Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [15]
‘We should get sticks,’ said Trix.
‘Sticks, Trix?’ He smiled.
‘If we’re going to be beating off monsters,’ she said grimly, ‘I’d prefer not to be using my bare hands.’
Fitz raised an eyebrow ‘Monsters?’
‘Well you didn’t get yourself in that state, did you?’
He frowned, dearly still trying to remember how exactly he had got himself in that state.
Trix found a sizeable piece of wood and held it up for him. ‘Here you go.’
‘You keep it,’ said Fitz. ‘I prefer to use my wits.’
‘Then I imagine’, she said drily, ‘that we’re both doomed. Come on – it’s going to be night soon.’
Trix waggled the stick in her hand, checking for balance, before setting off after him. Overhead, the first stars were beginning to peek through the bruised sky.
26
Chapter 4
‘I bet you even put knickers on her.’
A church, thought the Doctor, seemed an unlikely place for Calamee to have brought him. Not that he’d already formed any opinion about her religious tendencies. But – from what he could remember of them – his experiences had tended to demonstrate that brash, opinionated youth generally held little truck with organised religion. But if she was looking for sanctuary for him, it made sense, he supposed.
He shook his head: his amnesia was clearly not total. How would he have known that churches equalled sanctuary if it had been? As they’d walked, he’d managed to bring up dozens of fascinating – if useless – bits of information: he’d run through the periodic table, listed two dozen different planets that he felt sure he’d been to, named all eleven Lassie films, and found it impossible to recall quite what Salvador Dali’s Autumn Cannibalism had looked like, although he couldn’t, for the life of him, work out why it was irking him so much. Personal details – other than his name – simply weren’t there. He couldn’t remember where he’d come from, how he’d arrived, anything about his parents or his family. Nothing before he’d awoken in the woods. It had crossed his mind that, perhaps, there was nothing before that: that, somehow, he’d been created there and then under a bush. But if that was the case, why had whoever or whatever had created him deigned to fill his head with such bizarre trivia as the dates of all Frank Sinatra’s comeback tours? He felt he ought to be more annoyed than he was about all of this, more frustrated.
That, in itself, was starting to get him worked up.
It had taken them less than half an hour, winding their way through what the Doctor imagined were the less salubrious areas of the city. Even Calamee had seemed nervous, sticking close by the Doctor in a rather sweet way. Nessus, as was his wont, had settled down around the back of Calamee’s neck, like some huge, occasionally wriggling, fur collar. He seemed to have lost interest in the Doctor. The Doctor couldn’t blame him – an amnesiac, he mused to himself, is hardly the most stimulating of travelling companions.
Calamee had explained that the city would he settling into its siesta before the imperator’s birthday carnival round about now, which explained the relatively deserted streets. Soon there was almost no one around – just a 27
few elderly women, laden down with raffia baskets of shopping, or people closing up their premises. A few stringy dogs sniffed their way around the shop doorways, or curled up tiredly in the shade. This deep into the city, the streets were narrow and uneven – deep, cool canyons in the heat of the day’s end. But it would soon liven up, Calamee had explained when they’d seen a stack of vast, papier-mâché puppets in a small square. Children were fussing around them, laughing and squealing – and the Doctor could see how truly tatty the city was. It had evidently been built with either an eye on economy, or with a less-than-expert labour force. Walls of buildings, plastered in white and cream