had first taken her from that pit…
I'm hungry Daddy, she said. I haven't eaten for so long. And being out, being free … I'm hungry.
'You're confusing me.' Brief images from his dream flashed by and he staggered beneath Natasha's weight. Gnashing jaws, severed limbs, Natasha's real father holding the woman against the wall as he tore out her innards, her little brother Peter, shrugging off the bullet wounds and thrashing around on that body on the floor, and her words came to him again: They kept us hungry.
Oh no, Daddy! she said, Never that, never, ever that for you. You saved me!
'I saved you,' he said, and he pulled her close to his chest.
Perhaps the bullet still in her body moved. Natasha screamed, and for a second she seemed to fill his mind with the effort, being as wholly there as Tom himself. And then she calmed with a groan and a sigh, and something scratched his chest, and Tom sat down in the grass like a mother nursing a newborn child.
Tom drifted. The presence of Natasha in his mind was stronger than it had ever been before, so large and powerful and potent that it seemed to drive him into a fugue, a state of conscious dreaming that quickly took on a feel and taste he had known only recently. The house, Tom thought, the room, the basement …
The countryside vanished, and Natasha was feeding him memories as he fed her his blood.
This time they told him so much more.
She stormed into the basement, brushing aside the remains of the man her mother had just killed. He slapped against the open door and slid down its metal surface, a stain of blood and flesh that drove Natasha into greater frenzy. His Tom face quizzed her intentions and she snapped at it as she ran by.
Inside, her family was already at work.
The basement was huge, much larger than the footprint of the house above, and partitioned with several large glass screens. There were more than just a few survivors down here; there must have been thirty men and women, spread throughout the several glass-walled rooms, and as Natasha and her family stormed in, every one of them seemed to have a gun in their hand.
Her father was a few paces away, his arms and legs flailing as two men and a woman pinned him against a wall. His head thrashed from side to side, blood flew, a man fell away, the flash of gunshots strobed the air, and then her father knelt and leaped, kicking out and digging his toe into the woman's eye as he went. The remaining man followed him with gunfire, and even though several bullets thudded home he kept on running and leaping. Every time he landed it was on a different person, and each time he leaped again he left a mess of rent flesh and broken bones behind. Blood trailed from his bare feet, and Tom flesh and clothing were caught on his long talons. Bullets traced the air after him, and his wild screeches matched the sound of shattering glass.
Natasha ran into the melee, slashing out with her hands. She knocked a gun from one woman's hand, and as the woman knelt to retrieve it Natasha grabbed the back of her neck, long nails piercing skin and sinking in, fist squeezing tighter and tighter. A man ran into her, lashing out with a knife and burying it to the hilt in her shoulder. Natasha screamed, saliva and blood spattering the man's face and neck. He let go of the knife and backed away grinning, then suddenly stopped grinning. Natasha followed, dragging the woman behind her, fingertips almost meeting inside the woman's neck. The woman squealed and thrashed, reaching back and batting ineffectually at Natasha's arm and hand. The man glanced down at the woman, then back at Natasha.
Have her! Natasha shouted, but it came out as an animal roar, nothing intelligible in that violent outburst. And there that brief period of coherence ended. Natasha screeched, power thudding through her child's body and firing every nerve end, rage pumping her blood and spasming in her muscles, pain singing from every bone that sought to distort and be something it could not. Her jaws opened wider, her arms grew longer, fingers were pincers, nails were claws, and her teeth throbbed in her gums at the thought of fresh flesh ready to part beneath them. She took a bite out of the woman's face and then threw her at the man. As he caught the body and stumbled back, Natasha's little brother fell on him from above and ripped out his throat.
There were still some people left alive, a core of defenders that had retreated to a far corner of the basement thinking that their guns would protect them there. Natasha and her family ducked down behind tables and furniture, slinking through the rooms, smashing through glass partitions where they had not already been destroyed by gunfire. Where they found someone living—a man hiding in a cupboard, stinking of piss and fear; a woman taking huge snorts of white powder from a shattered glass vial—they slaughtered them, relishing the splitting of their bodies, spreading insides across the tiled floor. Where they found a dead body they slashed at it on their way past, or perhaps paused to swallow a ruptured eyeball or take a mouthful of exposed breast. It took only a minute to come together, Natasha and her brother, their father and mother, all of them coated in blood, their own, and others', mad, raging, berserk. Her brother spat gobbets of meat from his mouth and slashed at metal furniture, his nails squealing across its surface. He was still young, still learning to direct this rage.
They did not speak, because in this state such communication was all but impossible. Tom, part of Natasha through her memory and yet still an independent observer, realised that everything for the berserkers was instinct. Like a pride of lions on the hunt, or a flock of birds weaving back and forth across the sky, they knew what to do and when. Natasha's father growled and broke left, her mother moved to the right, and Natasha and her little brother waited for a few seconds, preparing to leap over the bank of metal cabinets they hunkered behind.
The humans gathered in the corner of the room were shouting and screaming and crying, letting off bursts of gunfire at shadows thrown by flickering lights. Natasha could smell their fear, and it was good. She could also sense the meat of them, their pumping hearts, their pulsing blood, the flesh of their thighs and the tender taste of their throats. She glanced sideways at her brother and tried to smile, but her tooth-filled mouth would not allow her. He tried to smile back.
Their parents roared at exactly the same moment, launching their attack, diving into the humans unfortunate enough to be on the outside of the group. Guns exploded, bullets whined and whistled around the basement, thudding into walls and ricocheting from furniture.
Natasha and her brother leaped onto the metal cabinets and looked down at the violence below.
There were maybe ten people left alive. Their father was to the left, standing on his hind legs disemboweling a man while a woman fired at him again and again. His body danced and jigged, feet kicking him from the wall, jumping from the floor, dodging bullets as his face and hands remained working on the man. He turned suddenly on the shooter, snatched her gun and buried it barrel-first into her face. One of his claws caught the trigger and the back of the woman's head erupted into the air.
To the right their mother was a blur of thrashing limbs and snapping teeth. A man fell before her, screaming as she pulled herself up his body and opened it every inch of the way.
Someone shouted, someone else pointed, and bullets screamed at Natasha. The memory blurred as she danced left and right, jumped and powered down from the ceiling, bounced from the floor. The whistle of bullets passed close by, and their paths sometimes left hot streaks across her skin. And sometimes, they struck her. Peter whined behind her as a bullet found home. He fell to the floor beside her, growled, and they leapt together. Both of them found meat.
The lights went out as one last desperate burst of gunfire found a switching panel. The stench of an electrical fire added to the odour of opened bodies. But the humans were all dead or dying and already the rage was subsiding. For the berserkers, there were wounds to heal and expended energy to replace.
Natasha and her family settled down to feed.
Do you see? Natasha asked. Do you see now what they made us do? Her voice was weak and tired, barely there at all. Tom could feel her inside his head but there was not the sense of invasion there had been before. He almost had to search to hear her voice.
'I saw,' he said. 'But I don't understand.'
I'm tired, she said. So tired. I haven't fed for so long, Daddy. I need to go away for a while.
'Wait!' Tom said, 'we have to decide where to go, what to do.'
Yes, we have to leave, she said, to leave, he's coming, Mister Wolf is coming … but I'm really only a little girl. She faded away at last. Tom could not be certain what he heard in those final few words: vulnerability, or hopelessness.
He sat there in the morning sun, the unearthed girl in his lap, cows staring over the gate at him with disinterest. A sparrow hawk hovered high overhead, stalking something a couple of fields away. Bees buzzed the hedge, and a tiny wren darted in and out of the undergrowth, picking insects from leaves, wagging its tail to gain balance each time it landed. Tom wished that he could find his balance so easily.
He loved the countryside, and right now it was shielding what had happened from the eyes of the world. His
