along a path, a toddler running beside her, aiming for the playground. The toddler, a little girl, ran on ahead, jumping onto the roundabout and waiting impatiently for her mother to begin pushing. The baby squealed in its pram as it watched its sister having so much fun. The mother, tall, red-headed and attractive, pressed the pram's brakes and pushed the roundabout, bending to kiss her daughter every time she spun by. The little girl giggled and the mother smiled.
They don't have a clue, Cole thought. He had just killed his friend for them. For their safety. For the little girl's future. That's what all this was about. After six years spent living in one bed-sit after another, drawing the meagre army pension they had awarded him after letting him go, picking up crappy, menial jobs as he watched for signs of the berserkers' reemergence, it had all come to this. He was convinced that he was doing right, and yet sometimes he had to remind himself, to reinforce his conviction.
Because Cole was not a bad man. Cole was a good man.
He had left the army six years ago, three months before killing Sandra Francis. They had refused to let him pursue the escapees, saying that they were gone and that was that. Gone back to wherever they came from, the brass told him. They'll not worry us now. But he had never forgotten the wagon that rolled in one June morning under cover of darkness, ROBINSON FRESH FOODS painted across its sides. The sounds he had heard from within had stayed with him forever. And later, seeing those things as they brought them out, his view of the world had changed in seconds.
The woman in the park reminded him of the scientist, Sandra. She had been attractive, her red hair hiding a stunning intellect behind Barbie doll looks. And that had been Cole's mistake. He had been a bigot, believing that it would be easy to persuade the truth from her.
What did you do to the girl?
I can't tell you.
What makes her special?
I cant tell you.
You have to—
No, I don't.
What was in the syringe? Did you help them, did you make them immune to the silver?
I can't tell you.
Did you help them escape?
A silence, long and loaded. And Francis never shifted her gaze from Cole's eyes.
You did. You did! Why? You have to tell me. Really, you do, because I need to know, and I'll find out one way or the other.
Then it's the other.
More talking, more pleading, but however tightly he'd tied her to the chair and however much he had threatened, Cole could not bring himself to torture her. And really, looking back on it, he believed that nothing would have made her talk.
Because she was scared.
Please, tell me or—
Or you'll shoot me?
And perhaps that had been her mistake: not believing that he would.
Cole marked this as the point when he had grown up. Leaving the army had turned his purpose into a private crusade. His shoulders had bowed under the weight of guilt and responsibility, and he spent many waking hours convincing himself that he was doing everything right. There were no voices, no jealous gods giving him their time, but there was God, present at every twist and turn of his life and listening to his fears and hopes. He knew what Cole was doing, and He knew why, but that did not make the remorse and doubt any less difficult to bear.
Cole let go of the balustrade and smiled as the woman glanced across at him. She smiled back, then went back to playing with her children.
I'm doing all this for them, he thought, patching any holes in his conviction. He had just killed a friend. He shook his head to dislodge the memory and it slipped down through the grates in his mind, under the skein of reality he had created over the past ten years, finding itself prisoner with so many other memories, ideals and discarded morals that he worked so hard to keep subdued. That false vision of reality kept them all hidden away. The memory would come back, he knew that, and would haunt him forever, just as the memory of Sandra Francis' death haunted his dreams. But even as Cole walked along the landing and down the external staircase, Nathan King became a man he had once served with at Porton Down, a fun friend, a good soldier. He was a million miles and ten years away from that corpse already cooling in the filthy flat.
Cole climbed into his Jeep. Salisbury Plain was about two hours away. He could be there by dusk.
For a long time, Tom could not move.
The corpse of the child still lay where he had found it, wrapped in chains and virtually buried in filth. It had been a girl; he could see her long hair (and hear her voice, that was a girl's voice), and she wore the rotten remnants of a dress. It may have been pink once, but burial had bled all colour to a uniform brown. Between the chains he could still make out the patterned stitching on the chest, flowers and butterflies and everything a little girl would love. It was a long dress, sleeveless, something for the summer, not this cool autumn day. Her leathery skin seemed unconcerned by the freshness in the air. Her face (it should be looking the other way, not at me, it shouldn't have turned to me) was a mummified mask of wrinkles, a dead young girl with an old woman's skin. The creases around her eyes and the corners of her mouth were deep, home to muck and tiny, squirming white things. Her mouth hung open, filled with mud. Her eye sockets were moist, dark, and not totally empty. The eyes sat like creamy yellowed eggs, waiting to birth something unknowable.
Her hand still touched his arm. He remained motionless, staring at the places where her fingers squeezed, the slight indentations in his skin, hairs pressed down, redness around where her fingers touched him because she was squeezing him.
Tom gasped, realising he had not breathed for many seconds. A breath shushed across the Plain, shifting grasses and setting a spread of nearby ferns whispering secrets. He could not take his eyes from the girl.
'That's not squeezing me, it's just touching me,' he said, staring down at the hand. He raised his other hand, ready to lift her mummified arm and set it down across her chest. 'I shifted her … she moved … her arm lifted and fell, all because I shifted her, all down to gravity …' He breathed hard between each phrase, trying to force away the dizziness that blurred the edges of his senses, determined to ignore the feeling that the corpse was about to move again. Every instant held the potential of another squeeze, another touch.
But her fingers are pressing—
Tom pulled away and the little girl's nails scratched his skin.
'No!'
The girl's body settled back into the mud, the chains holding her tight. They clinked as she shifted slightly—
Gravity, it's gravity.
Then a small slick thing slipped from a hole in her shoulder and scurried across her body.
Tom crawled backward out of the grave, pushing with his feet, pulling with his hands. There was no sign of Steven down there, not exposed at least, and he could not go back in to go deeper, he just could not. Jo would be frantic by now—it was mid-afternoon already and the sun was dipping to the west, ready to kiss the horizon and invite in the dark—and he suddenly realised just how many hours he had lost here. His shoulders and arms ached from the exertion, and his heart galloped hard.
'Oh Jesus God fucking hell,' he moaned, closing his eyes and trying to understand what he had done. It was a moment of reason in madness, clarity in confusion, but the moment was chased away. He felt it leave, lifting its legs and sprinting from his consciousness as a strange voice forced its way inside.
Are you Misterwolf?
Tom's eyes snapped open. The child's corpse was shifting. He could not see actual movement, but the sinking sun reflecting from the moisture on its body was wavering, the reflections stretching up and down, left and right, repeating their rhythmic movements. As if the body were breathing.
No … no, not Misterwolf.
Tom was shaking, his eyes watering. He wondered whether it was that giving the corpse an illusion of movement.
