by Tim Lebbon
The girl was silent, and her presence had retreated from his mind. He thought that maybe she was asleep, or whatever it is dead things do. He wanted to continue questioning her about Steven, but there would be plenty of time later. For now he was content to struggle through his exhaustion, welcome the madness that enveloped him—
I’m at home in bed, the doctor’s there, I’m drugged up, I’m dreaming, tasting and smelling and knowing things that can’t be real, but dreaming nonetheless.
—and make his way back to his car.
When Tom arrived at the vehicle he saw Mister Wolf’s Jeep parked a hundred yards further along the road. Too tired to think straight, he did not even consider trying to disable it, perhaps by slashing the tyres or ripping wires or pipes from the engine. It was simply there, ready to follow him, and that was how he perceived it.
Later, the possibility of that missed chance would haunt him. It could so easily have changed the heartache that was to follow. And later still, he would begin to wonder exactly where the dead child Natasha had been at that moment, when everything could have changed.
Tom put the body in the boot, collapsed into his car and drove away.
* * *
Cole lay in the darkened streets of his mind, mugged, attacked, unconscious, and the voice was coming from very far away.
Fuck you, Mister Wolf.
He twitched, feeling the damp ground beneath him. The voice echoed throughout the subterranean world of his mind, filling that space but only leaking out from a few badly sealed openings. Manholes that did not sit quite straight in their frames, perhaps. Old, rotted doors opening onto unused basements, which themselves held steel doors rusted open, leading down into darker places where forgotten memories and old guilt dwelled. She was calling him from far away, but still he heard.
We’re leaving now, Wolf-boy. You stupid shit. Call yourself a soldier?
Cole shifted, and the whole substructure of his mind moved with him. It flexed to allow the words entry and then clamped shut behind them. If he entertained those echoes they would become true. He could hear, but he did not have to listen.
And there was something else behind the words. A slippery intent, an unwanted invitation. Burying her voice away could not hide the way in which the words were spoken. Mocking. Scathing. Even deep in unconsciousness Cole knew that he had to follow the girl, and he knew that she knew.
He slowly began to surface. The cool pavement beneath him changed into the soft damp ground of the Plain. The dark building beside him turned into the rock from which Roberts had ambushed him. As his unconscious underground receded and hid itself away, Cole heard the voice again, dulled by distance instead of the divisions of his mind.
Goodbye! Goodbye, fucker!
Cole pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. The world swayed and threatened to tip him off. His head ached like a bastard, and there was a patch of dried blood above his ear, tight in his hair and crackling as he flexed his scalp. He touched it, feeling around the edges for any tell-tale softness. Painful, sore, and he would have a headache for days, but he figured he had escaped lightly.
Escaped.
“Little bitch!” he screamed. “Oh shit, how could I have been so stupid!”
The Plain was utterly silent at night. Even the occasional breeze gave little more than a sigh, and any animals abroad were embarked on a stealthy hunt for food. Cole cursed, winced at the thud of pain in his head, and heard a car starting up from the road.
Roberts. And he had Natasha with him, and they were leaving. Natasha – a berserker as mad and vicious as any – was leaving Salisbury Plain for the first time in ten years. And Cole knew where she would be going. She would take Roberts, lure him ever onward until she had what she wanted: her kin around her, and a chance to live again.
He did not waste any time looking for his gun. He had another in the Jeep and time, suddenly, was something that had taken solid control of his life. He stood, swayed, but urgency drove his pain down and fear gave balance.
“I’m coming for you, you little bitch,” he said to the dark. Nothing answered, but Cole had a sense that his words were heard. They were heard very well indeed.
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 skittered 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 at tonight! That in itself was almost beyond belief.shot
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, rivalling 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 was 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 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.knew
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 a fence post 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 cooled on 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 or under the fence, 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 his tiredness cost him 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 liked 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 and good in his palm, calming the pain. He checked the pistol had a round chambered and a full magazine, then dropped it 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 lay 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 dark, 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. He drove on regardless, 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 lay 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 much 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 lay 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 in. 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. And 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 slewed 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 back seat, switching on the interior light. If Mister Wolf was closing in, Tom would present him with a fine target. But he had no choice. 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 road 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 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. that 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 their station, passing on news of the search underway 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 back seat, 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, so 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 fear . . .
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 revelling in that. She moved back slightly then, her apparition of her husband now made flesh, and Tom’s heart broke at the sight of her face.