Berserk by Tim Lebbon

skull.
    You’re bleeding! Natasha said.
    “It’s not too bad,” Tom said, and he thought, How does she know? It felt like a lot of blood, and in his madness would he really feel the pain? Even if his skull was cracked would his sudden lunacy let him know about that? He thought not. And yet, in the same instant, he decided that it did not matter.
    He pushed himself away from the rock. A breeze swept in across the moors and his back felt cold, sweat and blood cooling and sending a chill through his shoulders. He closed his eyes, remained on his feet, shook the dizziness away. When Mister Wolf groaned again Tom stepped forward. He had no idea what he was doing. Here was a soldier, a killer, armed and ready to shoot, and Tom was tackling him. He had never done anything like this in his life before. The nearest he had come to any sort of trouble was helping a young lad being mugged outside a town centre pub in Newport, and even then the cowardly assailants had run off with a shouted “fuck you” over their shoulders. Now he was standing over a prone man, looking for a gun.
    He laughed. He could not help it. The sound was frightening in the darkness; it was the sound of a madman. But it also comforted Tom because it was a real voice, not a whisper in his head—
    Lots of blood!
    —and not the wild sound of the Plain at night, when anything could be about.
    He stepped over the shadow of the fallen man, waiting for a hand to close around his ankle to trip him. But Mister Wolf groaned again, and Tom felt a smile in his head.
    “He’s not dead,” Tom said.
    Kill him, Natasha said. She still sounded weak and distant, and behind the words there was a vulnerability that was almost hypnotic.
    “No!”
    If you don’t, Daddy, he’ll wake up and —
    “I’m not your daddy! And I’m not killing anyone.”
    Tom bent down beside the man and felt across the ground. His hand soon closed around the cold metal of the pistol, still clasped in Mister Wolf’s hand. He pried his fingers away from the grip. Even in unconsciousness the man held tight.
    Kill him, Daddy.
    “Shut up.”
    Natasha’s voice withdrew from Tom’s mind, and again that sense of loneliness washed over him. His head had started to ache from the impact. Blood dripped cool down his neck and between his shoulder blades. As he stood with the gun in his hands, dizziness assailed him once more and he staggered back to the rock for support.
    The gun was surprisingly heavy and very cold. Tom weighed the weapon, resting it in his splayed hand and moving it slightly to get the feel of it. He could see very little, and he thought that keeping hold of it in the dark would be dangerous. He’d likely shoot himself in the foot. He had no idea about safety catches, how to hold or fire it, so he swung back, threw the gun and held his breath until he heard a dull thump from somewhere out on the Plain. With any luck it would be buried in the muck. He thought that the chance of this man – whoever he was – finding it upon waking was very remote.
    The possibility suddenly hit him that this may well be Nathan King lying before him. Tom knelt and rested his hand lightly on the back of the man’s head. It came away sticky with blood, and there was slight movement as the man breathed and twitched in unconsciousness. He moved down and felt beneath the torso. This man was heavily built and felt fit, not fat like King.
    Whoever it was, he could wake at any moment.
    Tom knew what he had to do. He felt his way to where Natasha and her chains had fallen after knocking out the man—
    was She won’t be there, she never there, it’s all in my messed-up mind!
    —and there she was, hard and alien beneath his fingertips. How could there be anything alive about her? But such questions, Tom knew, avoided the obvious facts about the last couple of hours. The mad part of him snickered at his denial, and the old Tom, who had come here ten hours earlier searching for a simple truth about his lost