Doctor Who_ Combat Rock - Mick Lewis [83]
Cockroaches. Cockroaches the size of carpet slippers. At least four of them, scaling the bamboo walls happily, antennae questing, armoured wings folded, carapaces throwing back the firelight.
‘Santi not like,’ the Indoni wailed miserably as another one trickled across the floor missing her bare feet by inches.
‘Jamie not like either,’ the Scot said, instinctively hitching up his own kilt and tip-toeing back to his former position as far away from the beasts as he could. The tribespeople were cackling with glee at their discomfort, and the man whose back had obscured Jamie’s view of the fire had now moved aside enough for the highlander to be able to see exactly what they were intending for their evening meal.
He promptly forgot all about the cockroach monsters.
Panic bolted through him, urging him to fling himself right back out of the door into the full fury of the storm, and waste no time sliding down the tree trunk. But the sheer horror of the moment fastened him to the bamboo floor.
Rationality kicked back in. He would never be able to get both himself and Santi out of there before the natives caught him anyway. All he could do right now was to try to prevent Santi from seeing what was cooking, and hope that it would prove sufficient for the tribe’s appetite.
He put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her head onto his chest, ostensibly to comfort her in her fear of the cockroaches. Santi being Santi, however, she refused what she assumed were his attempts at intimacy, and pushing him away happened in the process to glance towards the fire, and so was treated to an unobscured view of what was left of Ussman slowly being rotated on the spit.
His blackened face stared at her in greeting, eyes boiled into spitting fat by the flames, hair seared away, but the features were still recognisable as belonging to their friend.
Jamie tensed, waiting for the inevitable screaming frenzy.
It didn’t come. She stiffened, and her mouth fell open, but she said nothing. Didn’t move. Even when one of the cannibals sliced away a portion of Ussman’s belly with a bone knife and passed it to a naked man with grey hair who was obviously the head of the tribe. The Indio chiefs eyes reflected the fire as he sank his teeth into the hunk of flesh, juices trickling down his chin. Jamie stared, along with Santi. Stared in sickened fascination at the pink-red meat under the charred surface layer, and one thought only played in his mind: meat.
That’s all it was, all it comes down to; all we are.
Meat.
Soon every man in the hut was offered their share, and still Santi said nothing. Jamie thought better of trying to talk about it. What was there to say? They were stuck forty feet up in the storm-lashed sky, sharing a tree-house with a room full of cannibals who were happily engaged in eating their friend.
What was he supposed to do – crack a joke to lighten the atmosphere?
The men had all received their fine portions of breast, belly, leg and arm. Now it was the women’s turn. The cook rotated the spit and worked his bone knife on Ussman’s blackened backside. He then handed out slim portions of cooked buttock to the three women in the hut, two of whom were swollen with naked pregnancy, the third being a wizened hag. They accepted their lot gratefully.
It was only at this point that Santi broke her silence.
‘Huh! Women always get bum deal!’
Jamie gaped. Nothing should have surprised him about Santi by now, certainly not her grasp of Earth slang. That was understandable after all, considering the number of offworld tourists she’d consorted with in the dancing dubs of Batu. But the rapidity with which she’d managed to overcome her horror of the cannibalism of her fellow Indoni, someone she’d been joking with, even flirting with, only a day before, left Jamie at a loss for words. He blinked at her in disbelief, wondering whether it was