Doctor Who_ Combat Rock - Mick Lewis [60]
There had been a fury mounting in the guerrillas as they searched each successive cell and saw the extent of the torture committed against their countrymen. It reached a peak when they found the eyeless prisoner. Jamie leaned against a wall, catching his breath after the excitement of the battle, keeping out of the way of the guerrillas as they took the dead man down from his shackles and carried him outside the cell. From the look on their faces this was obviously the man they had come to find. Some high-ranking OPG rebel, he assumed.
They hadn’t told him too much on the journey here. Jamie had nothing to say. Judging from the guerrillas’ grief and rage, keeping quiet right now was by far and away the best thing to do.
More gunfire from outside. The guerrillas began heading back the way they had come, bearing their sad prize. Jamie followed, but his battle-adrenalin had pumped dry upon seeing the condition of the tortured man.
Maybe they had done the same thing to Victoria, if she was here?
In his despondence he almost missed the crack of light around the edge of a door in the wall to his left, and the rebels had clearly missed it too. He stopped. The door was ever so slightly ajar, allowing a faint green light to escape that made him feel sick and uneasy for no good reason – or might it have had something to do with the torture and death he had already witnessed in this dreadful place? He called to the two guerrillas ahead of him, and indicated the all but hidden doorway. They glanced at it, and then reverently lowered the body of their comrade to the floor in order to investigate further.
Jamie took it upon himself to go first.
He pushed the door inwards and it moved without grating.
More of the queasy green light welcomed him, and there was a stone stairway falling away beneath him, spiralling down into green. He turned uneasily to the guerrillas, but their faces were resolute. Clutching his machete more tightly, he proceeded down the steps, making as little noise as he could.
They were slimy, and more than once he nearly reached the bottom more quickly than he intended. Once, a guerrilla snatched the back of his shirt to prevent him plummeting, and he was sure they were not too happy with his lack of stealth.
Down and around, down and around, the green light becoming stronger, and at last he reached the bottom to be faced with another doorway, this one without a door, that opened into a large, low-ceilinged room.
The green light was from an array of dusty bulbs set haphazardly in the walls or dangling from string from the ceiling. There was a work bench in the centre of the room, one ratty armchair of gouged leather in a corner, a horrendously stained and filthy mattress next to it, a mug next to that. The workbench was piled with devices, some gleaming and new, some rusted – all quite horrible. They were gadgets of torture, Jamie could deduce that straightaway: sharp, vicious, cruel; some pronged, some jagged, some big – obviously to be hefted
– others small, like fitted attachments.
There was no-one in the room.
Scattered around the chamber were a number of short metal tanks, maybe five feet in length, most of them sealed.
Jamie heard a guerrilla groan in horror from behind him at what lay within the open ones.
The metal tanks were too small for the men and women squashed inside them, their legs broken and folded up unnaturally to fit the confined space. They hadn’t been dead for long by the condition of them. Some had bits of them missing, the wounds and stumps ominously cauterised. Some were white, obviously tourists, and in equally mutilated condition. This had been done for pleasure then, Jamie thought incredulously. Why else torture a holidaymaker?
While the guerrillas occupied themselves with forcing open the other containers, Jamie’s eyes scanned the walls looking for any other doors, and found a curtain. It had probably been white once, but was now daubed with dried orange stains that could have been old blood. It framed an alcove, and didn’t quite obscure the shadow behind