Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [69]
Ace looked at the Doctor. She liked walking with him. She liked having a chance to talk. ‘At school, when I was a kid, we were all wearing Chipies and shaving brandnames into our hair. Some of the kids even had them tattooed. You know, like designer names on their faces. The Crows like their tattoos, too. But this is different, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor. They climbed over a low barbed‐wire fence and entered a field, moving diagonally across it. The grass stung Ace’s bare ankles. She was working up a sweat as they walked. In the sky above them a jet fighter climbed, too far away to hear. It left twin white streaks of vapour trail behind it. Further back the neat parallel track was beginning to fragment and blur. It looked like a broken twist of DNA in the sky. They surprised some birds arguing in a thick hedgerow. The birds fell silent as they passed. Ace couldn’t see them among the dense twigs and the dusty green leaves. Bright red berries gleamed. ‘Are those berries poisonous?’
‘They are now,’ said the Doctor. He opened his umbrella. Ace joined him, walking close beside him under the shelter of the umbrella as it began to rain. Ace checked her watch. It was right on time. The evening rain, carrying industrial poisons from Germany. It made a steady gentle drumming on the fabric over them.
‘I missed the Crows. I mean, I wasn’t around when it got started. I was too old. When I first saw them I thought they were Goths. But they were too political. And then I thought they were hippies. But they were too violent.’ Ace looked back down again towards the roadside buildings below them. A cluster of trees blocked her view. If she hadn’t walked that way she would never know they were there. ‘It used to be blues parties or acid raves. Or motorbikes and a fight on Saturday night.’ Ace remembered the sound of bottles breaking after the pubs shut. Some of her own Saturday nights, when she was still a kid. A boy lying bleeding and crying on top of a spilled carton of Chinese food. The way everybody ran because they thought the police were coming. Ace had put a handkerchief to his face. It had been a nasty cut, but shallow. She got grease and plum sauce all over her good jeans, her Saturday night outfit. She wondered why she bothered. No blood, though. And the police never did come.
They came out of the field and through a gap in the hedge, the countryside around them looking suddenly sad in the rain. The sky was an odd yellow. On the other side of the hedge was a narrow country lane, trees close on either side, forming a canopy above them. The Doctor closed the umbrella again. ‘Almost there,’ he said.
‘Almost where?’ said Ace, but then they walked around a curve and she could see for herself.
At a wide point in the lane a small car was parked, nosed into a tangled hedge. An Austin A35, fifty years old but gleaming as if it was new. Ace didn’t know which was more unlikely, finding a car there or finding one in such good nick. The Doctor was taking something out of his pocket. Keys. He turned to her and smiled.
‘You drive.’
* * *
They drove through small villages with cherry trees edging the road. The pale pink bloom was thick in the October heat. Clouds of shed blossom drifted in front of the car like snow until the heavy rain arrived and soaked it down.
* * *
13
The rain made a constant quiet tapping on two of the three windows high on the cellar wall. At the third window it splashed softly, gathering and running in. It was running through the hole Justine had made, smashing the glass in with a brick.
Justine was aware of the noises, listening for any change in the pattern. Her feet were numb with cold. This place was unusually cold, even for a basement. Justine flexed her toes and felt them tingle. The chill was coming up from the icy stones. She walked deeper into the basement, espadrilles slopping on the floor. The power rose around her and through her, transmitted up through the soaked rope soles into the skin of her feet. Like electricity,