Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [88]
Breaks will stop the cars.
* * *
A ten‐pound sledgehammer was best. When it hit the windscreen of a car the whole big slab of reinforced glass crunched up in the middle and released at the edges.
Justine is standing on a bridge above a motorway and thinking about sledgehammers. Justine is seventeen now and desires are no longer so simple. The intensity of vision has been blunted, so drugs are essential to recapture it.
In an empty bathtub in an old house Vincent Wheaton was twisting on cold porcelain. A girl was holding his hand.
And the girl was smiling.
The ten‐pound sledgehammer is a weighty fist of metal on a strong wood handle. Your muscles feel good as you swing it up. Justine was swinging it up. Justine swung it at three in the morning until her arms were tired. Running down the car‐choked streets of West Kensington. And it feels even better as you bring it down. But there were other methods.
Petrol bombs, for instance.
The kind you make with three tablespoons of sand, a milk bottle and a piece of cloth. The kind Justine had lined up beside her elbow on the concrete ledge of the motorway bridge. Three days after her seventeenth birthday. Watching the endless stream of traffic pouring out of London below her. The Friday night rush. Justine is lighting a match.
* * *
Now Vincent writhes in the dry bathtub. Justine holds on to his hand, knuckles white and popping with strain. In Vincent’s mind is a firestorm of anger and the image of cars, neverending lines of cars.
But the cars are beginning to burn.
And then the Bad Thing happens.
* * *
‘Jesus Christ, what was that?’ said Ace.
The explosion blew the front window of the sitting room in on the Doctor and Ace. The Doctor was standing in front of Ace and facing her, nearest to the window. His body created an impact shadow, sheltering her from the fine spray of broken glass. She was fighting her way up out of the armchair, the glass spilling from her hair, running towards the front door. The Doctor was already there.
It was pitch dark outside but Ace didn’t have any trouble seeing. Flames were rising into the air from a scorched tangle of wreckage on the gravel driveway. From the size and shape of it, Ace recognized the remains of the Saab. There was a hole in the wooden wall of the garage where the car had been slammed through. Ace didn’t have any problem working out what had happened because now another hole was punched through the west wall, the Kharman Ghia emerging in a spray of bricks and torn planking. The small sports car went spinning across the garden, tearing lawn, slamming the earth with a wet pounding sound and clawing up clods of mud and grass. It was as if a giant foot had kicked it and sent it splintering through the garage wall. The car tore through a hedge and kept rolling away from the house, towards the orchard on the hillside. It became an indistinct shape, lost in the darkness, but not for long. The petrol tank ruptured and ignited, first in a twisting halo of pale blue, then in hot orange flame. The car collided with a tree, bounced back and lay still on the lawn, burning.
There was a creaking sound behind Ace. She turned away from the open door and looked up at the staircase. The firelight from the burning Saab shone through the window on the landing. Standing there was a girl in jeans and a leather jacket. The Doctor came back in through the front door and stood beside Ace, looking up at the girl on the stairs. She stood watching them, ready to run at any moment. The Doctor looked at the girl, then out the door at the burning cars, then back at the girl again.
‘Excellent,’ he said, smiling at Ace.
* * *
16
The bedroom had evidently once been used for some other purpose. There were special fittings on the windowsills for mounting a telescope, the kind you had in seaside houses