Besides, it was fascinating, like a car crash or a train wreck. He had to watch. And it distracted his mind from … from … something awful that he could no longer quite remember.
"It's good to forget, for a while," said the man in the boat. He looked straight at Tom and smiled, a pained expression that showed far too many teeth. "But you'll always remember again in the end. Watch now. Remember."
Asleep, his dreams hijacked by Natasha's memories, Tom watched.
The man in the boat was not alone. There were four of them, two adults—a man and a woman—a young boy, and Natasha, through whom Tom was viewing this memory. They were all dressed in similar grey-green clothes, almost militaristic. The adults sat stony-faced, but the boy seemed excited, forever standing and being told to sit again, babbling and being hissed at to remain silent. He was panting like a puppy at play. The adults seemed to speak to him without moving, and Tom heard whispers in his mind.
"Almost there," the man said out loud. His legs were jerking up and down, feet tapping the deck beneath them. His hands clasped at his thighs. He turned to the woman next to him, his wife, and smiled, and kissed the side of her face. "Remember, it's not us doing this," he whispered. She turned away as if she could not face him, and looked across at her son. He did not echo his parents' apparent sadness. The boy was standing again, keening as he jumped up and down on the spot, hands twisting the legs of his plain trousers into tight knots. His eyes were changing colour.
A voice came from elsewhere, dull and distant and lifeless. You leave no one, it said, and a shape stood above them, blurred against the skyline.
Try as he might Tom could see nothing outside the cockpit where the family sat. They were totally enclosed. The only reason he knew this was a boat was because Natasha's memory told him so, and the only way he could be certain of the movement was by the shadows of the radar mast gliding up and down across the cockpit as the boat dipped and peaked the waves. The little boy was running back and forth now, four steps left, four steps right, and the movement must have been blurring him in memory because his arms seemed to be growing in length, his legs thickening. It was as if Natasha's memory in Tom's mind was slipping, and its images were slurring.
"Peter … ," the woman said, but she trailed off when the man put his hand on her arm. The boy's eyes shone as if they caught the sun.
One minute, the distant voice said, and the shadow of the speaker rose and fell across the woman's face as the boat traversed another wave. She turned and looked directly at Tom—at Natasha—and smiled a smile he remembered his mother giving him so many years ago. It spoke of unquestioning love, and a motherly instinct to protect.
The man leaned to the side and spoke to the woman. She shook her head, both angry and scared, and he held her closer and spoke again, keeping her still so that she could hear everything he had to say.
Then he let go, pulled away and began to blur.
Tom tried to draw back. Something had changed here, a sudden jump in the reality of things that he should not be seeing. And yet he was prisoner to this dream, a passive viewer of Natasha's memory being played out in his own head, and he was trapped here watching and hearing, tasting and smelling the truth of history. He tried to close his eyes but was already asleep. He would have turned away had he any control. Instead, he saw the family go berserk.
The voice rose into a shout, its words indistinguishable from the snarls and screams coming from the cockpit. The young boy Peter was on his hands and knees now, fingers and toes clawing at the timber decking and leaving deep scores in its surface. The slashed wood shone bright in the sun. He shook his head, and spittle and blood flecked the deck around him. The adults seemed to speed up, their movement jerky, as if this were a movie with every third frame removed.
The view flipped onto its side and began to vibrate as Natasha fell to the deck.
I don't want to see this, Tom thought, and Natasha said, No, but you need to. And it's only just begun.
Ten seconds, the vague voice said, and Natasha looked up at the shadow looming above them. Its stance showed fear. Its voice held awe. Its hands were weighed down by a blocky, heavy object that could have only been a gun.
What are you showing me? Tom thought, but there was no reply, because this was pure memory once more. As the boat thudded onto a beach and a high door in its bow fell open onto wet sand, he became a part of it.
The rest of the dream, the memory, the nightmare came to him in brief glimpses, each of them more confusing than the last, and more terrifying. To begin with Tom could make little sense of the individual images, but the memories viewed through Natasha's eyes combined to evoke a sense of impending action, and a distinct emotion: dread.
Natasha ran onto the beach behind the adults and her younger brother Peter. The sands were deserted, a beautiful golden spread marred here and there with blots of driftwood or seaweed drying in the merciless sun. At the head of the beach where the dunes began, maybe fifty yards away, sat a huge house made of glass and steel, an architect's wet dream sparkling with daylight and holding mystery behind its shaded windows. There were several cars parked beside the house, none of them worth less than fifty grand.
Several people stood around the house and hunkered down on its balconies. They flashed. It was only as Peter flipped onto his back and writhed like a landed fish that Tom realised the flashes were gunshots.
A blur here, like film forwarded sixteen-speed, the images distinguished only by their redness.
They were in the house. It was light, airy, ultramodern, all steel and slate and glass. The father was holding a woman against a wall and emptying her chest cavity onto his feet. Heart, lungs, shattered ribs slopped out, their impact smothered by somebody else screaming. He bit at her lower jaw and tore it away, and as he turned Tom saw just how much he had changed.
Blur.
Natasha was running along a corridor. It turned left and right, doors flashing by on either side, but it was blood that laid the trail she was following. Another turn and she came across the crawling man, mangled leg dragging behind him like a gutted fish. The man collapsed on the floor and turned, attempted to raise a gun, but one slash of Natasha's claws ripped his hand apart, sending the weapon spinning against the wall in a rain of blood. He screamed, Natasha leaned in, and there was a howl that can only have come from an animal as the memory turned red.
Blur.
Peter was in the kitchen, thrashing at a body on the floor. He leaped onto it, screeched, flaying with his hands and feet, jumped off, landed on the work surface, turned to look at Natasha, opened his mouth wide—his mouth, filled with too many teeth and meat and a scream that was not possible—and jumped onto the body again. His head shook and tugged and the body slid across the tiled floor, leaving bits of itself behind. It was barely recognisible as human, other than its clump of blonde hair matted with brain. Peter jumped off again and came at Natasha, but there was no panic, no fear, only a primal sense of sibling love.
Blur.
Some people—the survivors—had locked themselves into the basement. Natasha's parents were down at the door trying to tear through, but it was steel-lined, and their claws and teeth screamed on the metal leaving only shiny slashes behind. Peter was a few feet away trying to dig through the wall. Natasha loped down the steps to join her family, leaving bloody footprints behind.
Blur.
The door stood open now, and there was shooting, and Natasha's mother was dancing against the wall as a man emptied an Uzi at her. None of the bullets seemed to be hitting her; chunks of plaster blew out, shards of concrete block rattled to the floor, and when the magazine was empty she stopped dancing. And growled.