Berserk

by Tim Lebbon

  “Where is what I’ve spent the last ten years trying to find out,” Cole said. “And I think you know why.”

  King bowed his head. “Poor bastards,” he said again.

  Cole stood to leave. “Nath, you live like a pig. What happened to you? Why did you go this way? You could have sorted yourself out, got a decent job in security. Worked abroad, maybe. Why this?” He gestured at the filthy living room, encapsulating the whole of King’s life with one wave of his hand.

  “Seeing what I saw . . .” King said, but he shook his head and looked down at his bound arms and legs. “You leaving me like this?”

  Cole put his hand on King’s shoulder and squeezed. His old comrade. His old friend. “No,” he said, and as King’s shoulders relaxed Cole grabbed him around the head and broke his neck.

  * * *

  Outside Nathan King’s second-floor flat, Cole stood for a while and held onto the landing balustrade. He was shaking. His hands were clawed, cramped, and his shoulders ached. He had not killed anyone for six years; he had killed a friend. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, taking strange comfort in the city smells after leaving the reeking flat. Exhaust fumes and the stench of stale fat from fast food restaurants were preferable to the stench of King’s decline. Memories flashed by, images of King and him ten years ago, young and brash and indestructible.never

  Working at Porton Down had been a much sought-after posting. The food and accommodation had been good, the security work interesting, and the local ladies had always been interested in men clothed in uniforms and secrecy. Days on the base were spent patrolling the perimeter, fixing fences, handling the dogs, guarding the gates and occasionally doing over reporters who made it their mission to ‘reveal breaches in security’. Evenings were spent at local pubs and clubs, spreading wild tales without actually saying anything, and letting the local girls work off their fascination in the back seats of cars or on the moor behind the pubs. Cole, King and the others had revelled in the assignment. They were reliable men, good soldiers – that was why they had been chosen – but they were also more than aware that they had landed a cushy number. They worked hard at the security of the base, always aware that a true breach would likely result in them being sent back to their regiments, and put a lot of energy into their leisure time, too. The base had a good gym and ample countryside for running. They kept fit. They banked their extra wages. Rarely, if ever, did they question what was going on at the camp. They all knew of the facility’s history, but they were Army through and through. They understood the need for deterrent and retaliation, and none of them had any time for the occasional protestors who camped at the main gates, waving their placards and demanding the safe return of a bunch of bunnies or puppies.

  Three months after starting there, he and King had witnessed the return of the berserkers from Iraq.

  Cole opened his eyes and stared out across the park opposite the flat. A young mother was pushing a pram along a path, a toddler running beside her, aiming for the playground. The toddler – a little girl – ran on ahead, jumping onto the roundabout and waiting impatiently for her mother to begin pushing. The baby squealed in its pram as it watched its sister having so much fun. The mother, tall, red-headed and attractive, pressed the pram’s brakes and pushed the roundabout, bending to kiss her daughter every time she span by. The little girl giggled and the mother smiled.

  They don’t have a clue, Cole thought. He had just killed his friend for them. For their safety. For the little girl’s future. That’s what all this was about. After six years spent living in one bed-sit after another, drawing the meagre Army ‘pension’ they had awarded him after letting him go, picking up crappy menial jobs as he watched for signs of the berserkers’ re-emergence, it had all come to this. He was convinced that he was doing right, and yet sometimes he had to remind himself, to reinforce his conviction.

  Because Cole was not a bad man. Cole was a good man.

  He had left the Army six years ago, three months before killing Sandra Francis. They had refused to let him pursue the escapees, saying that they were gone and that was that. Gone back to wherever they came from, the brass told him. They’ll not worry us now. But he had never forgotten the wagon that rolled in one June morning under cover of darkness, ‘Robinson Fresh Foods’ painted across its sides. The sounds he had heard from within had stayed with him forever. And then, seeing those things as they brought them out, his view of the world had changed in seconds.

  The woman in the park reminded him of the scientist, Sandra. She had been attractive, her red hair hiding a stunning intellect behind Barbie-doll looks. And that had been Cole’s mistake. His sexism had made him believe that it would be easy to persuade the truth from her.

  What did you do to the girl?

  I can’t tell you.

  What makes her special?

  I can’t tell you.

  You have to—

  No, I don’t.

  What was in the syringe? Did you help them, did you make them immune to the silver?

  I can’t tell you.

  Did you help them escape?

  A silence, long and loaded. And Sandra never shifted her gaze from Cole’s eyes.

  You did. You did! Why? You have to tell me. Really, you do, because I need to know, and I’ll find out one way or the other.

  Then it’s the other.

  More talking, more pleading, but however tightly he’d tied her to the chair and however much he threatened, Cole could not bring himself to torture her. And really, looking back on it, he believed that nothing would have made her talk.

  Because she was scared.

  Please, tell me or—

  Or you’ll shoot me?

  And perhaps that had been mistake: not believing that he would.her

  Cole marked this as the point when he had grown up. Leaving the Army had turned his purpose into a private crusade. His shoulders had bowed under the weight of guilt and responsibility, and he spent many waking hours convincing himself that he was doing everything right. There were no voices, no jealous gods giving him their time, but there God, present at every twist and turn of his life and listening to his fears and hopes. He knew what Cole was doing, and He knew why, but that did not make the remorse and doubt any less difficult to bear.was

  Cole let go of the balustrade and smiled as the woman glanced across at him. She smiled back, and went back to playing with her children.

  I’m doing all this for them, he thought, patching any holes in his conviction. He had just killed a friend. He shook his head to dislodge the memory and it slipped down through the gratings in his mind, under the skein of reality he had created over the past ten years, finding itself prisoner with so many other memories, ideals and discarded morals that he worked so hard to keep subdued. That false vision of reality kept them all hidden away. The memory would come back, he knew that, haunting him forever, just as the memory of Sandra Francis’ death haunted his dreams. But even as Cole walked along the landing and down the outside staircase, Nathan King became a man he had once served with at Porton Down, a fun friend, a good soldier. He was a million miles and ten years away from that corpse already cooling in the filthy flat.

  Cole climbed into his Jeep. Salisbury Plain was about two hours away. He could be there by dusk.

  * * *

  For a long time, Tom could not move.

  The corpse of the child still lay where he had found it, wrapped in chains and virtually buried in filth. It had been a girl; he could see her long hair and she wore the rotten remnants of a dress. It may have been pink once, but burial had bled all colour to a uniform brown. Between the chains he could still make out the patterned stitching on the chest, flowers and butterflies and everything a little girl would love. It was a long dress, sleeveless, something for the summer, not this cool autumn day. Her leathery skin seemed unconcerned at the chill in the air. Her face (it should be looking the other way, not at me, it shouldn’t have turned to me) was a mummified mask of wrinkles, a d
ead young girl with an old woman’s skin. The creases around her eyes and the corners of her mouth were deep, home to muck and tiny, squirming white things. Her mouth hung open, filled with mud. Her eye sockets were moist, dark, and not totally empty. The eyes sat like creamy yellowed eggs, waiting to birth something unknowable.

  Her hand still touched his arm. He remained motionless, staring at the places where her fingers squeezed, the slight indentations in his skin, hairs pressed down, redness around where her fingers touched him because she was squeezing him.

  Tom gasped, realising he had not breathed for many seconds. A breath shushed across the Plain, shifting grasses and setting a spread of nearby ferns whispering secrets. He could not take his eyes from the girl.

  “That’s not squeezing me, it’s just touching me,” he whispered, staring down at the bony hand. He raised his other hand, ready to lift her mummified arm and set it down across her chest. “I shifted her . . . she moved . . . her arm lifted and fell, all because I shifted her . . .” He breathed hard between each phrase, trying to force away the dizziness that blurred the edges of his senses, determined to ignore the feeling that the corpse was about to move again. Every instant held the potential of another squeeze, another touch.

  But her fingers are pressing—

  Tom pulled away and the little girl’s nails scratched his skin.

  “No!”

  The girl’s body settled back into the mud, the chains holding her tight. They clinked as she shifted slightly—

  Gravity, it’s gravity.

  —and a small slick thing slipped from a hole in her shoulder and scurried across her body.

  Tom crawled backward out of the grave, pushing with his feet, pulling with his hands. There was no sign of Steven down there, not exposed at least, and he could not go back in to go deeper, he just could not. Jo would be frantic by now – it was mid-afternoon already and the sun was dipping to the west, ready to kiss the horizon and invite in the dark – and he suddenly realised just how many hours he had lost here. His shoulders and arm ached from the exertion, and his heart galloped hard.

  “Oh Jesus God fucking hell,” he moaned, closing his eyes and trying to understand what he had done. It was a moment of reason in madness, clarity in confusion, but the moment was chased away. He felt it leave, lifting its legs and sprinting from his consciousness as a strange voice forced its way inside.

  Are you Mister Wolf?

  Tom’s eyes snapped open. The child’s corpse was shifting. He could not see actual movement, but the moisture across its body reflected and wavered in the light of the sinking sun, the reflections stretching up and down, left and right, repeating their rhythmic movements. As if the body were breathing.

  No . . . no, not Mister Wolf.

  Tom was shaking, his eyes watering. He wondered whether it was that giving the corpse an illusion of movement.

  “No,” he moaned, filthy hands pressed to his face as if to squeeze out the truth. “No, no, no.” He scrabbled to his feet and backed away. His heels tangled in the outstretched legs of one of the excavated skeletons, and as he tumbled backward the voice came again, an invader in his own mind.

  Don’t leave me again, Daddy, not after so long! It was wretched, this voice, and pathetic, and altogether terrifying.

  Tom fell back into a skeleton’s embrace. The impact shook its arms and they clanked against him. Bones cracked and crumbled. He screamed. It was a full, loud screech that hurt his throat, and the sound and pain brought him briefly up from the dark depths of disbelief that were pulling him down, drowning him. He found his footing again and backed away, treading carefully this time so that he was not tripped, stretching his legs back over the bodies he had dug up and laid out to view. He kept his eyes on what he could see of the corpse wrapped in chains. He could not really think about the chains, not yet. That was for later. Their reason for being there, their intention . . . that was for much later, when he was away from here and crying in Jo’s arms, begging her to go home with him, continue their life, accept the lie and try to find their way with Steven’s memory intact and unsullied.

  Please . . . the voice said in his head, and Tom screamed again. So cold . . . so alone . . . I hurt. It was the accent that terrified Tom the most. The words were bad enough, and their implications, but the accent was one he could not place, a smooth-flowing speech that he was sure he had never heard before. If he were imagining this voice, he could have never envisaged something he did not know.

  “This is real,” he said, and though she did not speak, he knew that somewhere in his mind the dead girl smiled.

  * * *

  Tom backed farther away, knelt in the heather and stared at the open grave. The bodies he had brought out were catching the setting sun. He could smell their decay, even this far away. Perhaps they would rot faster now that they were uncovered. Some were skeletons, others had traces of skin and flesh . . . and the little girl, with her wrinkled skin and those ping-pong ball eyes loose in their sockets . . .

  Even from where he was now he could see her hand, resting across her chest and ready to grab again. “Tendons tightening,” he whispered, “and muscles contracting, out of the cold ground at last, just something natural that’s making her fingers move like that.” He looked down at the scratch marks on his arm. Almost as if she didn’t want me to go.

  Those words, that accent, the idea that she was not as dead as the others. “That chain.”

  Steven, the voice said, and although he jumped Tom did not stand and run. He should have. Any sane thought would have told him to run as fast as he could. But sanity seemed to be setting with the sun, inviting in its own breed of darkness.

  “My dead son,” he whispered to the air.

  Not dead, Daddy.

  “I’m not your daddy.”

  There were tears, the unmistakeable sound of sobbing inside his head. I know, the voice whispered at last, I just wanted to say it again.

  “Not dead?”

  You didn’t find him, his skelington?

  “No.” She said skeleton like a kid, with a ‘g’ in there. I wouldn’t have made that up, would I? If I were imagining all this?

  Then he’s not dead. He’s . . . gone.

  “Gone where?”

  Silence, loaded with potential. He could feel something in his mind, a presence hanging quietly back.

  “I’m not talking to you,” Tom said, shaking his head and standing.

  Please—

  “No, I don’t mean I don’t want to, I just mean I’m not. I can’t be. This isn’t happening.” Tom turned to leave. He would abandon everything he had done for the sake of his mind; losing it would not help Jo, not on this anniversary of Steven’s death. And he was dead. His son was dead. Thinking any other way would drive Tom mad. He smiled, almost laughed, wondering how true madness compared to what was happening to him now.

  He pinched the back of his hand until his nails drew blood, then wondered what germs would invade his bloodstream from the muck on his skin.

  “I’m going home,” he said, setting out for the hole beneath the fence.

  Not that way! Bad man, nasty man, big bad Wolf!

  “I’m not hearing this.”

  This way, another way, please Daddy!

  “I’m not your—”

  He’s come to kill you and—

  “You can’t know this.”

  A loaded silence again, filled with a promise of something incredible. I know so much more, the little girl said. And though she still sounded scared and panicked, her words held power and control beneath the surface.

  “I’m leaving.” But even as Tom set off across the Plain, he heard the distant sound of a car engine from beyond the artificial boundary bank.

  That’s him, the voice said, quieter and more controlled. He’s a bad man. Very bad. He has only death in his head.

  “And you have life?”

  No, freedom. I don’t want to be here anymore, Daddy! Please come and get me, pick me up, hold me and
hug me and I’ll tell you where to take us to be safe. The man’s coming now! I can feel him. Mister Wolf!

  Tom heard the engine’s tone change as the vehicle came to a stop. It rumbled on for a moment and then cut out. He strained to hear the car door opening and closing, but it was too far away. I could be doing this to myself, he thought, making this up to try to cover what I’ve done. He looked down at his filthy hands and clothes, tainted with soil from a grave. The back of his hand still bled. The blood was startlingly red against the mud drying across his pale skin. Autumn colours.

  What would he tell Jo?

  I’ll help you find Steven, the little girl said. My name is Natasha.

  “How do you know my son’s name?”

  It’s at the front of your mind. And Jo, as well.

  “My wife.” In my mind . . . so what else does she see, know of me?

  Please, take me out of here, out of the hole. Come and take me, and I’ll show you what happened here. I can, you know. My real Daddy told me how. If you touch me I can show you, even though I’m . . .

  “What?” Tom asked, scanning the fence for any signs of movement. “What are you? Dead? Dead and wrapped in chains?”

  Wrapped in chains because I’m not dead, the little girl’s voice said.

  “Not dead.” Tom turned and looked back at the dark hole in the ground, the fragmented bodies arranged beside it.

  Please, I’m very scared. And lonely. Take me, hold me, and I’ll show you everything. And if you believe, I’ll try to help you find Steven. Please!

  “Why would you do that?” He was talking to the air, the Plain, the sinking sun, and yet already he was certain he would receive an answer. Tom felt peculiarly comfortable with his newfound madness. Perhaps acceptance was insanity in its purest form.

  Because my Daddy loved me, and I think you love Steven the same way.

  “Where is your Daddy?”