Doctor Who_ Illegal Alien - Mike Tucker [2]
He hurried out into the street, discarding the whiskysoaked blotting paper. in the gutter, and desperately tried to regain his bearings. A voice from up the street made him start.
'Put that blasted light out! This is supposed to be a blackout. Do you want them to drop one on you?' In the distance an ARP warden was shouting through the letter box of a terraced house. McBride hurried over to him, pulling his trench coat tight against the chill of the November night.
The ARP warden, a stocky man in his sixties with a handlebar moustache, straightened up as McBride crossed the street. 'You shouldn't be out here. The all clear hasn't been sounded. Why aren't you in a shelter?'
McBride didn't have time to argue. 'Did you see that thing up there?'
'What?'
'In the sky. Something glowing.'
The warden gave McBride a longsuffering look. He sniffed. 'You've been drinking, haven't you?' He pulled a notebook and pencil out of his jacket. 'I'm going to have to take your name.'
McBride shook his head vigorously. 'Listen, Something has come down. I think it fell a couple of blocks away?'
The warden harrumphed, loudly. 'Don't be ridiculous, man. If a bomb had gone off I'd have heard it. And the name isn't Jack, it's Potter. Colonel T.P. Potter, retired.'
McBride's patience was beginning to wear thin. 'It wasn't a goddamn bomb.'
Potter prodded McBride in the chest. 'I've got quite enough to deal with without pranksters like you causing trouble. Now, what's your name?' A light was suddenly visible in one of the houses, as someone pulled back a curtain to investigate the noises in the street. The warden was off like a dog after a rabbit.
'Put that damn light out. Do you want me to report you?'
Cursing, McBride tried to reorientate himself. The thing had come down to the east of St Paul's. 'Watling Street,' he muttered under his breath. 'Must be near Watling Street.' He headed off through the deserted streets, trying to ignore the rattle of gunfire and the distant noise of explosions, aware that his nightly game of Russian roulette had become a little more dangerous than he had banked on.
His progress through the city was slow; there was too much bomb damage that had yet to be cleared away. As he approached the area where he had seen the ball of light come down he had to skirt around several small fires.
McBride was unsure whether or not the damage he was walking through was the result of the object's impact.
He stopped, his eye caught by a pulsing glow on the far side of a row of bombedout terraced houses. Cautiously, he began to pick his way through the rubble. He passed a child's crib with a slate roofing tile embedded in it. He felt sick to his stomach, unsure whether to take it as a memorial to a tragic death, or a shrine to a miraculous escape. Deciding that there was too much blackness in his life, he opted for the latter and continued his unsteady progress through the shattered house.
He reached what would have been the kitchen and peered up over the halfdemolished wall. There, in the rubble before him, was a sphere, about eight foot in diameter, glowing softly with an inner light. Several fires burnt around it, and bricks and timbers sporadically clattered down from the building in whose side it had embedded itself.
McBride pushed his hat back on his head and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to clear his fuzzy head. It certainly wasn't a bomb at least no bomb that he'd ever seen before. Summoning up his courage, he crossed to the sphere, watching his distorted reflection in its polished surface as he approached. He walked around it once. There didn't seem to be any break in its surface no seam, no cracks, no indication of its construction.
McBride tentatively reached out to touch the surface.
Surprisingly, it wasn't hot at all, and with more confidence he placed both palms on the cool reflective surface.
With a hiss like the opening of a million bottles of Coke the sphere began to split down the middle, dazzling light spilling out, lighting up the rubble like a searchlight.