Doctor Who_ Combat Rock - Mick Lewis [67]
‘If the Indoni are as brutal to prisoners as you describe, it’s more important than ever that we find Victoria,’ he said.
‘So how do we do that?’
‘Maybe we don’t need to,’ the Doctor replied, watching outrageously coloured birds tumbling through the branches in a courtship dance. ‘The Indoni are in the jungle looking for us, remember. And Victoria’s with them.’
‘I get it. So all we have to do is let them find us.’
‘Well, something like that, Jamie, yes. The only trouble is...’ he hesitated and faced Jamie again, his expression dark.
‘What?’
‘Well, as you’ve seen, they haven’t got a very good hospitality record, have they?’ The Doctor’s voice rose with his agitation. ‘What atrocities are they likely to perform when they do find us?’
Chapter Ten
‘Your face more, more, more ugly than ghost.’ Wina said definitively, turning her back on Santi and following Wemus along the jungle trail.
‘In my village you hang from tree because you black magic thing,’ Santi replied promptly, tossing her locks with finality. ‘Banuwang witch.’
Wemus grinned at Kepennis; he was rather enjoying the Indoni girls’ constant fighting. He liked to think it was over him, although Santi had never given him any sign that she found him attractive. But why shouldn’t she? If the prettier of the two liked him, then surely the one Wina was heaping such disdain on would follow suit?
Or was he just being a vain, arrogant Papul idiot? He grinned at himself this time. Whatever. He was actually enjoying this trip now.
He thought of the red, red weal on Budi’s neck as Tigus dealt the machete blows and his grin slipped away.
A great smashing of undergrowth to their left.
The Doctor paused, Jamie coming to a halt behind him. A guerrilla nudged them forward with a rifle barrel and barked something nervously in Papul.
‘Snatcher?’ the Doctor asked Tigus as they resumed their progress.
The guerrilla leader was walking alongside him, and now he shrugged. ‘There are many beasts in these jungles. Many dangerous beasts... Not just Snatchers’
‘That’s very reassuring.’
The crashing moved away from them. The two Indoni girls had barely noticed it, immersed in their feuding as they were.
Jamie was trying to engage Ussman in conversation, but the normally loquacious trader was still unable to forget the image of his best friend kneeling under the blows, his body slowly toppling forward into the grass. Ussman looked cowed and miserable. Drew, as always, walked alone. Nobody wanted to talk to him. That seemed to suit him fine, although now and again he would try to touch one of the girls surreptitiously, and sometimes not so surreptitiously. This abortive lechery had nearly embroiled him in a bout of fisticuffs with Wemus, when he had once tried stroking Wina’s long black hair. Tigus had swiftly ended the tussle with the intervention of his machete.
They continued southwards, sometimes trekking over foothills that brought them above the jungle, affording them vistas across the treetops to distant mountains capped by snow to the East, and a broad swathe of brown water that Kepennis claimed was the Schlachtenmoord River to the South Then it was back into the trees, embraced by exotic foliage.
It was hot, and it was humid. Sweat dribbled between their shoulder-blades and nestled in the hollows of their chests continually. Insects bit and stung, forming a constant cloud around them as they walked. Plants and vines cut at their legs, plucking at clothes and flesh. Sometimes they would be wading through swamps up to their thighs, while large, unseen creatures entered the water around them with dramatic splashes.
In one such swamp, the trees all dead and ghostly white mirrored by the water below, the group encountered the cause of the splashes. Or at least, one of the guerrillas was unfortunate enough to do so.
Nobody even saw it. One moment they were traversing a broad jungle swamp, the leafless bones of the trees reaching up into the air and down into the reflection around them, bits of grass and twigs floating alongside the travellers