Doctor Who: Combat Rock (21 page)

The bodies were all Indoni. And they were all headless.

Clown powered up his rifle and made his way along the planks towards the missionary house. He could hear his own breathing, the faint jingle of bells from his hat and the screech of distant birds. Nothing else.

Agat was empty of life.

He did not feel fear, because he was too deeply immersed in causing it. He was a Dog, a killer, a man of blood money. A bounty hunter, a mercenary – there were many names for what he did. He had seen death in all its faces, and he was too old and scarred to be frightened by it. It was just an end to things; he himself was an end to things. Death wearing a clown face and jester cap. Yes, he had seen many disturbing and horrific things in his time.

But this...

There was the missionary’s house, a simple two-storey clap-board colonial-style cottage, painted white and shining in the midday sun. Nice.

It looked like his job had been done for him, then.

But where were all the Papul locals, and why had they killed the Indoni inhabitants?

He entered the house anyway, because he was paid to be thorough.

Father Pieter was sitting in an armchair facing the shattered window. He held a severed head in his hands, and his eyes were staring across Flamingo Bay, his mouth wide open and smeared with blood.

Clown levelled his rifle at him with one hand, then lowered it again. The missionary was dead. His job was done without him having to pull the trigger.

He moved closer, puzzled by the grisliness of the tableaux.

The head the missionary was clutching was white, or at least those bits of the skin not daubed with drying blood were white. There was a clumsily-made hole in the left temple, and bits of grey matter were slopped around the abrasure.

Nice.

Clown tutted and turned to leave.

‘I have eaten God.’

Clown swung around, the rifle level in his grip once more.

The dead missionary was looking at him. Eyes vacant, mouth now closed and Clown could see the flecks of grey upon the lips. He spoke again:

‘I have eaten...
God
.’

Clown lowered the gun. The missionary was a lunatic –

that was evident – but still alive.

‘What happened here?’

Father Pieter looked right through him, and what should have been a disconcerting sight for any self-respecting missionary in his nice colonial house – namely, the sight of a mercenary with clown make-up standing in his living room pointing a gun at his head – seemed not to throw him at all.

He’d obviously seen worse shit.

‘I said, what happened here?’ he repeated when the Father said nothing.

The missionary looked down at the head in his lap. ‘You came home, my friend,’ he said in a voice weak with insanity.

‘You came home to find me... and how did I greet you?’ He was laughing now; a horrible, drooling hollow sound that almost raised Clown’s hairs. Almost, but no cigar. He was tempted to smoke the creep right now but he had things to sort out.

‘You’ve been a bad preacher man, haven’t you?’ He stepped past the armchair and its mad occupant, nudged the door to the hallway open with his army boot. Scanned the hall quickly. Nothing.

Looked like the preacher man was all on his own. ‘I said you’ve been bad: He returned his attention to the bizarre figure in the armchair. ‘Been writing a journal about the jayapul uprisings. Saying things the lovely President Sabit isn’t too keen on. You been sending reports home stating Sabit’s been staging the riots to discredit the OPG and justify Indoni army occupation... that’s right, isn’t it?’ He was wasting his words.

The man merely looked at him, drooling. Eyes not even clocking the Clown. ‘The journal, you old fool. I want to know where every report you’ve still got is kept.’ He sighed, and then smiled, although the expression was lost under the permanent garish lipstick grin already etched on his face. Sabit was worried about this sad sack of shit?

‘You’ve really been a bad,
bad
preacher of the Word, ain’t you?’

‘I have eaten God.’ The father raised the severed head until it was level with his own, and facing his own. ‘And now I can never eat again. My old friend, what did they do to you?’

He lowered the head and gave Clown a beseeching look. ‘Kill me. Please.’

Clown shrugged. ‘Well, what the hell else did you think I came here for?’ He ratcheted the safety and was about to press the trigger when he stopped. ‘No.’

The preacher implored him with bloody hands.

‘I said no. I don’t wanna do you any favours, you sick bastard. And I don’t wanna do Sabit any either. He need never know I didn’t carry out his “special duty”. No... I think I’ll just leave you with your cannibal buddies. Looks like you’re one of them now.’

He ignored the drools and whimpers and left the house.

Out on the walkways, there was still nobody around to explain what had happened, except for a black hunchbacked bird hopping among the carnage, and he wasn’t talking. Agat was a ghost town. A Blood Town. He’d read enough about the place to know that it had started out as a missionary outpost in the utmost wilderness of the jungle. The first attempts at creating a town had been drowned in blood as the cannibals reacted violently toward this unorthodox intrusion into their natural habitat. It looked like Agat had reverted to form.

He shouldered the rifle and headed for his cruiser, parked next to the ransacked police hut.

Some things you just really shouldn’t meddle with.

The canoes were where Tigus expected them to be, nestled on the north bank of the Sclachtenmoord, next to an abandoned river station.

The Doctor eyed the long vessels dubiously. They were hollowed-out tree trunks that looked like they’d been used for many years, judging by the state of them. He looked along the jungle’s edge, where the tall, palm-like trees crept down to the muddy banks for miles in either direction with nothing to break the monotony, wondering if this might be an opportunity to escape. The same answer he always received came back to him, his own answer: escape to where, exactly?

‘You won’t catch me climbing in those,’ Drew said, hands on hips.

‘Then you die here,’ Tigus said simply. He patted the haft of his machete where it jutted into the belt of his khaki trousers, and looked around at the group, at Santi and Wina, at Ussman, at the Doctor and Jamie, looking for any further signs of protest. There were none.

‘Good. We go.’

Two guerrillas pushed one of the canoes out, and held it while the Doctor,Wina,Wemus and Kepennis waded out to climb aboard. The vessel rocked alarmingly as the guerrillas let go and Wina went tumbling into Wemus, emitting a parrot-like squawk. Wemus settled her securely next to him as the guerrillas guffawed with amusement.

Drew, Santi, Jamie and Ussman occupied the other canoe.

Oars were thrust into the men’s hands and they were ordered to start paddling. Jamie glanced over at the Doctor, whose canoe was already drifting away from the Scot’s, and shrugged.

‘Don’t worry, Jamie!’ the Doctor called. ‘We’ll find Victoria eventually.’

‘Aye, well we don’t seem to be going about it the right way, if you ask me!’ he hollered back.

‘Well, we... we don’t appear to have a choice,’ the Doctor muttered despondently, and gave Tigus a reproachful glare.

The two canoes were moving downstream fairly rapidly now, with Jamie’s party forming the rear. Drew looked behind him and noticed that Santi had not been supplied with an oar, and promptly stopped rowing himself. A guerrilla ordered him to begin again.

‘Hey, if she don’t have to row, nor do I.’ he said, entirely satisfied with his point of view.

‘If you not row,’ the guerrilla said, lifting a machete from the bed of the canoe, ‘what good your hands to us?’ He sliced a line of blood along the offworlder’s left wrist. The blond man yelped and delved for the oars without further complaint.

Santi folded her arms and smirked happily.

She was tired of walking.

It had been a long night, and Victoria had not slept at all well. She had spent it in a military outpost deep in the interior of the Papul jungle. The outpost consisted of a muddle of huts filled with hammocks for soldiers to sleep in when on patrol and a cache of supplies hidden away to provide for all their needs: at least, that was how Agus had described it to her as they flew in the night before.

Of course, the outpost in reality was nothing like that.

The hammocks had been taken, the food too, the huts burned by rebels. Agus had been half-expecting this, which was something of a relief, and had therefore brought emergency supplies, if no hammocks. Victoria slept on the grass floor of a temporary shelter erected by soldiers next to the ashes of the former huts. She had lain on her back peering up at the stars above the small clearing that housed the

‘outpost’, and wondered about the Doctor, about Jamie. She wondered about them perhaps bickering in their affectionate way: Jamie always exasperated and headstrong, the Doctor always seeming to be daunted by events but yet resolute under it all. She knew they would be desperately worried about her, and only wished she could let them know she was all right. If, of course, they were all right themselves.

Her thoughts had turned to Agus, the handsome Indoni officer, and how badly she had misread him. His graciousness, urbanity and thoughtfulness must all have been a sham then.

He was a killer, as bad as the men he hunted, it seemed. And although he had not been cruel to her, or hurt her in any way so far, she knew that now she had seen him for what he was, he need no longer keep up the pretence of a civilised man.

The strange thing was that since her discovery of the tortured prisoner and subsequent journey into the jungle, he had remained as polite as ever, despite the initial outburst at the barracks.

But she had seen through him and his philosophy, and both he and it were as shallow as... as the colonialism she was used to back home, she thought with something like cold shock. And what would her father have said to his beloved daughter harbouring such unfashionable, alien views?

Maybe – and this thought cheered her up somewhat –

maybe deep down, under that Victorian oh-so-conservative veneer, he would have approved...

Her attention was brought back to the present by the sight of a thin serpent uncoiling from beneath a log in front of her.

The soldier preceding her had clumsily disturbed it from its rest and now it was ready for violence, brown body tensed, small head regarding her intently. A hand drew her gently back and Agus took her place on the trail. His machete flashed up and down and the snake was two. He flipped the severed lengths into the undergrowth beside the path and smiled at her reassuringly.

‘You must be careful where you tread, Miss Waterfield.’

‘I don’t see the point of all this,’ she flashed at him angrily, her fury goaded by the fear the snake had woken in her.

‘I told you: President Sabit wants you to witness first-hand the barbarity the rebels are capable of. Then you might be more sympathetic to our cause.’

‘But what does he care if I am sympathetic or not? And after seeing what you get up to in your prisons, I’m hardly likely to ally myself to your...
cause
, am I?’

‘I can only apologize again, both for what you have seen in Wameen, and for having to bring you into such hostile terrain,’ the officer replied smoothly, attempting to unruffle her feathers with a smile.

‘Yes, well, I’m rather dubious as to the motives of a president who would want to inflict this kind of ordeal on an innocent outsider,’ she retorted, slapping away a winged insect the size of a baby’s fist that was attempting to drill into her bare arm with a lengthy proboscis. She shuddered as it smeared into a green mess on her skin, and wiped it away, not looking at the officer.

Behind her, the rest of the column of soldiers was waiting patiently for her to resume her progress, the trail being too narrow to permit more than one person at a time. And yet Agus had described it to her as a trail well-used by rebels, and she supposed the fact that the outpost had been destroyed nearby was a testimony of sorts to his statement.

Agus applied a tube of gel-like medicine to the bite, and rubbed it in gently, then he held out a hand for her to continue.

There really was not much point in arguing.

It was after they had walked for another five sweaty minutes that Victoria was forced to stop again. The trail was hemmed in on both sides by tall and weird vegetation: tree roots fluted together like the pipes of church organs swept up into the tree tops; huge leaves as broad as barn doors flopped down from spiny boles; fronds exploded outward from plants like exotic punk haircuts. Insects seethed mindlessly in swarms of sudden sound, then cut off into absolute silence. It would have been thrilling, it should have been inspiring, but Victoria wanted none of it. She yearned only to be reunited with her dear friends. So when the company halted again, she eagerly hoped it was because they had gone as far as they had intended on this pointless mission and were about to return to the cruiser.

There was a chorus of shouts from further ahead. Agus pushed his way past the soldiers in front, and despite her tiredness, Victoria followed. Maybe they had found some sign that would lead them to the Doctor and Jamie.

What they actually found was a soldier with a face the colour and texture of green jelly, lying on the path. A small snake was wound around his neck, its fangs burrowing into the soldier’s windpipe.

At first Victoria assumed it was similar to the one she had nearly fallen victim to, but then she saw exactly where it had come from. As another soldier, companion to the dead man, pointed into the thick underbrush, Victoria could just make out a figure lurking in the green shadow. A parrot-sized bird was nodding on the figure’s shoulder, its colourful beak tilting this way and that. And then a second snake was flipping from the direction of the figure, snapping into the pointing man’s wrist and locking its lithe body around his hand. He screamed and tumbled back into a church organ tree. His face was already turning a shocking green. As Victoria watched, the whites of his eyes flecked green too, and then were completely subsumed by the colour. The man stopped gasping.