Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [87]
Justine was walking under the trees. School was over and she was free and she was walking with Cheryl. She loved this moment.
It didn’t last long, however.
Halfway down the street from the station you began to hear the traffic. No matter how slowly you walked the trees only lasted five minutes. Today it was less because it was Cheryl’s brother’s birthday and Cheryl was in a hurry to get home. Five minutes of green, then you arrived at the big road. The road they had to cross every day. Five minutes among the trees, then perhaps fifteen minutes waiting for a break in the traffic.
Today Justine didn’t wait. She saw a gap and ran straight across. She was laughing with triumph when she reached the other side. The traffic was an enemy and today she had beaten it. She was standing on the far side of the road, almost home, laughing, but she was standing alone. Where was Cheryl? Justine stopped laughing. She didn’t remember letting go of Cheryl’s hand. The road was dangerous. Her mother and father told her that twice a day, but they didn’t really need to. Justine could feel that it was dangerous. Something to be feared and hated. Now cars sped past her roaring, sweeping their stink over her. A little girl standing at the roadside. Standing alone.
Where was Cheryl? Justine spun around, searching for her friend. Then she stopped.
On the far side of the road Cheryl was standing, laughing at Justine’s confusion. She waved at Justine, then leaned out, looked at the approaching cars. There was another brief break in the traffic coming up. Justine looked, too. There was a moment’s silence on the road. Fumes danced in the heat, twisting images in the distance. The small bright colours of cars, far off and approaching. The rising sound of powerful engines began to fill the silence.
Justine squinted into the gritty oil‐heavy air. The cars were a long way off but they were approaching very fast. Cheryl was looking at them, too. She hesitated, then stepped out into the traffic lane, hesitated again and then stepped back on to the roadside. Justine decided to call to her, to tell her to wait. She took a deep breath of the roadside air and began to cough, the fumes burning her throat and eyes. But Cheryl was back in the road again now, running towards her.
There was a long scream.
But it was all right.
It wasn’t Cheryl. It was a car making the noise. It was the breaks of the car. Justine’s mother had told her the word. Justine never forgot it because she imagined something breaking, something precious which you could never repair again.
Now there was that screaming sound but it was all right. It wasn’t Cheryl. It was the breaks. The breaks stopped a car. They would stop the cars before anything happened to Cheryl. Things were happening quite quickly now. Where was Cheryl? Justine squinted out through the thick fumes, looking out into the road. The long mechanical scream of the car was ending. There was a noise like something hot hissing on a stove. It was the noise of tyre rubber on the road surface. Then a heavy wet sound.
Justine kept looking for Cheryl. Cars were stopping. Other cars kept moving, driving up on the pavement so they could get past the blockage. After all, this was supposed to be the high‐speed route out of London. Justine was looking back and forth, twisting her neck, blinking her eyes in the blurred stinging air. Then she saw Cheryl. Cheryl was on the same side of the road as her. The safe side. The home side. Very close to Justine. In fact, Justine had seen her several times as she swept her eyes around. But it had taken a little time for Justine to accept that this was Cheryl, lying here just in front of her. To accept that Cheryl could have been hammered into this blunt, bloody shape.
When the ambulances eventually arrived they couldn’t do anything about Cheryl. But they gave Justine an injection that stopped her screaming.
In the early hours of the following morning Justine’s parents found that her bed was empty. After a frantic search they realized she wasn’t anywhere in the