Berserk (23 page)

As soon as Tom stood from the car several people looked at him: a man walking his dog on a small grassed hill beside the main building; a lorry driver using a cash machine; a mother and her young daughter just exiting the main doors. He was the centre of attention, and they could not help but see the guilt on his face. A burst of dizziness hit him and he leaned back against the car, closing the door and looking up at the sky as if admiring the day. He held onto the handle, sure he was going to pitch left or right at any moment. He could feel something warm running down his leg, and he hoped it was blood.

Daddy!
Natasha called.
Stay awake! Stay standing! Don’t fall down!
There was genuine concern in her voice, and he realised that had been all but lacking up to now. He shook his head, confused.

“I’m doing my best,” he whispered, then bit his lip. Covered in blood and dried mud was bad enough; talking to himself would be sure to mark him as a loony.

When he felt steady enough he lowered his head and opened his eyes. He needed to focus on something, centre his vision to still the crazy gymnastics his balance seemed to be enjoying at the moment. He stared at a huge menu for the burger bar. When the cheeseburger stopped wavering from side to side like a zeppelin in a hurricane he took another deep breath, closed his eyes again, counted to ten.

Nobody was watching him now. Perhaps they had seen the state he was in and decided to move on. Or more likely, he was simply not their business. Strangers are like forgotten photographs to other strangers: the negative is there, but the image is never printed.

Tom shifted sideways with his back against the car. It would look weird to anyone watching, but not as weird as a bloody bullet hole in his back.

And just what the fuck is she doing to me?
he thought.
Or am I still in shock? Bleeding my life away without even feeling it?
He had no answers, and if Natasha heard, she remained silent.

That fuzziness remained, a veil over the past that seemed to dilute its importance. “Jo,” Tom whispered experimentally, but he did not cry.

He reached the boot and popped it open with the electronic key. Now there was no alternative but to lean in and expose his back. “Help me now if you can,” he said, but Natasha was silent once again. He moved the spilled tools aside, shifted an old pair of shit-caked Wellington boots, then gathered up the blanket covering the floor of the boot. It had been chequered once, but successive spillages of livestock food and countless assaults by muddied footwear had turned it into a uniform grey. Filthy.
Just as likely to attract attention with this,
he thought, but then Natasha was back, her young voice filled with excitement like a kid on her way to the zoo.

I’ve been talking with Sophia. They’re not far away now. They’ll tell us where to meet, and they know somewhere safe. Isn’t that fine?

“And Steven?”

A pause, so slight that Tom thought he had imagined it.
He’s at Home,
she said.

“And where is Home?”

It’s a place
. . . Natasha said, trailing off. If she’d had eyes, Tom imagined she would be staring into the distance.
My mother used to tell me about it while I was falling asleep. Below the streets of a city she never named are the tunnels, and below them the caves, and way, way below them is Home. Humans have never been there, only berserkers. It’s huge, alight with fires which have burned forever. The food is the richest, growing from the purest ground. Water collects in pools, the cleanest there is, and there are fish like nowhere else in the world. Some of the dwellings carved from the rock go back to a time before humans walked on two legs. There are other tunnels leading to other places, but it’s Home that berserkers always return to. The cradle of our existence. It’s
. . .
somewhere I can barely imagine, let alone explain.

“I suppose we’ll both see soon enough.” He curled the blanket into a ball and slammed the boot shut, hissing as pain punched him in the back. Something ground around in there, like a rat clawing and gnawing through his flesh in search of another organ to rupture, and Tom had to lean forward and rest against the car, eyes closed once again. “Natasha, I’m going to go, I’m going to collapse and that’ll be it, no Home, no Steven—”

Don’t you fucking dare!

His eyes snapped open. Fear swiped him around the face, and it was as effective as a real slap. The dizziness retreated. The pain decided to stay put, and he could feel it waiting in the shadows for its next opportunity to mess with him.

He had never heard her speak like that. That had not been a little girl’s voice. Those had been the words of someone used to being in control.

is
What
she doing to me?
he wondered yet again, and he thought briefly of what Cole had said.

Mister Wolf might be here soon,
the girl said in his mind, shouting, drawing him away from his own thoughts.
And we won’t get away from him again, not with you shot like that. You’re bleeding, Daddy.
Her voice dropped again, changing from a shout back to a childish whine.
So much blood! Get in the car and hold me before we go, and I’ll make sure we both have the strength for this.

“What are you doing to me?” he asked.

Helping you. Making you strong. Keeping you alive.

“I don’t even know what you are.”

I’m a berserker, just like I’ve told you and shown you. Sit with me for a minute and I’ll dream you some more, show you the truth.

He opened the back door and sat in the car.

Pick me up, hold me like you did before.

Tom manoeuvred Natasha into his lap and cradled her like a baby. He felt a needle-prick at his chest, and this time she moved in his arms, a grotesque shuffle that raised his hackles and sent a tingle down his spine.

We’ll both be well soon,
she said, and then he felt her withdraw from his mind as she began to feed.

With his free hand he spread the dirty blanket over the strange girl. Then he leaned his head back, relishing the warm waves of comfort that spread through his body and took away the pain.

Soon they took the light as well.

* * *

“I’ve shown you what we are,” Natasha said, “and now I’ll show you what they did to us.”

And this was her real, true voice, and she sounded just like a little girl.

* * *

Cole had lost them. He was sure of this, just as he was sure that the MX5 was dying. It coughed and gasped, and something sounded as if it had come loose in the engine.
Of all the dumb fucking luck . . .
But then he
had
murdered the car’s owner, so he supposed there was some cosmic justice at work here.

He was on the motorway heading north, simply because he could move faster that way and it felt as though he was getting somewhere.

The car sputtered again and jerked, and at sixty that was not good. He’d have to pull off soon, or risk having to stop on the hard shoulder. If that happened and the police decided to stop and see if there was any problem, he’d have trouble explaining the blood and brains and bone all over the car’s interior. He could try, he supposed. But it would not be easy.

I’m chasing a monster I buried alive ten years ago, officer, because some stupid twat dug her up without having the slightest fucking idea what he was doing. And now he’s doing his best to take her to more of her kind, where she’ll be looked after and tended and brought back to the land of the living, and I’m afraid of that because there’s something about her, something they did to her at Porton Down. And though I don’t know what it is, I am certain that, along with the Black Death, AIDS and a dash of the Ebola virus on your morning cornflakes, you wouldn’t class it as Good News. Oh, the car? Yes, well, I accidentally blew the driver’s head off when I really only meant to put one in the car body. Pretty brunette. Just the kind of woman I’m trying to protect.

No, that would never work.

Cole took the next exit from the motorway. The car died on the roundabout and he managed to roll downhill into a small petrol station. There was a garage behind it with one car inside, its oily guts strewn across the ground. As the MX5 curved to a halt, the mechanic strolled over, lighting up a cigarette on the way.

“Shit!” Cole climbed from the low car, cursing at the increasing pain in his bruised thighs. “Don’t worry, mate,” he said, nonchalant as he could be. He could feel a splinter of bone stuck into his rear from where he had sat on it.
How bloody casual can I be like this?
he thought. The .45 was a reassuring weight in his belt.

The mechanic looked him up and down. His eyes grew wide, he took a long drag on his cigarette, then nodded. “Yep. S.E.P.” He turned and walked away.

“What?”

The mechanic spoke over his shoulder, still walking. “Somebody Else’s Problem. Douglas Adams. Phone’s in the shop.”

Cole stared after the man in amazement. “Maybe my luck’s changing,” he muttered, but then he pictured the woman he had killed, her pale thighs and black panties and ruined head, and he knew that Lady Luck would never smile at him again.

He limped to the shop, digging his mobile phone from his pocket. Hopefully they’d have toilets inside, and from there he could make the call he had been contemplating for the past hour, one which he had always promised himself he would never make. The call that would guarantee that he would be tried for at least four murders.

He had already tapped in the number.

“I’m too committed,” he said as he entered the shop and spied the sign for the bathroom. The gum-chewing girl behind the till stared at him.

Cole thought of himself as a good person, God-fearing and good. A splinter from an innocent woman’s skull could prick his ass, but that did little to change his mind.

In the bathroom he checked that all the cubicles were empty, stood where he could see the door and pressed ‘dial’ on his phone.

The phone was answered after four rings. It took some discussion and several minutes on hold for him to be passed through, but in the end the familiar voice came on, and Cole felt his instant dislike rising to the fore.

“Major Higgins,” Cole said. “So you’re still licking Her Majesty’s ass?”

* * *

They were in the enclosed rear of some sort of vehicle, being transported to Porton Down. It was moving fast and the roads were bumpy, and if it weren’t for the safety belts they would have been tossed from wall to wall.

There were no windows, and only one weak light. Strong mesh formed six separate cages, three on each side, with a walkway down the centre. The sliding doors to these cells were open today. Natasha sat across from Peter, and their parents sat in the stalls next to them, none of them speaking. Her father seemed to be asleep, but she could see the glint of his eyes beneath his lowered eyelids. Still pumped up from the exertions of the day, his animal instincts kept him awake. Her mother sat with her head resting back against the side of the truck, mindless of the bumps and knocks, staring at the short strip-light in the ceiling. Her face was pocked with two old bullet wounds, put there only hours before. By the time they reached Porton Down the wounds would be totally gone. The effort of healing was tiring her, and Natasha saw her eyelids droop.

Her brother sat wide awake before her, still alight from the hunt. His recent wounds were mere shadows, echoes of pain, and he twitched slightly now and then to shrug off another memory. He had healed more quickly than all of them, but then he the youngest. In humans a child will heal faster than an adult, and so it was with them.
was

They were contained. Though the doors to the cells were unlocked and the light was on, the truck’s rear door was bolted and deadlocked from outside. There was an electronic lock as well; Natasha could see the empty housing where its internal control had been removed. Mister Wolf had taken pleasure in telling them that the truck was heavily reinforced for their own safety. It was fully wired and could be injected with a massive electrical charge. For their protection. Finally, there was a container of nerve gas fitted into a delivery container between the ceiling layers. Again, for their protection. He had smiled whilst telling them this, though there was no comfort behind the expression.
Fuck up,
it said,
and I’ll gas you myself. Make one move to get out, and I’ll light you up like Christmas.
Her father had nodded at Mister Wolf, walked around the truck, tapped at walls and kicked tyres, and then smiled at the soldier as if he had already discovered a flaw in the vehicle’s security.

Natasha was tired but could not close her eyes. She had been cooped up like this with her family many times before, and every time they had remained awake. It was not the fear of confinement, nor the obvious fact that they were prisoners that prevented them from sleeping. It was the knowledge that, one day, they would become expendable. Only one of the humans had ever shown any sign of truly understanding what they were and what they could do, and Mister Wolf made no secret of his desire to be rid of them. His mistake was assuming that the berserkers were unnatural, a slur on creation. If he could only see into their past . . .

Peter’s eyes flickered left and right, scanning the corners of their cells, ever vigilant for a hope of escape. He would not find it, Natasha knew, not here and not now. And she guessed that he knew that too. Her father, eyes almost closed and yet fully awake, waited for a more obvious chance at flight. And her mother felt every vibration of the road through her skull, each twist and turn of the truck. A couple of hours after setting out from the naval port she opened her eyes and announced to her husband and children that they would soon be home.

Home. Natasha could not remember the real Home – the place her parents spoke of often, but only silently in her mind – because she had been a babe in arms when they were caught. Their enclosure at Porton Down was all she knew, other than the places they were sent to on occasion to feed, and destroy. Her brother had been born in captivity. Perhaps that explained why he, more than any of them, was constantly on edge and ready to fall over. The slightest upset would set him raging; the smallest scolding drove him berserk. No problem for his family, but for the humans it made for a challenging time. It was a wonder they had not already tried to destroy him, but they understood the strength of a family.