Then he let go, pulled away and began to blur.
Tom tried to draw back. Something had changed here, a sudden jump in the reality of things that he should not be seeing. And yet he was prisoner to this dream, a passive viewer of Natasha's memory being played out in his own head, and he was trapped here watching and hearing, tasting and smelling the truth of history. He tried to close his eyes but was already asleep. He would have turned away had he any control. Instead, he saw the family go berserk.
The voice rose into a shout, its words indistinguishable from the snarls and screams coming from the cockpit. The young boy Peter was on his hands and knees now, fingers and toes clawing at the timber decking and leaving deep scores in its surface. The slashed wood shone bright in the sun. He shook his head, and spittle and blood flecked the deck around him. The adults seemed to speed up, their movement jerky, as if this were a movie with every third frame removed.
The view flipped onto its side and began to vibrate as Natasha fell to the deck.
I don't want to see this, Tom thought, and Natasha said, No, but you need to. And it's only just begun.
Ten seconds, the vague voice said, and Natasha looked up at the shadow looming above them. Its stance showed fear. Its voice held awe. Its hands were weighed down by a blocky, heavy object that could have only been a gun.
What are you showing me? Tom thought, but there was no reply, because this was pure memory once more. As the boat thudded onto a beach and a high door in its bow fell open onto wet sand, he became a part of it.
The rest of the dream, the memory, the nightmare came to him in brief glimpses, each of them more confusing than the last, and more terrifying. To begin with Tom could make little sense of the individual images, but the memories viewed through Natasha's eyes combined to evoke a sense of impending action, and a distinct emotion: dread.
Natasha ran onto the beach behind the adults and her younger brother Peter. The sands were deserted, a beautiful golden spread marred here and there with blots of driftwood or seaweed drying in the merciless sun. At the head of the beach where the dunes began, maybe fifty yards away, sat a huge house made of glass and steel, an architect's wet dream sparkling with daylight and holding mystery behind its shaded windows. There were several cars parked beside the house, none of them worth less than fifty grand.
Several people stood around the house and hunkered down on its balconies. They flashed. It was only as Peter flipped onto his back and writhed like a landed fish that Tom realised the flashes were gunshots.
A blur here, like film forwarded sixteen-speed, the images distinguished only by their redness.
They were in the house. It was light, airy, ultramodern, all steel and slate and glass. The father was holding a woman against a wall and emptying her chest cavity onto his feet. Heart, lungs, shattered ribs slopped out, their impact smothered by somebody else screaming. He bit at her lower jaw and tore it away, and as he turned Tom saw just how much he had changed.
Blur.
Natasha was running along a corridor. It turned left and right, doors flashing by on either side, but it was blood that laid the trail she was following. Another turn and she came across the crawling man, mangled leg dragging behind him like a gutted fish. The man collapsed on the floor and turned, attempted to raise a gun, but one slash of Natasha's claws ripped his hand apart, sending the weapon spinning against the wall in a rain of blood. He screamed, Natasha leaned in, and there was a howl that can only have come from an animal as the memory turned red.
Blur.
Peter was in the kitchen, thrashing at a body on the floor. He leaped onto it, screeched, flaying with his hands and feet, jumped off, landed on the work surface, turned to look at Natasha, opened his mouth wide—his mouth, filled with too many teeth and meat and a scream that was not possible—and jumped onto the body again. His head shook and tugged and the body slid across the tiled floor, leaving bits of itself behind. It was barely recognisible as human, other than its clump of blonde hair matted with brain. Peter jumped off again and came at Natasha, but there was no panic, no fear, only a primal sense of sibling love.
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.
