Doctor Who_ Beyond the Sun - Matthew Jones [55]
11
SHE WHO FIGHTS WITH
MONSTERS . . .
Jock stood by one of the large windows of the hospital, staring across at the figures huddled around the small campfires in the grounds. There was no wind that morning. The thin plumes of smoke from the dying fires trailed vertically into the sky like threads of cotton. The area around the hospital was becoming more like a refugee camp or a war zone with each passing day. Despite the hospital being off limits to the general population, people still made their way here when they were sick, or brought their injured friends or siblings.
When the Sunless had come, hospitals were among their first targets. And when the new collaborating administration had taken over, a group of healers had immediately begun to resist.
Small but important gains had been made. Antibiotics were being smuggled out and dispersed to those who did not qualify for treatment. A network of children were distributing and administering vaccines to their younger friends.
Several healers in the hospital resistance had been caught and all of them without exception had been killed. The Sunless would enter the hospital and without a word of warning set upon the person and beat them to death in front of whoever happened to be there.
They had just beaten people to death with their bare hands. Twice Jock had seen it happen.
And when the Sunless were finished they would remain for a whole minute staring at the witnesses with their dead eyes as if daring them to respond, before stalking out of the hospital, with their smooth matching strides. They walked as if the world was theirs. And it was.
Twice Jock had been witness to the violence and twice he had not dared intervene. He had just stood by and let it happen. Angela, a woman he had worked with for twenty-five years, had screamed at him in terror. He could see her now, kneeling on the floor as the Sunless stood around her pummelling her with their fists. She had been screaming for his help. He remembered her spectacles cracked and lopsided on her bloody face. He had allowed people he knew to die, let his friends die even as they had cried out his name.
Despite all his efforts in the resistance, Jock still felt that he had become a bystander. His fear of the Sunless had made him somehow only half a person. Something in him had died, something he didn’t even know he had until it had been extinguished. Something important. Even if some miracle led to the Sunless disappearing from the face of the planet, he didn’t think Ursu would ever be the same again. He knew that he wouldn’t be the same.
He was joined at the window by a young Saurian healer who had just spent a sleepless night sneaking out through the kitchens to tend to the injured outside. She was enthusiastic and brave, and if Jock had been ten years younger he might have flirted with her. Well, maybe twenty years younger.
The young healer told him in a breathless whisper that she had managed to splint a broken leg and tend to two infected wounds during her secret patrol of the campfires. He saw the idealism in her large diamond-shaped eyes and felt curiously moved by it. He could almost believe that the principles of Ursulan society were still intact beneath the oppression of the invaders.
A frozen seed biding its time beneath a hard winter’s snow.
A little cheered by her valour, Jock decided to take a tour of the injured inside the hospital. As he moved through the still, quiet wards he heard footsteps behind him. For a moment he thought that it was the Saurian female returning, but when he turned he saw that it was a human woman.
She was in her teens, with long dark hair tied back in a pony tail. Although she could have been no more than eighteen, she walked with the calm authority of someone much older. Her uniform bore a single white stripe, which was strange because he hadn’t heard that there were new people with medical skills being brought in.
‘Hey, are you, like, a surgeon?’ she asked. Her accent and phrasing were strange. It was rare to hear