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 leaving 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 cried out 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 windshield, 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, turning 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 backseat. 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 the entire 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 repeatedly struck the front of the Jeep.
"Good," he whispered, and he meant it. "And I'm not your daddy. That man … that thing is your father, not me." He tried not to focus on any one image from the dream.
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?"
There's more for you to see before I can explain, Natasha said, voice hitching as her sobs dried up. 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 every' one 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?"
I can't. 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 had 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.
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 hot 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 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 neck. 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?"