by Tim Lebbon
Natasha turned to see what he had been looking at, who he had been talking to. Standing above her on the boat’s main deck, eyes bearing their own peculiar human hunger, a soldier watched the continuing bloodshed. The soldier whom her parents referred to as The Man.
To Natasha he was like a scary monster from a children’s book, and she called him Mister Wolf.
* * *
Tom snapped awake, panicking. He had no idea where he was. He looked around the car, expecting sea water to flood in at any moment, wondering why he could no longer feel the boat leaping from wave to wave. He could smell blood but there was no one else in sight, no one but the shrivelled thing suckered to his chest.
“No!” He pushed away, wincing as the pain roared in his lower back. Cole. I saw Cole through Natasha’s eyes. Watching them, and enjoying it. “Leave me alone!” he said.
Natasha rolled back against the leather seat. Wet blood glittered around her mouth. She did not move, but Tom sat up anyway, pressing his hand to his chest and feeling the warm trickle of blood running onto his palm and down his wrist.
No, Daddy, she said, it’s not like that, not always. And never for you. I’m trying to help you. Can’t you feel, can’t you sense the pain drifting away?
Tom pushed back against the front seats, staring at Natasha’s mouth as he heard her voice in his head. No, those lips were not moving. No, her limbs had not shifted position. She was propped against the back seat and there she remained. And yet his blood surrounded her shrivelled mouth, and the pain in his back from the bullet wound was a fist of fire twisting in his insides, its fingers flexing and reaching and tearing . . . but it was bearable. Awful, making him want to scream, but bearable.
Can you feel it? Fading away? Listen to me and it will get even better.
“How?” he asked. “Why? Am I in shock?”
Not shock, Natasha said.
Tom almost laughed. Almost. “I’ve never been shot before. I shocked, let me tell you.”am
Not shock, she said again. I’m feeling better, so you are too.
Tom glanced down at his chest, the lip of torn skin there that still dribbled blood into his opened shirt. “Have you been drinking my blood?”
Only a little. Her voice was quiet and tentative, the voice of a child found doing wrong.
“You told me you weren’t a vampire.”
We’re not! she said, more determined now. They thought that at first. Especially him, Mister Wolf. Teased us with garlic and crosses and . . . She laughed, a dry rustle that matched her physical appearance. My mummy and daddy went along with it because it amused them. They did their best to sleep in the day and wake at night, even though it upset my brother and me, and Mister Wolf and the others thought they knew what they were doing. Funny. It was funny. Even the day they found out we were fooling them, it was funny. She trailed off, as if that day were the last time she had found cause to truly laugh.
“I’ve been shot,” Tom said. “I’ve been shot!” He leaned forward over Natasha’s body and rested his forehead on the back seat, turning slightly so that he could look along the road at Mister Wolf. He was still lying half-in a ditch beside the road, an arm and leg splayed out onto the tarmac, the rest of him almost hidden from view. He was not moving. Tom wondered what Natasha had done to him, and how, but he thought he had a good idea; he had felt her dark psychic fingers exploring his own mind, and he had no doubt they possessed strengths greater than those he had already experienced.
We really do have to go now, Natasha said. He’ll be awake soon, and he’ll have more bullets.
“But I’ve been shot, I’m bleeding. I can’t drive like this.”
Listen to me, Daddy. If you listen to me you can do it.
“I think the bullet’s still inside.” He checked his stomach and abdomen, feeling gingerly for an exit wound, but he found none – only the pounding pain in his lower back, and the feeling of something being very wrong inside. Is that just the bullet grinding around, he thought, or has it moved stuff in there?
We have a connection, Natasha said, and Tom suddenly thought of her dried mouth clasped to his chest, his blood leaking into her desiccated body. The image was thrust into his mind, not conjured, held there for his inspection and turned by memories other than his. He sensed the blood flowing from beneath his skin, and felt it enter Natasha’s mouth. He could sense the draining from his veins, and taste his own blood upon another’s tongue. And wherever he looked, whichever way he turned, he felt calmed and soothed by the exchange. It was as if bad blood were being bled from him, taking pain along with it, and yet it was good blood when imbibed. Strength came to him, and something unknown seemed to stir in Natasha’s mind.
There, Natasha said. See?
“But I don’t understand,” he said, reaching around and feeling the ragged mess of his back. Blood still coursed between his fingers, and when he shifted a fresh flow warmed his skin.
You don’t need to, she said. It’s enough for now to accept it and let it help. We have to go.
“I don’t think—”
You can drive.
“I’m not sure—”
Daddy . . .
Tom looked down at Natasha’s body, her face, eye sockets holding the shrivelled eyes like old raisins. And even though he saw no movement, he felt her smile.
Thank you, she said.
From outside the BMW, above the rumble of the engine, Tom heard a groan. He looked across the road at Cole’s arm and leg, saw the fingers twitching and the foot dragging across the ground. “He’s waking.”
Natasha was silent but her smile remained in his head, the gratitude apparent. I can’t let it end like this, he thought. Not here, and not now. He moved slightly, waiting for pain to tear up his insides, but it was little worse than a bad toothache. A toothache the size of his entire lower body, true, but it was a rich, vibrant pain, not debilitating. He shifted some more, stepping carefully from the rear seat, standing, turning, closing the door and resting into the driver’s seat. I’ve just been shot in the back and now I’m going to drive, he thought, and the idea was so alien that it made no sense whatsoever, gave him nothing to grab onto. Here was Tom, entire life spent behind a desk, most daring exploits usually involving having four pints instead of two on Friday evening pub visits, who now sat covered in his own blood, a ten-year-old body talking to him from the back seat, an ex-Army killer lying twenty feet away, and his murdered wife in a car farther along the road.
There’s still Steven, Natasha said then, and she knew exactly what to say to turn his mind back to the present.
Tom nodded, thought fleetingly of his young son playing soldiers in their back garden, and slammed the driver’s door.
Cole sat up in the ditch. He shook his head, putting his hands to his temples as if to contain his dizziness. Then he looked straight at Tom, and his expression was unreadable.
“You killed Jo,” Tom muttered. He reversed the BMW, went forward, back and forward again until it was facing along the road at his own battered car. His wife was in there, dead and cooling, Cole’s bullets still wrapped up in her organs and flesh.
Steven, Natasha said again.
Tom nodded, gunned the engine and slipped it into first gear.
Cole stood on shaky legs. He still held the pistol in one hand, and the other delved into his jeans pocket and came out with a slim silver shape. A fresh magazine.
Tom thought of Steven laughing as he blew out the candles on his tenth birthday cake, and Jo ruffling his hair and smiling at Tom, her eyes as alight as those candles with the knowledge of the blessed life the three of them had together.
Steven, the girl said yet again, and behind the voice in his mind was a sudden sense of promise and hope.
As Tom changed into second gear and pressed down on the accelerator, he swerved the car across the road. The offside edge caught Cole across the thighs and sent him spinning across the ditch and into the hedge. Tom looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the killer disappear in a
shower of leaves and limbs.
The pain nestled at the base of Tom’s back, and Natasha stroked his mind, calming, soothing, telling him all the things he wanted to hear.
CHAPTER NINE
Cole had not thought about his ex-wife for months. They had divorced soon after the berserker programme had been closed down – when Cole had buried Natasha and her family, and the others had escaped – and he had not seen her since. Sometimes he had to look at a photograph to remember what she looked like. He missed her sometimes, but it was always the idea of what she represented that he mourned the most: normality. A real life, with a wife, kids maybe, and an existence other than the one he had led for years. His life was an obsession, and there was no room in an obsessive’s life for anyone else. He had shut her out without even knowing it, and by the time he realised what was happening, she was gone.
He thought of her now, as Roberts aimed the stolen BMW straight at him, and it was because he could think of no one else who would give even a microscopic shit that he was dead.
Instinct probably saved his life. Unable to tear his eyes from Roberts’ face – eyes wide, skin smeared with blood, hate painted red – Cole started to fall back, letting gravity lure him down toward the ditch from which he had just climbed. The car closed in, Cole pushed with his feet, and by the time the car’s wing clipped his thighs he was already moving back into the hedge. The car gave him rough assistance.
His shout matched the berserker bitch’s screech of glee in his head.
Cole’s feet left the ground, and he tried to spin in the air to protect himself from the worst of the impact. All he succeeded in doing was presenting his face to the hedge instead of the back of his head, and he managed to bring up his hands as the spiky growth welcomed him in. The impact was relatively soft, but sharp. Branches pricked at his hands, cheeks, neck and chest, while his lower body landed awkwardly in the ditch, a protruding rock thumping his stomach and winding him. Dried leaves fluttered down around him, and something squealed and hurried away deeper into the undergrowth.
He waited until gravity had settled him down before slowly taking his hands away from his eyes. Lost them again, he thought, staring down into a pile of leaves and rabbit droppings. He remained still, sucking in a breath when he could, waiting for the pain of broken bones to kick in. The noise of the car striking him had been a dull thud instead of a crack, and he knew that pain was a fickle thing, sometimes shouting in with a roar, other times laying in wait until its target had begun to think itself lucky. He had suffered enough pain – and dealt it, too – to know that he had a few more seconds yet until his fate became clear.
If he had broken a leg or arm, the chase was over. If he was merely bruised and winded . . . even then, Roberts would have a long head-start. Cole was not sure he could get away with stealing another car again so soon, especially looking as roughed up and bloodied as he did. Of course, he did not have to be so polite next time.
“Bitch!” he said, hoping to provoke some response. He imagined the berserker child chained to the headless bodies of her brother and parents, closed his eyes again and laughed at the image, projecting it as hard as he could lest she still hid in the underground of his mind. No secret hatches opened, no darkened alleys spewed forth her rage, and Cole could only assume that she had left him alone for now.
What if I don’t hear her again? he wondered. He could try to follow, but without any clues he had no idea at all of where they were heading. London? The coast? Further north? Berserkers were excellent at hiding – the escaped family had shown that over the last decade – and without any leads at all, Cole would never find Natasha.
But he had shot Roberts, he was sure. Misty as his vision had been, head shrieking with Natasha’s intrusion, he had seen the man stumble to the car after the gunshot, kept his eyes open long enough to see the first bloom of blood on the back of Roberts’ jacket. And with a silver bullet from a .45 nestling in his back, he wouldn’t get very far.
Cole’s ex-wife came to mind again, tall, beautiful, never understanding, and he wondered where she was now.
Opening his eyes again, he slowly pushed himself upright. The pain was merely terrible, nothing worse. He spat and watched his bubbly saliva and blood hanging on a small branch in the hedge. No bones ground together. There seemed to be nothing burst inside. He laughed. His head throbbed as if struck by a nuclear hangover, his face and neck bled from a dozen lacerations, but he had managed to survive being run over by the man whose wife he had killed earlier that morning.
He supposed he could consider himself lucky.
Brushing leaves and mud from his clothes, Cole looked around for the magazine. He had kept a grip on the .45, and it only took him a few seconds to locate the mag, click it home and slingshot the slide. He felt happier like that, at least. If only he’d been able to put one of these silver bullets into that shrivelled fucking bitch.
“Damn!” he shouted, finding another wound in the meantime. One of his teeth had somehow shattered, and parts of it were embedded in his upper lip and gum. He opened his mouth and let blood and speckles of tooth dribble out, leaning forward so that most of it missed his clothes. Don’t want to ruin my look, he thought, snorting, trying not to laugh again because it hurt too much. He probed the broken tooth with his tongue, finding sharp points and cutting himself again.
“Fuck!” he spat, and a flock of starlings took flight from the field across the road. The cows stood there, still looking his way, calmed now after the gunshot. “Seen enough?” he asked. They stared, chewing their cud like nervous football managers. Damn, he was such a mess.
But not as much of a mess as Roberts. Dead wife, his life fucked, shot in the back, he surely couldn’t go much farther. However much the little bitch was urging him on, dick-stroking him in his mind, soothing and cajoling . . . he’d be bleeding. He’d be hurting. Someone like that couldn’t go forever on adrenaline and fear alone. He was a normal guy, and he would grind to a halt. Cole had to make sure he was in the vicinity when that happened.
Climbing from the ditch, resting one hand on his thigh to push himself up, Cole realised that he had pissed himself.
That bitch . . . !
A car came around the corner from the direction the BMW had taken. It was an old Mazda MX5, growling through a holed exhaust. Cole bet the owner thought that sounded cool.
He’d pissed himself. Probably when she’d screeched at him, invaded his mind, driven him down into his own darkness. It was her fault.
“You bitch!”
As the soft-top approached, Cole raised the gun. The car slowed, the driver wide-eyed and terrified, and in her face Cole saw the mockery of the berserker girl, the twinkle in her eyes every time she had called him Mister Wolf, the condescension in the gaze of someone so young.
He pulled the trigger.
He had meant to put a round through the canvas roof, but blood dripped in his eye as he fired. The car slewed to the right, just clipping the rear bumper of Roberts’ abandoned car before nudging the field gate and coming to a halt. It rolled back slightly then sat there, engine still running.
There was no movement from inside.
“Shit,” Cole whispered, pricking his tongue on his ruined tooth. “Shit, shit, shit.”
When he reached the driver’s door and opened it and watched the woman’s body tumble out onto the road, he tried to tell himself he would have had to kill her anyway. No way he could leave her here with a smashed up car and a body inside. She’d run and find someone, and the police would have been onto him in hours, if not minutes. She was a brunette and looked as though she had been very attractive, just the sort of woman he sometimes tried to fuck when loneliness got the better of him. The bullet had popped neatly through the corner of the windscreen and taken off part of her skull. Blood and brains dripped from the underside of the canvas roof and across the dashboard. Her skirt had ridden up to reveal skimpy black panties and pale, muscled thighs. She was a casualty, and it was people like her he wa
s trying to protect.
Doing his best to reason away his second murder of the day, Cole dragged the woman to Roberts’ old car and piled her in with the other corpse.
He did not even bother flicking the skull splinter from the centre of the MX5’s steering wheel before driving away.
* * *
Tom was numb. His body felt distant, and sitting in the driver’s seat his head felt strangely lower than his stomach. He could move his hands on the steering wheel and gear stick, his feet on the gas and brake and clutch, and he constantly twitched in the seat, subconsciously trying to find the pain that should be there. He had a feeling that the bullet was lodged somewhere close to his spine, but at least he was not paralysed.
Yet he felt unattached.
And mentally his numbness had spread, a protection against what had happened that was as obvious as it was comforting. As he drove he dwelled on what the last twenty-four hours had brought to, and taken from his life, and yet his mind only skimmed the surface. The digging, the body, the running, the shooting, the dying . . . all these flashed through his mind with the immediacy of fresh experience, and yet with the dimness of faded dreams. He could smell the stink of the grave, but digging up those corpses seemed like someone else’s memory. He could smell Jo and hear her yawn and see her brushing her hair, but she was someone from the past, an inconsequential part of his here and now.
He could feel Natasha inside, worming her way through his mind, exploring, calming, and he welcomed her in. Because she was protecting him. She was a drug that he needed so much, one that took away the pain and heartache and replaced it with one word, and one aim: Steven.
He drove slowly and sensibly, not wishing to attract attention. He could feel the tremendous damage his body had sustained – she could hide the pain and the immediate consequences, but not the knowledge – and some part of him worried about what the future would hold. Yet somehow he knew that he was safe, at least for now. Safe until they reached wherever it was they were going.