Doctor Who_ Deep Blue - Mark Morris [29]
He had been in the pub for ten minutes when, seemingly apropos of nothing, a pint glass flew across the room, beer arcing from it, spattering the crowd.
The glass smashed against the bar, spraying a woman with crystal splinters. She screamed, her hands flying up to her lacerated face. The man beside her turned, enraged, and launched himself at the nearest target, an elderly, bespectacled man who was standing with his wife, sipping whisky. He bore the man to the ground, punched him in the face, smashing his spectacles. The elderly man‟s wife slammed a wine glass on to her husband‟s assailant‟s head, cutting her hand, and then, astonishingly, spun like a dervish and began to viciously pummel the young man in the leather jacket who was standing next to her. The young man retaliated, kicking and bludgeoning the woman to the ground. As if the sudden flurry of violence had snapped their own fragile threads of inhibition, other people abruptly turned to launch unprovoked attacks on those standing close to them. These tinders of violence escalated into a forest fire with such astonishing speed that within half a minute of the catalyst of the exploding glass the entire room was in uproar.
The chain of events was so swift that Andy, like many others, could only gape at first, his beer glass clutched almost forgotten in his hand. He had been involved in violent situations before and quickly realised that what was happening here did not conform to the usual patterns.
Brawls and riots generally looked more frightening than they actually were, most of those involved content simply to make up the numbers, to get caught up in the excitement whilst staying out of trouble. Here, though, things were different.
Here, the majority rather than the minority seemed eager to get in on the action.
Women were screeching and clawing and kicking; men were punching, head-butting, picking up whatever they could find to use as weapons. The violence was intense, random, senseless, frenzied. People were simply inflicting pain on others for the sheer crazed joy of it, fighting with whoever was closest to hand, regardless of age or gender.
Andy had only a second or two to take this in before a big guy with a thick moustache and a look of glazed madness in his eyes lunged towards him. Andy jumped up from his seat and instinctively threw his beer in the man‟s face. As the man blundered on, momentarily blinded, Andy dropped his beer glass and in one movement stepped forward and punched the man right in the centre of his face, poleaxing him. Before anyone else could zero in on him, Andy ran across to the door at the back of the bar, shot through it and slammed it behind him.
The corridor behind the bar, at the end of which was a staircase leading up to the living quarters, was deserted. To Andy‟s immediate right was a fire exit door, which he slammed through without hesitation. He found himself in a cobbled back yard that narrowed to an alleyway that ran along the side of the building. The noises coming from inside the pub made it sound as if a wild party was taking place in there. Andy took out his walkie-talkie and put a call through to the station. By the time the police arrived, three minutes later, the violence had spilled out into the street.
Andy stayed out of sight at the end of the alleyway until he heard the sirens and saw the flashing lights of four panda cars and a Black Maria. When he emerged into the glass, debris and body-strewn street, the doors of the police vehicles were opening and uniforms were piling out. Though he was grateful for the back-up, Andy still couldn‟t help feeling uneasy. A good number of his colleagues looked as itchy for a fight as most of the people in the pub had been, and Andy didn‟t think their eager, yet oddly blank expressions could simply be put down to adrenalin.
As the uniformed PCs and the pub combatants clashed, Reg Stafford, a fellow sergeant and a friend of Andy‟s, got out