"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 knew 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.
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 the fence posts 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 soaked 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, 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 in his tiredness made 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 like 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, good in his palm, calming the pain. He released the magazine, check that it was fully loaded, clicked it back in and dropped the pistol 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 lie 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 darkness, 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. Regardless, he drove on, 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 were 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 mush 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 lie 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. 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. 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 slowed 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 backseat, switching on the interior light. If Mister Wolf were closing in, Tom would present him with a fine target. But there was nothing else for it. 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 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.