Doctor Who: Combat Rock (20 page)

Together they were like the children that were always in trouble with teachers.

But really, they were scared.

Because, underneath the facade of light-hearted simplicity, there was a lot to be scared of. They were Papul working in an Indoni-dominated society. They had to be careful. They were playing a dangeroUs game, on nobody’s side, as Kepennis continually reminded Wemus. Other Papuls – especially the OPG – resented them for making money out of the exploitation of the island, and the Indoni looked down on them simply because they were Papul. On top of that, they would now be suspected of working with the OPG, and this was an especially disturbing thought for Wemus: even if they were rescued by the Indoni army, they’d probably be shot as collaborators. The Indoni would believe they’d deliberately led the tour group into the hands of their colleagues the OPG.

Still, they didn’t really need to worry about the Indoni finding them. The OPG would probably chop their heads off long before then. Wemus remembered Budi and shivered.

It was ruminations like these that had helped rob Wemus of a lot of his sleep. It probably accounted for Kepennis’s faint as well, he thought, as he took in his friend’s tense expression.

The older guide had always been a little more introverted and serious than Wemus, but the last few days he seemed to have lost all his sense of fun. But then, they weren’t exactly in a fun situation, he admitted to himself ruefully. He hadn’t been his normal self either. But maybe that was going to change.

‘She likes me, Kepennis.’

‘Huh?’ the other guide was staring absently through the trees that fringed the clearing that was the meeting place.

Dawn was wooing the wildlife; creatures boomed plaintively, ululated, chuckled, whispered, called with jungle-morning yearning. Softly, quietly at first, the sound swelling triumphantly as the day caught hold. The sky was the purest creamy pink, fractured by bloody breaks.

‘She likes me – Wina?’ Still Kepennis looked confused.

‘The Indoni girl. She actually
likes
me. You know how rare that is: an
Indoni
liking a Papul. Normally they think we’re ugly and inferior.’

‘You are ugly, Wemus, you big-nosed brute. But you’ll never be inferior. Well, only to me anyway.’ Kepennis grinned at his friend fondly, coming out of his reveries. Then his face grew serious again as he took in the earnestness of Wemus’s expression. ‘Forget it, he said solemnly.

‘What do you mean?’

Kepennis sat up straight, the cigarette burning in one hand.

His eyes were more grave than Wemus had ever seen before.

‘She’s Indoni. Forget her. This is not right.’

‘Why should I? Why shouldn’t I try for something better?

Especially if she likes me.’

‘Have you heard yourself?’ Now Kepennis’s voice was hushed with a cold anger. ‘Something better? What are you talking about? What right have you got to say that to me!’

Wemus was frankly puzzled. He stood up, hurt and confused. ‘I don’t understand, Kepennis.’

‘Indoni will never be “something better”. You disgust me for thinking so little of your own people.’

‘I – I didn’t mean that. I just – ‘

‘You’re a Papul! And don’t you ever forget it:

‘My word! You seem to be rather more perky now, don’t you?’

Kepennis looked round, his anger choking him. The Doctor had approached them without the two guides even being aware of it. He was clasping his hands together and looking at Kepennis shrewdly, like he could see right through him. Kepennis nodded curtly and pulled on his cigarette.

‘Wonderful! Because we’re going to need your help to get us out of here.’

‘What do you mean?’ Kepennis asked suspiciously.

The Doctor beamed expansively with one of his winning, childlike smiles. ‘Well, you are the guides, aren’t you? I should think we’d have a very difficult time escaping on our own. Where would we go? Yes, I’m afraid we’re rather counting on you to show us the way home.’

‘Escape?’ Wemus whispered, ever conscious of the fact that OPG guerrillas were all around them.

‘I need a drink,’ said Kepennis bleakly.

‘Yes, well, as soon as Jamie returns, we will need your help,’ the Doctor continued. Then he turned away, tapping his hands against each other playfully and looking innocently up into the dawn sky. ‘That is, of course, unless you’re too afraid to risk helping us.’

Kepennis’s indignant reply was lost under the loud, splintering impact of something very large crashing through trees on the other side of the clearing.

There was a hubbub of excited chatter from the guerrillas.

Wemus and Kepennis followed the Doctor to the edge of the clearing to discover the origin of the noise.

They hadn’t heard the faint buzz of dying engines over the hullabaloo of the jungle’s dawn orchestra. But there was the familiar dented Indoni cruiser, surfing the treetops which were snapping and shearing away under the uneven contact, and now the craft was nosing drunkenly down into the clearing.

Tigus shouted something and the guerrillas dived for cover. The Doctor rushed for the shelter, where Wina and Santi were still arguing, and told them to huddle into balls.

The impact came a moment later. A series of thumps and the ugly sound of metal buckling, then a skidding slide and a final wrenching thud as the craft hit something solid.

They waited for the explosion.

Nobody moved. Wemus was curled up under a fat bole, his nose pressed up unpleasantly against Kepennis’s feet.

There were a few muffled cries from the guerrillas, but still no explosion. Wemus raised his head.

The white man in the skirt was staggering through the stand of trees away from the craft, which was nestled against a big stump like a broken shiny animal. Behind him, a few guerrillas fell out of the port, some limping, others looking merely dazed.

Jamie saw Wemus and wobbled towards him uncertainly.

Tigus rose to block his way, just as the Doctor emerged from the shelter.

‘Jamie!’ He rushed forward to clasp the highlander’s hands delightedly. They shook hands speechlessly for a moment, two dear friends reunited and thankful for it. Then the Doctor’s face assumed an anxious expression.

‘Jamie... did you find Victoria?’

Jamie shook his head. ‘She was there all right. But the soldiers have taken her into the jungle. Maybe they’re lookin’

fer us.’

Tigus had no time for any of this. He was waiting impatiently for Jamie’s fellow passengers to arrive. He lunged forward to clutch the first man into the campsite, and harangued the man in Papul. He didn’t look too pleased by the tired response he got. Meanwhile, the Doctor was doing his own, albeit more gentle interrogation, as he led Jamie towards the fire prepared earlier by the guerrillas. He poured the highlander some soup from the battered cooking pot and asked him about the expedition.

‘The pilot got shot,’ Jamie explained, shaking his head with disbelief, ‘so this other idjit flew us here. He couldnae fly to save his life. We’re all lucky to be in one piece.’

The highlander related the rest of the story of the attack on the army barracks at Wameen, the Doctor listening gravely.

When he had finished, the Doctor rose, turning his back on Jamie thoughtfully, both hands templed under his chin.

‘If the Indoni are as brutal to prisoners as you describe, it’s more important than ever that we find Victoria,’ he said.

‘So how do we do that?’

‘Maybe we don’t need to,’ the Doctor replied, watching outrageously coloured birds tumbling through the branches in a courtship dance. ‘The Indoni are in the jungle looking for us, remember. And Victoria’s with them.’

‘I get it. So all we have to do is let them find us.’

‘Well, something like that, Jamie, yes. The only trouble is...’ he hesitated and faced Jamie again, his expression dark.

‘What?’

‘Well, as you’ve seen, they haven’t got a very good hospitality record, have they?’ The Doctor’s voice rose with his agitation. ‘What atrocities are they likely to perform when they
do
find us?’

‘Your face more, more,
more
ugly than ghost.’ Wina said definitively, turning her back on Santi and following Wemus along the jungle trail.

‘In my village you hang from tree because you black magic thing,’ Santi replied promptly, tossing her locks with finality. ‘Banuwang
witch
.’

Wemus grinned at Kepennis; he was rather enjoying the Indoni girls’ constant fighting. He liked to think it was over him, although Santi had never given him any sign that she found him attractive. But why shouldn’t she? If the prettier of the two liked him, then surely the one Wina was heaping such disdain on would follow suit?

Or was he just being a vain, arrogant Papul idiot? He grinned at himself this time. Whatever. He was actually enjoying this trip now.

He thought of the red, red weal on Budi’s neck as Tigus dealt the machete blows and his grin slipped away.

A great smashing of undergrowth to their left.

The Doctor paused, Jamie coming to a halt behind him. A guerrilla nudged them forward with a rifle barrel and barked something nervously in Papul.

‘Snatcher?’ the Doctor asked Tigus as they resumed their progress.

The guerrilla leader was walking alongside him, and now he shrugged. ‘There are many beasts in these jungles. Many dangerous beasts... Not just Snatchers’

‘That’s very reassuring.’

The crashing moved away from them. The two Indoni girls had barely noticed it, immersed in their feuding as they were.

Jamie was trying to engage Ussman in conversation, but the normally loquacious trader was still unable to forget the image of his best friend kneeling under the blows, his body slowly toppling forward into the grass. Ussman looked cowed and miserable. Drew, as always, walked alone. Nobody wanted to talk to him. That seemed to suit him fine, although now and again he would try to touch one of the girls surreptitiously, and sometimes not so surreptitiously. This abortive lechery had nearly embroiled him in a bout of fisticuffs with Wemus, when he had once tried stroking Wina’s long black hair. Tigus had swiftly ended the tussle with the intervention of his machete.

They continued southwards, sometimes trekking over foothills that brought them above the jungle, affording them vistas across the treetops to distant mountains capped by snow to the East, and a broad swathe of brown water that Kepennis claimed was the Schlachtenmoord River to the South Then it was back into the trees, embraced by exotic foliage.

It was hot, and it was humid. Sweat dribbled between their shoulder-blades and nestled in the hollows of their chests continually. Insects bit and stung, forming a constant cloud around them as they walked. Plants and vines cut at their legs, plucking at clothes and flesh. Sometimes they would be wading through swamps up to their thighs, while large, unseen creatures entered the water around them with dramatic splashes.

In one such swamp, the trees all dead and ghostly white mirrored by the water below, the group encountered the cause of the splashes. Or at least, one of the guerrillas was unfortunate enough to do so.

Nobody even saw it. One moment they were traversing a broad jungle swamp, the leafless bones of the trees reaching up into the air and down into the reflection around them, bits of grass and twigs floating alongside the travellers in the eerie hush, and then one of the guerrillas was uttering a puzzled oath and abruptly disappearing under the water as if sucked down by an unseen apparatus of immense power. A widening pool of ripples and a fur balaclava marked the spot. He didn’t re-emerge.

Needless to say the party wasted no time crossing the rest of the swamp. They were all very relieved upon reaching the muddy shore to find nobody else had been plucked beneath the water by the invisible predator.

‘Now you can only charge small money for men,’ Wina resumed as they emerged from the jungle onto a grassy plateau that hung above the broad sweep of the Sclachtenmoord,

‘Because you look more like animal than woman.’

Santi looked down in dismay at her torn top, muddied skirt and scratched legs. Her hair hung in itchy clumps, and she knew her face must be a mask of mud and smeared make-up.

She looked at Wina and then smiled, because her Indoni companion was actually trying to act superior while looking every bit as dishevelled as herself. So, instead of replying, she simply nodded and gave a dazzling ironic smile. Wina snorted and turned away.

‘The Schlactenmoord,’ Tigus said, pointing at the wide but slow-moving river.

‘Interesting name,’ the Doctor puffed, brushing parasites from his bare legs below the rolled-up baggy trousers. ‘Of Earth origin I should imagine. Possibly Dutch. Has there been a substantial missionary presence in the area?’

‘The speakers for a meaningless God?’ Tigus said with some bitterness. ‘Of course they come here, make bad our culture, kill our traditions. But many perished at the hands of the Kirowai.’

‘The Kirowai? And what might they be?’ The Doctor took off his frock coat and hung it over one arm, sweat rolling down his forehead under the hot, exposed sun.

‘Cannibal.’ Tigus pronounced the last syllable to rhyme with ‘pal. He looked proud.

‘Oh. And are these cannibals prevalent in the area?’

‘South of the Schlactenmoord is Kirowai country. They live in tree-house and have constant war with neighbour village. From here we must be careful.’ He seemed to be almost relishing the idea.

‘And you have no control over them, being Papul yourself?’ the Doctor asked hopefully.

Tigus laughed. ‘They kill and eat each other. Why should they spare someone from other tribe like me? Someone from other end of island? I am stranger to them just like you. We all become bones in tree shrine if we meet them.’

‘Then let’s, er... let’s just hope we don’t meet them, shall we?’ the Doctor said nervously.

Clown was on the stilted walkway and he was looking at the blood. It was everywhere. No longer dripping but drying under the Papul sun. Bodies and bits of bodies were everywhere, in grisly displays outside stalls, hanging over the plankways, floating in the water beneath.