Tom could barely comprehend the cruelty. In his sleep—where his dreams were Natasha's memories, steered and controlled and yet going only one way—he cried out, trying to shout at Cole for the terrible things he had done. 'One more bullet!' he said, and it was Natasha's voice begging the soldier to kill her rather then bury her alive with her dead family. But Mister Wolf looked and saw only what he had been told to see: monsters. No little girl, no dead family, only monsters like these that had murdered his friends and comrades. And bury her he did.
You see? Natasha said. You see what they did to us, Daddy?
Tom came around quickly, rising out of the dream and back to desperate reality. Though the feeling of dread had gone—blossomed into the violence and terror of Porton Down—the dream had left him with a sense that all could never be right with the world again. He had seen terrible hidden things that he had never suspected existed. He was privy to awful secrets. And his wife …
Daddy, we have to go, Natasha said. She moved in his arms.
Tom gasped and tried to push her away, but the front seats prevented her from going any further. She moved on his lap, her limbs and body twisting slowly, as if performing an endless stretch. Her face had come away from his chest, her mouth bloody, dried lips pulled back from her teeth like those of a hissing dog.
'Are you coming back to life?' he said.
'I was never quite dead.
'What are you doing to me?'
Only good. Helping you.
'Helping me so that I can help you?'
Of course, she said, and her honesty made him hate himself. And helping you because you don't deserve what has happened. None of us do. We berserkers were wronged by Mister Wolf, and now he has done wrong to you as well.
'You want revenge?' Tom asked, thinking of Jo lying on the back seat of their ruined car … the image distant, like a faded black and white impression of crystal clear reality.
I want to be safe, she said. Tom tried not to look down at her face, but he could not help himself. He thought of the little girl she had been in the dream, confused and frightened and forced to watch her mother gunned down, her father and brother executed in front of her. He cried. They were dry tears, sobs heaving at his shoulders and reminding him of the pain lying dormant in his back, waiting to be reawakened. She was helping him. She was making him better. Whether by doing so she was making him into something else entirely, it would not do to consider right now.
'Let's go,' he said. 'In then out again. Food, drink, toilet, and then we'll go to meet them. Lane and Sophia. We'll go to them and they can take you home.' And I'll find Steven, he thought, and will he look like those things that were chained up at Porton Down? Those people, living food, chained to the wall for the berserkers to have at whenever they felt hungry. 'Will he?' Tom asked out loud, but Natasha did not answer.
He looked down at the girl in his arms—the corpse that had started to move—and opened the car door.
Chapter Eleven
Tom's life had been dominated by the loss of his only child. Since then he had spent a long time thinking about what this meant, and how he had changed, and how Steven's death had affected everything. He had come to realise that there are times that pin your life to the background scope of the universe. These vital moments—not necessarily defining moments, but instants that dictate the course of your life—can be few and far between, or many and varied. They can be significant happenings, or apparently inconsequential events. They set the course of your future and paint the route of your past, and your present pivots around them.
When Tom climbed from the car with Natasha in his arms there came one such moment. A policeman passed by just as Tom nudged the car door shut with his hip. He was tall and thin and tired-looking, but his eyes changed as they passed over Tom and Natasha. Became more alert. Became aware. A second later the policeman looked away, frowning, and rubbed at his temples as he passed through the sliding doors into the service station, as if trying to massage a memory back into his tired mind.
She's in them as well! Tom thought.
A mother passed by towing two children by their arms. All three looked at Tom and what he carried, and all three looked away again, the children ceasing their struggles and complaints.
In their minds, just like she's in mine.
Yes, Natasha said, except you know me.
Tom walked on, crossing the car park and skirting between cars. In a couple of vehicles he saw people glancing at him and then away again, slight frowns creasing their brows. A man tightened his grip on a steering wheel, knuckles as white as his face. A woman picked up a book and opened it, scanning its upside down pages. He approached a group of teenagers wearing baggy jeans and baseball caps, laughing and joking and cursing their way up their pack's pecking order. He paused, Natasha's weight shifted in his arms, and he doubted her. She silenced his doubt when the teenagers fell quiet, all six of them looking down as if comparing their trainer brands.
Tom walked by, passed through the sliding doors into the service station, made for the toilets. More people ignored him, and he felt a thrill at what was happening. He felt invisible. He was invulnerable, even though the bullet in his back was grinding against a bone, injecting his spine with a pain that even Natasha could not swallow whole. Service stations had always struck Tom as impersonal places where nobody really cared; now, he was as far away from the centre of attention as he had ever been.
Once in the bathroom he went to the farthest cubicle, locked the door and sat on the toilet seat. His legs and arms began to shake and he had to set Natasha down, resting her back against the closed door. The blanket fell from her face and he closed his eyes, not wishing to see the mummified features that seemed to have changed. Were her eyes really that open before? he thought. Was her mouth really that wide? Natasha was not with him right then, and he hoped she could not hear his thoughts. He would have hated for her to hear the disgust he could not keep from his mind.
'I need to clean up,' he said. His voice called her in from wherever she had been and the body in the blanket shifted slightly, settling. Tom looked away.
He grabbed wads of toilet roll and went about cleaning the blood from his back.
'You were controlling those people,' he said.
No, just giving them other pictures in their heads.
'Some of them looked confused.'
It depends on what pictures I give them.
'What pictures do you give me?' he asked, trying to remember what Jo sounded and smelled like, unable to do either.
Soon you can mourn, Natasha said. Soon.
'You're controlling me—'
No, Daddy! Just giving you different pictures.
Tom unrolled some more toilet paper and dabbed again at his wound. Most of the blood had dried into a hard crisp across his back and buttocks, and he would need more than dry tissue to remove it. But he was more concerned at the wound itself. It should have killed him. He knew that Natasha was doing something to ease the pain, giving while she took, but the fact that he could find nothing of the hole other than a scabbed mess of ridged skin and blood brought him back to Natasha's memory of the attack on the house. In the boat on the return journey, she had looked at her family and seen their wounds already healing. That was a berserker thing, and now it was happening to him.
Tom cleaned up as best he could, used the toilet, then left the bathroom. Natasha cast herself about again and eyes were averted, comments died on lips, attention flowing away from Tom and Natasha as if pushed away by a magnetic field. In the shop he picked up some food and drink and a couple of T-shirts. He paid the girl behind the till, trying his best to catch her eye, but she looked anywhere but at Tom. He hefted the weight in his arms but the girl did not look. She put his change on the counter instead of dropping it in his hand, turned away from him and ran her fingertips down a rack of cigarette packets, as if the truth to life itself were printed alongside the government health warnings.
