Doctor Who: Combat Rock (15 page)

Yeah. Clown had discarded his eye glasses and was wearing white face paint, twisted red lipstick, red latex nose, a jester’s hat with bells. Crazy tit. Still wearing his combat gear, and that made it all even more surreal. Juxtaposition of laughter and death, was that it, Clown? Yeah, good that. Some kind of ironic statement? I ain’t gonna laugh, ain’t gonna cry.

None of it’s funny anymore.

Crazy tit.

The cruiser banked sharply, and Clown’s bells jingled.

And Pan
was
laughing. Laughing so hard. The others were staring at him with disinterest as he laughed, sitting around him on cushioned benches that ringed the interior of the cabin.

Grave was dressed in black as usual. Evil-looking psycho with his shaved head, long black executioner gloves and noose around his neck. Yeah, Pan was with a real bunch of jokers, wasn’t he? Release the freaks... How’d it ever come to this?

There was Saw, the ugliest man that ever lived: big, fat and bearded, with grubby white T-shirt stained with old blood stretched over his huge belly, chainsaw attached to his belt.

And let’s not forget that eye, permanently lodged halfway down his cheek. A rare beauty. Yeah. Bass, hair slicked back with oil, handsome and cool, thought he was in some 1950s biker movie or some early 1980s punk rock’n’roll band – get a reality check, you tit. Pretty Boy preening as usual, dreaming up photogenic poses he could strike when they went into action, just for the camera that was in his head. Twist at the controls, juddering the vessel just to piss them off, make them feel sick before battle like he always did. Battle? Slaughter, more like. Pan didn’t even want to look at them. They made him want to gush. So he laughed instead. Oh, did he laugh.

They’d lost it, hadn’t they?

Twist brought the cruiser down next to the compound, nudging up a cloud of dirt and taking out a totem pole of some weird significance. The Dogs clambered out as the dust settled around them, Pan first, a Power Rifle lazy in his arms, cradled there like an ugly killer baby. The rest followed him, stooping under the low grass lintel and spreading out inside the village.

The village – Pan couldn’t remember the name of it – was deep in the Papul interior. They would do what they’d done to two villages already: question the primitives about the location of the Krallik, get no answers, and then burn. Sabit’s instructions seemed pretty pointless to Pan, but then wasn’t everything really, apart from sex with some stranger?

‘These monkeys would rather burn than betray their revered rebel,’ Pretty Boy spat after twenty minutes of fruitless interrogation.

‘So let ‘em; Pan said.

They strolled away from the burn, Grave taking out the few stragglers who tried to make it through the narrow gate.

Bodies choked the entrance as he continued to fire lazily, just as if he were fishing by a peaceful brook, and not layering beams of energy into naked human flesh while the village flamed behind.

Let ‘em all burn.

The cruiser took to the skies again, the seven Dogs loaded aboard, along with their seven different, splendid psychoses.

Of course Tigus made Santi go first along the bridge.

Although he didn’t laugh as he prodded the slightly stocky Indoni girl onto the first slat, the decision was obviously prompted by some cruel sense of humour, the Doctor supposed.

‘Look at her go!’ Drew whooped as Santi’s arms flailed out to grip the shoulder-high support ropes, emitting a colourful curse in Indoni as she did so. Wina watched from the bank with arms folded and a regal expression of disdain on her face as Santi continued to scream obscenities. ‘She has no etiquette.’ she muttered to Wemus beside her. ‘Make me shy to be Indoni!’

The guerrilla leader waited until Santi had made it across three slats before ushering the Doctor to follow her. ‘Oh my word!’ the Doctor exclaimed as he took his first step onto the rickety bridge and felt it buck under him. He surveyed the dizzy plunge beneath his feet with a considerable lack of enthusiasm. There came a yelp from Santi; one of her high-heeled dancing shoes had plunged through a broken slat and she’d gone with it, her legs kicking frantically in space, short skirt made even more short where it was hiked up by one of the lower ropes, giving her audience a good look at her thighs and white knickers. She squawked and wriggled inelegantly, clutching the upper ropes for dear life. The Doctor wobbled alarmingly towards her in a rescue attempt, although her struggles caused the bridge to oscillate even more wildly He finally managed to clasp her waist with one arm, holding onto a guide rope with his other hand, and pulled her back up to safety. Wina shook her head at the entire spectacle, as if Santi were making a big fuss over nothing.

Santi regained her dignity, straightened her skirt again, turned to face the guerrillas, and hurled a string of foul suggestions at them that just made them titter even more. Then she lurched gracelessly forward onto the next, thankfully solid, rung.

It was Wina’s turn next. She made as regal a progress over the rickety bridge as such an undignified means of crossing would allow. She didn’t utter a sound, gingerly but coolly testing each slat with her foot before trusting it with her weight. Ahead, Santi exploded into expletives again as she was forced to spread her legs to shuffle along the foot ropes, there being a space of some three yards without any rungs.

Wina followed far more elegantly: her legs being longer she was not forced into such an unbecoming posture, and couldn’t help remarking to Wemus who was crossing directly behind her that Santi had the etiquette of a goat.

She had just finished smirking when something rose, fast as an eye blink, from the frothing water to quest the air above the bridge.

Wina had an impression of a long slimy rope, seaweed-green. A fleshy rope thick as a man’s leg. The guerrilla directly behind Wemus lost his footing on a rung as the rope moved towards him, flash-quick. He was falling from the bridge – just managed to grab at a lower rope with one hand.

Swinging above the torrent.

Tigus balanced himself on the wildly swaying bridge as Santi shrieked and Wina forgot all her etiquette and joined in.

He steadied his rifle, waiting for a clear target. There was a deafening steam-like hiss from below, and something broke the surface of the rapids. A huge mossy green rock, that was not a rock but a featureless head. While everyone stared at this new horror, the slime rope went for the dangling guerrilla.

What looked like long green fingers wiggled from the end of the rope, unclenching to reach for the rebel. They seized his head, tweaked it like it was a nut and blood was jolting out from the crushed skull. The Papul let go of the bridge and dropped. The fingers caught him before he hit the water and snatched the corpse below the surface. The head lowered slowly beneath the river again, white water cascading over the bulging mossy forehead. It was gone.

Santi was crouching on the bridge, caterwauling. Wina was being comforted by Wemus. The Doctor put an arm around Santi’s shoulder while attempting to keep his own balance.

‘Snatcher,’ Kepennis announced gravely, peering down watchfully into the torrent.

Tigus nudged him onward. ‘Move,’ he yelled to the others ahead of him. ‘Fast.’

They didn’t need prompting. Wina’s successive progress across the bridge was considerably less regal.

She’d been told to wait in the officer’s mess for her own safety, where a nice bed had been prepared for her and where she’d spent a disturbed and wakeful night. But then Victoria had never been one for doing as she was told.

Agus had taken her to her room the night before, and had made a big deal out of not locking her in – his sense of chivalry positively forbade it. But she knew she couldn’t go far. Where would she go exactly? Agus told her there were soldiers out searching for the Doctor and Jamie, so all she could sensibly do was sit tight and wait until they were found.

But she wasn’t always sensible either, and Agus hadn’t locked the door.

That was asking for trouble.

So, after sitting patiently in her room all morning, watching the soldiers parading in the courtyard below, and only having one visit from Agus to distract her, she finally got restless beyond endurance and left the room.

The officers’ quarters were quiet, the corridors empty. She tip-toed down the stone steps that led out to the courtyard, not quite knowing why she was tip-toeing, but sure it was the right thing to do regardless.

The soldiers had finished their drill. The courtyard was deserted.

She had a choice: the large gate that opened onto the market square beyond was directly ahead of her across the yard. That was quite tempting. Although the naked Papuls with their grotesque penis gourds made her feel nervous and affronted her decency, the exotic bazaars and all the colour and whirl of a busy alien market town attracted her.

Her other choice was to enter one of the two arches on the walls to either side of the courtyard. The one to her left was closest, but the dimness beyond did not look particularly inviting. The other was too far away to judge, but the bleakness of the facade above the doorway was distinctly offputting. The small glass-less windows looked too much like prison cells, but then so did the ones above the nearer arch.

That settled it then: out! Explore the town.

She had to pass the entrance of the nearest archway to get to the gate, and as she did so the smell hit her, like a down-draft of human misery. It smelled of blood and fear, and was well married to the barely audible moan of utter agony that chased after it a moment later.

Victoria flinched, and froze dramatically in the middle of the courtyard.

Her bowels contracted at the smell and the sound. Her eyes watered with unnatural fear. The smell faded, then came again: revolting, flesh and faeces, and everything she did not want to think about right now, or ever.

Go, a voice told her. Get out, see the sights, maybe hire some craft to search for your friends. This place was not good, despite all Agus’s assurances that the Indoni were fighting on the side of the angels.

She was going to listen to the voice,
her
voice, but then the cry came again, faint and awful, and that decided her.

She’d never been obedient, and she’d rarely been sensible; but Victoria could
always
be relied upon to get herself into a mess.

Because she was brave and, yes, noble, she did what she really knew she shouldn’t do.

She turned and entered the dark archway.

Wayun had reached the top of the ladder. From the guerrillas’

quarters it stretched up through a hatch-less opening in the ceiling, up through the next storey of the temple which was the provisions store, through another opening above and up to the Krallik’ s domain.

Wayun was now where few rebels had ever stood before.

Below him, the hole in the wicker floor leading to safety and reassurance. Ahead of him, a curtain stretching across the chamber in which he stood. There was nothing around him, no furniture, no windows: the only light slipping through chinks in the grass walls. The curtain was black and featureless, obviously stolen from some wealthy Indoni trader.

There was an absolute silence from behind the curtain.

Wayun’s fury was curdled by that silence, by the awful sense of wrongness about everything. Maybe the Krallik was not there? he thought hopefully, and that hope shamed him as he pictured his brother’s head hanging above the pink mist rising from the lake. Of course he was there. The simple antechamber he stood in was literally Wayun’s purgatory, before fate decided whether he should enter the hell of the Krallik’s domain, or retreat below and pick up the reigns of his disillusioned life.

Wherever the Krallik was, he brought hell with him.

Wayun knew that now. It had taken a long time, but he was certain at last. And now Wayun must enter hell too, and destroy whatever he found there.

Could he do it?

He had the bone knife in his hand, and of course it was sharp enough for the job. Hadn’t he spent all morning sharpening it?

Could he do it?

Nobody had ever spoken to the Krallik in his temple before. Instructions had always been relayed in the Krallik’s unique and frankly unnatural way. And if that was strange why had no-one ever commented upon it? Oh yes, it was unnatural too for everyone to accept it. So why was he different? Had the shock of his brother’s murder freed him from the Krallik’s witchery?

He remembered the stories of the Krallik’s bravery in the past, how he’d fought elusive jungle battles with his persecutors, the Indoni army; how he’d planned and executed decisive tactical strikes against the heart of the enemy with the help of his loyal band of OPG warriors – and Wayun reminded himself that that included him too

He remembered the tales of the Krallik’s brutality and cruelty, the seemingly irrational slaughter, the whispers others had spread about the rebel leader always sitting up here alone in the dark, communing with his madness.

He remembered all this and fear held him rooted, like he was a plant growing from the floor of the antechamber.

They were fighting a war with the Indoni, and just about anything was acceptable in war.

Except madness.

Except evil.

He could do it.

He stepped towards the curtain.

Through the archway, the darkness at first complete then giving way to a faint glimmer, beckoning to her from down a long stone corridor, windowless, obviously to accentuate the despair anyone passing down here must feel. Why? A prison.

Of course.

The glow was coming from around a bend to the left at the end of the corridor. She knew she shouldn’t be doing this. Her feet were quiet on stone, but her heart was so loud. The smell was stronger. She could feel it entering her lungs, circulating around her body. She clutched her handkerchief to her nose, but still had to breathe.

Around the corner, and the glow was emanating from a weak lamp set on the floor of a prison cell. She could see through the bars in the steel door. A grotesque-looking man was doing something to a prisoner hanging against the far wall of the cell. Grotesque? No, that didn’t cover it: the man might have been Indoni, but he didn’t look like any soldier or civilian Victoria had seen yet; and he was certainly not Papul.