Doctor Who_ Bad Therapy - Matthew Jones [129]
‘Small accident. The road curved but I didn’t,’ the Doctor muttered. ‘Nothing to worry yourself about, your Highness.’
The Doctor inspected the damage to the little car. The whole front was crumpled, making the car appear as if it were wrinkling up its nose in distaste.
The Doctor exhaled heavily; Tilda was not going to be best pleased.
After helping the woman in the passenger seat out of the car, they set off, stumbling through the grounds, towards the building which lay ahead of them in the darkness.
If the Doctor had stayed to examine the damage a little longer, he’d have heard some rather desperate thumps coming from the boot.
The reason why the instructors at the academy said that the Diving, Rolling Breakfall with Kick didn’t work was because they knew what they were talking about.
The pain that lit up Chris’s body as the bullet entered his shoulder couldn’t have been more intense if a blow torch had been pressed up against his body.
Chris collapsed out of the forward roll, and lay sprawled on his back at the gunman’s feet. Any kind of movement at all sent jarring stabs of agony 224
through his body. His whole body was burning. Had someone poured petrol on him and set him alight?
The pain receded and he started to feel groggy, almost drunk. His ears were full of loud static. From his worm’s eye view, he could see Patsy struggling in Gordy Scraton’s arm-lock. Chris’s vision telescoped and they suddenly looked like giants fighting far above him. It all seemed strangely distant as if it somehow didn’t have anything to do with him at all. He decided that he was just going to lie there and burn.
Gordy pointed his gun at him. Chris just stared helplessly up the dark, grey barrel and waited.
Another noise began to compete with the hissing in his ears. The whole street suddenly appeared to be filled with bright white light. The noise grew to a shrill rattling crescendo. And then Gordy and the gun and the noise disappeared in a smear of shiny metallic blackness.
Gordy howled once in utter terror and then was silenced for ever as the black cab swallowed him inside of itself, and hurtled away into the smog.
‘Get on your feet, Cwej,’ Patsy ordered, her voice filled with fear and determination. ‘We need to get off the street. Now!’
Chris screamed in pain as Patsy pulled him roughly to his feet. He tottered drunkenly, leaning heavily upon her. They stood, uncertainly, in the smog-filled street for a moment. An icy emerald glow appeared in the darkness ahead of them, marking the tip of a triangle that was completed by two brilliant white headlamps.
Patsy hooked her shoulder under Chris’s armpit to support him and they broke into a lumbering run for their lives.
When Jack had stowed away in the boot of Tilda’s convertible he hadn’t given any thought to how he might get out again. It had been a snap decision, born as much out of his anger with Gilliam as his concern for the Doctor.
He’d dashed down the front stairs of the Tropics and sprinted around the back where Tilda’s car was parked, hopping into the boot only moments before he heard the Doctor arrive with the strange woman from the painting in Moriah’s study.
The journey had been terrifying; even worse than the dive-bomber at the fairground. He’d rattled around in the small space like half-pennies in a porce-lain pig. The boot of the sports car was tiny, with only just enough room for him to curl up in a foetal position. He couldn’t even straighten his legs to take a kick at the lock.
Bugger! He began to feel faintly silly. Some rescue this was turning out to be! He was probably going to need rescuing himself. That was if the Doctor made it out of the asylum alive.
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Jack slumped in the confined space, letting his weight fall against the back of the boot. He felt it give slightly under his back. He pushed again, and felt something crack. And then it dawned on him that the rear of the boot was also the back seat of the car. Filled with new hope, he