Doctor Who_ Combat Rock - Mick Lewis [48]
None of it’s funny anymore.
Crazy tit.
The cruiser banked sharply, and Clown’s bells jingled.
And Pan was laughing. Laughing so hard. The others were staring at him with disinterest as he laughed, sitting around him on cushioned benches that ringed the interior of the cabin.
Grave was dressed in black as usual. Evil-looking psycho with his shaved head, long black executioner gloves and noose around his neck. Yeah, Pan was with a real bunch of jokers, wasn’t he? Release the freaks... How’d it ever come to this?
There was Saw, the ugliest man that ever lived: big, fat and bearded, with grubby white T-shirt stained with old blood stretched over his huge belly, chainsaw attached to his belt.
And let’s not forget that eye, permanently lodged halfway down his cheek. A rare beauty. Yeah. Bass, hair slicked back with oil, handsome and cool, thought he was in some 1950s biker movie or some early 1980s punk rock’n’roll band – get a reality check, you tit. Pretty Boy preening as usual, dreaming up photogenic poses he could strike when they went into action, just for the camera that was in his head. Twist at the controls, juddering the vessel just to piss them off, make them feel sick before battle like he always did. Battle? Slaughter, more like. Pan didn’t even want to look at them. They made him want to gush. So he laughed instead. Oh, did he laugh.
They’d lost it, hadn’t they?
Twist brought the cruiser down next to the compound, nudging up a cloud of dirt and taking out a totem pole of some weird significance. The Dogs clambered out as the dust settled around them, Pan first, a Power Rifle lazy in his arms, cradled there like an ugly killer baby. The rest followed him, stooping under the low grass lintel and spreading out inside the village.
The village – Pan couldn’t remember the name of it – was deep in the Papul interior. They would do what they’d done to two villages already: question the primitives about the location of the Krallik, get no answers, and then burn. Sabit’s instructions seemed pretty pointless to Pan, but then wasn’t everything really, apart from sex with some stranger?
‘These monkeys would rather burn than betray their revered rebel,’ Pretty Boy spat after twenty minutes of fruitless interrogation.
‘So let ‘em; Pan said.
They strolled away from the burn, Grave taking out the few stragglers who tried to make it through the narrow gate.
Bodies choked the entrance as he continued to fire lazily, just as if he were fishing by a peaceful brook, and not layering beams of energy into naked human flesh while the village flamed behind.
Let ‘em all burn.
The cruiser took to the skies again, the seven Dogs loaded aboard, along with their seven different, splendid psychoses.
Of course Tigus made Santi go first along the bridge.
Although he didn’t laugh as he prodded the slightly stocky Indoni girl onto the first slat, the decision was obviously prompted by some cruel sense of humour, the Doctor supposed.
‘Look at her go!’ Drew whooped as Santi’s arms flailed out to grip the shoulder-high support ropes, emitting a colourful curse in Indoni as she did so. Wina watched from the bank with arms folded and a regal expression of disdain on her face as Santi continued to scream obscenities. ‘She has no etiquette.’ she muttered to Wemus beside her. ‘Make me shy to be Indoni!’
The guerrilla leader waited until Santi had made it across three slats before ushering the Doctor to follow her. ‘Oh my word!’ the Doctor exclaimed as he took his first step onto the rickety bridge and felt it buck under him. He surveyed the dizzy plunge beneath his feet with a considerable lack of enthusiasm. There came a yelp from Santi; one of her high-heeled dancing shoes had plunged through a broken slat and she’d gone with it, her legs kicking frantically in space, short skirt made even more short