Berserk

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 northwest, 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 need only the slightest opportunity to put a bullet in the bitch's head.

He threw the farmers' shotgun into a field beside the road—it was too difficult to hide—and the .45 was back in the holster on his belt. The magazine had been 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 feel improved," he said. "She felt 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 northeast. 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 northeast.

Who knew, he might 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.

Just how is she improved?

Yeah, right, it would be that easy.

"Yeah, right."

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 had 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 him 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, and 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 I or his time on a farm as a youngster, his stories were always rich and compulsive. Perhaps such storytelling talent had something to do with being blind.

One day, on the drive back to the hospital, she looked in her rearview 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 nightclothes.

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

Natasha, perhaps using her child's honest sense of what is right and wrong, remained silent 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 adrenaline 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 frontyard 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 said.

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.

"Got away? Who got away? Your family were dead in that hole with you."

"There were others who escaped before I was buried."

Another mystery, Tom thought. "But why would they help us after so long?"

Because I'm one of them. The statement was so obvious that Tom could imagine no possible lie behind it. She was one of them, and they would help her. And him? Her new daddy?

"You're confusing me, and—"

We have to go. He's coming!

"We can't just drive away, not with Jo like this, we have to take her—"

He's getting closer.

Tom shouted an incoherent scream of rage and hopelessness, and he felt Natasha in his head soothing and calming, touching those places that she somehow knew would work.

Shhh, shhh, I love you Daddy, shhh.

"Are you good?" he said, not sure how else to ask. He knew what he meant; he only hoped that Natasha understood as well.

We were good, she said. All of us. Just different. My daddy … my first daddy … told me that they stole our innocence and forced us to do what we did. He said to never let it change me.

"Do you want revenge?"

I just want my family back. She sobbed again, her voice coming from farther away as if she were trying to hide. I just want to be with people like me. Will you be my daddy? Will you?

Tom nodded once, and she seemed to hear that. He was glad, because it was not something he thought he could actually say. Not yet.

He had no choice but to abandon the car. It was smashed up and shot to pieces, and to drive it any farther would be to risk being stopped. It was almost eight A.M., and there would be people on the road by now. Tom was surprised that no one had yet passed them on this narrow lane. And besides, it had Jo's blood on the seats. He could smell it, and he could smell her, the subtle lavender perfume she favoured growing stale as her body cooled beneath it.

Somehow, for now, he was keeping at bay the madness that her death must bring.

For the first time since leaving the Plain he opened the boot. It squealed, twisted metal protesting at being forced, and as the lid popped up he knew that it would never close again.

Natasha lay against the back of the rear seats, the heavy chains still wrapped around her body. She looked no different from before. Her smell was one of dampness and age, muck and must, and Tom stepped back a pace or two while fresh air swilled the boot.

I'm cold, she said. I'm hungry. Will you hold me?

Tom did not want to move any closer, but the vulnerability in that child's voice pricked at his heart. He could remember Steven when he was a little boy, standing at their bedroom door and saying there was a goat in his bedroom. Each time Tom would take him back and show him that there was no goat, and each time Steven would end up in their bed, snuggled between them in their warmth, already back to sleep by the time Tom and Jo settled down again. It was his voice, and their love for him, and secretly they had both quite liked having their young son in with them. He would twist a little finger into their ears to wake them at six in the morning, but he had a giggle that would banish the early hour and welcome in the sunrise.

Tom moved closer and stared down at the body. It was the first time he had seen her in daylight. "Is that really you?" he said.

It's me, Natasha said. Look what he did to me. Look what Mister Wolf turned me into.

She looked like a child carved out of wood, wrapped in old cloth, constrained in chains, buried and left to rot. Veins and ligaments stood out in stark relief against her stretched skin. He could see old yellowed bones. The chains were rusted the colour of dried blood. And there was movement, tiny earthy insects crawling here and there where clumps of soil were stuck to her body or the chains, while others burrowed in hollows that gradual decay had formed in her corpse. A golden centipede made its way across the boot's carpet, afraid of the light.

Tom reached in, grabbed the chains and dragged Natasha to him. He gathered her up, grunting, amazed that he had carried her so far last night, and lifted her against his chest. He looked down into her face, terrified that she would smile. He would drop her and run, because nothing like this could be alive, not alive and moving like when he had first taken her from that pit…

I'm hungry Daddy, she said. I haven't eaten for so long. And being out, being free … I'm hungry.

"You're confusing me." Brief images from his dream flashed by and he staggered beneath Natasha's weight. Gnashing jaws, severed limbs, Natasha's real father holding the woman against the wall as he tore out her innards, her little brother Peter, shrugging off the bullet wounds and thrashing around on that body on the floor, and her words came to him again: They kept us hungry.

Oh no, Daddy! she said, Never that, never, ever that for you. You saved me!

"I saved you," he said, and he pulled her close to his chest.

Perhaps the bullet still in her body moved. Natasha screamed, and for a second she seemed to fill his mind with the effort, being as wholly there as Tom himself. And then she calmed with a groan and a sigh, and something scratched his chest, and Tom sat down in the grass like a mother nursing a newborn child.

Tom drifted. The presence of Natasha in his mind was stronger than it had ever been before, so large and powerful and potent that it seemed to drive him into a fugue, a state of conscious dreaming that quickly took on a feel and taste he had known only recently. The house, Tom thought, the room, the basement …

The countryside vanished, and Natasha was feeding him memories as he fed her his blood.

This time they told him so much more.

She stormed into the basement, brushing aside the remains of the man her mother had just killed. He slapped against the open door and slid down its metal surface, a stain of blood and flesh that drove Natasha into greater frenzy. His Tom face quizzed her intentions and she snapped at it as she ran by.

Inside, her family was already at work.

The basement was huge, much larger than the footprint of the house above, and partitioned with several large glass screens. There were more than just a few survivors down here; there must have been thirty men and women, spread throughout the several glass-walled rooms, and as Natasha and her family stormed in, every one of them seemed to have a gun in their hand.

Her father was a few paces away, his arms and legs flailing as two men and a woman pinned him against a wall. His head thrashed from side to side, blood flew, a man fell away, the flash of gunshots strobed the air, and then her father knelt and leaped, kicking out and digging his toe into the woman's eye as he went. The remaining man followed him with gunfire, and even though several bullets thudded home he kept on running and leaping. Every time he landed it was on a different person, and each time he leaped again he left a mess of rent flesh and broken bones behind. Blood trailed from his bare feet, and Tom flesh and clothing were caught on his long talons. Bullets traced the air after him, and his wild screeches matched the sound of shattering glass.

Natasha ran into the melee, slashing out with her hands. She knocked a gun from one woman's hand, and as the woman knelt to retrieve it Natasha grabbed the back of her neck, long nails piercing skin and sinking in, fist squeezing tighter and tighter. A man ran into her, lashing out with a knife and burying it to the hilt in her shoulder. Natasha screamed, saliva and blood spattering the man's face and neck. He let go of the knife and backed away grinning, then suddenly stopped grinning. Natasha followed, dragging the woman behind her, fingertips almost meeting inside the woman's neck. The woman squealed and thrashed, reaching back and batting ineffectually at Natasha's arm and hand. The man glanced down at the woman, then back at Natasha.

Have her! Natasha shouted, but it came out as an animal roar, nothing intelligible in that violent outburst. And there that brief period of coherence ended. Natasha screeched, power thudding through her child's body and firing every nerve end, rage pumping her blood and spasming in her muscles, pain singing from every bone that sought to distort and be something it could not. Her jaws opened wider, her arms grew longer, fingers were pincers, nails were claws, and her teeth throbbed in her gums at the thought of fresh flesh ready to part beneath them. She took a bite out of the woman's face and then threw her at the man. As he caught the body and stumbled back, Natasha's little brother fell on him from above and ripped out his throat.

There were still some people left alive, a core of defenders that had retreated to a far corner of the basement thinking that their guns would protect them there. Natasha and her family ducked down behind tables and furniture, slinking through the rooms, smashing through glass partitions where they had not already been destroyed by gunfire. Where they found someone living—a man hiding in a cupboard, stinking of piss and fear; a woman taking huge snorts of white powder from a shattered glass vial—they slaughtered them, relishing the splitting of their bodies, spreading insides across the tiled floor. Where they found a dead body they slashed at it on their way past, or perhaps paused to swallow a ruptured eyeball or take a mouthful of exposed breast. It took only a minute to come together, Natasha and her brother, their father and mother, all of them coated in blood, their own, and others', mad, raging, berserk. Her brother spat gobbets of meat from his mouth and slashed at metal furniture, his nails squealing across its surface. He was still young, still learning to direct this rage.

They did not speak, because in this state such communication was all but impossible. Tom, part of Natasha through her memory and yet still an independent observer, realised that everything for the berserkers was instinct. Like a pride of lions on the hunt, or a flock of birds weaving back and forth across the sky, they knew what to do and when. Natasha's father growled and broke left, her mother moved to the right, and Natasha and her little brother waited for a few seconds, preparing to leap over the bank of metal cabinets they hunkered behind.

The humans gathered in the corner of the room were shouting and screaming and crying, letting off bursts of gunfire at shadows thrown by flickering lights. Natasha could smell their fear, and it was good. She could also sense the meat of them, their pumping hearts, their pulsing blood, the flesh of their thighs and the tender taste of their throats. She glanced sideways at her brother and tried to smile, but her tooth-filled mouth would not allow her. He tried to smile back.

Their parents roared at exactly the same moment, launching their attack, diving into the humans unfortunate enough to be on the outside of the group. Guns exploded, bullets whined and whistled around the basement, thudding into walls and ricocheting from furniture.

Natasha and her brother leaped onto the metal cabinets and looked down at the violence below.

There were maybe ten people left alive. Their father was to the left, standing on his hind legs disemboweling a man while a woman fired at him again and again. His body danced and jigged, feet kicking him from the wall, jumping from the floor, dodging bullets as his face and hands remained working on the man. He turned suddenly on the shooter, snatched her gun and buried it barrel-first into her face. One of his claws caught the trigger and the back of the woman's head erupted into the air.

To the right their mother was a blur of thrashing limbs and snapping teeth. A man fell before her, screaming as she pulled herself up his body and opened it every inch of the way.

Someone shouted, someone else pointed, and bullets screamed at Natasha. The memory blurred as she danced left and right, jumped and powered down from the ceiling, bounced from the floor. The whistle of bullets passed close by, and their paths sometimes left hot streaks across her skin. And sometimes, they struck her. Peter whined behind her as a bullet found home. He fell to the floor beside her, growled, and they leapt together. Both of them found meat.

The lights went out as one last desperate burst of gunfire found a switching panel. The stench of an electrical fire added to the odour of opened bodies. But the humans were all dead or dying and already the rage was subsiding. For the berserkers, there were wounds to heal and expended energy to replace.

Natasha and her family settled down to feed.

Do you see? Natasha asked. Do you see now what they made us do? Her voice was weak and tired, barely there at all. Tom could feel her inside his head but there was not the sense of invasion there had been before. He almost had to search to hear her voice.

"I saw," he said. "But I don't understand."

I'm tired, she said. So tired. I haven't fed for so long, Daddy. I need to go away for a while.

"Wait!" Tom said, "we have to decide where to go, what to do."

Yes, we have to leave, she said, to leave, he's coming, Mister Wolf is coming … but I'm really only a little girl. She faded away at last. Tom could not be certain what he heard in those final few words: vulnerability, or hopelessness.

He sat there in the morning sun, the unearthed girl in his lap, cows staring over the gate at him with disinterest. A sparrow hawk hovered high overhead, stalking something a couple of fields away. Bees buzzed the hedge, and a tiny wren darted in and out of the undergrowth, picking insects from leaves, wagging its tail to gain balance each time it landed. Tom wished that he could find his balance so easily.

He loved the countryside, and right now it was shielding what had happened from the eyes of the world. His battered car, his dead wife … he could see her feet and lower legs through the open back door. Jo, he thought, but suddenly the idea of that body being his wife was alien and distant. She was somewhere else now.

Tom stood, carried Natasha and her chains to the car and set her down on the bonnet. It was only as he let go that he realised how easily he had moved. He paused, standing still, trying his best to discern exactly what had changed. Eyes closed, he heard so much more. Hands over his ears, he saw more. His head no longer hurt, and the aches and pains in his limbs had faded. He thought back to the memories Natasha had shared with him … but it was more than sharing. He had seen what had happened in that house. She had not told him about it, nor explained it, she had shown him. In the same way that she came into his mind to talk to him, so she had invited him into her mind to know more of her.

And what did I find? he thought. That she's a monster? Some sort of wild animal, immune to bullets and knives, impossible to kill, a killer herself? But he shook his head and looked down at the strange body on the car bonnet. She was more than an animal, and more than simply a killer. She was more than human, not less. She was, as she had told him, a berserker.

Do you see what they made us do? She had whispered before slipping away into a deep sleep. They kept us hungry.

Tom had to leave. He felt refreshed and strong and ready to move on, and though the grief over Jo sat heavy on his shoulders, there was still a numbness that held back the tears. He looked through the shattered windshield at his dead wife on the backseat, and it was not her. That is not Jo! There lay the body he had touched and loved for over thirty years, and yet she was not there. She's dead, he thought, dead and gone forever and I'll never see her again, never smell her or taste her or talk with her again for all eternity. But though the rage and grief were there, something kept their full effect at bay, a numbness that promised worse to come.

Perhaps it was the unreality of what was happening. The impossibility. Natasha had thrown him into a dream world, a place where dead girls spoke in his mind and a man with guns came after him. A place where an unearthed corpse wanted him to be her daddy. Maybe it was that; the unreal, surreal place his world had become.

Or perhaps he really had gone mad.

"We have to go," he said, and out of that unreal daze a panic began to descend. He was parked just off a country lane with the body of his wife in the car and a ten-year-old corpse wrapped in chains on the bonnet. He could not afford to drive the car any farther. Natasha and her chains were too heavy to carry very far. His wallet contained about fifty pounds in notes. Looking around he could see no signs of habitation nearby; no farms, no isolated houses that may offer him transport or a place to hide. He scratched absently at his chest and his fingers came away smeared red. He had been cut there, perhaps by flying glass when Mister Wolf blasted at his car with his gun. Tom rubbed the blood across his fingers until it dried, sticky and crisp, and he wondered why he felt so strong.

Desperation, he thought. Fear. Panic. All simmering just below the surface of whatever's keeping me going. "Crash and burn," he said, and that was what he would end up doing. But while he still had energy to stand and the will to move on, he was more than willing to let instinct and events take over. Just like Natasha and her family in the basement of that house, dodging or shrugging off bullets, raging at the wounds, letting instinct lead them on.

In the distance, Tom heard the roar of a car's engine. It sounded like the growl of a wolf approaching its prey.