Berserk

"Lane!" Higgins shouted.

"Eloquent as ever," Lane said, and he suddenly growled and bent at the waist, stooping into an animal pose.

"Please!" Higgins said. He started shaking his head, eyes looking left and right at his dead men.

Lane straightened, his face changing. He was crying blood. He pointed his pistol at the major. "I'm giving you the choice," he growled.

"No, please Lane!" Higgins said. "I have a son, a daughter. I have grandchildren! It's Janey's birthday in three days, what will she do without her granddad? What will she do? Please, Lane. Please." He was crying now, a thin, slight man whose fatigues and rank did nothing to protect him from fear.

"I'm giving you the choice," Lane said again, enunciating each word carefully through his stretching jaw, sprouting teeth.

"Sophia?" Higgins said, but there was no help there. She still held onto her rifle, but she was changing too, growling and grunting and snarling at the corpse of a soldier at her feet.

Lane pulled himself upright, seeming to exert a massive effort to do so. His arm wavered, and then lowered. He dropped the pistol. "Your … last … chance," he said, and the final word transformed into a roar.

Higgins looked at Tom for the first time, then down at Natasha nestling in his arms. "You have no idea," he said, and then he raised his pistol and shot himself through the mouth.

Lane and Sophia were upon him before his body hit the ground.

Tom retreated back into the unit as the berserkers took their fill. He carried Natasha with him and settled her in an old rocking chair, its re-upholstered seat and back Tom up by bullets. The chair moved for a couple of seconds, and then kept moving. Even above the sounds of ravenous feeding from outside, Tom could hear the subtle creaks of the girl's torso bending and stretching.

Daddy, she said, her voice uneven and strained. Daddy!

The chair rocked.

Tom felt sick, as if he had eaten a handful of uncooked meat. The taste in his mouth was one that never should have been there. He looked at his hands, but there was no sign of blood, and for that he was relieved.

Natasha did not look as though she could be alive—her face was frozen, hair still matted with mud, limbs and body dried and stiffened by time. And yet her joints had begun to work, and every small movement in one limb seemed to encourage movement in another.

The chair rocked.

She shifted as if every bone in her body were broken, a fluid motion that seemed to feed upon itself. Tom wondered whether now that she had started, if she would ever stop.

"What is it?" he said, but he knew, and she said, You know. "I can't help you," he said. "I can't take you out there while they're—"

You don't need to take me out. Her mental voice was a pained whine, and her real voice came as a low rattle: "Daddy …"

He knew that she was right. And he knew what she was doing to him. He supposed he had known from the begi

"Daddy!"

His back flared with pain, and Tom could do nothing but return to Natasha. He lifted her from the chair, sat there himself and settled her in his lap. She was heavier than before, and her teeth seemed sharper, her suckling mouth more eager. He looked down at where she gnawed at his chest, saw his blood bubbling there, and closed his eyes.

In his mind he saw more murder at the hands of the berserkers. But this time the memories were his own.

Chapter Fifteen

Cole had found a navigator inside his head. As he drove, he waited for Natasha to visit him again and entice him on to whatever fate she believed awaited him. He was happy to follow. This was his life, and the lives of everyone he had ever loved, known, met, seen, heard or killed. This was history being written, being created here and now. One bullet from his pistol could change the world. All he asked for was a chance.

So he had wandered the streets of his mind, passing through sunlight and looking to the shadows. They hid many things and some of them he saw and knew—ghosts of friends, the wraiths of the people he had killed. But none of them harmed him, none of them frightened him, because they were all of his own making. Natasha did not project herself into their images and steer them to attack. The woman from the MX5 was there, but was a product of his own memory. However much he felt disturbed at her being in the dusky alleys of his mind, he knew that she was all him. He saw her black panties and pale milky thighs, and that was the final sight he'd had of her, that was all, there was nothing else in the memory. Nothing like Natasha had made for him.

He moved on, passing across intersections where his life had changed or may change in the future. He saw no street names and decided that he had to name them himself. In the next couple of hours perhaps he would make a whole new map of his life, draw it fresh purpose, a totally different emphasis. He was a murderer and that would never change, but the justification he sought lay in those blank street signs, buried at crossroads he had yet to reach.

People watched him from the buildings lining these long roads, and they were the unknowns he was trying to save. None of them knew of Natasha, or Lane, or the others; none of them were aware of the danger they were in every second of every minute of their lives. None of them realised that there really were monsters. The fact that they would never appreciate what Cole was about to do did not concern him in the slightest. He was not acting for fame and fortune; he would be signing no book deals, he would appear on no talk shows.

And then, driving north on the motorway, waiting for Natasha to return and tell him where she was, Cole felt a shadow beneath the streets. It moved quickly, passing under his feet as he looked up at the faceless masses staring from the skyscrapers of his soul. He looked down at the road and saw that he was standing on a manhole, edges rusted into the frame but its promise still obvious.

He did not want to go down there.

The shadow thumped away to the left, shattering windows and cracking facades, and Cole followed on the surface, turning left from the motorway and following the road in his mind's eye. He ran faster as he drove faster, keeping an eye on the road and his mind on the shadow as it thundered on ahead. It was not Natasha—he could not feel those slick fingers in his mind, and even if she were hiding down there in his darkest subconscious, he would know her—but he did not question its presence. Perhaps as she had refined her ability to communicate in those long years below the ground, maybe he had too, in that confused decade just gone by. Perhaps his hate for her was so strong that it had Tom itself from him, taking on a shadow of its own true existence. The thought that he may be following his own disembodied hatred did not concern him at all.

The shadow urged him left again, and as the sun set, so the streets of his mind lost focus. Nearing something dark, he thought. Closing in on the terror.

The shadow disappeared and Cole wailed, bumping the car into an old stone wall. But then he saw light other than the setting sun, and he knew that he was there.

Down in a shallow valley, at the edge of a spread of industrial buildings, a ball of fire blossomed into the sky.

"We're leaving." Someone nudged Tom's shoulder and he jerked awake. For a second he had no idea where he was. He'd been dreaming of blood and death and the stink of bodies turned inside out. Awake now, relief washed through him, but the stench and taste returned when he remembered what had happened, and what was still happening.