Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [31]
‘Ready, Calamee?’ He glanced at her, his eyes stinging, and she threw him a look, half puzzlement, half disgust. He sighed and gave a sniff. He could see her spoiling for an argument, but he had neither the time nor the inclination right now. He had to find Fitz and Trix – particularly Fitz: they’d been together when whatever had happened had happened. He turned back to Madame Xing to ask her something that had suddenly occurred to him – but she wasn’t there. The library wasn’t there. Without any warning, they were back in the restaurant, and the young man was lifting the white sphere from the table.
He gave a polite bow to the speechless pair, and left.
‘If you think I’m just going to forget all that,’ said Calamee daddy, ruffling the fur on Nessus’s neck, ‘you’ve got another think coming.’
The Doctor’s shoulders sagged. ‘Some things,’ he said, getting to his feet,
‘should never be forgotten.’
Ake had come back here twice since he and Keef had killed the alien and torched its ship. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was guilt. Maybe, somehow, 55
he would feel better about what he’d done if he could understand it all.
Why had the alien come here, if not to invade? If it had been here for a genuine reason, why would it have landed in the middle of nowhere, secretly, unannounced? Part of Ake knew that he was trying to convince himself that they’d done the right thing. He had no love of aliens – they’d done nothing for Espero. Humanity had come out here to start again, and the aliens had snubbed them, waving their superior technologies in humanity’s face, sneer-ing at humanity’s failure. But part of him knew that what they’d done had been wrong.
Over and over again, Ake replayed that night: the alien climbing out of its ship and racing towards them. It had to have been attacking, hadn’t it? They’d shot it in self-defence. It had been the alien or them. And with Joshua there, they couldn’t take any chances.
Ake had gone home and buried his head in his pillow, trying to drown out the sound of the alien’s weird cries. The noises from its ship, as it had burned, had made Ake wonder if there had been others aboard.
Now he was back here again, watching the last traces of smoke rise from it in the dim glow of his lantern. He wandered around the blackened wreck, now nothing more than a melted blob. The horse-man’s skeleton had crumbled, and Ake, trying hard not to look at what he was doing, smashed it to powder with the back of his spade. It would be days – if not weeks – before anyone found it. No one came out here. But the thought of the bones, mutely accusing him, lying there, was too much to bear.
Sweat slicked his dark skin and his shirt clung to his back as he finished battering the creature’s remains to dust. He stepped back and leaned on the spade, trying not to breathe through his nose. The stench of burning wrapped itself around him, thick and oily and cloying. Every time he thought about it, he felt sick rise in his throat.
But now, in the sudden silence, he thought he heard something else: a quiet, hissing noise. Like a gas leak. Ake picked up his lantern and swung it around, trying to locate the source of it. But the gentle breeze smeared it out, making it sound as though it were coming from everywhere. He started to walk around the smoking remains of the alien’s ship – and stopped abruptly.
Looking down at where his feet were sticking to the grass, Ake felt his stomach wrench.
A swathe of the ground, over a metre wide and stretching away in a long arc out of sight to each side, had turned to a greyish green slime. It bubbled and fizzed as though it was alive, blades of grass being subsumed at frightening speed into it, dissolving into the muck. Ake took a step back, hearing and feeling the sucking as he pulled his feet out of it. His skin crawled, and he instinctively brushed at his bare arms. Espero was cursed with insects, par-56
ticularly at night, but this was nothing like he’d experienced before. It was as though every inch of his body was being infested with tiger ants, nipping and