another berserker, and he could not risk doing anything to the soldiers on the base, so it was their food that suffered. He had probably supped blood until he was drunk from it, then continued until he was almost asleep, suckling from habit rather than necessity until the man died. Natasha was sorry. The food had been there for over a year now, and she had grown quite attached to him.
She walked on. The fate of their victims was the least of her worries right now. She had told her parents that she was going to her room to read, but in reality she had simply wanted to leave the courtyard because of the thickening atmosphere out there. Something was happening. It got like this sometimes—angry and loaded—and Natasha usually put it down to the electrical grid above their heads. But other times she shrank away from such tall tales, telling herself to grow up and try to understand what was going on. There were group dynamics at work here that her child's mind found difficult to fathom, but at least she realised that something was occurring. Her brother, oblivious, played tag with Dan and Sarah, still too young to know. All children are born animals, her mother once had told her, human and berserker. But with its first breath a berserker child is different, and every breath henceforth, increases those differences.
Natasha walked through the communal living area—blank walls, functional furniture, a TV and overflowing bookcase—and headed back to the bedrooms.
Someone was following her.
She darted into her parents' room and hid behind the door. A few seconds later Dan walked by, singing softly to himself and clicking his fingers, something he did when he was nervous. He paused outside Natasha's closed bedroom door, listened briefly and then walked on, singing changing to humming. He had obviously grown bored of playing tag.
He's doing something, Natasha thought, but she had no idea what.
Her memory jumped, blinked, skipped reels—and she was in Dan's room trying to stick something into his mouth so that he did not bite off his tongue. He was thrashing on the bed, moaning and screaming, foaming at the mouth, eyes turned up in his head, and though she had already seen the syringe and blood drops on his bed she did not know what they meant. She was shouting for help because Dan looked as if he were dying, and she had never seen a berserker die. Humans yes, plenty of times, often by her own hand. But never a berserker. Her cries merged with his screams, and her parents soon came running.
Not Lane and Sophia, though. They stayed away.
Her father took over trying to hold down Dan's tongue. He stuck his fingers into the boy's mouth, wincing when Dan clamped down and bit hard, and Natasha thought that the taste of another berserker's blood would have calmed him down. But he kept thrashing and screaming past her father's hand, and soon the loud siren that announced the opening of an external door went off.
Dan pushed Natasha's father away and sat up.
His screaming and thrashing had brought on the change, and foam was still bubbling at his mouth. His eyes glinted red, hands twisting into claws, and as he stood Natasha saw that blood was dripping from his sleeves and trouser legs.
'Dan,' her father said. She heard something in his voice then that spoke volumes, and later, when everything was ending, she thought that even then he knew what was to come. Perhaps he had known for some time.
Dan growled, shivering as the fury burst through his veins and lit up his child's body like a radiator. He sweated blood. He shook his head, pink saliva speckling the walls of his room.
'Dan, whatever you're going to do, don't. Nothing will work against them, you know that, they—'
'Weak!' he said, spitting blood. The word was barely discernable past his mouthful of teeth, and whatever he said next came out only as grunts and snarls.
Natasha's father glanced at her and motioned her back against the wall.
From outside there came a scream, bloody and wet, and then the sudden explosion of machine guns.
Natasha's memory jumped again, and then slipped into a series of rapid images that reminded Tom of a trailer for a movie … a horror movie, where they showed all the best, bloody bits in order to lure in the viewers— Natasha ran along the corridor, her father holding her hand, Dan loping ahead of them. As he emerged into the living area a stream of bullets threw him against the wall, their silver coatings already melting into his bloodstream to poison and kill. But Dan howled, spun on the floor and stood again, leaping across the width of the room to land astride the soldier doing the shooting. He ripped off the man's head and threw it at the glass wall between the living area and courtyard. It left a bloody question mark on the window before bouncing beneath a settee.
Her mother ran in from outside, hunkered down low, her brother clasped to her chest. He was already raging and dribbling, but her mother cooed to him, trying to calm him down and prevent the change. 'I want no part of this!' she said, and her father said, 'I don't think we'll be given any choice. Where are they?' Her mother turned to look back into the courtyard and a bullet struck her face, exploding one eye and spilling hissing blood and brains across the boy clasped to her chest. 'No!' her father screamed, and Natasha smelled the silver, the stench of burning blood and poisoned flesh, and she knew straight away that her mother would not be rising again. The syringe, she thought, wondering what Dan had injected and hating him for not sharing it.
She and her father ran toward the glass wall—her father carrying her raging brother beneath one arm—and then turned back when they saw what was happening outside. The courtyard had become a battle ground. Soldiers poured through the door from the control centre—some they recognised, a couple they did not—fanning out, firing, throwing grenades. Mister Wolf was probably with them, but Natasha could not see him. Out there too, Lane, Sophia and their children flashed across the courtyard, powering through bushes, over paved areas, blurring around bullets, ripping out throats and spewing blood, bouncing from walls, taking occasional hits only to rise again, stronger and more enraged than before. Natasha saw the smudges of terrified faces. A torso trailing guts splashed into the pond. The fountain turned red. A grenade exploded by the window and starred the glass, and her father grabbed her hand and pulled her away, back toward their rooms. 'Mummy!' Natasha said, but she knew that her mummy was dead.
They hid in her room, lying down beside the bed. Her father had slammed the door again and again, smashed a hole in the wall and fused the security lock. It pushed four heavy bolts into the door from the wall, trapping them inside, making certain that they were set apart from Lane and Sophia and the escape these two had obviously planned. They would be trapped here now until the soldiers came to let them out. He cried and raged and swore as he never had before in front of his children. His tears were for his dead wife and his son and daughter, born innocent and yet guilty of so much at others' bidding. 'Daddy, let's go and get them!' Peter gurgled, his face distorting and growing red from the change. But her father held him and kissed his forehead, shaking his head, saying, 'It's not our fight,' and more gunfire and explosions swallowed whatever else he said.
Lane smashed against the door, screeching, his nails tearing through masonry and snagging on the metal bolts, pulling and pushing and twisting, but even his berserker strength could not bend the thick steel. He screamed through the wall at them, nonsense in his words. 'Natasha!' he said, and other things, and 'Natasha!' again. 'He wants me, Daddy?' Natasha said, and her father shook his head and closed his eyes in despair. The bashing and screaming continued until gunshots and explosions replaced them. There was more fighting and more death, and then it became quiet for some time, the only sounds the sobbing of her father and her little brother on the verge of rage. Natasha was petrified. But her fear and her father's despair kept her from the change.
Mister Wolf, face splashed with drying blood, pressed the pistol into the back of Natasha's father's head and pulled the trigger. Natasha squeezed her eyes shut, trying her best to un-see what she had seen, cast out the image of her father's face bulging out as the silver bullet melted his brain and poured its poison through his body, and even though her brother was screaming she could still hear Mister Wolf's voice, low and loaded, 'I've been waiting to get rid of this scum for so long.'
They were dragged through the courtyard by their legs, tied with steel-wired rope, and however much pleading or shouting Natasha and Peter did the soldiers would not let go. She could see why: the bodies of their fallen comrades littered the ground, bleeding and Tom and all of them dead. No Lane, no Sophia or their children, she thought, and the idea came for the first time that perhaps they had got away. Perhaps after all this there had been a chance after all. A chance that started in a syringe, something to calm the burn of silver and negate its poison. 'Where are they?' she asked, and Mister Wolf turned to her—a little girl, that's all she was—and struck her across the face with his pistol. She cried because her daddy was not there to protect her, nor her mummy to calm the hurt. 'Shut up, bitch,' Mister Wolf said. They got away, she thought, and even though they had left her and her family to die, for a while she was glad.
The Plain, her brother's cold execution, the hole, the digging and burying, she remembered all of that, and
