprendé?”

The farmer nodded, eyes still wide.

“I should be talking to your wife,” Cole muttered. He nudged the farmer aside and pressed the remote locking button. The BMW opened up to him, he climbed in and started the engine. Smooth. Fast. But he’d have to dump it within the hour.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Those echoes of Natasha had been too remote, she had offered no clues, and Cole had no idea which direction to take. Logic dictated north-west, back toward Wales and Roberts’ home. But something else nagged at Cole, and the more he thought about it the more elusive it became. He headed north, listening out for Natasha, willing her to come back to him with her taunting faux-child’s voice, hating the idea of her in his mind but knowing that it was the only way to track her. The fact that he now believed she
wanted
him to follow changed nothing. She would slip up, or Roberts would make a mistake, and Cole would only need the slightest opportunity to put a bullet in the bitch’s head.

He threw the farmer’s shotgun into a field beside the road – it was too difficult to hide – and the .45 was back in his pocket. The magazine was reloaded. The near miss at the cottage had angered him, but he was doing his best to put that anger to good use. He was trying not to think of the woman he had killed that morning. She had been in the way, that was all.

None of this was his fault.

“She didn’t improved,” he said. “She felt
feel
dead
.” Natasha and her chains had knocked him out on the moor, and even though he had not seen her in the darkness he had felt her, a damp, slick thing, filled with no signs of life at all. Cold. Wet. She had been below ground for ten years. Cole could still remember putting her there, the cries for mercy that turned into screams of rage as the soil was piled in on top of her.
I’ll see you again,
she had said.

I’m a good man,
he thought for the thousandth time, and he pictured the farming family he could so easily have left weighted down at the bottom of their slurry pit.

And then it came to him. Not dwelling on what was nagging him brought it home; her voice, when it was loud enough to hear, had come from the north-east. He was not certain how he knew this but the knowledge was welcome, and undoubted. When he had picked up her voice on the way to the farm something inside had clicked, a direction-finder that he was unaware he even had. Turning his head left and right now did nothing, but when he heard her again, he would be sure.

At the next junction he turned right and headed east, reading a map book as he drove, trying to find a road that lead north-east.

Who knew, he may even luck out. Find the right road, come across Roberts burying his wife in some field, kill him and open the boot and stare down at Natasha, gloating right back at her as he placed the .45 against her leathery skull and pulled the trigger.

is
Just how
she improved?

Yeah, right, it would be that easy.

Fucker
. . . he heard a few minutes later.
Eat my shit, Mister Wolf
. . .
lost
. . .
going
. . .
fucker.

Yeah, right.

* * *

Tom remembered a story his mother had told him when he was in his teens. It had affected him strongly then, and now it seemed to say a lot about the situation he was in, both literally and in a spiritual sense. He found some solace in it; there was precious little else to comfort him. And remembering the story brought him somehow closer to his mother. However old a man may be, he always wants his mum in times of crisis and stress.

She was a nurse for much of her life, and when she was in her twenties she befriended an elderly patient in the hospital where she worked. He was in his nineties, a veteran of two World Wars, blinded at Dunkirk, and a compulsive gambler. Horses were his preference, and he chose them by name alone. He liked names, he said, because they told him much that his ruined eyes could not. Tom’s mother would take the old man on trips from the hospital during her days off, sitting with him at the bookies while he placed bets and stared at the ceiling, listening to the races broadcast live over the radio. If he lost he would smile and pat her hand; if he won he would buy her lunch and tell her about his life. She was more than content to listen, she said, because he was a fascinating old man. Whether he talked about the trench hell of World War One or his time on a farm as a youngster, his stories were always rich and engaging. Perhaps such storytelling talent had something to do with being blind.

One day, on the drive back to the hospital, she looked in her rear-view mirror and saw him smiling up at the ceiling, a look on his face she had never seen before. “What a beautiful light!” he said, and he was still smiling as his head rested back against the seat.

She pulled over and felt the old man’s wrist, but she already knew that he was dead. She drove to a police station and told them what had happened, and when she said she was a nurse they suggested she should drive him to the hospital herself. So there she was, in the middle of London, a corpse in the back of her car with betting slips spilling from his pockets and that beatific grin forever on his face. She received more than a few strange looks from pedestrians and other drivers, and by the time she arrived at the hospital she was laughing through her tears.

Tom knelt in the front seat of his ruined car and stared back at Jo’s corpse. There was no grin on her face, other than the clown’s smile painted there in dried blood. And no one could mistake her as sleeping. Not with the wound in the back of her head, and the amount of blood on her night clothes.

“I hope you found the beautiful light,” Tom said, reaching back to touch his dead wife’s hand. “You my light. I’m sorry, Jo. It’s all my fault. I’m so sorry.”
were

Natasha, perhaps using her child’s honest sense of what is right and wrong, remained silent for a while as Tom wept.

* * *

Later, Natasha said,
He’s coming for us.

“So what can I do about it? He’s a killer, he’s got a gun. I have my dead wife and a child’s corpse in a ruined car. It’s finished.” Tom found no hope in that morning’s dawn, and the potential only for pain.

Not for Steven. Daddy, all this was for Steven, wasn’t it? How can it be finished when it’s only just begun?

“I don’t believe you,” Tom said. He was sitting in the driver’s seat, trying to work out what to do. He could think of nothing.

Natasha retreated to a deep corner of his mind and began to sob.
I’m only doing this for you,
she said.

He wondered how a dead girl could cry. “I don’t believe that either.”

The girl was silent, still sobbing, and she withdrew and left him alone.

Tom gasped at the sensation of being abandoned and leaned back in his seat.
Was
she lying? Could Steven really still be alive? He felt in his bones that he could, and if there was even the slightest chance that his son was not dead, he owed it to himself – and to Jo – to try to find him. There was little else left for him now, nothing to go home to, no future . . .

No future. His hopes and dreams of a gentle old age spent with his wife had been blasted away by that bastard’s gun.

Grief birthed anger, and Tom realised that he had been angry since that first encounter on the Plain. It had kept him going, boosted adrenalin into his system and given his aging muscles precious fuel to drive him on. He had excavated a mass grave and crashed his way from a farmyard under fire. That was not real, not him at all, and yet he had mud under his fingernails and the dead wife to prove it all.

And the thing in the boot. He had that, too.

“Natasha?” he asked.

Daddy?

He ignored that. Let her have her own dreams for now, whoever or whatever she was. “Natasha, how do you know where Steven may be? You have to tell me what you know if you want me to trust you. Look at it with my eyes … I’m sitting here talking to fresh air, and a corpse I just dug up is communicating with me in my head. You have to understand my doubt. You have to accept my uncertainty.”

I already showed you something about me while you slept,
she said.
That was honest, wasn’t it? It’s bad to lie. Only naughty children lie. I’m not naughty. I’m a berserker, and my family were berserkers, and they kept us hungry so that we would do those things for them.

“Who?” But Tom already knew.

Them. The men. The soldiers.

“But why use you? Why not do it themselves?”

There’s more to see, Daddy. I can show you if you like. But not yet, and not here. Mister Wolf is coming, I can feel him, he’s getting closer. We have to go. You have to take me away from here. I can show you the way, but you’re the only one who can look after me.

“We have to go to the police,” Tom said, staring into the hedge beside the car. “Jo is dead. She was murdered. We have to tell the police. Have to. They’ll catch him, they’ll protect—”

Me?
Natasha said, and her voice had changed. Still a little girl’s voice, but older and wiser now. Harder.
They’ll protect me? One look and I’ll be sent for tests, cut apart. And you, what will they do to you when they find me in your car? How will you explain me? And Mister Wolf is one of them anyway, they’ll know him, they won’t stop him, or maybe he’ll kill them too, and we have to go, because the Wolf is coming and I
can’t stop him and you won’t stop him, not again. Nothing can stop him. He killed my family and he’ll kill me in the end, if we don’t go now.

“You’re confusing me.”

I’m telling the truth, Daddy. I wouldn’t lie to you. He’s a bad man, and no one can stop him, not the police, not you, no one. Our only chance is to find the berserkers that got away before he does, and then they’ll help us.