Natasha's parents sat quietly playing chess. Her brother larked with Dan and Sarah, two other young berserker children, a rough and tumble version of tag where the one who was "it" had to chase the others on all fours. The other berserker adults—Lane and his wife Sophia—were lying out in the sun, shielding their eyes and whispering.
This was when the change began. Because Lane and Sophia were whispering of escape, and their plan did not include all of Natasha's family. She remembered, and Tom saw, and with this knowledge came a feeling of dread at what was to come next.
Tom woke up. His neck ached from where he had been leaning back. Natasha was huddled in his arms, a cold dry shape that seemed to have taken on fresh weight since he had fallen asleep. He was filled with trepidation. The world was loaded with threat and primed with violence, and for a few seconds he did not want to move lest he kick started whatever was to come. He looked around without moving his head and saw people passing by outside, glancing into the car, meeting his eyes and looking away quickly, walking to their car or toward the restaurant as if they were used to seeing blood-soaked men huddled in rear seats with children's' bodies.
Five more minutes, Natasha said, and she sounded desperate and demanding, her voice striving for normality but dripping with something more animal and vital. Tom looked down and saw bubbles of blood between her mouth and his chest. He was feeding her; more accurately, she was feeding from him. He closed his eyes to see how he felt about this, and was surprised to discover no feelings at all. He was ambivalent to what Natasha was doing.
Yet still that sense of dread, hanging around him like an acid bubble about to burst.
It's inside, she said, it's in my memory, and I'll show you what I can remember … five more minutes, Daddy, and I'll feel better and you'll know what they did. What he did. And then you'll know why we have to move on.
She drifted away, and so did Tom, falling back into a sleep that invited the movie of her memory to return to him. It skipped and jumped as if cut and spliced from recollections that made no sense, and Tom fell into frame, scared and daunted, yet eager to know.
Natasha walked in from the courtyard, glancing through the door into their dining room. Three people were chained to the wall in there, and though she only caught a glimpse, it looked as though one of them had died. That was bad. Probably Lane had done that, angry that he had not been allowed out on the latest jaunt. He got like that sometimes—petulant, spoilt, like a child that has had its favourite toy taken away. He would never take it out on 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.