Berserk

Chapter Five

After half an hour of driving Tom had to pull over. He had begun to shake and he could not stop. He tried breathing deeply, but that only made his breath stutter, which in turn encouraged his shaking even more. He turned off the engine and reclined his seat, crossing his hands in his lap, hoping that he would calm down soon enough. The shaking was exhausting.

He was alone. Already he was wondering what he had put into the car boot. A dead girl wrapped in chains? Really? Or perhaps only a bundle of twigs and grass?

Natasha was silent on the matter. Tom's mind jumped and danced with his body, slipping from belief to disbelief, terror to confusion. It skitted from reality to madness as well, though Tom did not know which was which. His feet knocked against the pedals and his hands jumped in his lap, knuckles rattling against the door on one side and the gear level on the other. He groaned, begged for it to end, but nobody was listening.

It took ten minutes for the shaking to die down. He supposed it could be shock. However much he tried to deny what had happened, he had grave dirt beneath his fingernails. And whenever he doubted he had heard a voice in his mind, the memory returned of the way it felt when Natasha was there. The intrusion was gentle yet definite, and when she withdrew … he felt so alone. Abandoned. Like a body buried alive, destined to spend eternity underground with only the true dead for company.

He suddenly remembered the man who had been chasing him, Mister Wolf, and he knew that the chase was still on. Tom had been shot at tonight! That in itself was almost beyond belief.

He started the car and pulled away. He was still shaking, but it was little more than a hangover shake now. He was used to those.

The headlights carved a tunnel of light through the darkness, throwing back occasional reflections from pairs of eyes hiding away in the hedgerows. Road kill, Tom thought, and the word sent a shiver through him.

His thoughts turned to Jo and Steven. Everything happening now was all because of his love for them. Natasha's suggestion that Steven could still be alive pounded at his mind, rivaling the pain from the back of his head. It drove him on. The possibility had, he supposed, enabled him to do what he had just done. He had come to the Plain hoping to find out where Steven was buried, and instead he had been told that he may not be dead at all. How trustworthy his source, he could not tell, whether it really was a living-dead girl from out of the ground, or his own mad hallucination. But the idea was all that concerned him for now. Exploring it would come later, when he arrived back at the cottage and opened the car boot. If he found Natasha in there, he could ask her the dozens of questions presenting themselves to him right now. If there was nothing but a pile of twigs, then he would have to question himself.

"She's real," he said, and from the boot came a single, distant thought in confirmation: Yes. Tom looked at his filthy hands on the steering wheel, felt the ache in his arms and shoulders, and from that moment on he was never in any doubt.

Acceptance was easy. Understanding could come later.

It took Cole three attempts to climb back over the fence. His fingers kept slipping on the dew-speckled metal, and he was still weak and dizzy from the blow to his head. It was the thought of what Roberts had taken with him that drove Cole on. He recalled her mockery from ten years ago; even when he was burying her in a hole in the ground there was mockery. Because she knew she was superior. She knew that was why she was being buried, hidden away, put down deep where she could be forgotten. And even though the future for her had offered only pain and suffering, she had taken comfort in that knowledge. Begged for him to kill her, yes, but with a smugness that ensured he had not.

And now, after so long in the ground, her voice and its impact was louder than ever. Whereas before she had been able to touch, now she could shout. And beyond that, Cole thought, there could be even more. That time in the ground must have bled her senses and bloated that strange ability all berserkers had to touch with their minds.

He could not let her go. She was mad. She was a berserker. And soon, now that she was back in the world, she would want to feed again.

"Coming to get you," Cole muttered, sliding his hands up the fence posts one at a time, pushing against his weight with his feet, sliding them up, hands, feet. "Coming to get you, you little monster, freak, nightmare. Hear me? Do you hear me now, do you know my thoughts?" He thought she did not—she must have been too far away already—but it pleased him to think them. Fear had always been a good motivator. Add hatred to the pot and the brew is ferocious indeed.

Cole feared and hated Natasha in equal measures. To service both emotions, he had to kill her.

Hands, feet, more muttering and cursing into the night, and now he could see the top of the fence, curved over and sharp. Difficult to negotiate at dusk with all his senses about him; now, at night, his head still spinning, it would be almost impossible.

"Go over now, or find where Roberts got in," Cole muttered. His arms and legs were already starting to shake from the tremendous strain, and sweat soaked his skin. He swung one leg up and caught it quickly over an upright. He slipped and a curve of metal sliced at his jeans, tearing them and scratching the skin beneath.

He had no choice. If he tried to find the way Roberts had come through, he would lose him—and Natasha—forever.

Cole snatched at the curl of a fence upright, feeling the keen edge slice his palm. He scrambled over, trying his best to avoid more cuts, but in his tiredness made mistakes. He fell down on the other side, landing heavily on his back, neck bent to save his head from another impact. The wind was knocked from him, and seconds that seemed like minutes passed before he hauled in a huge breath. The movement brought pain with it—from his gashed hand, cuts on both legs, bruised back and still bleeding head—but Cole shut it all out. He stood, scampered down the bank and ran to the Jeep, ignoring the pouty feel of the flesh of his shin. He hauled open the door, bloody hand slipping on chrome. The clasp of the storage compartment beneath the driver's seat passed through his fingers several times, and he had to wipe his hand across his jacket to clear the blood before he could get a firm grip. The .45 felt heavy, cool, good in his palm, calming the pain. He released the magazine, check that it was fully loaded, clicked it back in and dropped the pistol onto the passenger seat.

"Now let's find out where you're going on holiday," he said, smiling as the Jeep grumbled to a start. He tried to convince himself that the smile was because he was in action again. But behind all that lay an intense relief that he was heading away from the Plain. The Plain and that terrible grave, uncovered now, evidence of a past atrocity laid bare to the moon's timeless gaze. He pulled away, and the more distance he put between himself and the pit, the better he felt. Calmer. More assured.

He tried not to think of what might lie ahead. If he had let his mind probe the future—if he had known what was to come, or even guessed half of it—he may well have eaten a bullet there and then.

In the darkness, with everything that had happened weighing down and distracting him, Tom lost his way. The landscape looked totally different at night. The road signs read the same, but behind them the darkness skewed direction, and any sense of where he was or where he was heading soon vanished. Regardless, he drove on, trying to maintain the same direction because he knew that the man would be coming. Mister Wolf, Natasha had called him, a little girl expressing little girl's fears. In her voice he had heard true fear, but something else as well, something he could not quite place. Something wrong.

He came to a T-junction, and both ways were villages whose names he did not recognise. He chose left because it felt closer to the direction he should be travelling. The road soon curved to the right and straightened, and Tom pressed his foot down, trying to put as mush distance as possible between himself and the pit he had opened in the ground. Opened a can of worms now, he thought, and that inspired images of squirming things in the meaty wetness of a corpse.

The landscape became more hilly, trees and hedges bordering fields, mostly bare and stubbled after the harvest. Tom wondered briefly what else may lie hidden beneath the surface of the world around here, just waiting to be discovered. What other secrets did Porton Down own? He had read tales of disease and radioactive elements being released so that scientists could chart their progress across the British Isles. Perhaps even now, Tom's skin was aglow with radioactivity, changing, cells mutating and readying themselves for the cancer they would eventually welcome. Or maybe, after unearthing so much horror, he was a carrier for some bizarre bug or chemical, a trace of which had been buried along with those it had killed. A chemical conjuror of nightmares, perhaps, turning his brain to mush even as he tried to escape with a bundle of twigs and rags.

But no, none of that fit. Everything King had told him felt right, and Natasha seemed to be the proof of that. The living proof? He was still unsure. She spoke to him, but she was cold and hard, a mummified thing. She had mentioned the bullet still within her—the silver bullet …

"Oh for fuck's sake!" Tom slammed on the car's brakes and the vehicle slowed to a halt across the road. He had seen no other traffic since leaving the Plain, and a collision was the least of his worries right now. He turned and grabbed the map book from the backseat, switching on the interior light. If Mister Wolf were closing in, Tom would present him with a fine target. But there was nothing else for it. He was completely lost, and he had to find his way back to the cottage.

And what then? Flee with Jo, letting the maybe-dead Natasha guide them with silent words in his head?

"Cross that one when we come to it," he said, flipping the pages of the atlas. He found the hamlet where they were staying, the area of the Plain he had just come from, and eventually he located the village he was now heading toward. Not that far out of his way, he was pleased to see. Lost and found again. He grunted, closed the book and moved off.

Maybe half an hour and he would be back at the cottage. Then he would have some explaining to do.

Natasha remained silent for the whole journey. There was no feeling that she was probing at his mind, no sense that she was about to speak at all, and Tom wondered again at that bullet still inside her, and how his moving her had shaken it loose. What a cruel, ridiculous irony that would be: unearthing a ten-year-old corpse that spoke to him in his head and told him that his son could actually still be alive, only to have it die on him because he had moved it. How he would laugh at the Fates that planted that one on him. He tried to speak to her in his mind and out loud, but there was no hint of a response, and he soon felt foolish doing so. Not as if anyone's watching, he thought. But after tonight, he would never feel certain of that again.

It took twenty minutes to drive to the cottage, not half an hour. A whole slew of possible scenarios hit him as he approached the corner and turned into the driveway. The police are inside, comforting Jo and liaising with the station, passing on news of the search under way on the Plain. Tom pulls up in his car—only twelve hours late—and whatever apology he offers, he cannot hide the filth on his clothes, the mud beneath his fingernails, the blood in his hair. And just then the officers receive a call about a mass grave turned out on Salisbury Plain and one of them goes to search the car, glances into the backseat, approaches the boot …

Or perhaps there is no one there and Jo is sitting up alone, nursing yet another cup of hot sweet tea as she awaits his return. She is angry and scared and afraid of being alone, very afraid, she has always told him that, and in a way he thinks it is Steven's death that brought her own mortality screaming down upon her. And Tom's as well, because it is his death she fears the most. I never want to be left alone, she often tells him, and in that statement are implications that they refuse to discuss. But he often thinks to himself that she never will be alone, because if anything happens to him she will ensure that she follows soon after. So she is there, staring at the door and waiting for it to open, and at the back of her mind is that growing shadow of suicide …

Or maybe Mister Wolf is there already, somehow knowing where to wait for Tom. And perhaps Jo is lying dead in the kitchen, her blood staining the flagstones black and the look on her face something Tom will never see. Because Mister Wolf is a hunter, a killer, and as soon as he has Tom in his sights he will shoot. Natasha will find her death at last. And Steven, wherever he may be …

But there was no vehicle in the driveway, and the cottage lights blazed, and even before Tom had stopped the car Jo was out of the house and flinging herself at his door, hauling on the handle and leaning in as he applied the parking brake, hugging him, hitting him, cursing at him and screaming how much she loved him, how worried she had been, and never once did she ask where he had been or why he had returned so late.

"Jo," Tom said, tears coursing a surprising hot streak across his cheeks. "Are you feeling better?" We need to move, he thought, but here was his beloved wife. He had made her like this, and he owed her this moment.

"I was so worried!" she screamed into his neck, unable or unwilling to lift her head and lose contact with him. Tom felt her voice pressing against his skin, finding his flesh and bones whole and reveling in that, screaming again. She moved back slightly then, her apparition of her husband now made flesh, and Tom's heart broke at the sight of her face.

She must have been crying for a long time. Her eyes were puffy and red, her face swollen and sore from the tears. Her mouth was turned down at the corners, as if the weight of her fears had been acting on her with a terrible gravity. She was still wearing the nightclothes he had left her in, and they were rumpled and creased, smelling vaguely of must and fear. I can smell the fear on my wife, Tom thought, and fresh tears came to his eyes.

For a while, he forgot about the thing in the boot.

"I'm so sorry Jo," he said, reaching out and hugging her back to him. She shifted position so that she was sitting on his lap in the car, bent low, her head resting on his shoulder so that her hot face pressed against his neck and cheek once again. "I love you honey, really, I'm so sorry if I frightened you. Time ran away with me, just left me. And I got lost on the way home, and I didn't know what to do, I had no idea what I was doing!"

"You smell," she said, "mud and earth. You stink. You're filthy! Oh Tom, I was so terrified that you'd never come back!"

Tom's idea about lying to his wife—about the car having a puncture, and him knocking himself out changing it—had fled the moment he saw her. In truth he had no wish to lie to her about anything, not anymore. And with that certainty came a sense of excitement at what he had to tell her next. Steven, he would say, Jo, I really think he might still be alive. But he did not have the chance to speak. Jo hugged him tight, squeezing the air from him, keening like a dog welcoming home its long-lost owner. And Natasha, so silent for the whole journey, chose that moment to make herself known again.

Daddy! she said. He's coming! Misterwolf is coming!

Tom glanced past Jo's head at the rearview mirror and saw that Natasha was mistaken. Whether or not she could have spoken up earlier was something he did not think about until much later, but right then all he knew was that she was wrong. Mister Wolf was not coming; he was already here.

The Jeep was parked in the drive entrance, blocking any hope of escape out onto the road.

He's here to hurt me, Daddy!

The driver's door was opening.

Please don't let him hurt me … it hurts so much already!

And as Tom opened his mouth to speak to his wife for the last time, the shooting began.

To begin with, Cole was aimless. He drove simply because he had to drive. Sitting in his Jeep waiting for inspiration to hit would have felt even more useless than just driving for the sake of it. So he powered along country lanes, taking lefts, rights, or heading straight on at junctions, trying to imagine which way Roberts had come. He slowed down and turned his lights off intermittently, looking for signs of other car headlights in the countryside around him. There was nothing.

He drove fast, because slow would have felt even more hopeless.

Blood was pooling in his boot, squelching at every gear change. His jeans rubbed at the gash on his calf, and each contact was like the touch of a white-hot iron. He needed stitches, he knew, but they would have to wait. What were causing him more problems were the cuts on his hands, the sliced left palm especially. They smeared the steering wheel with blood, and every time he changed gear his hand slid around the gear stick, threatening to slip off. He wiped his hands on his jeans and jacket, but that only aggravated the wounds and encouraged the bleeding.

I've really hurt myself, he thought. Done some real damage.

He drove on. At a T-junction he turned left without thinking, simply because there was nothing else to do. And inside, he searched for Natasha.

She would not be out in the open, in those parts of his mind that he knew so well. She would be below. Down in the dark, hidden away, rooting around like the devious little bitch she was. So he hunted for her, running through the familiar streets of his consciousness, heading off down alleys he did not recognise. There was graffiti on walls, but he could not read it. Letters swam in and out of focus. He thought they were a language he did not know, speaking of things he could not understand. As much as this disturbed him, Cole was used to it. He often felt like a stranger in his own mind, and like everything else that was wrong with life, he attributed it to Porton Down.

He sought further, deeper, inviting Natasha in even though he hated the sense of her in his head. Especially this Natasha, newly risen from the ground with a shout instead of a whisper.

"How does the air feel on your skin, monster?" he said. "Are you lonely without the bones of your kin to keep you warm, vampire?" Like all berserkers she despised the word vampire, he knew, but it was more out of vanity than anything else. She hated for her berserker clan to be thought of as anything other than unique. "Wrinkled dry dead thing crying like a baby when I chained you up with those vermin you called mother, father, brother."

A chuckle in his mind; not his. He did not feel her intrusion, but he knew that she was there, hovering slightly beyond. He drove on, trying to discern which direction the laugh had come from.

"Laughing at what I did to you, Natasha? You won't find it funny when I catch you this time. You think ten years was a long time in the ground, smelling your family rotting around you? Feeling their flesh grow cold, wet, fluid? Or did you eat them to stay awake, just for a little while longer?"

She laughed again, a sound so filled with confidence and hate that Cole slowed the Jeep, shivering. Fuck you, Misterwolf.

He came to a junction and turned left.

"Still awake then, vampire?"

I'm no vampire!

"I bet you're sucking the life out of that poor man already."

She was silent but still present, and Cole narrowed his eyes as he tried to put direction to the slithery touch now evident in his mind. He veered left and right on the road, striving to sense which way was closer.

Warm, Natasha said.

"I'm going to find you and kill you," Cole said. "I'll kill him, too."

Why should I care? the girl said, and Cole smiled when he heard the doubt in her voice.

"Get out of my head!" He had to cover what he had heard, hold it to himself for whatever advantage it may yield him.

I'm not in your head, Misterwolf … I'm below it, down here rooting through all these things you want to forget. Would you like me to describe some of them to you now? Dredge up these memories for you to feast on? They're all here, awaiting their fair showing. Here, this woman Sandra Francis with her long red hair and—

"Shut the fuck up!" Cole hissed. He swung the Jeep left into a narrow lane, and the sense of his mind being invaded grew warmer, wetter.

Warmer.

"You want me to find you."

There's always fun in the chase.

He pressed his foot down on the gas and flicked the headlamps to full beam, taking corners at a mad speed, careening into a high bank, wheels spitting mud and gravel as they squealed against protruding stones, away again, light dancing and vibrating across the road ahead of him as the Jeep bounced and jolted from side to side.

Warmer still …

Cole reached over and grabbed the .45 with his left hand, clicking off the safety and resting it between his legs. It was a cool, comforting weight. He fought with the steering wheel as the vehicle splashed through a deep puddle. A house flashed by on the left, whitewashed walls reflecting headlights back at him. Its occupants were probably tucked up cosy in bed, unaware of what had passed them perhaps only a few minutes before. They were dull sheep, sleeping and working, breathing and eating, never questioning the realities they were brought up to hold as truth.

Cole had seen things, done things. He knew that all such realities were lies, invoked because they painted comfortable pictures out of unnatural, unbearable paints. The truth was never easy to accept. It could drive a man mad. His own madness, his own unbearable truths, were buried deep. And he liked it that way. They spoke to him sometimes, but usually only in dreams, and he had become adept at forgetting his dreams.

Sandra with her long red hair?

Cole shook his head, and the point of one of those hidden memories sank back down into safe, impenetrable depths.

Ooh, very warm now Mister Wolf. Be seeing you soon. Don't forget to have fun, because fun is what it's all about. What else is there? Only death, and decay, and ten years of purgatory, you bastard. You'll never win, Cole. Never!

"What game are you playing?" Cole said, but Natasha did not answer, and he suspected that she had fallen silent for now. Is it just this? he thought. Maybe it was a tease and they went the other way. There's no rule to this little bitch, no rhyme or reason.

There was a hollowness in his chest at the thought of her being out, a void where hope had once existed. So many times over the years he had considered returning to the Plain, excavating the grave, pulling out Natasha's corpse and finishing what he had started. But he was scared and in denial. Even with everything he knew of the berserkers, he had believed that she would be dead. And that belief, that hope, had kept him away. That, and the certainty that unearthing a corpse that spoke to him would drive him mad.

Around the next corner a tractor blocked the road.

Cole stomped on the brake and clutch, righting the juddering wheel, the Jeep shuddering as the ABS kicked in, the farmer turning in his tractor, his face big and pale and comically shocked, mouth open and one hand coming up to protect his face against the two tonnes of metal hurtling toward him. Cole shouted and pressed the pedals harder, actually standing from the seat and bracing himself against the steering wheel. The tractor jumped forward as the farmer sped up, a reaction as useless as it was automatic. And the one thought that screamed out in Cole's mind was, What the hell is he doing out at three in the morning?

The Jeep hit a pothole and bumped to the left, burying its nose in the hedge. Cole was thrown forward, seatbelt locking across his chest and biting into his neck. It knocked the breath from him and, winded for the second time in an hour, he slumped back in his seat and gasped for air. The Jeep's bumper had nudged the tractor's big rear wheel, but only slightly. The farmer drove on for an extra few feet—as if afraid that the Jeep would leap ahead again, like an animal lunging at its prey—and then pulled over into a gateway.

"You alright?" the man shouted, jumping from the tractor and waddling up the road. He was wearing a boiler suit and Wellington boots, and in the glare from the Jeep's headlamps he looked like a lumbering puppet. Cole sucked in a breath at last and let out a hooting laugh, realising as he did so that he had been grasping the .45 so tightly between his knees that he could feel bruises forming there already.

"So do I just shoot this twat?" he said, laughing so hard that a string of snot powered from his nose. I'm losing it, he thought, too pumped up, too careless.

The farmer reached the Jeep and held out his hand as if to open the door. But then he looked inside, and whatever he saw in Cole's face caused him to move back a few cautious paces, eyes downcast. Dominant male, Cole thought, snorting again. He gave in to the laughter as he restarted the Jeep—it had stalled after striking the hedge—and by the time he scraped between the tractor and the far hedge he was guffawing almost beyond control. But it felt good, it felt like regaining control, so he let it come some more.

"Nearly there!" he said, laughing again. "Nearly there for you, Natasha! I've been warming my gun so that the bullet's not too cold when it goes into your skull." His head hurt, his leg was stiff with dried blood, and every time he turned the steering wheel it felt as though blades were slicing into his hands. "Soon," he said.

Cole glanced once in his rearview mirror. The farmer was already climbing back onto the tractor, probably trying to get his story straight so he could tell his fat wife later.

Natasha was there then, probing his mind, seeing how close he was and withdrawing again. She left something behind, an echo of herself. To Cole it felt like fear. He smiled.

He held the .45 in his right hand as he steered; dangerous, but he was unwilling to drop the gun now. If that had been Robert's car back there and he'd fumbled the pistol instead of clasping it between his knees, he could have lost his best chance. So no more risks. Not now he was so close.

And why does she want me to find them?

"She's sick," Cole said, "and mad. She's been under the ground for ten years." He expected a smart answer from the living dead girl, but she had truly gone.

He looked left and right, searching for any gates to driveways, or narrow lanes, or parking areas. Roberts and his wife must have hired a cottage for the weekend, which would be good for Cole. No one else around to witness what was about to happen. If he was really lucky, the bodies would not be found for some time.

A few minutes later he saw the glare of car headlamps through the hedge to his right and he slowed down, killing his own lights. Moonlight was enough to see by at this speed. There were sparse white clouds in the sky now, like smudged paint on a blank black canvas, the stars splashes. He lowered his window, saw the entrance to the driveway, turned off the engine and coasted to a stop between the gateposts, blocking any route of escape.

The pistol felt good in his right hand.

It was Robert's car. Luck had lead Cole on …

Luck and her, luck and Natasha, because she wanted me here.

He wondered where she was, and guessed the boot. Roberts would not have wanted to put something like that, something old, mysterious, dead, on the backseat where anyone could see it.

The car's rear lights were still on, and there seemed to be a commotion in the driver's seat. Cole squinted, glancing aside to allow his night vision to make out the shapes, and then he smiled. Perfect. He felt no thrill at killing, took no pleasure; it was a job well done that pleased him.

This would be over very soon.

Opening the door he heard a woman's voice, raised and muffled, angry and relieved, and as his feet crunched down on the gravel he was glad she was making so much noise. This way, Roberts would not even hear the gunshot that killed him.

The interior light of Robert's car was on, and Cole saw him look in the rearview mirror, his eyes widening, mouth dropping open to shout a warning.

"Shit!" The last thing Cole wanted to do was to hunt these people down. This had to be quick.

He cupped his right hand in his left, braced his legs and started shooting.