Berserk Read Online Free Page A

head apart. “Don’t you even think about starting this and not finishing it! Do you know what I’ve been through since it happened? The doubt, the suspicion? And now that you’ve told me everything we thought is wrong, you can’t just fuck off without telling me how wrong!”
    “I could be shot for this,” King said, and Tom sensed there was little exaggeration in his comment.
    “Then why are you here now?”
    The big man shrugged and leaned back in his chair. “Maybe sharing my nightmares will lessen them.”
    “You think I don’t have nightmares?” Tom asked.
    “No,” King said, “you don’t.” And the look in his eyes was cold and terrified.
    “So . . . ?” Tom asked, and he thought, should maybe he leave, maybe he shouldn’t tell me.
    “So . . . there was an accident at Porton Down. Your son and those others were there, and they were killed. And the Army whitewashed it. Made it into something it wasn’t. Hushed it up. Believe me, they’re good at that kind of thing.”
    “What sort of accident?”
    King looked into his beer. “Something escaped.”
    “So what did I bury?” Tom asked, suddenly certain that the coffin he and Jo had wept over had not been filled with anything to do with them.
    “Sod from the marshes. They buried the dead on the Plain. They didn’t want the infection to spread.”
    “What sort of infection? Plague? What?”
    “A plague of sorts,” King said. He finished his drink in two gulps, looked around, twitchy. Tom realised that he would be leaving soon, and there was nothing Tom could do to stop him. King already knew he had said too much. But this was still a story without an ending, and Tom could not live with this mystery anymore.
    “How do you know all this?” Tom asked.
    “I was at Porton Down too,” King said. “I had to bury the bodies.”
    Bury the bodies. Tom closed his eyes and tried not to imagine his son’s rotten body, flopping around in the bucket of an excavator with a younger Nathan King at the controls.
    “Where’s my son’s grave?” he asked, eyes still closed.
    “Tom, you’ll never—”
    “Where is my son’s grave? Nathan, I need to tell you something. I’ve mourned for ten years, and I’ll mourn until the day I die. What you told me bears up what I’ve always believed: that we were lied to. But I don’t see what I can do about it, other than visit my son one last time. I’ve spent too long crying over an empty grave.” And there’s more I can do, he thought, so much more. But not here and not now . . . I have to think first. Make plans.
    “Don’t go looking,” King said, standing. “I saw the bodies. And I know the truth.”
    “What truth?” Tom asked, and then the comment he had heard the previous day came back to him just as King spoke.
    “They kept monsters there,” he said. And before Tom could hit him with any more questions King had left the pub and disappeared into the night.
    Something escaped, the ex-Army man had said. A plague of sorts. They kept monsters there . . .
    Tom sat at the table for a long time, staring into the murk of the pub and seeing so much further, to the moors, to Salisbury Plain. Though he saw there, its true form was blurred by lies. something
    But now that the seed of truth had been planted, Tom needed to see it bloom.
     
     
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    When Tom and Jo left home for their journey to Wiltshire, it felt as though they were going for more than a long weekend. Tom checked that the doors and windows were locked, set the answerphone, unplugged the TV and stereo, closed all the internal doors . . . and he felt as though he should be laying white dust sheets over the furniture. Only three days, he thought, taking one last look around the living room, noticing some of it instead of just seeing it. The picture of them on their wedding day, with such a promising future evident in their happy smiles. And Steven, photographed at the parade to mark the end of his basic training, with that same