Doctor Who_ Deep Blue - Mark Morris [97]
Charlotte looked alarmed. You mean she’s changing into one of those things? Like my Dad did?’
Mike pulled a face. ‘Keep your voice down. We don’t want to start a panic.’
‘Sorry,’ whispered Charlotte. ‘But what’s going to happen when she becomes... uncontrollable?’
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ said Mike. ‘For the moment she’s harmless enough.’
Tegan chose that precise moment to give a loud groan and slump sideways in a dead faint. Mike rushed to her, Charlotte close behind him. Placing his hand gently beneath Tegan’s head he lifted her back up into a sitting position.
‘Tegan,’ he said, quietly but urgently, ‘Tegan, can you hear me?’
Her lips moved soundlessly for a moment, then in a thick, clotted voice, she said, ‘We are Xaranti.’ Her eyelids fluttered, then parted. The eyes beneath were completely black.
Mike didn’t realise they had drawn an audience until he heard the collective gasp from behind him. He turned to see the doctor and nurse who had tended the Doctor’s wounds, plus several curious patients, stepping back, shocked expressions on their faces. Next moment Max Butler barged through the crowd, looking harassed. ‘What’s going on here?’
he demanded - then he caught a glimpse of Tegan’s eyes a split-second before she closed them again.
‘Oh my God,’ he breathed.
‘She’s fine,’ Mike said hastily. ‘She just needs to rest.’
‘Rest?’ Max said, eyes wide with incredulity. ‘She’s got the plague, man! You’ve got to get her out of here!’
‘There is no plague,’ scoffed Mike. ‘This is a water-borne infection. It can’t be passed from person to person.’
‘How the hell do you know that?’ Max demanded.
‘I just do, that’s all.’
Max shook his head. ‘No. You’ve got to get her out of here.
We can’t take the risk.’
There was another collective gasp as Mike unholstered his gun and pointed it at the ceiling. ‘We can and we will. Tegan is my personal responsibility. And I assure you, Max, that if she tries to harm anyone here, I’ll shoot her. Is that good enough for you?’
Turlough sat on the sand with his back against the TARDIS
door, the faint tingling vibration from the time machine like an echo of the trembling dread in his stomach. He had had no choice but to lead the Brigadier, Benton and four UNIT
troops back to the fun-fair, where the TARDIS stood like a curio between two stalls. The hybrids had loaded the TARDIS
on to the back of an army truck and driven it down to the beach, where it now stood, dwarfed on the outside at least, beside the vast dripping hulk of the usurped Morok craft.
Turlough and the TARDIS were bait for the Doctor - or at least insurance against his departure.
Once again Turlough glanced fearfully at the guns that the quartet of soldiers were pointing at his head. The soldiers’
metamorphosis was continuing apace; their eyes now contained a swirling blackness that came and went, like storm clouds scudding across the moon. Turlough tried to avoid eye contact with any of his captors for fear of antagonising them. He knew how violent and unpredictable those infected by the Xaranti virus could become and didn’t want to give them any kind of an excuse to blow his head off.
They had been waiting for twenty minutes and now Turlough was growing increasingly jittery. He wondered how long the Brigadier was prepared to hang around, what would happen if the Doctor didn’t show up at all.
At first, when the tingling in his back increased, Turlough thought it was due to the fact that he had been sitting in the same position for too long. Then the tingling became a shuddering, and an instant later was accompanied by the trumpeting bellow of the TARDIS’s engines. Irrespective of the guns that were being levelled at him, Turlough scrambled away from the TARDIS and twisted round just in time to see it fade and disappear, dragging the cacophonous din of its de-materialisation with it.
‘Doctor!’ Turlough called in indignance and despair, but it was too late.
The TARDIS was gone.
For a few moments Turlough stared at the place where the