sledgehammer. The whole vehicle shook. The passenger seat rattled in its bracings, and a puff of stuffing erupted from its front face. It drifted lazily down onto the mat as the car stereo and heating panel exploded in a shower of plastic, glass and wires.
Jo had slumped down over his lap, hiding from the shooting. He could feel her shaking with fright, mumbling her terror, and he put his hand on her head to show her he was still there. She was wet with the sweat of fear.
The noise was incredible. The various sounds of the car being destroyed around him—Go back, go back!—the explosive gunshots, much louder than he could have imagined—Go back go back, now!—and his own screaming, so loud and yet so detached from him that for a few seconds he wondered whether it was Jo.
Go back, Daddy, back, back, he's hurting me!
Tom tried to lean forward in his seat to offer less of a target, but Jo was heavy in his lap, still jerking and gasping from the shock of what was happening. Her legs protruded from the open door, the most exposed part of her, and he was terrified that one of them would catch a bullet.
It hurts! Natasha screamed, and suddenly Tom realised what she had been saying, and why, and he knew that she was right. He turned the ignition key, slipped the car into reverse and slammed his foot on the gas.
The shooting paused as the car started to move, and Tom guessed that Mister Wolf was reloading. Good timing. He turned to look back over his shoulder just at the instant when the rear of his car struck the front grill of the Jeep, jerking him back in his seat. Jo pressed against his stomach and chest, and Tom gasped. He saw the man leap away to one side, roll on the gravel and stand again, fumbling in his pocket with one hand and holding the gun with the other. For a second their eyes met. The man frowned, cocked his head to one side, holding Tom's gaze. And then Tom saw the game of distraction Cole had been playing when he brought up the gun and aimed it at his head.
The bullet exploded the seat's headrest as Tom drove forward again. He braked quickly and reversed into the Jeep once more, careful to keep Jo's legs safely clear of the impact. He felt hot metal glancing across the back of his scalp, opening up fresh wounds.
Hurts, hurts!
The car struck again and he kept his foot on the accelerator, wheels spinning in the gravel and sending small stones flying, the stench of the burning clutch filling his nostrils, the Jeep moving back now because the man had somehow, miraculously, left the parking brake off.
The gun exploded again and again, punching holes in the car. Jo shook but Tom did not look down, could not, not now that there was the slightest chance they might escape. He could smell something other than the clutch, something that must have been the sweet tang of a gun growing hot.
'Come on!' Tom screamed, and the Jeep rolled from the driveway and back out into the road.
Jo jerked on his lap and then lay still. Tom looked down and saw a blossom of blood on her back, spreading slowly outward from a ragged hole in her dressing gown. 'Jo?'
Footsteps, running on gravel.
He kept his foot on the gas.
Another engine roared and a tractor ploughed into the side of the Jeep, shoving it several feet along the road with a screech of tires and the howl of breaking metal.
'Jo?'
There was room now to reverse between the Jeep and tractor—tangled together as if they had rolled off the production line as one—and the gatepost, and as Tom saw Mister Wolf standing directly in front of the car, leveling his pistol, he spun the wheel and ducked down over Jo. Two bullets thudded into his seat. He felt the warmth of Jo's blood on his cheek where he was pressed against her back. Her legs and the open door snagged the gatepost and then flipped free again. The car hit something, scraped by, and Tom sat up in his seat, blood and tears dropping from his chin and cheeks as he twisted around and reversed quickly up the road.
He was sobbing, blinking fast, trying so hard to keep his eyes clear so that he did not bury them in the hedge. More gunshots followed him, but he did not care now, would not care if one of them struck him in the neck. At least then he could hold Jo one more time before he bled to death.
There's still Steven, Natasha said.
'Shut up!' Tom shouted. He aimed the car around a bend and steered its smashed rear into a gateway, knocking the gate from its iron moorings. It fell slowly, as if wanting to remain standing. He saw dawn blurring the night in the east. Jo's blood ran warm on his legs. He twisted the wheel and drove forward, away from the cottage and the Jeep and Mister Wolf, who wanted so much to kill him.
Me, Natasha said, it's me he wants to hurt, Daddy, not—
'I said shut up!' Tom screamed, and two wheels churned briefly along the grass verge before he regained control.
Jo was still and silent, and he could see now that the bullet in her back had not killed her. How could it, when there was so little left of the back of her head from those first few shots?
He touched her there, hoping that somehow, as he drove, he could share in his dead wife's final thoughts.
Tom was aware that he was dreaming, but that awareness gave him no control. He had slipped from a chaos of nightmarish images into this almost filmic episode, and though he could feel the sudden outside influence that drove this—it was more like a memory than a dream, yet one that someone else was remembering for him—he could do nothing to steer or influence its course. He sensed that it would be bad. He tried to close his ears, his eyes, but he was asleep, and dreams paid little heed to external senses.
Besides, it was fascinating, like a car crash or a train wreck. He had to watch. And it distracted his mind from … from … something awful that he could no longer quite remember.
'It's good to forget, for a while,' said the man in the boat. He looked straight at Tom and smiled, a pained expression that showed far too many teeth. 'But you'll always remember again in the end. Watch now. Remember.'
Asleep, his dreams hijacked by Natasha's memories, Tom watched.
The man in the boat was not alone. There were four of them, two adults—a man and a woman—a young boy, and Natasha, through whom Tom was viewing this memory. They were all dressed in similar grey-green clothes, almost militaristic. The adults sat stony-faced, but the boy seemed excited, forever standing and being told to sit again, babbling and being hissed at to remain silent. He was panting like a puppy at play. The adults seemed to speak to him without moving, and Tom heard whispers in his mind.
'Almost there,' the man said out loud. His legs were jerking up and down, feet tapping the deck beneath them. His hands clasped at his thighs. He turned to the woman next to him, his wife, and smiled, and kissed the side of her face. 'Remember, it's not us doing this,' he whispered. She turned away as if she could not face him, and looked across at her son. He did not echo his parents' apparent sadness. The boy was standing again, keening as he jumped up and down on the spot, hands twisting the legs of his plain trousers into tight knots. His eyes were changing colour.
A voice came from elsewhere, dull and distant and lifeless. You leave no one, it said, and a shape stood above them, blurred against the skyline.
Try as he might Tom could see nothing outside the cockpit where the family sat. They were totally enclosed. The only reason he knew this was a boat was because Natasha's memory told him so, and the only way he could be certain of the movement was by the shadows of the radar mast gliding up and down across the cockpit as the boat dipped and peaked the waves. The little boy was running back and forth now, four steps left, four steps right, and the movement must have been blurring him in memory because his arms seemed to be growing in length, his legs thickening. It was as if Natasha's memory in Tom's mind was slipping, and its images were slurring.
'Peter … ,' the woman said, but she trailed off when the man put his hand on her arm. The boy's eyes shone as if they caught the sun.
One minute, the distant voice said, and the shadow of the speaker rose and fell across the woman's face as the boat traversed another wave. She turned and looked directly at Tom—at Natasha—and smiled a smile he remembered his mother giving him so many years ago. It spoke of unquestioning love, and a motherly instinct to protect.
The man leaned to the side and spoke to the woman. She shook her head, both angry and scared, and he held her closer and spoke again, keeping her still so that she could hear everything he had to say.
