Biblical (25 page)

Suddenly the other Berserkers roared in unison. The Viking broke his gaze from Fabian’s and turned towards where the village lay, behind the skirt of seagrasses. Two hundred meters off, the men from the village had assembled, some fifty of
them, and had formed a rank of kneeling spearmen, a second rank of archers behind. They did their best to look resolute, but Fabian knew he was looking at fifty dead men; and he guessed they knew it too. He turned back to the Berserker at the same time the Berserker turned back to him. The warrior frowned, peering at the spot where Fabian stood, but this time there was no eye contact. It was clear he could no longer see the boy from another time.

The blackened-faced warrior turned away and fell back into his battle trance, combining with his comrades to form a single seething, writhing mass of violent intent. They roared and bellowed and howled and hissed, beastlike, at the village defenders. Their screams and cries became less and less human, each passing second bringing them closer to the beasts whose pelts they wore. One, then a second Berserker tore at his hose to reveal his erection, waving it at the enemy. The others stamped and twisted, the knot of fur-clad warriors convulsing as a single spasm coursed through them.

One Viking, a handsome blond man of about thirty, his clothing, helmet and arms identifying him as the chief, moved swiftly round to stand in front of the Berserkers, holding his arms wide in a gesture of restraint. Fabian guessed that the chief was probably the only warrior capable of controlling, if only temporarily, the Berserkers’ frenzy. The village archers let loose a desperate volley of arrows which fell some distance short of their targets. The Viking chief saw his chance to launch an attack between reloads and, with a bellow of command, pointed his sword in the direction of the villagers.

It was like a great wave of concentrated hate and violence being released. The Berserkers screamed insanely as they surged headlong, some stumbling in their lust for killing and eagerness for death.

Fabian forgot all about his fear and became swept up again in the excitement, the base, animalistic thrill of the moment.
Everything he had thought he hated about that part of himself suddenly made him feel more alive than he had ever felt. Except, he realized, for the day he had brutally beaten Henkje Maartens. But there was no space, no time for the thought and it swept from his mind as the Berserkers rushed onwards with a chorus of low bellows and high-pitched screams.

A second rank of twenty or so Vikings followed the Berserkers; these broad-shouldered men bore no swords or shields, instead each carrying a heavy double-headed ax. Compared to the seething insanity of the attackers ahead of them, these warriors were disciplined and ordered, arranged in evenly spaced rows, axes balanced on shoulders. While the Berserkers ran screaming towards the defenders, these axmen walked at a steady, measured pace, allowing the gap between them and the Berserkers to open up.

Fabian ran as fast as he could, falling in behind the Berserkers. He could smell them, more animal than human, something dark and base suffused in the odor. A second volley of arrows arced into the air and rained down on the attackers, many finding their target, most missing. The wounded Berserkers did not fall or even slow in their attack: some snatched at the arrows and pulled them from their bodies, the arrowhead barbs tearing out flesh; others seemed oblivious to the arrows in their bodies and charged on.

It was not just the most brutal thing Fabian had ever witnessed: it was a thousand times more brutal than anything he could ever have imagined. The Berserkers ran straight into the defenders’ ranks, shattering them and sending some running in terror. Those who remained were defenseless against the inhuman onslaught. All the Berserkers seemed possessed, demonic. Sword blades flashed briefly before being blooddulled; each Berserker rapidly and repeatedly stabbing his opponent in a bloodlust frenzy, continuing to ram his sword or knife into the body over and over again, long after it was
clear his victim was dead. Many of the Berserkers were themselves mortally wounded, their bodies rent open or necks spouting blood, but even in their death throes they fell onto their opponents, clawing and raking at them with bare hands, biting into necks or faces and ripping flesh with their teeth. The air fumed with the rich copper smell of blood and Fabian stood entranced by how horrific, how bestial the Berserkers were. How magnificent they were.

Once they had killed enough to break through the ranks of villagers, the Berserkers charged on towards the village itself. The defenders, who had lost more than half of their number, made an effort to regroup but the axmen were now upon them. Fabian watched, hypnotized by the rhythm of the axes. Compared to the Berserkers, there was something mechanistic about the axmen’s assault. Again it was not at all how Fabian had imagined a Viking attack: the evenly spaced axmen had taken their axes from their shoulders and had begun to swing them, long before they reached their enemies, in a regular motion like a sideways figure-of-eight. The swing of each axman left no gap with that of his neighbor and when they reached the remainder of the defenders, they scythed through them as if harvesting corn. Again there was no defense: the heavy, doubleedged axes sliced though air, flesh and bone with the same callous ease.

The rest of the Vikings who had been following on, armed with sword and shield, ran through, overtaking their ax-wielding comrades and following the Berserkers into the village. Fabian ran on too, something dark burning in his blood. He started to come across bodies: a second line of defense had been set up by the villagers and had met the same fate as the first. A cluster of rent-asunder corpses and several disembodied limbs marked where the line had been swiftly overwhelmed. He spotted one body, its face pulped beyond recognition by spear or sword; Fabian recognized the boy he had watched on lookout only by his blood-blotted mustard shirt.

Nearer the village, the bodies were more scattered, women and children among them, some clearly having tried to run to safety but cut down, their backs hacked to raw flesh and the rear of their skulls caved in.

The young woman he had seen when he had found the village lay close to the lodge from which he had first seen her emerge. She lay on her back, sightless blue eyes staring up at a cloudless blue sky. Her skirts had been hoisted to her waist and her white thighs exposed, as were her pale breasts through the ripped-open tunic with the carefully embroidered brocade collar. A surprisingly bloodless single sword wound beneath her chestbone marked where a Berserker, having finished with her, had ended her life. Fabian looked down at the cruelly pathetic scene of her death and was amazed at how little he cared about her suffering.

When he reached the village, he saw that the Berserkers were more frenzied than ever. They were now killing everyone and everything they found. Children lay slaughtered next to livestock and some Berserkers fell upon women and raped them on the bare earth of the square, bellowing like beasts. When the other Vikings reached the village, the chief at their head, they tried to contain the Berserkers as much as they could, shepherding women and children to one corner of the square. Any thoughts that Fabian might have had that this was inspired by any sense of humanity were dispelled when a boy of about eleven made a break for it. He was caught by one of the Vikings who drew his sword across his throat, cutting deep into the neck and letting him fall lifeless to the ground: an example for others thinking of escape. To Fabian, the cold, calm ease of the murder seemed far worse than the demented frenzies of the Berserkers; he also realized that these women and children were not being saved by the other Vikings because of their humanity, but because of their value: they were booty, slaves to be kept or traded.

It was over.

The Berserkers were gathered in the village square, all still wild-eyed, panting and restless despite the fact that some were mortally wounded, but still so detached from their bodies that they were unaware of their dying.

Fabian had his answer. He knew why he had been brought here to see this; he understood now where the violence he had launched against Henkje Maartens had come from. Whatever flowed in these men’s blood flowed in his too.

*

The feeling came over him again. The world shifted in the universe and the sky changed hue, the air changed texture. Fabian felt disoriented, dizzy, lost in time and place.

Everything was gone. The village, the Vikings, the bodies of the dead, the rich cupric odor of blood in the air. Fabian didn’t need to turn to see that the dyke was restored behind him or that the lighthouse once more stood sentinel where a thousand-year-dead youth in a mustard shirt had once scoured the sea for longships.

When he did turn, he saw that the man who had been walking his dog along the shore had reached where Fabian sat, his back against the stone.

He was an old man, in a time when old meant being beyond sixty instead of approaching forty. His white hair ruffled in the sea breeze. His eyes, staring at Fabian, were full of horror.

“Did you see?” he asked Fabian, his voice tremulous, terrified; a frightened child’s voice from an old man. “Did you see it too?”

After he got back to Casey’s from the Schilder Institute, Macbeth checked his email to find three lengthy messages from Poulsen in Copenhagen, each with specific questions that Macbeth could not answer fully without direct access to his team. That, he guessed, was the point Poulsen was making: he needed Macbeth back in Copenhagen.

The ghost folder on his computer desktop taunted him after he closed his email. It didn’t open, as he had known it wouldn’t; his repeated clicking on the icon habitual and vaguely compulsive, like someone absently picking at a scab they know they should ignore. It was Melissa who filled his thoughts and he felt something cold and heavy starting to coalesce in his gut: the deferred sense of loss he had known would eventually come.

Casey had given him a key for the apartment and the first thing Macbeth had done after Bundy dropped him off had been to note down the names the FBI agent had mentioned, while they were still fresh in his memory.

Now, as he sat alone in the apartment, Casey at work in MIT, Macbeth opened his web browser and searched for the names. Nowadays people – as he had explained to Casey in weak justification for sending texts to their year-dead father – existed not just physically, but virtually. Melissa would still be out there somewhere, a ghost of scattered electronic data.

He found the website of her company, as well as a dozen references to it and its work, including a business section profile
of Melissa from the
Chronicle
. The company website was the thing that troubled him most. On the ‘about us’ page, Melissa stood front and center in a photograph with her key staff. They all displayed the essential sunrise-industry credentials of youth, informality and cool. Yet they were all dead. No one had suspended the website, because there was no one left alive to suspend it: a
Marie Celeste
adrift on the waters of the Internet.

Scanning the caption for the photo, Macbeth noticed that the company’s deputy CEO was called Deborah Canning. He checked again the note he had made after talking to Bundy: Deborah Canning’s name was there. Macbeth went through the full list of victims of the Golden Gate mass suicide: she wasn’t listed. Not everyone involved with the company had died, after all. Maybe she was who Bundy was looking for.

He checked the name John Astor. Macbeth had heard the rumors about him, of course: everyone seemed to have heard them, yet no one seemed to know who Astor really was. The Internet was surprisingly empty of references to him: Macbeth’s search results were dominated by the two John Jacob Astors of the famous family: one the dynasty’s founder, the other a descendant namesake who went down with the
Titanic
.

What mentions he could find of the contemporary Astor were on conspiracy sites, one of which claimed the FBI and Homeland Security had red-flagged any site referring to the ‘leading Simulist thinker, John Astor’. Macbeth remembered Bundy referring to ‘Simulists’. There were the usual paranoid ravings about a global conspiracy and Macbeth decided to stop chasing a ghost and try the other two names dropped by the FBI agent.

He had no problem finding either.

Jeff Killberg had been one of the world’s leading movie effects specialists. His company had been behind the CGI effects of some of the biggest-grossing movies over the last five years, and had been the target of the firebombing attack by Blind Faith eighteen months earlier. Macbeth couldn’t understand why
religious zealots would deem special effects as an offense to God.

Killberg, a mix of creative and technological genius, had played his cards, and his patents, close to his chest, doing most of the key research and development himself. He would, apparently, ‘farm out’ elements to his employees and outside contractors, but nothing that would give an insight into the central concept or innovation he was working on – exactly how Casey described Professor Blackwell’s methodology.

Killberg had recently announced he was about to unveil new visual effects technology that would shake the movie industry to its core and offer moviegoers a completely new, totally immersive experience. The technology was never revealed: Jeff Killberg had been found tortured to death and hideously mutilated in his Pacific Heights home. Someone had worked on him very expertly with some kind of blade. The secure computer suite in the basement of Killberg’s house had been stripped, systematically and totally. Despite the previous religiously motivated firebomb attack, suspicion for the murder fell on Killberg’s commercial rivals. The computer effects industry had become, it seemed, literally cut-throat.

What troubled Macbeth most was that one of the companies to which Killberg had farmed out work had been Melissa’s gaming technology company.

Samuel Tennant.

Again Macbeth’s search was easy. There were references to Samuel Tennant across the Internet: photographs, articles, forums. Tennant, it seemed, had everything: looks, brains, money. A lot of money.