Berserk by Tim Lebbon Read Free Book Online Page B

He had come this far.
    My son’s corpse? Do I really want to see that? His skeleton, his skull, whatever is left of his skin? He looked up at the sun, squinting, seeing no answers there.
    “It’s madness,” he said, and the sound of his own voice startled him into action. He picked up the shovel and worked around the skull.
    A few minutes later he revealed the first eye socket. Tom backed away and slid around the hole to work at the back of the skull. He had no wish to be watched. He knelt and used his hands again, and minutes later they tangled in a chain. Tom cursed as he felt the metal pinch his finger, but then he tugged gently at the chain around the skeleton’s neck, bringing the dog tags up into the sun for the first time in a decade. He did not question why they were still there, why they had not been removed, the panic that this suggested in the men who had buried the bodies. He not. Because here, at last, was a name. could
    His heart thumped as he moistened his thumb and rubbed it on the metal, cleaning away the muck. He scraped with his thumbnail, revealing the letters and numbers, sobbing as he did so. Tears blurred his vision and he wiped them away, smearing mud across his face.
    Gareth Morgan. This was not his son.
    Tom kept digging around the skeleton, not so careful now that he knew it was not Steven. He was sweating, his clothes stuck to his body with sweat and grime, and his heart was hammering from the exertion.
    Bastards! Anger filtered in past the shock. The bastards, killed our sons and lied to us about it! The significance of this weighed heavy, and the implications of what he was doing suddenly felt so much more serious. If he was captured doing this – uncovering a scandal that could very well explode the heart of the British government – what would be done? Would he simply be added to the hole before it was filled in again?
    He stood, looked around, saw the buzzards still circling high overhead, then carried on digging.
    Around the remains of the stranger called Gareth Morgan the soil suddenly became loose, and Tom stumbled as the dirt fell into a hollow with a rush. His foot sank in, he dropped the shovel and spread his arms, falling onto his rump beside the skull. Mass grave, he thought, and then the smell hit him. Wet rot, decay, age, not the smell of the recently dead but the stench of time. He leaned back and pulled his foot free, rolling across the disturbed ground away from the new hole and the smell drifting up from it. He closed his eyes and buried his face in heather, breathing in the muddy freshness of it, trying to clear the smell of his son’s death from his lungs.
    “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Tom said, suddenly sobbing into the ground. He had no idea what he was doing. His hands clawed, fingers dug in, as if afraid that he would fall off the world if he loosened his grip. And wasn’t he doing that already? So much had changed in the last hour that he would not be surprised to open his eyes and find the world spinning the opposite way. Smelling the honest peaty smell of the ground beneath him, he wished that he had never overheard those two men in the pub.
    But he had. And King had given him the map, and now here he was. Looking for his dead son.
    Tom crawled back to the skeleton – revealed to its ribcage now that the soil around it had tumbled into a hollow – and stared down at what he had done. There were other bones visible down there, touched by sunlight for the first time in years. The corpses must have been piled in together, covered over with a layer of soil and heathers, and as their flesh rotted away beneath the ground it left hollows behind, dark wet spaces filled with nothing but the gas of decay and the undying echoes of their violent deaths. The skeleton called Gareth Morgan still wore the remnants of a uniform and shreds of leathery skin clung to its bones, moist and browned by the damp soil. Beneath it a tangle of bones and clothing, skin and hair, marked