by Tim Lebbon
“I thought you’d eaten enough to last you a week,” Mister Wolf said, glaring at Natasha’s father with a stare that said, I’m so scared of you I don’t know where to turn.
Her father knew this, but rarely played on it. If you got the better of someone like Cole, he would make it his mission to find a way to pay you back. Exposing his weaknesses only made him need to feel stronger. There was nothing he could really do to them, not without reason – he had his orders from way above – but he could make their lives uncomfortable if he so desired. And if his superiors ever questioned his actions, he would put it down to ‘training’. He used that word a lot – training. As if they were dogs.
“I’ll have food brought to you,” Mister Wolf said. “All of you.” Everything he said had an undercurrent of threat. He hated them. He was a weak and insecure man, and Natasha feared him more than anyone or anything she knew.
* * *
There came a blank spot in Natasha’s memory – a forgotten period, or something she did not want Tom to see – and then there they were, the berserkers, all together in the place at Porton Down where they had been kept for years, together like patients in an asylum or animals in a zoo. They were gathered in their courtyard, a large landscaped area with a pool and fountain, shrub planting, seating areas, a patio and barbeque, and a heavy steel grille spanning from wall to wall, supported on thick stone columns. The whole grid hummed gently. The sun shone through, but its power and beauty was lessened by the mesh, tainted by incarceration. The place smelled of lavender and the potential for death.
Natasha’s parents sat quietly playing chess. Her brother played with Dan and Sarah, two other young berserker children, a rough and tumble version of tag where the one who was ‘it’ had to chase the others on all fours. The other berserker adults – Lane and his wife Sophia – were laying out in the sun, shielding their eyes and whispering.
This was when the change began. Because Lane and Sophia were whispering of escape, and their plan did not include all of Natasha’s family. She remembered, and Tom saw, and with this knowledge came a feeling of dread at what was to come next.
* * *
Tom woke up. His neck ached from where he had been leaning back. Natasha was huddled in his arms, a cold dry shape that seemed to have taken on fresh weight since he had fallen asleep. He was filled with trepidation. The world was loaded with threat and primed with violence, and for a few seconds he did not want to move lest he kick-start whatever was to come. He looked around without moving his head and saw people passing by outside, glancing into the car, meeting his eyes and looking quickly away, walking to their car or toward the restaurant as if they were used to seeing blood-soaked men huddled in rear seats with children’s bodies.
Five more minutes, Natasha said, and she sounded desperate and demanding, her voice striving for normality but dripping with something more animal, and vital. Tom looked down and saw bubbles of blood between her mouth and his chest. He was feeding her; more accurately, she was feeding from him. He closed his eyes to see how he felt about this, and was surprised to discover no feelings at all. He was ambivalent to what Natasha was doing.
Yet still that sense of dread, hanging around him like an acid bubble about to burst.
It’s inside, she said, it’s in my memory, and I’ll show you what I can remember . . . five more minutes, Daddy, and I’ll feel better and you’ll know what they did. What he did. And then you’ll know why we have to move on.
She drifted away, and so did Tom, falling back into a sleep that invited the movie of her memory to return to him. It skipped and jumped as if cut and spliced from recollections that made no sense, and Tom fell into frame, scared yet eager to know.
* * *
Natasha walked in from the courtyard, glancing through the door into their dining room. Three people were chained to the wall in there, and though she only caught a glimpse, it looked as though one of them had died. That was bad. Probably Lane had done that, angry that he had not been allowed out on the latest jaunt. He got like that sometimes – petulant, spoilt, like a child that has had its favourite toy taken away. He would never take it out on another berserker, and he could not risk doing anything to the soldiers on the base, so it was their food that suffered. He had probably supped blood until he was drunk from it, then continued until he was almost asleep, suckling from habit rather than necessity until the man died. Natasha was sorry. The food had been there for over a year now, and she had grown quite attached to him.
She walked on. The fate of their victims was the least of her worries right now. She had told her parents that she was going to her room to read, but in reality she had simply wanted to leave the courtyard because of the thickening atmosphere out there. Something was happening. It got like this sometimes – angry and loaded – and Natasha usually put it down to the electrical grid above their heads. But other times she shrank away from such tall tales, telling herself to grow up and try to understand what was going on. There were group dynamics at work here that her child’s mind found difficult to fathom, but at least she realised that something was occurring. Her brother, oblivious, played tag with Dan and Sarah, still too young to know. All children are born animals, her mother had told her once, human and berserker. But with its first breath a berserker child is different, and every breath henceforth increases those differences.
Natasha walked through the communal living area – blank walls, functional furniture, a TV and overflowing bookcase – and headed back to the bedrooms.
Someone was following her.
She darted into her parents’ room and hid behind the door. A few seconds later Dan walked by, singing softly to himself and clicking his fingers, something he did when he was nervous. He paused outside Natasha’s closed bedroom door, listened briefly and then walked on, singing changing to humming. He had obviously bored of playing tag.
He’s doing something, Natasha thought, but she had no idea what.
(Her memory jumped, blinked, skipped reels)
—and she was in Dan’s room trying to stick something into his mouth so that he did not bite off his tongue. He was thrashing on the bed, moaning and screaming, foaming at the mouth, eyes turned up in his head. She had already seen the syringe and blood drops on his bed but did not know what they meant. She was shouting for help because Dan looked as if he were dying, and she had never seen a berserker die. Humans yes, plenty of times, often by her own hand. But never a berserker. Her cries merged with his screams, and soon her parents came running.
Not Lane and Sophia, though. They stayed away.
Her father took over trying to hold down Dan’s tongue. He stuck his fingers into the boy’s mouth, wincing when Dan clamped down and bit hard, and Natasha thought that the taste of another berserker’s blood would have calmed him down. But he kept thrashing and screaming past her father’s hand, and soon the loud siren that announced the opening of an external door went off.
Dan pushed Natasha’s father away and sat up.
His screaming and thrashing had brought on the change while foam was still bubbling at his mouth. His eyes glinted red, his hands twisted into claws, and as he stood Natasha saw that blood was dripping from his sleeves and trouser legs.
“Dan,” her father said. She heard something in his voice then that spoke volumes, and later, when everything was ending, she thought that even then he knew what was to come. Perhaps he had known for some time.
Dan growled, shivering as the fury burst through his veins and lit up his child’s body like a radiator. He sweated blood. He shook his head, pink saliva speckling the walls of his room.
“Dan, whatever you’re going to do, don’t. Nothing will work against them, you know that, they—”
“Weak!” he said, spitting blood. The word was barely discernable past his mouthful of teeth, and whatever he said next came out only as grunts and snarls.
Natasha’s father glanced at her and motioned her back against the wall.
From outside there came a s
cream, bloody and wet, and then the sudden explosion of machine guns.
(Her memory jumped again, slipped into a series of rapid images that reminded Tom of a trailer for a movie, a horror movie, where they showed all the best, bloody bits in order to lure in the viewers)
—Natasha ran along the corridor, her father holding her hand, Dan loping ahead of them. As he emerged into the living area a stream of bullets threw him against the wall, their silver coatings already melting into his bloodstream to poison and kill. But Dan howled, spun on the floor and stood again, leaping across the width of the room to land astride the soldier doing the shooting. He ripped off the man’s head and threw it at the glass wall between the living area and courtyard. It left a bloody question mark on the window before bouncing beneath a settee.
—her mother ran in from outside, hunkered down low, her brother clasped to her chest. He was already raging and dribbling, but her mother cooed to him, trying to calm him down and prevent the change. “I want no part of this!” she said, and her father said, “I don’t think we’ll be given any choice. Where are they?” Her mother turned to look back into the courtyard and a bullet struck her face, exploding one eye and spilling hissing blood and brains across the boy clasped to her chest. “No!” her father screamed, and Natasha smelled the silver, the stench of burning blood and poisoned flesh, and she knew straight away that her mother would not be rising again. The syringe, she thought, wondering what Dan had injected and hating him for not sharing it.
—she and her father ran toward the glass wall – her father carrying her raging brother beneath one arm – and then turned back when they saw what was happening outside. The courtyard had become a battle ground. Soldiers poured through the door from the Control Centre – some they recognised, a couple they did not – fanning out, firing, throwing grenades. Mister Wolf was probably with them, but Natasha could not see him. Out there too, Lane, Sophia and their children flashed across the courtyard, powering through bushes, over paved areas, blurring around bullets, ripping out throats and spewing blood, bouncing from walls, taking occasional hits only to rise again, stronger and more enraged than before. Natasha saw the smudges of terrified faces. A torso trailing guts splashed into the pond. The fountain turned red. A grenade exploded by the window and starred the glass, and her father grabbed her hand and pulled her away, back toward their rooms. “Mummy!” Natasha said, but she knew that her mummy was dead.
—they hid in her room, lying down beside the bed. Her father had slammed the door again and again, smashed a hole in the wall and fused the security lock. It pushed four heavy bolts into the door from the wall, trapping them inside, making certain that they were set apart from Lane and Sophia and the escape these two had obviously planned. They would be trapped here now until the soldiers came to let them out. He cried and raged and swore as he never had before in front of his children. His tears were for his dead wife and his son and daughter, born innocent and yet guilty of so much at others’ bidding. “Daddy, let’s go and get them!” Peter gurgled, his face distorting and growing red from the change. But her father held him and kissed his forehead saying, “No, it’s not our fight,” and more gunfire and explosions swallowed whatever else he said.
—Lane smashed against the door, screeching, his nails tearing through masonry and snagging on the metal bolts, pulling and pushing and twisting, but even his berserker strength could not bend the thick steel. He screamed through the wall at them, nonsense in his words. “Natasha!” he said, and other things, and “Natasha!” again. “He wants me, Daddy?” Natasha asked, and her father shook his head and closed his eyes in despair. The bashing and screaming continued until gunshots and explosions replaced them. There was more fighting and more death, and then it became quiet for some time, the only sounds the sobbing of her father and her little brother on the verge of rage. Natasha was petrified. But her fear, and her father’s despair, kept her from the change.
—Mister Wolf, face splashed with drying blood, pressed the pistol into the back of Natasha’s father’s head and pulled the trigger. Natasha squeezed her eyes shut, trying her best to un-see what she had seen, cast out the image of her father’s face bulging out as the silver bullet melted his brain and poured its poison through his body, and even though her brother was screaming she could still hear Mister Wolf’s voice, low and loaded, “I’ve been waiting to get rid of this scum for so long.”
—they were dragged through the courtyard by their legs, tied with steel-wired rope, and however much pleading or shouting Natasha and Peter did, the soldiers would not let go. She could see why; the bodies of their fallen comrades littered the ground, bleeding and torn and all of them dead. No Lane, no Sophia or their children, she thought, and the idea came for the first time that perhaps they had gotten away. Perhaps after all this there had been a chance. A chance that started in a syringe, something to calm the burn of silver and negate its poison. “Where are they?” she asked, and Mister Wolf turned to her – a little girl, that’s all she was – and struck her across the face with his pistol. She cried because her daddy was not there to protect her, nor her mummy to calm the hurt. “Shut up, bitch,” Mister Wolf said. They got away, she thought, and even though they had left her and her family to die, for a while she was glad.
* * *
The Plain, her brother’s cold execution, the hole, the digging and burying, she remembered all of that, and Tom could barely comprehend the cruelty. In his sleep – where his dreams were Natasha’s memories, steered and controlled and yet going only one way – he cried out, trying to shout at Cole for the terrible things he had done. “One more bullet!” he said, and it was Natasha’s voice begging the soldier to kill her rather then bury her alive with her dead family. But Mister Wolf looked and saw only what he had been told to see: monsters. No little girl, no dead family, only monsters like those that had murdered his friends and comrades. And bury her he did.
* * *
You see? Natasha asked. You see what they did to us, Daddy?
Tom came around quickly, rising out of the dream and back to desperate reality. Though the feeling of dread had gone – blossomed into the violence and terror of Porton Down – the dream had left him with a sense that all could never be right with the world again. He had seen terrible hidden things that he had never suspected existed. He was privy to awful secrets. And his wife . . .
Daddy, we have to go, Natasha said. She moved in his arms.
Tom gasped and tried to push her away, but the front seats prevented her from going any further. She moved on his lap, her limbs and body twisting slowly as if performing an endless stretch. Her face had come away from his chest, her mouth bloody, dried lips pulled back from her teeth like those of a hissing dog.
“Are you coming back to life?” he said.
I was never quite dead.
“What are you doing to me?”
Only good. Helping you.
“Helping me so that I can help you?”
Of course, she said, and her honesty made him hate himself. And helping you because you don’t deserve what has happened. None of us do. We berserkers were wronged by Mister Wolf, and now he has done wrong to you as well.
“You want revenge?” Tom asked, thinking of Jo lying on the back seat of their ruined car . . . the image distant, like a faded black and white impression of crystal-clear reality.
I want to be safe, she said. Tom tried not to look down at her face, but he could not help himself. He thought of the little girl she had been in the dream, confused and frightened and forced to watch her mother gunned down, her father and brother executed in front of her. He cried. They were dry tears, sobs heaving at his shoulders and reminding him of the pain lying dormant in his back, waiting to be reawakened. She was helping him. She was making him better. Whether by doing so she was making him into something else entirely, it would not do to consider right now.
“Let’s go,” he said. “In then out again. Food, drink, toilet, and then we’ll go to meet them. Lane
and Sophia. We’ll go to them and they can take you Home.” And I’ll find Steven, he thought, and will he look like those things that were chained up at Porton Down? Those people, living food, chained to the wall for the berserkers to have at whenever they felt hungry? “Will he?” Tom asked out loud, but Natasha did not answer.
He looked down at the girl in his arms – the corpse which had started to move – and opened the car door.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The latter years of Tom’s life had been dominated by the loss of his only child. Since then he had spent a long time thinking about what this meant, and how he had changed, and how Steven’s death had affected everything. He had come to realise that there are times that pin your life to the curtained agenda of the universe. These vital moments – not necessarily moments, but instances that dictate the course of your life – can be few and far between, or many and varied. They can be significant happenings, or apparently inconsequential events. They set the course of your future and paint the route of your past, and your present pivots around them.defining
When Tom climbed from the car with Natasha in his arms there came one such moment. A policeman passed by just as Tom nudged the car door shut with his hip. He was tall and thin and tired-looking, but his eyes changed as they passed over Tom and Natasha. Became more alert. Became aware.
A second later the policeman looked away, frowning, and rubbed at his temples as he passed through the sliding doors into the service station, as if trying to massage a memory back into his tired mind.
She’s in them as well! Tom realized.
A mother passed by towing two children by their arms. All three looked at Tom and what he carried, and all three looked away again, the children ceasing their struggles and complaints.