Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [77]
Don XaPristi’s men. Old style thugs, probably recruited from the ghetto gangs. Qixotl had seen a lot of them since he’d arrived on Dronid. Neanderthals, mostly, all sharpened teeth and gold medallions. They were slimy, they were ugly, and they tended to be quite extraordinarily violent.
Mr Qixotl turned, and ran. Which was stupid, bearing in mind how crowded the bar area was. He scattered the Professionals around him, and stumbled towards the exit, knocking aside the various chairs, glasses, and customers in his path.
Behind him, there was a shout, then the sound of scurrying feet. Qixotl swore. All in all, his exit from Shockley’s Den of Almost Limitless Iniquity wasn’t what you could have called subtle.
24:22; still six cans down, but a lot more sober than a few minutes previously.
Qixotl bolted along the backways of Traducersville, tactically knocking over any garbage cans he happened to come across. There probably wasn’t much point in doing that, but it couldn’t hurt. He’d looked over his shoulder once or twice, and he hadn’t seen any sign of the thugs, so he guessed he’d shaken them off back in the slums. But then, it was too dark to see very far, and his vision wasn’t exactly perfect, what with the curse of the Blue Dog upon him and all. So he kept moving, just to be on the safe side.
Don XaPristi would have sent the men to give him a warning. The kind of warning that made you go “ouch” in lots of unusual places. Qixotl was running out of time, and running out of options. One way or another, he had to get hold of the cash for a demat circuit.
And then what?
Hmm. Funny. He didn’t normally bother with long-term plans. For the last half-hour, though, there’d been something nagging at him. Ever since Mr Gabriel had told him about the Doctor, and the great battle that was supposed to be coming to Dronid.
‘Maybe it’s different this time...’
Yeah. He needed his ship in working order, but there was a profit to be made here, right? He’d stumbled into the middle of something big, maybe big enough to shake up the whole timeline. And if somebody knew how to exploit the situation properly, say, somebody with a stolen TARDIS and not too many scruples...
Oh. Oh, yes. That was it. That was lovely.
Mr Qixotl had just had a very, very interesting idea.
8
THE BODY POLITIC
The vault had, in a very real sense, come to life. And it wasn’t happy.
The walls were screaming. Earlier, Bregman had heard the toucans shrieking their heads off in the rainforest, and now the same kind of sound was filling up the vault, a squawking, screeching, cackling noise that seemed to come from every direction at once. The voice from inside the casket fell silent. Bregman turned, searching the vault for the source of the screaming, but all she saw was Sam, standing in the doorway behind her. Frozen. Like a rabbit caught in headlights. Bregman guessed she probably looked the same way herself.
Then the walls began to blossom. Shoots forced their way out of the cracks in the stone, their stems shot through with deep red arteries, and buds the colour of dead flesh broke open before Bregman’s eyes. The blooms had petals like flowers, but they were scarred and wrinkled like old skin. Something moved under Bregman’s feet, and she stumbled backwards, until her spine was pressed against the side of the casket. In front of her, the floor rippled, as organic tendrils pushed the slabs aside and reached up towards the torchlight.
Bregman started stomping on the growths, trying to mash them back into the ground. It wasn’t really a rational response to the situation, but what the hell? Now the voice had abandoned her, she didn’t have anything to do except panic. She looked up as she stamped, hoping to make eye contact with Sam again, but Sam wasn’t there. The vault had changed shape around her. New walls had grown out