And what did I find? he thought. That she's a monster? Some sort of wild animal, immune to bullets and knives, impossible to kill, a killer herself? But he shook his head and looked down at the strange body on the car bonnet. She was more than an animal, and more than simply a killer. She was more than human, not less. She was, as she had told him, a berserker.
Do you see what they made us do? She had whispered before slipping away into a deep sleep. They kept us hungry.
Tom had to leave. He felt refreshed and strong and ready to move on, and though the grief over Jo sat heavy on his shoulders, there was still a numbness that held back the tears. He looked through the shattered windshield at his dead wife on the backseat, and it was not her. That is not Jo! There lay the body he had touched and loved for over thirty years, and yet she was not there. She's dead, he thought, dead and gone forever and I'll never see her again, never smell her or taste her or talk with her again for all eternity. But though the rage and grief were there, something kept their full effect at bay, a numbness that promised worse to come.
Perhaps it was the unreality of what was happening. The impossibility. Natasha had thrown him into a dream world, a place where dead girls spoke in his mind and a man with guns came after him. A place where an unearthed corpse wanted him to be her daddy. Maybe it was that; the unreal, surreal place his world had become.
Or perhaps he really had gone mad.
"We have to go," he said, and out of that unreal daze a panic began to descend. He was parked just off a country lane with the body of his wife in the car and a ten-year-old corpse wrapped in chains on the bonnet. He could not afford to drive the car any farther. Natasha and her chains were too heavy to carry very far. His wallet contained about fifty pounds in notes. Looking around he could see no signs of habitation nearby; no farms, no isolated houses that may offer him transport or a place to hide. He scratched absently at his chest and his fingers came away smeared red. He had been cut there, perhaps by flying glass when Mister Wolf blasted at his car with his gun. Tom rubbed the blood across his fingers until it dried, sticky and crisp, and he wondered why he felt so strong.
Desperation, he thought. Fear. Panic. All simmering just below the surface of whatever's keeping me going. "Crash and burn," he said, and that was what he would end up doing. But while he still had energy to stand and the will to move on, he was more than willing to let instinct and events take over. Just like Natasha and her family in the basement of that house, dodging or shrugging off bullets, raging at the wounds, letting instinct lead them on.
In the distance, Tom heard the roar of a car's engine. It sounded like the growl of a wolf approaching its prey.
Chapter Eight
Cole listened out for Natasha. He had been driving for half an hour, and although he had not heard her again, still he was sure that he was going in the right direction. It felt right. And for now he had nothing else to hang onto but that.
He tore through the country lanes, barely shifting down a gear to negotiate blind bends or humpback bridges. He had already had one collision today; he hoped that was his share of accidents for a while. And besides, the faster he went, the more chance he had of catching the old man and the girl. She lured me on, he kept thinking, she wants me to follow.
People were traveling to work now, and here and there he passed other cars going in the opposite direction. Their drivers greeted him with a uniform expression; shock and disgust. Slow down! they all said with their glares, and he grinned back and pushed down on the gas as he passed them by. He was doing all this for them, these sheep, these innocents who thought that nine to five, Coronation Street and a meal out on Saturday was all there was to life. None of them had a clue about what was really happening in their world. None of them knew the risks he took, the life he had given up to pursue the berserkers and try to keep the innocents safe from harm. And if he took time to stop and tell them they would call him mad.
Let them. It had been years since he had let his own peculiar madness be an upset.
And then there they were, the old guy standing beside the parked car, staring straight at Cole with eyes as wide as a rabbit's in a headlamp's glare.
"Holy shit!" Cole stepped on the brakes and swerved the car across the road, sliding it sideways to prevent careening into the hedge. I can't be this lucky! he thought, but there was Roberts, moving back and forth with indecision, the fear of an innocent who had seen terrible things etched on his face.
Cole was out of the BMW and running at Roberts almost before the wheels had stopped spinning. He paused a few steps away and aimed the .45 at his face.
"She's not here!" Roberts said.
"What?"
"I hid her. I know you want her, she told me, so I hid her where you'd never find her."
Cole paused, trying to work out whether or not Roberts was telling the truth, or if it even mattered. Roberts had seen Natasha and knew what she could do, so he needed to be removed from the picture. "Where?" he asked.
"If I tell you, you'll kill me."
"I'm going to kill you anyway."
Roberts moved back one pace and leaned against his wrecked car, glancing down into the backseat. Cole followed his gaze and saw the dead woman's legs through the open door. "You think I care?" the old guy said. "You killed my wife, you bastard." There was little emotion in his voice, no real trace of anger or rage or anything else that could be dangerous. Numb.
"I'm sorry," Cole said, keeping his voice equally neutral.
"So kill me," Roberts said.
"Where's the girl?"
"I told you, I hid her."
Where? Cole thought, just where? He could have stopped anywhere between the cottage and here, hid her in a barn or shed, beneath a hedge, out in a field, anywhere … but wherever she was, she would be found again. He could kill Roberts now, but his job would be far from over.
"Tell me where."
"No. You've hurt her once before, I won't let you—"
"Hurt her! Do you even know what she is, you stupid fuck?"
"A little girl you buried alive."
Cole shook his head, snorted. "Look, I don't have time for this. Tell me where she is and you'll join your wife quickly, no pain, you won't even hear it coming. Don't tell me, and I'll shoot you again and again until you do. Believe me, I could use a whole magazine and you'd still be conscious."
"You won't do that," Roberts said.
Cole braced himself, lowered his aim until the sight rested on Roberts's left collarbone, then swore because he was right. Cole could kill him with few qualms, but torture was not his thing.
"Okay, I won't do that, but let me appeal to you. Please. You have no idea what she is, or what she can do, and you have to tell me where she is."
"So that you can kill her?"
"Yes, exactly! I should have killed her ten years ago instead of doing what I did. That was stupid of me. I should have known she would have risen again at some point."
"I don't know what the hell you're on about, but I won't let you hurt her again. She's an innocent."
"Innocent! What has she been telling you?" Cole said, genuinely amazed. "Has she told you what a wonderful little girl she was, how sweet her family were? Has she really?"
"She told me that she and her family were turned into killers." Roberts seemed to be gaining confidence, and that pissed off Cole because he was the one with the fucking gun!
"They've always been killers," he said. "They're berserkers. They're not human, not like you and me. They're a different breed, a whole race apart. Yes, we—the army—used them, but they went willingly enough, let me tell you. They used to spend their long lives hiding from us because of the persecution their kind suffered centuries ago. They'd slink through shadows and take someone here, there, now and then. They eat us! They eat people! But we caught them and gave them the chance to do it for real, to revel in what they are. Because they're very, very hard to kill, and they never make a mistake."