Doctor Who_ Combat Rock - Mick Lewis [36]
Wayun’s gaze left the snarl of the doorway/mouth and climbed past the two eye hole windows to the bulging forehead and the stakes emerging from the roof like spikes of hair. More heads adorned these stakes, rotting now, some merely dirty bone, the flesh scooped away by hungry birds.
Just below the stakes, where there were no windows, where there would be no light, was the Krallik’s lair.
Wayun entered the temple.
Inside the mouth, a large gloomy room. Logs carved into stools, benches and tables scattered around haphazardly.
Hammocks of vine and leaf hung from the low roof like burst cocoons. There were maybe fifteen men in the hot, airless room. Their balaclavas of fur were stacked on a log against the wall as they busied themselves fashioning knives from animal femur bones.
Most of them looked up at Wayun. A couple, maybe ashamed, continued to work on their knives, as if Wayun was not there. Wayun chose them.
He took a bone knife away from one man, tilted it in his hands, examining the handiwork. Still, the man did not look up. Wayun handed him back his weapon silently.
The fear had left him.
There was only one emotion he could feel now.
The men in the room watched him carefully, apart from the shamed, the cowardly. They waited for some outburst, some sign of rage.
Wayun had never been a violent man, a bitter man. He was well liked amongst the OPG guerrillas. An amiable, thoughtful, polite young man, earnest and fair, strong but not overly skilled in warfare.
The men in the room looked at Wayun, and realized they no longer knew him.
A different man stood among them.
They wondered what this stranger would do.
The tourists thought they were lucky.
They’d survived the Mumi attack in Jikora, and fled to nearby Wameen, a teeming trading port in northern Papul. The soldiers who had also survived the attack duly followed them, and acting upon orders from the President himself, duly arrested them. Supernatural Mumi aggression would not be tolerated, was the buzz on the colourful, if grubby streets of Wameen. And nor would any tourists unlucky enough to witness the miraculous and terrible occurrence.
Soldiers were everywhere. They marched the streets, bullying the stall-holders, jeering at the Papul men in their traditional penis gourds, trigger happy, and rape happy. Jikora was closed. The Mumi would not be coming out to play with any tourists today. Or tomorrow for that matter. By order of President Sabit.
Sabit was being the jovial host, and entertaining those tourists who had witnessed the horror at Jikora. Or at least his men at the army barracks in Wameen were fulfilling that role for him. The offworlders were all guests of the Indoni military, and if any of them were stupid enough to voice their outrage (oh, and of course they were; they were on holiday after all, and they weren’t Papul, goddammit!), they were treated to a special kind of police brutality. There would be no leak to the tourist worlds beyond. Jenggel. Sabit had already prepared his press statement to explain their disappearance.
The OPG had murdered them. But not to worry, the perpetrators had already been caught and executed, and any future tourists wanting to come to Papul should certainly have no fear of rebel aggression against democracy. But just in case, there would be special military protection for all parties interested in exploring the unique wonders that Papul, this exotic jewel in the Indoni crown, had to offer.
By the time Victoria arrived in Wameen, another ‘guest’
of the Indoni army, the tourists who had so luckily managed to escape the crazy horror of Jikora were already dead.
The Doctor had made several attempts to engage the guerrilla leader in conversation as they made their way through the wet jungle. It had stopped raining as abruptly as it began, and now the jungle opened its throat more vociferously than before, a cornucopia of strange noises and cries surrounding them, the rainforest