Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [68]
One minute his head was empty of everything, no clues, no hints as to what might have happened, and now, suddenly, he had all this stuff piling up, spilling out of his brain like spaghetti. It was too much, too fast. Maybe if just one of the pieces were to fall into place, the rest would follow likewise, dominoes tumbling one after another after another. He screwed up his eyes and tried to remember how he’d got his injuries. With a grim determination, he plunged back into the pool of memories that Madame Xing had stirred up, replaying the images of his leaving the TARDIS with Fitz close behind. And then the darkness. Heavy and painful and animal darkness.
He and Fitz had been attacked, and he’d been injured.
He looked at the cat which seemed almost to be nodding, although only its tail moved.
‘You’re healing me,’ the Doctor whispered. ‘Or you were healing me.’ He felt the memory of alien fingers withdrawing from his body, a silent surgeon stepping away from the operating table. ‘So what’s happening now? And what was that wave? What’s it doing?’
A swish of ginger and white.
‘Ah. . . ’ With the slow expiration of breath came an image, a view through someone else’s eyes. He saw a smoking, melted mis-shape, lying on dark grass.
And then, overlaid on it as if someone was carefully rationing out what he was seeing, was a view of the barn in which he and Calamee had taken shelter, the vantage point high up above the roof. And then another view, inside the barn, juddering and swinging wildly. He could see Calamee, crouching at the edge of the hayloft, looking down – down at him, prone on the floor.
He felt his heartbeats slow, each one measuring out a little more of the extra life that he felt he’d been granted.
Swish. Beat.
Swish. Beat.
Swish.
The cat yawned, its mouth growing ever more impossibly wider until all that was left was
123
Beat.
Beat. Beat.
‘Hello?’ he said, wondering if he were alone now. ‘Tain?’ The name came to him out of nowhere.
‘Thank God!’ said Calamee. ‘I thought you were dead.’
124
Chapter 14
‘A spaceship powered by technobabble.’
‘Been there, said the Doctor as he struggled to get up from the floor of the bar,
‘done that, got the T-shirt.’
Calamee stared down at him blankly, Nessus peeking out of the pocket of the jacket that she still wore, pulled tight around her like a shield.
‘Old Earth saying – oh my giddy aunt!’ He clutched at his head where a troop of dwarves had suddenly decided to re-enact Riverdance. And not very well. ‘What happened?’
He looked around – the wave had gone, passed out of the other side of the barn. The ground hissed and fizzed, a thin layer of grey slime sheening in the starlight.
‘Is it safe?’ Calamee indicated the floor around him. ‘And what’s “Tain”? Or who?’
‘Not sure,’ he said cautiously ‘On both counts. The name just came to me.’
He fought back the instinct to reach down and touch the substance that coated the ground – and then noticed that, creeping across the floor as if following the wave, the straw and weeds were miraculously being reinstated.
‘Stay there,’ he warned her, and gingerly crossed to where the plants were springing up. His feet sucked and squelched in the goo beneath them.
He fished in his trouser pocket, found another empty jar and carefully scraped up some of the stuff before screwing on the top and pocketing it.
He stayed where he was and squatted down to watch the rebirth of the vegetation. Rather pointless, he thought, if that was all that was happening.
The regrowth passed silently across the floor, following the wave, and within minutes it seemed that nothing had happened.
‘I think it’s safe now,’ he said to Calamee, and stood scratching his head as she clambered back down the ladder and jumped nervously on to the floor.
‘What was it?’
‘A wavefront.