Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [124]
‘Ask her.’
‘All right,’ said O’Hara, beginning to move eagerly towards Justine, then thinking better of it. He remained standing beside Mulwray. ‘What is it you have?’
‘It’s a hit hard to explain,’ said Justine. ‘Let Vincent come over here and I’ll show you.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said O’Hara.
Justine said something else but Ace wasn’t listening. She was looking at the police helmet on the ground. It was similar to the one she had used in Turkey. Ace was measuring distances, wondering if she could get to it before they could fire at her. There was no way she could expose the laser sighting system in that kind of a hurry. But the helmet was heavy enough to use as a weapon in itself. If she could get it and throw –
‘Go!.
Someone was shouting.
Ace was so deep in concentration that she missed the beginning of the action.
O’Hara was already falling headlong into the mud, his gun flying from his hand. Mulwray’s arm was still swinging with the force of the blow that had knocked the other man to the ground. Mulwray’s face was still contorting as he shouted. Vincent was gaping at him, seated on the steps. O’Hara was pulling himself out of the mud now. Mulwray grabbed the teenage boy and flung him towards Justine. ‘Go!’ he yelled again. O’Hara was groping for his gun in the mud. Now the boy was running towards Justine, and she was running to meet him.
O’Hara had found his gun. As she ran Justine saw him pick it up, clutch at the muddy handgrip, and drop it again. Vincent was perhaps twenty paces away from her now. Mulwray was striding over to where O’Hara was thrashing in the mud. Fifteen paces. Mulwray stood over the other man. O’Hara was fumbling on the ground for his gun. Ten paces. Mulwray aimed his own handgun at O’Hara’s back. Five paces.
Vincent heard an incoherent shout of rage and he glanced back over his shoulder as he ran. He saw that Mulwray was pointing his gun, pulling the trigger again and again, but the gun wasn’t firing.
It didn’t matter.
He had Justine back. She ran straight into him, colliding so hard they almost fell.
Contact.
They wrapped their arms around each other. Vincent had her back. The weight of her was real in his arms. He could smell her, the leather of her jacket and the scent of her hair and face.
And he could feel the detonating passion surging out of her, the huge muscles of her emotion flexing and moving in his own skull.
The power had been building in Vincent ever since he’d been brought to this place, building in the long hours he stayed handcuffed to a child’s bed in a child’s room.
Now he twisted around, moving with Justine like two clumsy dancers in the mud. He whirled to face the tunnel mouth, whirled to throw the huge bolt of energy straight into the excavation site, to scour it off the mountainside forever.
Vincent squeezed his eyes shut and shouted with sheer exhilaration, bracing himself for the rush of images from Justine, bracing himself for the thunder of destruction.
But he could feel her emotions already, and immediately he knew that something was wrong. There was no blossoming rage, no gasoline stink of aggression. The hatred was there, and so was the need to smash and burn. But they were faint echoes lost in the background.
The emotions that surged into him, dominating everything else, were keen sadness, fear, and now, rising above the others, a simple powerful joy.
The memories that rushed out of Justine were a single unstoppable image, repeated over and over. A little girl was standing by a roadside. There were people all around her, passing her every second, but she was alone because the people were sealed inside cars. The traffic poured past the little girl and the little girl stood there all alone. The little girl had had a friend. The friend had held her hand just a moment ago. But now the friend was gone. There had been a screaming of breaks and her friend had disappeared. She could still feel the pressure of that hand in hers. The girl didn’t really understand where her friend had gone. She never would understand. She understood only that no