Berserk

Chapter Eleven

Tom's life had been dominated by the loss of his only child. Since then he had spent a long time thinking about what this meant, and how he had changed, and how Steven's death had affected everything. He had come to realise that there are times that pin your life to the background scope of the universe. These vital moments—not necessarily defining moments, but instants that dictate the course of your life—can be few and far between, or many and varied. They can be significant happenings, or apparently inconsequential events. They set the course of your future and paint the route of your past, and your present pivots around them.

When Tom climbed from the car with Natasha in his arms there came one such moment. A policeman passed by just as Tom nudged the car door shut with his hip. He was tall and thin and tired-looking, but his eyes changed as they passed over Tom and Natasha. Became more alert. Became aware. A second later the policeman looked away, frowning, and rubbed at his temples as he passed through the sliding doors into the service station, as if trying to massage a memory back into his tired mind.

She's in them as well! Tom thought.

A mother passed by towing two children by their arms. All three looked at Tom and what he carried, and all three looked away again, the children ceasing their struggles and complaints.

In their minds, just like she's in mine.

Yes, Natasha said, except you know me.

Tom walked on, crossing the car park and skirting between cars. In a couple of vehicles he saw people glancing at him and then away again, slight frowns creasing their brows. A man tightened his grip on a steering wheel, knuckles as white as his face. A woman picked up a book and opened it, scanning its upside down pages. He approached a group of teenagers wearing baggy jeans and baseball caps, laughing and joking and cursing their way up their pack's pecking order. He paused, Natasha's weight shifted in his arms, and he doubted her. She silenced his doubt when the teenagers fell quiet, all six of them looking down as if comparing their trainer brands.

Tom walked by, passed through the sliding doors into the service station, made for the toilets. More people ignored him, and he felt a thrill at what was happening. He felt invisible. He was invulnerable, even though the bullet in his back was grinding against a bone, injecting his spine with a pain that even Natasha could not swallow whole. Service stations had always struck Tom as impersonal places where nobody really cared; now, he was as far away from the centre of attention as he had ever been.

Once in the bathroom he went to the farthest cubicle, locked the door and sat on the toilet seat. His legs and arms began to shake and he had to set Natasha down, resting her back against the closed door. The blanket fell from her face and he closed his eyes, not wishing to see the mummified features that seemed to have changed. Were her eyes really that open before? he thought. Was her mouth really that wide? Natasha was not with him right then, and he hoped she could not hear his thoughts. He would have hated for her to hear the disgust he could not keep from his mind.

"I need to clean up," he said. His voice called her in from wherever she had been and the body in the blanket shifted slightly, settling. Tom looked away.

He grabbed wads of toilet roll and went about cleaning the blood from his back.

"You were controlling those people," he said.

No, just giving them other pictures in their heads.

"Some of them looked confused."

It depends on what pictures I give them.

"What pictures do you give me?" he asked, trying to remember what Jo sounded and smelled like, unable to do either.

Soon you can mourn, Natasha said. Soon.

"You're controlling me—"

No, Daddy! Just giving you different pictures.

Tom unrolled some more toilet paper and dabbed again at his wound. Most of the blood had dried into a hard crisp across his back and buttocks, and he would need more than dry tissue to remove it. But he was more concerned at the wound itself. It should have killed him. He knew that Natasha was doing something to ease the pain, giving while she took, but the fact that he could find nothing of the hole other than a scabbed mess of ridged skin and blood brought him back to Natasha's memory of the attack on the house. In the boat on the return journey, she had looked at her family and seen their wounds already healing. That was a berserker thing, and now it was happening to him.

Tom cleaned up as best he could, used the toilet, then left the bathroom. Natasha cast herself about again and eyes were averted, comments died on lips, attention flowing away from Tom and Natasha as if pushed away by a magnetic field. In the shop he picked up some food and drink and a couple of T-shirts. He paid the girl behind the till, trying his best to catch her eye, but she looked anywhere but at Tom. He hefted the weight in his arms but the girl did not look. She put his change on the counter instead of dropping it in his hand, turned away from him and ran her fingertips down a rack of cigarette packets, as if the truth to life itself were printed alongside the government health warnings.

"I'm going now!" Tom shouted. Music continued to play through speakers hidden away in the ceiling, people still chattered and ate and stretched road stiffness from their limbs, fruit machines pinged and flashed and lured people in … but none of it touched Tom and Natasha. They were ghosts, and by the time they left Tom guessed they would be little more than a niggle in the mind of even the most observant traveler.

Back at the BMW he lowered Natasha into the front passenger seat and strapped her in without thinking. Easing into the driver's seat, fingers stroking the key in the ignition, he looked sideways at the girl. She remained still, and all he could see of her was a matted clump of hair protruding above the tatty blanket.

"You're a little girl," he said. "You're not a corpse anymore."

"Thank you, Daddy," Natasha said, her crackling voice muffled beneath the blanket.

He turned the key and started the car, and as he pulled back onto the motorway, Natasha was a presence beside him as never before.

Cole had never understood the true meaning of frustration until now. The last ten years had been a period of dashed hopes and rekindled fears, and each time he had felt close to tracking down the escaped berserkers something had come along to scupper his plans. He realised now that he had never really been close at all; it was always his mind telling him that he was, giving subconscious meaning to the life he was leading and the things he had done to get there. The memory of people dying by his hand was not an easy one to live with, and it was only the importance of what he was doing that kept him going. He had been angry, yes, and impatient, and disappointed that most leads seemed to lead nowhere. But true frustration had not been a part of his life, not like he felt it now. This was heart-pumping, sweat-inducing, ball-shrinking angst, a burning desire to get moving tempered by the certainty that to stay here was his best hope. Every second he hung around the garage—still ignored by the mechanic, still someone else's problem—Tom and Natasha drew farther away. He opened his mind to the berserker bitch but there was nothing, no sign that she was there, no indication that she was even listening for him anymore. With every breath and heartbeat he lost them some more.

Cole burned his fingers lighting a cigarette, stupidly pleased at the distraction. Pacing the forecourt of the garage was pointless, so he went around to the back, looking for a suitable landing site for a helicopter. It was quiet around there, deserted, a field strewn with old car parts and oily engines like machine's tombstones. Too dangerous for a helicopter.

He walked back to the roadside, looked both ways, swore loudly. Nobody answered so he swore again, giving the finger to a frowning passenger in a passing car. The swearing did not make him feel any better so he continued, varying the words, desperate to purge the feeling of doom that had percolated through his body and which now swung from his bones like shadow monkeys.

He'd made the call almost an hour ago. Shouldn't Higgins be here by now? Didn't he have a fleet of helicopters standing by for just such an eventuality? Or had ten years softened the major? Maybe now he was just a desk jockey killing time until retirement. Cole hated the idea of that, but he thought it likely. Even ten years ago, the major had been unwilling to go to Cole's lengths to track down the berserkers. They're perfect, the old fool had said. There's no way on earth they'd let us catch them, so why even try?

"Because they're fucking killers!" Cole whispered to the afternoon air, and the accusation echoed back at him from nowhere.

But he had killed for good reasons, hadn't he? He'd murdered through necessity, and always quickly. He had never let anyone suffer. No torture. No sadistic shit. Just a quick bullet to the head, death before they knew it was coming. He thought of Natasha lying beneath his gun, closed his eyes, hoped so much that he would see that opportunity before the day was through. And as if it would help find her, he silently promised to kill her quickly.

"Where the fuck is he!" he shouted. A man filling his car with fuel glanced over and Cole stared him down. The man hurried to the shop to pay, head lowered, and Cole looked at his car. The driver's door was open and the keys were in the ignition.

Back to the shop: the man was staring fixedly at the woman behind the till. She too was avoiding looking at Cole, which made him certain that they were talking about him.

It was a Ford Mondeo, turbo diesel, fast and filled with fuel.

The man glanced at Cole then away again, pretending to peruse the display of wine and spirits behind the counter. Selling alcohol in a petrol station—Cole had never understood that. May as well sell guns in a bank.

He looked along the road in both directions, heart thumping with the potential of the chase to come. No sign of Higgins. He'd described to the major the car Tom was driving, said he'd wait here to be picked up, and the idea that maybe Higgins would pass him by only came to him then, a possibility that he tried to disregard but which was now growing and growing in his mind, taking over, taking only seconds to establish itself and convince him of its veracity. Higgins was going after them himself, and the killings that Cole had perpetrated would be for nothing if he wasn't there to see all this end.

"Fuck!" He flicked his cigarette away and strode for the Mondeo just as the man emerged from the shop. "You better just stay there!" Cole said, pointing, staring, and the man dropped the bag of sweets he had been carrying.

"N-n-no …" he said, eyes going wide.

"Just a car," Cole said. "You'll get another. I need it. Don't fucking move." He reached around and grabbed the pistol tucked into his belt, but let it go again. No need to cause such a scene now. He noticed the mechanic peering around the corner of the building, cigarette dipped from the corner of his mouth. "Somebody else's problem," Cole said to both men. "That's me. Leave it that way."

"No!" the car owner said, and he took two steps forward.

Cole pulled the gun. Everything froze. Even the sound of traffic seemed to lessen, as if involved in this moment.

"Puh … please," the man begged.

Cole ignored him, lowered himself into the car, slammed the door, placed the pistol between his thighs, started the engine and pulled away. Music blasted on, some weird whiny jangly shit, and Cole turned it up so that he could not hear the man shouting at him. He saw him, though, running after the car as Cole drove it from the forecourt and onto the road, performing a perfect U-turn and aiming back at the motorway.

Higgins had left him! That fucking jobs-worth gorilla. At least Cole knew he had been believed; Higgins would already have been told about the excavated grave on the Plain, and it would take only minutes to check with police about the stolen car and the showdown at the holiday cottage. So whether Cole was involved or not, he knew that Higgins would have called in every favour owed to him to get a force together looking for Tom and Natasha. He may have been reluctant a decade ago, but the Major would never pass up a chance like this. Especially so close to retirement.

Cole steered onto the motorway and put his foot down, lifting the car up to one hundred with ease. Traffic was relatively light, and he hogged the outside lane and flashed drivers aside when he drew up behind them. His aggressive driving attracted some angry gestures, but Cole ignored them. If only these idiots knew what he was doing and why. Secure in their own blinkered worlds they had no comprehension of what really existed around the dark corner of their existence. They had no idea of the horrors he had seen, which he now hunted to kill. So he let them throw him the finger, flash their lights and honk their horns, comfortable in the knowledge that he was doing all this for them. His legs ached, he bled from various wounds, he was a killer, and it was all for them.

"What the hell is this shit?" Cole ejected the CD. It was bright yellow and decorated with a picture of weird, colourful, fluffy characters. As he dropped it he heard a sound that caused his heart to stutter in surprise.

A baby crying.