Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [23]
Having reasoned himself into a properly controlled state the Doctor was starting to ease himself backwards out of the gap when he realised that it was getting wider. The metal of the shutters began to screech and grate as it was wrenched and ripped and crumpled. He rolled back out of the space and stood up to find two of the people raising the shutters with their bare hands. ‘That,’ he said, standing back to watch them, ‘is remarkable. I really must remember to be very careful what I say to you people.’
The two stopped what they were doing and turned to look at the Doctor. He smiled at them. ‘Just a couple more feet should do it I think,’ he said, gesturing upwards with his hands. ‘In your own time, of course.’
Horrified, mindless, wildly flat-out running was what finally got him back under control. Or at least it made him breathless and that made it impossible for him to keep on screaming. Once he had stopped screaming his panic subsided a little and the running became less desperate. He continued running until the reason to run began to feel less hellish, less snatchingly close. The running became more measured, more purposeful. He stopped running when he found he could no longer remember precisely what it was he was running from.
He walked for a while and then he glanced back over his shoulder. There was no one following that he could see. He took a deep breath and spun round. The street was empty. It was a pleasant street, wide and tree-lined. Was it familiar? It looked familiar. It took him a moment or two to recognise that it was his street and that his apartment block was just a little further on in the direction he had been walking, and running. What sort of aberration had he suffered this time? he wondered. Had someone threatened him? Ander Poul I have been sent to kill you -
was that a memory or a dream? How reliable was memory anyway? One thing was certain, he thought, next time he would take an auto-t. Walking did not seem to agree with him Poul reached his apartment block and, feeling safe at last, he entered the lobby without noticing the figure standing across the street watching him. The man was about average height, brown hair, dressed in the plain smock and leggings of a man of taste and moderate wealth and he was standing almost preternaturally still.
It was better than Uvanov could have hoped for. He surveyed the seven bodies laid out in the makeshift morgue they had set up in the briefing room. These casualties were definitely more, and more serious, than the normal run of ARF activists ‘killed while trying to escape’ together with the occasional dead security man who usually turned out to be an accidental victim of the zeal of his overexcited colleagues.
Seven dead: three of the anti-robot fanatics and four security men. Even without the injury figures and the general damage to the installations, this shaped up to be the sort of incident which could be used to cover any amount of corporate foul-ups. If the plan was to make him look bad it was going to backfire on them.
It was going to backfire on them in a big way. He put on his gravest expression and said, ‘Shocking. Absolutely shocking. It’s an outrage. Someone’s going to pay for this. I promise you, Bolon, someone is going to pay for this.’
The head of site security Teech Bolon, a short sharp-featured man who looked shifty at the best of times, was now looking positively furtive. ‘My theory is,’ he said, ‘they brought professional killers with them this time. Those two, ‘he pointed at the corpses of a large security man and a shorter one who were laid out together, ‘died fighting side by side. The odds were overwhelming. They never stood a chance.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘They were good men.’
They were Sewerpits scum, Uvanov thought and even by the normal standards of Company hypocrisy that little performance was more than a bit rich. But, before he could find a suitably cutting comment, his executive assistant jumped in and spoiled the moment.
‘What were their