Doctor Who_ Beyond the Sun - Matthew Jones [5]
Someone outside swore and threw their weight against the door. There was an unhealthy splintering sound and the door buckled in its frame. Emile dived out of the en-suite and put his back against the cabin door. ‘We’re full!’ he squealed. ‘Wrong cabin!’
The person on the other side of the door said something that might have been ‘Stinking light-weight’ and stopped pushing. Emile waited for a full minute, listening carefully for signs of life in the corridor. No easy task over the sound of his own heart pounding frantically in his chest.
‘Please let them be gone,’ he whispered to himself in terror. He was going to be stuck in the tiny cabin for ever. Just like when Dem̃ona, the most powerful woman in the universe, finally beat Comrade 7 and trapped her in a black hole.
But that was in a comic and Comrade 7 had managed to get out – although he couldn’t remember exactly how.
Maybe he hadn’t bought that issue.
He put his head in his hands and swallowed down panic. Yeah, but I bet she didn’t have to face crocodile men, out of their snouts on bubblejack!
The door suddenly crashed open, cracking against his head. He was too surprised to try to hold it closed. He tumbled to the floor, protecting his face with his hand, too scared to open his eyes.
‘Don’t eat me!’ he yelled, curling up into a foetal position in the middle of the floor.
When sharp teeth failed to bite into the soft flesh of his calves, he took a peek through his fingers.
A young woman stood in the doorway. A human woman. Despite her heavily made-up face, Emile could tell she was Hispanic. She had long, raven-black hair and thick, dark eyebrows that almost met in the middle. She was dressed entirely in black. Thick leggings, miniskirt, leather jacket. Emile recognized the style as Vampire Chic – the news pages of the fashion glossies were only just reporting it. The woman held a hard matt-black suitcase out in front of her like a battering ram. She was peering at him over a pair of goggle-shaped black shades, an expression of annoyance on her heavily powdered face. However, the more she stared at him the more her hostility melted into surprise and amusement.
‘Eat you?’ She raised a painted black eyebrow. ‘I don’t think so, little boyee.’ Her voice was surprisingly low, almost gruff. ‘I mean, like, dream on.’
The young woman stepped over him and laid her suitcase down on the empty bunk. Her long black hair slipped around her face like silk on marble. He found himself staring at a pair of genuine Titañon pro-wrestling lace-ups. Wow!
‘If we’re going to share this cabin, you’re going to have to stop trying to lock me out – my lug-gage won’t take that kind of abuse. That’s rule number one in a series of several thousand.’ She frowned down at him from behind her shades. She was a striking woman, although Emile thought her features were probably too sharp for her to be a model. Her nose was as straight as a laser, and she had the kind of cheekbones that could cut paper.
She sighed in exasperation. ‘Can you even understand what I’m saying, boyee?’
And then Emile realized who she was. Tameka Vito was in his year at St Oscar’s. He was suddenly very aware that he was lying, cringing, on the floor. He started to feel very foolish indeed.
Like him, Tameka had been at St Oscar’s for only a week, but unlike him everyone in his year already knew her name. She was just smotheringly cool. She was the only undergraduate who wore haute couture for starters, and she sort of just glided around the campus like Blake’s Tyger, only in black Lycra. He’d seen her lounging in the sun with her boyfriend, a purple-skinned Jeillo with thighs like a lion’s. Emile had spent twenty minutes watching them from a window in the library. Tameka had been reading under a black parasol in the driver’s seat of her custom speeder, wearing her corpse-like foundation and studiously avoiding getting a tan. The Jeillo had been sprawled in the back seat wearing