Doctor Who_ Illegal Alien - Mike Tucker [41]
It was the longest ten minutes Ace had ever spent, she was sure. The scuttling and chittering of the buglike creatures was getting louder. She swept the floor with her torchbeam.
There was no doubt about it: they were moving more than they had been; some were even reacting vaguely to her light.
They were waking up.
Footsteps! Thundering down the corridor. Ace braced herself, ready to run. It was the caretaker, axe in hand, panting, flailing with his arms, trying to get the words out.
'They're coming.' he gasped.
He kicked his way across the floor, driving a path through the Cybercreatures.
'Quickly...' He jammed the axe between the heavy arms of the wheel and threw all his weight against it. Ace did the same. Slowly, then more easily, the wheel began to turn. He tossed the axe to one side. 'Help me lift it.'
The lid rose easily on its hinge, and fell away from the hole with a crash.
'You go first,' the caretaker barked to Ace.
She looked down. Metal rungs were set into close brickwork, vanishing into darkness after only a few feet; the smell of sewage and stagnant rainwater; the rhythmic sloshing of the pumps. She hauled her feet over the edge, dropped nimbly into the hole and began descending the rungs, fast.
'Come on!' she shouted up the shaft. The caretaker was older than she was, and bigger. He was climbing into the hole too slowly. From above she heard the unmistakable flash of a Cybergun. The feet above her head twitched and jerked from the rungs; the twelvestone weight of her companion bounced down the shaft, rebounding off the walls, catching on the rungs, knocking Ace from her precarious perch and carrying her down into the darkness below.
They landed on damp, clammy stone. Mercifully the fall couldn't have been more than five feet. Ace groped about on the slime until she felt the handle of her torch. It still worked.
Thank God. She shone it in the face of her friend. His eyes were wide and dead, staring in different directions. His mouth was open, his neck broken, his body lying like a bonfirenight Guy.
Ace ran her hands over the emaciated, grizzled head.
She placed it in her lap and for just a second closed her eyes, feeling the tears well. Then, she laid his head on the ground and limped away into the tunnel, the feeble light of her torch dancing ahead, determinedly not looking back.
She hadn't even known his name.
CHAPTER 11
Every moment the smell of its craving grew stronger. Now the sensation was almost unbearable. It had been following the scent for weeks, and it was so close now Here outside this place the crimson stench hung thick in the air, drowning out everything, making its vision swim, its limbs tremble uncontrollably. Even the high, insistent singing in its head had been replaced by a cavernous silence.
It was dying, it knew. It was drawing on its last reserves of strength.
It stood against a brick wall, perhaps twenty feet high, featureless, windowless. Beyond lay what it sought. It pounded on the wall with its fists. And it could not break through. Its ragged tarpaulin billowed round it in a sudden gust of wind.
It turned.
The wind carried something on its breath. In the distance it could see one of the creatures approaching.
Oh, and this one reeked of it!
'Doctor...'
'Mmm...? Turn right here, Inspector?
'Doctor, will you stop being so mysterious. You're making the law look foolish.'
'Mmm...?'
'I'm the one who's supposed to be conducting this investigation, Doctor. Both investigations, in fact. Dr Peddler and the Lurker. Now you tell me they're both connected, but don't tell me how. On your sayso I've got half my force chasing round all the hospitals in this part of London asking a load of damnfool questions to damnfool doctors without any of us knowing what in the name of God is going on.
'Mmm...?'
'That's it.' Chief Inspector Mullen slammed his foot on the brake pedal of the police car. 'Not another inch do I go until you put me in the picture,