by Tim Lebbon
Who knew, he may even luck out. Find the right road, come across Roberts burying his wife in some field, kill him and open the boot and stare down at Natasha, gloating right back at her as he placed the .45 against her leathery skull and pulled the trigger.
is Just how she improved?
Yeah, right, it would be that easy.
Fucker . . . he heard a few minutes later. Eat my shit, Mister Wolf . . . lost . . . going . . . fucker.
Yeah, right.
* * *
Tom remembered a story his mother had told him when he was in his teens. It had affected him strongly then, and now it seemed to say a lot about the situation he was in, both literally and in a spiritual sense. He found some solace in it; there was precious little else to comfort him. And remembering the story brought him somehow closer to his mother. However old a man may be, he always wants his mum in times of crisis and stress.
She was a nurse for much of her life, and when she was in her twenties she befriended an elderly patient in the hospital where she worked. He was in his nineties, a veteran of two World Wars, blinded at Dunkirk, and a compulsive gambler. Horses were his preference, and he chose them by name alone. He liked names, he said, because they told him much that his ruined eyes could not. Tom’s mother would take the old man on trips from the hospital during her days off, sitting with him at the bookies while he placed bets and stared at the ceiling, listening to the races broadcast live over the radio. If he lost he would smile and pat her hand; if he won he would buy her lunch and tell her about his life. She was more than content to listen, she said, because he was a fascinating old man. Whether he talked about the trench hell of World War One or his time on a farm as a youngster, his stories were always rich and engaging. Perhaps such storytelling talent had something to do with being blind.
One day, on the drive back to the hospital, she looked in her rear-view mirror and saw him smiling up at the ceiling, a look on his face she had never seen before. “What a beautiful light!” he said, and he was still smiling as his head rested back against the seat.
She pulled over and felt the old man’s wrist, but she already knew that he was dead. She drove to a police station and told them what had happened, and when she said she was a nurse they suggested she should drive him to the hospital herself. So there she was, in the middle of London, a corpse in the back of her car with betting slips spilling from his pockets and that beatific grin forever on his face. She received more than a few strange looks from pedestrians and other drivers, and by the time she arrived at the hospital she was laughing through her tears.
Tom knelt in the front seat of his ruined car and stared back at Jo’s corpse. There was no grin on her face, other than the clown’s smile painted there in dried blood. And no one could mistake her as sleeping. Not with the wound in the back of her head, and the amount of blood on her night clothes.
“I hope you found the beautiful light,” Tom said, reaching back to touch his dead wife’s hand. “You my light. I’m sorry, Jo. It’s all my fault. I’m so sorry.”were
Natasha, perhaps using her child’s honest sense of what is right and wrong, remained silent for a while as Tom wept.
* * *
Later, Natasha said, He’s coming for us.
“So what can I do about it? He’s a killer, he’s got a gun. I have my dead wife and a child’s corpse in a ruined car. It’s finished.” Tom found no hope in that morning’s dawn, and the potential only for pain.
Not for Steven. Daddy, all this was for Steven, wasn’t it? How can it be finished when it’s only just begun?
“I don’t believe you,” Tom said. He was sitting in the driver’s seat, trying to work out what to do. He could think of nothing.
Natasha retreated to a deep corner of his mind and began to sob. I’m only doing this for you, she said.
He wondered how a dead girl could cry. “I don’t believe that either.”
The girl was silent, still sobbing, and she withdrew and left him alone.
Tom gasped at the sensation of being abandoned and leaned back in his seat. Was she lying? Could Steven really still be alive? He felt in his bones that he could, and if there was even the slightest chance that his son was not dead, he owed it to himself – and to Jo – to try to find him. There was little else left for him now, nothing to go home to, no future . . .
No future. His hopes and dreams of a gentle old age spent with his wife had been blasted away by that bastard’s gun.
Grief birthed anger, and Tom realised that he had been angry since that first encounter on the Plain. It had kept him going, boosted adrenalin into his system and given his aging muscles precious fuel to drive him on. He had excavated a mass grave and crashed his way from a farmyard under fire. That was not real, not him at all, and yet he had mud under his fingernails and the dead wife to prove it all.
And the thing in the boot. He had that, too.
“Natasha?” he asked.
Daddy?
He ignored that. Let her have her own dreams for now, whoever or whatever she was. “Natasha, how do you know where Steven may be? You have to tell me what you know if you want me to trust you. Look at it with my eyes … I’m sitting here talking to fresh air, and a corpse I just dug up is communicating with me in my head. You have to understand my doubt. You have to accept my uncertainty.”
I already showed you something about me while you slept, she said. That was honest, wasn’t it? It’s bad to lie. Only naughty children lie. I’m not naughty. I’m a berserker, and my family were berserkers, and they kept us hungry so that we would do those things for them.
“Who?” But Tom already knew.
Them. The men. The soldiers.
“But why use you? Why not do it themselves?”
There’s more to see, Daddy. I can show you if you like. But not yet, and not here. Mister Wolf is coming, I can feel him, he’s getting closer. We have to go. You have to take me away from here. I can show you the way, but you’re the only one who can look after me.
“We have to go to the police,” Tom said, staring into the hedge beside the car. “Jo is dead. She was murdered. We have to tell the police. Have to. They’ll catch him, they’ll protect—”
Me? Natasha said, and her voice had changed. Still a little girl’s voice, but older and wiser now. Harder. They’ll protect me? One look and I’ll be sent for tests, cut apart. And you, what will they do to you when they find me in your car? How will you explain me? And Mister Wolf is one of them anyway, they’ll know him, they won’t stop him, or maybe he’ll kill them too, and we have to go, because the Wolf is coming and I can’t stop him and you won’t stop him, not again. Nothing can stop him. He killed my family and he’ll kill me in the end, if we don’t go now.
“You’re confusing me.”
I’m telling the truth, Daddy. I wouldn’t lie to you. He’s a bad man, and no one can stop him, not the police, not you, no one. Our only chance is to find the berserkers that got away before he does, and then they’ll help us.
“Got away? Who got away? Your family were dead in that hole with you.”
“There were others who escaped before I was buried.”
Another mystery, Tom thought. “But why would they help us after so long?”
Because I’m one of them. The statement was so obvious that Tom could imagine no possible lie behind it. She was one of them, and they would help her. And him? Her new daddy?
“You’re confusing me, and—”
We have to go. He’s coming!
“We can’t just drive away, not with Jo like this, we have to take her—”
He’s getting closer.
Tom shouted an incoherent scream of rage and hopelessness, and he felt Natasha in his head soothing and calming, touching those places that she somehow knew would work.
Shhh, shhh, I love you Daddy, shhh.
“Are you good?” he said, not sure how else to ask. He knew what he meant; he only hoped that Natasha understood as well.
We
were good, she said. All of us. Just different. My daddy . . . my first daddy . . . told me that they stole our innocence and forced us to do what we did. He said to never let it change me.
“Do you want revenge?”
I just want my family back. She sobbed again, her voice coming from further away as if she were trying to hide. I just want to be with people like me. Will you be my daddy? Will you?
Tom nodded once, and she seemed to hear that. He was glad, because it was not something he thought he could actually say. Not yet.
* * *
He had no choice but to abandon the car. It was smashed up and shot to pieces, and to drive it any further would be to risk being stopped. It was almost eight a.m., and there would be people on the road by now. Tom was surprised that no one had yet passed them on this narrow lane. And besides, it had Jo’s blood on the seats. He could smell it, and he could smell her, the subtle lavender perfume she favoured growing stale as her body cooled beneath it.
Somehow, for now, he was keeping at bay the madness that her death must bring.
For the first time since leaving the Plain he opened the boot. It squealed, twisted metal protesting at being forced, and as the lid popped up he knew that it would never close again.
Natasha lay against the back of the rear seats, the heavy chains still wrapped around her body. She looked no different from before. Her smell was one of dampness and age, muck and must, and Tom stepped back a pace or two while fresh air swilled the boot.
she said. I’m cold, I’m hungry. Will you hold me?
Tom did not want to move any closer, but the vulnerability in that child’s voice pricked at his heart. He could remember when Steven was a little boy, standing at their bedroom door and saying there was a goat in his bedroom. Each time Tom would take him back and show him that there was no goat, and each time Steven would end up in their bed, snuggled between them in their warmth, already back to sleep by the time Tom and Jo settled down again. It was Tom’s voice, and their love for him, and secretly they had both quite liked having their young son in with them. He would twist a little finger into their ears to wake them at six in the morning, but he had a giggle that would banish the early hour and welcome in the sunrise.
Tom moved closer and stared down at the body. It was the first time he had seen her in daylight. “Is that really you?” he said.
It’s me, Natasha said. Look what he did to me. Look what Mister Wolf turned me into.
She looked like a child carved out of wood, wrapped in old cloth, constrained in chains, buried and left to rot. Veins and ligaments stood out in stark relief against her stretched skin. He could see old yellowed bones. The chains were rusted the colour of dried blood. And there was movement, tiny earthy insects crawling where clumps of soil were stuck to her body, or contained in hollows that gradual decay had formed in her corpse. A golden centipede made its way across the boot’s carpet, afraid of the light.
Tom reached in, grabbed the chains and dragged Natasha to him. He gathered her up – grunting, amazed that he had carried her so far last night – and lifted her against his chest. He looked down into her face, terrified that she would smile. He would drop her and run, because nothing like this could be alive, not alive and like when he had first taken her from that pit—moving
I’m hungry, Daddy, she said. I haven’t eaten for so long. And being out, being free . . . I’m hungry.
“You’re confusing me . . .” Brief images from his dream flashed by and he staggered beneath Natasha’s weight. Gnashing jaws, severed limbs, Natasha’s real father holding the woman against the wall as he tore out her innards, her little brother Peter, shrugging off the bullet wounds and thrashing around on that body on the floor, and her words came to him again, They kept us hungry.
Oh no, Daddy! she said, Never that, never, ever that for you. You saved me.
“I saved you,” he said, and he pulled her close to his chest.
Perhaps the bullet still in her body moved. Natasha screamed, and for a second she seemed to fill his mind with the effort, being as wholly as Tom himself. And then she calmed with a groan and a sigh, and something scratched his chest, and Tom sat down in the grass like a mother nursing a new-born child.there
* * *
Tom drifted. The presence of Natasha in his mind was stronger than it had ever been before, so large and powerful and potent that it seemed to drive him into a fugue, a state of conscious dreaming that quickly took on a feel and taste he had known only recently. The house, Tom thought, the room, the basement . . .
The countryside vanished, and Natasha was feeding him memories as he fed her his blood.
This time they told him so much more.
* * *
She stormed into the basement, brushing aside the remains of the man her mother had just killed. He slapped against the open door and slid down its metal surface, a stain of blood and flesh that drove Natasha into greater frenzy. His torn face quizzed her intentions and she snapped at it as she ran by.
Inside, her family was already at work.
The basement was huge, much larger than the footprint of the house above, and partitioned with several large glass screens. There were more than just a few survivors down here; there must have been thirty men and women, spread throughout the several glass-walled rooms, and as Natasha and her family stormed in, every one of them seemed to have a gun in their hand.
Her father was a few paces away, his arms and legs flailing as two men and a woman pinned him against a wall. His head thrashed from side to side, blood flew, a man fell away, the flash of gunshots strobed the air, and then her father knelt and leaped, kicking out and digging his toe into the woman’s eye as he went. The remaining man followed him with gunfire, and even though several bullets thudded home he kept on running and leaping. Every time he landed it was on a different person, and each time he leapt again he left a mess of rent flesh and broken bones behind. Blood trailed from his bare feet, and torn flesh and clothing was caught on his long talons. Bullets traced the air after him, and his wild screeches matched the sound of shattering glass.
Natasha ran into the melee, slashing out with her hands. She knocked a gun from one woman’s hand, and as the woman knelt to retrieve it Natasha grabbed the back of her neck, long nails piercing skin and sinking in, fist squeezing tighter and tighter.
A man ran into her, lashing out with a knife and burying it to the hilt in her shoulder. Natasha screamed, saliva and blood spattering the man’s face and neck. He let go of the knife and backed away grinning, then suddenly not grinning. Natasha followed, dragging the woman behind her, fingertips almost meeting inside the woman’s neck. The woman squealed and thrashed, reaching back and batting ineffectually at Natasha’s arm and hand. The man glanced down at the woman, back at Natasha.
Have her! Natasha shouted, but it came out as an animal roar, nothing intelligible in that violent outburst. And there that brief period of coherence ended. Natasha screeched, power thudding through her child’s body and firing every nerve end, rage pumping her blood and spasming in her muscles, pain singing from every bone that sought to distort and be something it could not. Her jaws opened wider, her arms grew longer, fingers were pincers, nails were claws, and her teeth throbbed in her gums at the thought of fresh flesh ready to part beneath them. She took a bite out of the woman’s face and then threw her at the man. As he caught the body and stumbled back, Natasha’s little brother fell on him from above and ripped out his throat.
There were still some people left alive, a core of defenders that had retreated to a far corner of the basement, thinking that their guns would protect them there. Natasha and her family ducked down behind tables and furniture, slinking through the rooms, smashing through glass partitions that had not already been destroyed by gunfire. Where they found someone living – a man hiding in a cupboard, stinking of piss and fear, a woman taking huge snorts of white powder from a shattered glass vial – they slaughtered them, relishing the splitting of their bodies, spreading insid
es across the tiled floor. Where they found a dead body they slashed at it on their way past, or perhaps paused to swallow a ruptured eyeball or take a mouthful of exposed breast. It took only a minute to come together, Natasha and her brother, their father and mother, all of them coated in blood – their own, and others’ – mad, raging, berserk. Her brother spat gobbets of meat from his mouth and slashed at metal furniture, his nails squealing across their surfaces. He was still young, still learning to direct this rage.
They did not speak, because in this state such communication was all but impossible. Tom, part of Natasha through her memory and yet still an independent observer, realised that everything for the berserkers was instinct. Like a pride of lions on the hunt, or a flock of birds weaving back and forth across the sky, they knew what to do and when. Natasha’s father growled and broke left, her mother moved to the right, and Natasha and her little brother waited for a few seconds, preparing to leap over the bank of metal cabinets they hunkered behind.
The humans gathered in the corner of the room were shouting and screaming and crying, letting off bursts of gunfire at shadows thrown by flickering lights. Natasha could smell their fear, and it was good. She could also sense the meat of them, their pumping hearts, their pulsing blood, the flesh of their thighs and the tender taste of their throats. She glanced sideways at her brother and tried to smile, but her tooth-filled mouth would not allow her. He tried to smile back.
Their parents roared at exactly the same moment, launching their attack, diving into the humans unfortunate enough to be on the outside of the group. Guns exploded, bullets whined and whistled around the basement, thudding into walls and ricocheting from furniture.
Natasha and her brother leaped onto the metal cabinets and looked down at the violence below.