Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [52]
‘Getting innocent people killed.’
‘Normal people.’
Trix felt cold and sick. Almost instinctively, she moved in front of Reo, sheltering him.
‘We’ve got nothing to do with the night beasts,’ she said. ‘They were here long before we were.’
‘Yeah, ’course they were,’ said one of the men.
‘We’ve already dealt with one of your monsters tonight,’ another one laughed coldly, rubbing his hands together.
The third one gave a low chuckle. ‘Now there’s just you,’ he said. ‘And your animal-loving mate.’
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‘Got friends in high places, have you? Friends at the Palace?’ The man sneered and spat heavily on to the ground. They must mean Fitz. But what did they mean about the Palace?
‘Look,’ she said in what she hoped was her least threatening, most reasonable voice.
‘No!’ cut in one of the men. ‘ You look’ The others laughed. It was bravado they shared, thought Trix, not bravery.
‘Get off on beating up women, do you? And little kids?’ There was a snort.
‘No,’ said one of them. ‘Just alien shit like you.’
And as one they moved towards her in silence.
Trix braced herself, ready to get kicked to death. Had it not been for Reo, cowering somewhere behind her, she might have tried to make a run for it.
Out in the light of the square, she doubted these three thugs would have been quite so brave. She wondered whether she could grab Reo and get into the open before they got to her, but they were just a few paces away.
She opened her mouth to try the shaming thing one last time: three against one, bullies. But then she realised that they’d stopped moving. In fact one of them took a step backwards. And then she noticed that she could actually see their features, as if someone had turned on a very dim light.
‘Holy Mary Mother of God,’ said one of them in a barely audible croak, crossed himself, and took a couple of steps back. In the distance, Trix became aware of the discordant sound of a fairground organ, creaking out a jolly tune that the situation twisted into a macabre theme. She turned slightly at the noise, and out of the corner of her eye she saw where the flickering light was coming from.
Reo.
She stared in amazement, because, for a moment, she wasn’t sure that it actually was Reo.
Somehow he’d grown: he was now almost as tall as she was, his body larger, distended, as though inflated from within. His clothes remained the same, though, and were stretched comically tight over his body, the cuffs almost at his elbows. But the most bizarre change was his face. Whereas before he’d had the normal features of a little black kid, now his skin was strobing with a sort of zebra stripe pattern – the white areas, as they scrolled up across his face, emitting a soft white light, like the screen of a laptop computer. The bars formed a V-shape, almost – but not quite – symmetrical, their edges jagged and changing as they moved. Constant among it all were his eyes, two little pits of darkness, and his mouth, thin and determined. The light seemed to burn from within him, cold and relentless. She looked down and saw similar 96
patterns racing up his hands and wrists and arms, vanishing into his stretched cuffs, now almost at his elbows.
Behind her, Trix heard the sounds of feet, scrabbling on the loose, pitted tarmac.
‘He’s an alien,’ one of the men whispered. Trix turned to see them stumbling away, one of them tripping over. He cried out as his friends left him in the dirt.
He picked himself up, tripping again, and hared after them. Within seconds, the three of them were sprinting down the alley, chased by the panicky echoes of their footsteps.
‘How the hell did you do that?’ asked Trix eventually, turning to see Reo’s body slowly shrinking, deflating like a leaky balloon. His features had faded to normal. He looked up at her, tugging his sleeves back down his arms as if nothing was wrong, a curiously adult gesture.
‘Help me,’ he said softly, ‘and maybe I’ll teach you how.’
‘You mean I could do that? Blow myself up, do the thing with the face?’
Trix’s mind reeled with the possibilities.
‘Given time,’ Reo said, his