Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [127]
In the end, the cold was so intense Vincent wanted to let go. But he couldn’t. A lifetime of emotions were tearing out of O’Hara, emptying him. O’Hara was fighting but it was doing no good. The storm in Vincent was sucking everything out. And Vincent felt it all travelling through him. It was like touching a bare wire, feeling a thousand volts running into you and being unable to let go.
But hands were pulling him loose.
He heard Justine saying, ‘Is he all right?’ And the Doctor saying, ‘Get him up to the house.’
And Ace saying, ‘Jesus, what a mess.’
* * *
They found Mancuso lying in the kitchen of O’Hara’s house, shot three times but still breathing. The Doctor hooked her up to the life‐support stretcher they found in Patrick’s bedroom. When the software reported that the wounds were too numerous and too complex, the Doctor tore out the motherboard from the medical computer and replaced it with a large computer chip, one with a luminous line glowing around it.
Ace sat in the child’s bedroom, watching Mancuso breathe and occasionally getting a readout from the life support screens. She nodded off to sleep and woke to find herself on a bunkbed covered with decals of cartoon characters, a pair of handcuffs locked on to the frame above her pillows.
When she accessed the medical computer, asking for Mancuso’s status, the reply was immediate:
TOO
MEA
NTO
DIE
Ace wandered through the wrecked kitchen and into the living room. The Doctor was sitting, watching some kind of television programme involving three screens, each showing a person’s face. One face was of an Oriental woman. She was saying, ‘This is exactly what I was afraid of. I never had full belief in this project, or in his ability to manage it. Now we are in an extremely difficult position.’
On another screen was a teenage boy wearing ceremonial robes. ‘Well, obviously we have no choice. There will have to be a policy U-turn. But don’t be too disheartened. A cleanup on a global scale will require many years, and a great deal of money applied to technology. Your people can start selling that technology.’
On the third screen was the pink wrinkled face of an enormously old man. The old man was saying nothing. He was just weeping.
The Doctor was evidently enjoying the programme very much. He turned and smiled at Ace as she came into the room. ‘Off,’ he said, and the television switched itself off, cancelling each of the images in turn.
‘Would you like to go for a walk in the woods?’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s a beautiful day.’
* * *
Instead of going immediately to the woods they found themselves drawn by the noises from the cavern mouth. The ground outside the excavation was covered with an ellipse of brilliant white that extended from the tunnel like a tongue. What remained of O’Hara was lying at the outer edge of the frost, the black husk of his body presented in sharp contrast against the white ground.
The noises were loud this close to the tunnel. The sound of earth and steel collapsing as the tunnel slowly buried itself. While Ace and the Doctor watched a final landslide thundered up the axis of the tunnel and sealed the excavation with tons of dirt and rock. The fall punched the last air pocket out and a muddy cloud blew up to the surface, settling like a fine spray of ink on the frosted ground, destroying the pure white of the landscape.
The rush of air plucked at Ace’s hair and the Doctor’s hat. It lifted O’Hara’s weightless corpse and sent it spinning up through the air. Ace remembered the taste of red wine and small sugared biscuits. Blue flame on tissue paper.
‘Make a wish,’ she said.
They walked in the woods until they met Justine and Vincent, coming back up from the old logging road. A boy was tagging along behind them and he smiled and yelled when he saw the Doctor.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Justine. ‘We told him not to come up here but he followed us.’
‘That’s all right,’ said the Doctor. ‘Brodie