Doctor Who_ Earthworld - Jacqueline Rayner [63]
‘As a crowd gathers round an angry young clown, Face down on the floor with his pants falling down, In the ghetto,’ crooned Elvis, bringing the sword down.
‘Stop him! Save Fitz!’ Beautiful words. The cry of an angel? Then the long, drawn-out screech of a whistle.
And then there was a bang, and there was blood on Fitz’s chest. And Elvis slowly toppled forward, sword still raised. Fitz rolled aside. The ring shuddered 114
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as Elvis’s body hit the floor. And Fitz, lying panting on his side, saw Africa lowering the gun.
He wanted to ask her why, but this was a murderess and he perhaps shouldn’t question her motives while she was still holding a smoking gun.
The other two triplets had come to stand by their sister. Three of them? Asia had returned. Had it been her voice, then, the angel’s voice? Had she saved him?
She spoke again, this time to the golden robots. ‘Take them back to the cells.
We –’ she gestured at her sisters – ‘have things to discuss.’
There was a fizzing sound all round Fitz – which presumably meant the energy barriers had gone down. Fitz couldn’t even bring himself to make a run for it. There was no point. Two robots were coming towards him, and he hadn’t forgotten the gun. For some reason the trips had decided they wanted him alive, but no one had mentioned anything about his being unhurt.
The two robots climbed into the ring. One effortlessly picked up the corpse of Elvis, the other bent down and grabbed hold of Fitz. He didn’t protest. He just asked, as politely as he could, ‘Could you just wait while I pull up my shorts?’
And when he’d done that, the robot led him away.
Chapter Eight
If You Prick Me, Do I Not Bleed?
Fitz sat there and looked at the body of the man who had been Elvis. Alone.
He was alive, but alone. Which should be a relief, but wasn’t, because he didn’t know what was going to happen next and it might well be worse.
He was in a tiny stone cell that wasn’t very pleasant but at least wasn’t as full of corpses as the last one he’d been put in: only one this time, and it wasn’t rotting yet, which was something. And he couldn’t see it very well, as the only light was coming though the door grille from the flickering torch on the other side, so he could try to pretend it wasn’t there. A trepidatious feel around the floor brought to light a couple of robot rats and, fantastically, his old (well, new, but it seemed old now) coat in a heap in the corner, but there was no sign of the rest of his clothes. He put the coat on over his shorts anyway, after he’d wiped as much of Elvis’s blood off his chest as he could. He wondered why they’d bothered to throw Elvis’s body in with him too. Maybe they were just keeping it out of the way. Maybe this cell was like the cupboard under the stairs, where you stuck old rolls of wallpaper and broken chairs that you might fix one day and buckets and spades waiting for the next summer holiday, oh, and anyone you’d killed recently that you weren’t quite sure what else to do with.
Elvis hadn’t wanted to die. Oh, he’d been a bit of a bigheaded prat, but bigheaded prats had feelings too and they didn’t deserve to be shot down just like that, even if they’d been trying to kill Fitz a few seconds beforehand. And what a way to go. Those were not cool last words. Mind you, they were not, in Fitz’s opinion, cool words at all, but Elvis had presumably thought them amusing. Fitz wondered if he’d dreamed them up on the spot, or if he’d been spending half his time in the ring composing some dodgy lyrical parody. If so, not time well spent. Fitz tried to take his mind off his possible impending demise by thinking what his own last words should be to ensure adequate adulation after his death. Strangely, it didn’t work.
He scooted his bum to one side as the puddle of blood crept closer. Shouldn’t 115
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it start to clot soon and stop doing that? Fitz shivered. The sight of other people’s blood