Doctor Who_ Atom Bomb Blues - Andrew Cartmel [64]
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Chapter Nine
Breakfast with the Duke
Butcher woke up to see two MPs staring down at him. He was lying in the driver’s seat of his jeep, cold and uncomfortable and disorientated. The jeep was parked on the side of the road that wound up the mesa towards the MP checkpoint, about two miles distant from it. The Military Policemen must have had its presence reported to them by vehicles rumbling past in the dawn.
They’d spotted the jeep and the figure slumped in it and notified the white tops, who’d come down here to investigate.
The MPs found Butcher curled up in the jeep asleep and, he realised now with some embarrassment, apparently drunk. There was an almost empty bottle of mescal on the seat beside him and another entirely empty one on the floor. His clothes stank of the liquor as if somebody had poured it all over him.
Somebody had. Those damned Apaches. But there was no sign of the Mescaleros now and no evidence to suggest that they had ever been there.
Butcher suddenly checked his holster. They’d even returned his side arm. For a moment he felt a vertiginous doubt open under him, like the ground giving away in an earthquake. Had the Indians ever really existed? Had he dreamed the whole thing?
He forced himself to calm down. Of course they’d existed. It had been no dream. They had just covered their tracks carefully, that was all. They must have driven him here late last night, poured the mescal on him and left the incriminating bottles with him so that when Butcher was found he’d apparently be dead drunk, sleeping off a binge. When in fact he’d been unconscious, ever since, ever since. . .
Butcher shuddered, his mind shying away from the memory of that strange translucent room where the thing had come slithering down from the ceiling.
The two MPs registered the shudder and exchanged a look. They apparently thought the Major had the shakes after a heavy night’s boozing. Butcher ignored them and forced himself to calm down. He told himself that the horrible thing, the transparent giant crab thing, with that face. . . it had all been a pipe dream. Brought on by that peyote stuff.
He still had the bitter aftertaste of it in his mouth. Butcher leaned out of 113
the jeep and spat, while the MPs watched him with barely concealed distaste.
He wished he could rinse his mouth out with the last of the mescal, anything to get rid of the foul residue of the peyote. They’d doped him. He’d had no choice. He’d been forced to eat the stuff at gunpoint. The Doctor had forced him. That little limey weasel. Well, he’d deal with him. And the girl.
Of course, Butcher had the good sense not to mention any of this to the MPs. He simply grunted a thank you for the wake-up call and started to turn on the jeep’s engine. One of the MPs reached in and switched it off. ‘Might be a good idea if you let us drive, Major. You look a little. . . tired.’ Butcher resisted the temptation to scream abuse at the man. His head was pulsing painfully, with a terrible aching hangover. Maybe those Indian devils had also poured mescal down his throat while he was asleep. Maybe he was too drunk to drive.
He stood up to get out of the jeep and only then noticed, to his horror, the dark stain at the crotch of his trousers. The MPs had seen it too, and though they didn’t give anything away, Butcher could clearly sense their disgust as he sat humbly in the rear of the vehicle and let them drive him back up the Hill.
He’d wet himself. Last night. When he’d seen that thing.
Only there hadn’t been a thing. It hadn’t been real. It had been the peyote.
It was all the Doctor’s fault. He would deal with the Doctor.
Butcher made it his first order of business to enquire about the Doctor, Ace and Ray Morita. He learned that Morita had driven the other jeep back to the compound in the early hours of the morning and while no one remembered seeing the Doctor and Ace come back with him, they must have done so because they had been observed at breakfast that morning and had then apparently gone to work in the school as usual.
Only