You're a murderer, and you'll be caught and put in prison. You'll die in there. And I wish it could be more. I wish you could meet Lane and Sophia again. And their children, remember them? Mister Wolf, I so wish you could see what has become of their children. They'd like you. Maybe raw, maybe just breathed on by a flame, blue. But they'd like you so much.
They're thriving. I hope you remember that. Living the life they were always meant to live before you bastards caught us and put us away. We're back, Mister Wolf. Back where we belong. And now we're going home.
'Stupid little bitch. Stupid little bitch! You think you're all there is? You think you're the centre of all this? There're too many parts, too many involvements for there to be any one centre. You've led me on for this long, do you think I'm just going to give up? Do you really, honestly think I don't have my own ways and means? Natasha, sweetheart, I've got a magazine full of bullets here for you, and now that I've found my shadow I've also found you.'
There's nothing for you to find, Misterwolf. We were always the shadows in the night. You took away our history, but we've won it back. Now fuck off, you pathetic man. Fuck off and kill some more women.
'You sound so confident, but you can't see everything, can you? Can't see past my shadow. It's hiding things from you. Hiding what I can see. I'll see you very, very soon.'
Cole's shadow rose up and filled the night, and he and Natasha could talk no more.
'We are going home, aren't we?' Natasha said, her voice a whisper in the silence. Dan was sleeping, and Sarah leaned back in her seat as her wounds healed. In the front seats Sophia and Lane glanced at each other.
'Home?' Lane said.
'Home,' Natasha said, louder this time. 'The place berserkers come from. The place we were always meant to find again. You've come from there, haven't you? That's where you've been, isn't it? And you're taking us back there now.'
Back home, Tom thought. Back to Steven. But if that's the case, why am I so terrified to say his name?
'Oh, Natasha,' Lane said, 'your mother really did talk such shit.'
In his arms, the girl turned to face Tom. Daddy? she said in his mind. And suddenly Tom knew.
'Where's my son?' he asked. Sophia turned in the passenger seat and looked back at him, and for once there was something other than dismissal in her eyes. It may have been regret.
That was when the Mondeo swerved around a bend in the road and struck the Range Rover head-on.
Chapter Sixteen
The shadow within had smothered him. Everywhere he looked, above and below, blackness held him within its grasp. He coughed and heard nothing. He sniffed and smelled nothing. The shadow had surged from his underground and flooded the byways of his consciousness, and it was only as a hazy light began to grow ahead that Cole realised he was being protected.
The shadow changed slowly from black to an oppressive, milky white, and Cole panicked. He could hardly breathe or move. If he opened his mouth he felt something trying to force its way in—not the shadow. He pushed forward, attempting to pull away from the thing's grasp, but it held him fast—again, not the shadow. He was not sure whether or not he was even conscious, but the pain suddenly bit into his thighs again, the throbbing raw and loud, and he started to find sense.
Airbag. It had been the last thing on his mind when he swung the car around the corner and saw the Range Rover heading his way. He'd had maybe two seconds to react.
Must be them. I've got the initiative … I've got the surprise … Speedometer, forty. The Range Rover's big, heavy, but is there really another way? Is there?
Airbag.
Next had come the instant decision, and a second later the impact as he drove into the Rover.
Now, pinned back in his seat, he knew he may have a few second's grace. The berserkers had met Major Higgins, that much was obvious, and now the major was probably a wet stain somewhere down on the valley floor. And those two Chinooks he'd seen flying over the motorway, maybe forty men packing everything they'd need to take down the berserkers?
Well, there were the flames. And there was the Range Rover.
The airbag was not deflating. It turned from white to red before his face, and Cole tasted blood, and panic settled in. He reached down into his lap and found the .45 still wedged under his thigh. It took him a few seconds to work it loose, then a couple more to aim blind, hoping that the crash had not skewed his sense of direction.
He closed his eyes, opened his mouth and pulled the trigger. The blast was huge. His ears were still ringing as he opened his eyes again and watched the airbag deflating before him. He quickly took stock. His legs still hurt like fuck, which meant he probably hadn't broken his back. He jiggled his ankles and felt the insides of his shoes, so no trapped feet. He felt as though he'd been thrown against a wall and had a gang of thugs set upon him with hammers and blowtorches while he was unconscious, but right now that sort of pain was good, because it meant that he was alive and conscious and not paralysed.
The windshield had shattered, either from the impact or the gunshot. Cole popped his seatbelt and used the pistol to knock out the remaining glass. It fell into his lap in diamond chunks, and dusk poured in.
The Mondeo was buried in the front of the Range Rover. The vehicles seemed to merge, and it was difficult to tell where one began and the other ended. Something hissed, something steamed, and Cole could smell petrol, potent and rank. The Rover's windshield had shattered and Sophia hung half-out, splayed across the bonnet. Her head was ruptured and leaking. Between Sophia and Cole, twisted into the buckled bonnet of the Mondeo, Lane.
Cole gasped.
Lane opened his eyes.
Tom sat up and shook his head. He'd been thrown against the back of the middle seats, and Natasha had tumbled to the floor at his feet. She groaned in his head, mumbling words that made no sense, and if he closed his eyes he saw jumbled images of what she had called home. They were blurring now, flickering, as if delivered to him on a fifth-generation videotape and viewed on a dodgy TV set. He could almost feel her belief and hope fading away.
None of them had been wearing seatbelts. He had been holding Natasha to his side as Lane drove them up out of the valley of death. Tom's view through the rear door had been apocalyptic: the blazing wrecks of the two helicopters, the shell of the BMW still flicking with flames, the ruptured bodies scattered across the car park and piled against the front door of one of the closed units. The sun had gone down and the fires painted the ground red. Or perhaps it was blood.
And then their brief conversation that shattered hope, Steven in his mind, and the car had driven straight into them. Tom had seen Cole in the driver's seat a split second before impact. The Range Rover's headlights had turned his face white, and his eyes were wide and dilated with madness.
He hoped that Cole was dead.
Tom looked forward. Lane had been thrown straight through the windshield and now lay twisted up on the Mondeo's rippled bonnet. Sophia was halfway through, and there was a lot of blood. Dan had gone between the front seats and crashed into the dashboard. He was moving slightly, mewling like a hungry kitten, and Tom saw his wounds, some of them new, gushing fresh blood. He was impaled on the gear stick, shuddering as he tried to lift himself off. Sarah, exhausted from her recent fight, had bounced against the rear of Sophia's seat and lay crumpled across the leather. She was not moving.
'Natasha, I think this is bad,' Tom said. She answered only with another moan, and more confused images of the home it seemed she would never know.
A gunshot rang out, loud and frightening in the stunned silence following the crash. Tom ducked down, looking forward at the Mondeo. The doors were still closed, the windshield was badly cracked, nobody moved. One of the vehicle's headlamps still burned, and he could make out shadows and shapes around the cars. All of them seemed to be moving, and he wondered whether all the soldiers had been on those Chinooks, or if others had been sent here by road. Maybe there would be more shooting soon and that would be it. Maybe—
