by Tim Lebbon
“Come on!” Tom screamed, and the Jeep rolled from the driveway and back out into the road.
Jo jerked on his lap and then lay still. Tom looked down and saw a blossom of blood on her back, spreading slowly outward from a ragged hole in her dressing gown. “Jo?”
Footsteps, running on gravel.
He kept his foot on the gas.
Another engine roared and a tractor ploughed into the side of the Jeep, shoving it several feet along the road with a screech of tyres and the howl of breaking metal.
“Jo?”
There was room now to reverse between the Jeep and tractor – tangled together as if they had rolled off the production line as one – and the gatepost, and as Tom saw Mister Wolf standing directly in front of the car, levelling his pistol, he spun the wheel and ducked down over Jo. Two bullets thudded into his seat. He felt the warmth of Jo’s blood on his cheek where he was pressed against her back. Her legs and the open door snagged the gatepost and then flipped free again. The car hit something, scraped by, and Tom sat up in his seat, blood and tears dropping from his chin and cheeks as he twisted around and reversed quickly up the road.
He was sobbing, blinking fast, trying so hard to keep his eyes clear so that he did not bury them in the hedge. More gunshots followed him but he did not care now, would not care if one of them struck him in the neck. At least then he could hold Jo one more time before he bled to death.
There’s still Steven, Natasha said.
“Shut up!” Tom shouted. He aimed the car around a bend and steered its smashed rear into a gateway, knocking the gate from its iron moorings. It fell slowly, as if wanting to remain standing. He saw dawn blurring the night in the east. Jo’s blood ran warm on his legs. He twisted the wheel and drove forward, away from the cottage and the Jeep and Mister Wolf who wanted so much to kill him.
Me, Natasha said, it’s me he wants to hurt, Daddy, not—
“I said shut up!” Tom screamed, and two wheels churned briefly along the grass verge before he regained control.
Jo was still and silent, and he could see now that the bullet in her back had not killed her. How could it, when there was so little left of the back of her head from those first few shots?
He touched her there, hoping that somehow, as he drove, he could share in his dead wife’s final thoughts.
* * *
Tom was aware that he was dreaming, but that awareness gave him no control. He had slipped from a chaos of nightmarish images into this almost cinematic episode, and though he could feel the sudden outside influence that drove this – it was more like a memory than a dream, yet one that someone else was remembering for him – he could do nothing to steer or influence its course. He sensed that it would be bad. He tried to close his ears, his eyes, but he was asleep, and dreams paid little heed to external senses.
Besides, it was fascinating, like a car crash or a train wreck. He to watch. And it distracted his mind from . . . from . . . something awful that he could no longer quite remember.had
“It’s good to forget, for a while,” said the man in the boat. He looked straight at Tom and smiled, a pained expression that showed far too many teeth. “But you’ll always remember again in the end. Watch now. Remember.”
Asleep, his dreams hijacked by Natasha’s memories, Tom watched.
* * *
The man in the boat was not alone. There were four of them, two adults – a man and a woman – a young boy, and Natasha, through whom Tom was viewing this memory. They were all dressed in similar grey-green clothes, almost militaristic. The adults sat stony-faced, but the boy seemed excited, forever standing and being told to sit again, babbling and being hissed at to remain silent. He was panting like a puppy at play. The adults seemed to speak to him without their lips moving, and Tom heard whispers in his mind.
“Almost there,” the man said aloud. His legs were jerking up and down, feet tapping the deck beneath them. His hands were clasped at his thighs. He turned to the woman next to him – his wife – and smiled, and kissed the side of her face. “Remember, it’s not us doing this,” he whispered. She turned away as if she could not face him, and looked across at her son. He did not echo his parents’ apparent sadness. The boy was standing again, whining as he jumped up and down on the spot, hands twisting the legs of his plain trousers into tight knots. His eyes were changing colour.
A voice came from elsewhere, dull and distant and lifeless. You leave no one, it said, and a shape stood above them, blurred against the skyline.
Try as he might Tom could see nothing outside the cockpit where the family sat. They were totally enclosed. The only reason he knew this was a boat was because Natasha’s memory told him so, and the only way he could be certain of the movement was by the shadows of the radar mast gliding up and down across the cockpit as the boat dipped and peaked the waves. The little boy was running back and forth now, four steps left, four steps right, and the movement must have been blurring him in memory because his arms seemed to be growing in length, his legs thickening. It was as if Natasha’s memory in Tom’s mind was slipping, and its images were slurring.
“Peter . . .” the woman said, but she trailed off when the man put his hand on her arm. The boy’s eyes shone as if they caught the sun.
One minute, the distant voice said, and the shadow of the speaker rose and fell across the woman’s face as the boat traversed another wave. She turned and looked directly at Tom – at Natasha – and smiled a smile he remembered his mother giving him so many years ago. It spoke of unquestioning love, and a motherly instinct to protect.
The man leaned to the side and spoke to the woman. She shook her head, both angry and scared, and he held her closer and spoke again, keeping her still so that she could hear everything he had to say.
Then he let go, pulled away and began to blur.
Tom tried to draw back. Something had changed here, a sudden jump in the reality of things that he should not be seeing. And yet he was prisoner to this dream, a passive viewer of Natasha’s memory being played out in his own head, and he was trapped here watching and hearing, tasting and smelling the truth of history. He tried to close his eyes but was already asleep. He would have turned away had he any control. Instead, he saw the family go berserk.
The voice rose into a shout, its words indistinguishable from the snarls and screams coming from the cockpit. The young boy Peter was on his hands and knees now, fingers and toes clawing at the timber decking and leaving deep scores in its surface. The slashed wood shone bright in the sun. He shook his head, and spittle and blood flecked the deck around him. The adults seemed to speed up, their movement jerky, as if this were a movie with every third frame removed.
The view flipped onto its side and began to vibrate as Natasha fell to the deck.
I don’t want to see this, Tom thought, and Natasha said, No, but you need to. And it’s only just begun.
Ten seconds, the vague voice said, and Natasha looked up at the shadow looming above them. Its stance showed fear. Its voice held awe. Its hands were weighed down by a blocky, heavy object that could have only been a gun.
What are you showing me? Tom thought, but there was no reply, because this was pure memory once more. As the boat thudded onto a beach and a high door in its bow fell open onto wet sand, he became a part of the vision.
* * *
The rest of the dream, the memory, the nightmare came to him in brief glimpses, each of them more confusing than the last, and more terrifying. At the beginning Tom could make little sense of the individual images, but the memories viewed through Natasha’s eyes combined to evoke a sense of impending action, and a distinct emotion: dread.
Natasha ran onto the beach behind the adults and her younger brother Peter. The sands were deserted, a beautiful golden spread marred here and there with blots of driftwood or seaweed drying in the merciless sun. At the head of the beach where the dunes began, maybe fifty yards away, sat a huge house made of glass and steel, an architect’s wet dream sparklin
g with daylight and holding mystery behind its shaded windows. There were several cars parked beside the house, none of them worth less than fifty grand.
Several people stood around the house and hunkered down on its balconies. They flashed. It was only as Peter flipped onto his back and writhed like a landed fish, that Tom realised the flashes were gunshots.
A blur here, like film forwarded sixteen-speed, the images distinguished only by their redness.
They were in the house. It was light, airy, ultra-modern, all steel and slate and glass. The father was holding a woman against a wall and emptying her chest cavity onto his feet. Heart, lungs, shattered ribs slopped out, the sound of their impact smothered by somebody else screaming. He bit at her lower jaw and tore it away, and as he turned Tom saw just how much he had changed.
Blur.
Natasha was running along a corridor. It turned left and right, doors flashing by on either side, but it was blood that laid the trail which she was following. Another turn and she came across the crawling man, mangled leg dragged behind him like a gutted fish. The man collapsed on the floor and turned, attempted to raise a gun, but one slash of Natasha’s claws ripped his hand apart, sending the weapon spinning against the wall in a rain of blood. He screamed, Natasha leaned in, and there was a howl that can only have come from an animal as the memory turned red.
Blur.
Peter was in the kitchen, thrashing at a body on the floor. He leaped onto it, screeched, flayed with his hands and feet, jumped off, landed on the work surface, turned to look at Natasha, opened his mouth wide – his mouth, filled with too many teeth and meat and a scream that was not possible – and jumped onto the body again. His head shook and tugged and the body slid across the tiled floor, leaving bits of itself behind. It was barely recognisable as human, other than its clump of blonde hair matted with brain. Peter jumped off again and came at Natasha, but there was no panic, no fear, only a primal sense of sibling love.
Blur.
Some people – the survivors – had locked themselves into the basement. Natasha’s parents were down at the door trying to tear through, but it was steel-lined, and their claws and teeth screamed on the metal and left only shiny slashes behind. Peter was a few feet away trying to dig through the wall. Natasha loped down the steps to join her family, leaving bloody footprints behind.
Blur.
The door stood open now, and there was shooting, and Natasha’s mother was dancing against the wall as a man emptied an Uzi at her. None of the bullets seemed to be hitting her; chunks of plaster blew out, shards of concrete block rattled to the floor, and when the magazine was empty she stopped dancing. And growled.
The man screamed as Natasha’s mother ripped into him, and then through him.
Screams came from the basement. Natasha plunged into the darkness to join in the final slaughter.
* * *
Tom screamed himself awake. Sunlight blazed in through the shattered windscreen, and for a moment he thought he was on that beach, perhaps facing the house of steel and glass and waiting to see what would emerge from it. He screamed again, his memory of the nightmares rich and fresh – he could taste the blood, smell the guns – and then someone whispered to him, calming, soothing.
Don’t worry, don’t cry, it’s all memory.
“It’s not mine!” he said. He turned in his seat to see Jo lying in the back. When he had finally stopped, he managed to push her from his lap out onto the road, then haul her up into the back seat. He had scraped her legs doing so, and there were speckles of black tarmac in the scratches. He had tried to pick them out, crying all the time.
Jo stared at him through half-closed eyes. The blur of his own tears seemed to make her cry.
There’s more, the voice said, more to see.
“I don’t want to.”
You must, Daddy, if you want to know me.
“I don’t! Since I found you everything’s . . . just . . .” He slumped back in his seat, wretched, hopeless. Hospital, he thought, police, but somehow both seemed futile.
It’s not my fault, Natasha said, her voice breaking in his mind. He felt her in there, her awareness melded with his own, and his tears were for both of them.
Tom climbed from the car and took a look at it for the first time. He had driven for an hour after Mister Wolf’s attack, lost in a blind panic, treading the waters of grief as Jo cooled across his lap. How he had not crashed he had no idea, because he could recall little of the journey. He must have passed through other villages, and yet he could remember nothing of observers reacting to the ruined car and the dead woman in his lap. Perhaps because he did not see them meant that they could not see him.
The car was a wreck. It was a wonder that it had driven anywhere, such was the violence that had been wrought upon it. The sides and rear were buckled and dented, all the windows smashed, and more than a dozen bullet holes perforated the chassis. The driver’s door and the rear door were speckled with Jo’s blood. It was not obvious – there were no great smears or splashes – but Tom knew what he saw. His dead wife’s blood. On their car. On the car he had driven for an hour, with Jo dead across his lap.
He fell to his knees and buried his face in his hands, Natasha’s bad dreams fading to be replaced by this, his own living nightmare.
I’m hurt, Daddy, Natasha said, and Tom glanced up at the boot of the car. It was crushed and buckled from where he had struck the front of the Jeep several times.
“Good,” he whispered, and he meant it. “And I’m not your daddy. That man . . . that is your father, not me.” He tried not to focus on any one image from the dream.thing
You rescued me, she said, sobbing. You found me. You birthed me from the earth, and you’re as close to a daddy as I have. I’m only a little girl. I’m only—
“You’re that thing from my dream!” He shook his head, as if doing so would rearrange and resolve the images that had invaded his troubled sleep. “What are you? What were you doing?”
Natasha said, voice hitching as her sobs dried upThere’s more for you to see before I can explain, . But now Mister Wolf will be coming. He hasn’t finished. He wants me dead, and you as well because you’re helping me. He wants everyone dead. He was human once, but he lost all that, and now he’s just a bad man.
“Human?” Tom said, tipping his head back and staring at the brightening sky. He was not entirely sure what that meant.
We have to move on, the voice said, quiet and considered. We have to go, because of Steven.
“Where is he?”
The blunt question must have surprised Natasha because she fell silent for a few seconds. Tom could still feel her in his head, but the sensation stilled like a held breath.
I can’t tell you, she said.
“Why—?”
can’t. I I’m not sure, not really, but the closer we get the more certain I’ll be. And it’s dangerous there. Very dangerous. If he’s still with them, they’ll be angry, and strong, and well-fed.
“Who are you on about? I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this.”
They kept us hungry, Natasha said. And then she drew back into herself and left Tom alone, alone with his dead wife and that already-familiar sense of abandonment.
* * *
Cole had never enjoyed killing. Those few occasions he killed – his old friend Nathan King recently, and the times before – had been out of necessity. King had died because he knew too much and he had started blabbing, but really it was all down to the berserkers. Cole had promised himself ten years ago that he would have to be as heartless, ruthless and vicious as them to catch the ones that had escaped or, ironically, to prevent them from being noticed. He knew that he could never truly match them, but he had tried. Through the doubt and the self-hate, he had tried.had
After killing Sandra Francis six years before, Cole had cried. Curled up in bed the tears came, and he stood immediately, went to the kitchen and cut himself across the back of his left hand. The pain gave the tears
a different reason, and the blood brought back memories that had given him some form of justification. If the scientist had talked, helped him, revealed everything she knew about what made Natasha special, perhaps he would have let her live.
Now, standing over the kneeling farmer and pressing the barrel of the .45 to the back of the man’s skull, Cole would have cheerfully seen the fool’s brains splatter his shoes.
“Fucking idiot!” he shouted. “It’s early, you should be in bed, not driving around the fucking lanes wrecking cars. Idiot. Idiot!”
“I . . . I . . .” was all the farmer could say. He was shivering, sweating and crying. Instead of inspiring pity this only increased Cole’s anger.
“Stop stammering and tell me what you’re going to do about it. Tell me!”
The farmer had seen most of what had happened. The shooting, Roberts ramming the Jeep into the road, the blood on the woman’s legs where she lay across Roberts’ lap. Cole knew that he had hit her several times, and that was bad, that was wrong. But right now he was too enraged to feel sorrow or regret. Now, his blood was up.
I’m berserk! he thought, and although the idea was horrific, it was strangely satisfying as well. “I’m almost as mad as them!” he said. Cole’s finger tightened on the trigger and he pressed the barrel harder into the farmer’s head. The old man swayed on his knees and then tumbled onto his side, crying and raising his hands to ward off the bullet. He could have been anyone’s father, probably had grandchildren, showed them around the farm, let them feed the chickens and play in the hay barn . . .
“I . . . I . . .” he continued to say.
Cole knelt next to him and pressed the gun up under his chin. “I said, what are you going to do about it?”