Doctor Who_ Illegal Alien - Mike Tucker [44]
Mullen shook himself. Where was he? Spinning round, he got his bearings just in time to see Constable Quick through the glass door, inside the school, settling himself into a comfortable chair and stretching his arms and feet.
'What the...'
He took a dumbfounded step back towards the school.
'Quick!' he bellowed. 'What the Devil do you think you're doing?'
Ace, had the Doctor but known it, was almost within earshot of her friend as he begged her forgiveness. He had raised his voice to the sky: she was beneath his feet, sloshing through an underground river of rainwater. Her progress had been slow she seemed to have been down there for hours. She had left her the caretaker she had had to and pressed on with their plan.
Barely six yards along the tunnel Ace had come face to face with her first major obstacle. The German bombs had done their work: the tunnel was almost entirely blocked with rubble bricks, concrete, and London clay. She had shone her torch up into the dark gash where the roof had been. It didn't look safe. Gingerly, she had begun hefting the uneven chunks of earth and masonry from the pile, her ears straining for any sound from behind which might indicate that she had been followed into the pit. Nearly an hour later she had managed to clear a space deep enough to reach what she desperately hoped was the end of the cavein and wide enough just to crawl through on her stomach. Wriggling like a worm, she had squeezed herself between unsteady tons of rock and concrete.
After what seemed like an age she had emerged into what she hoped was just water. The tunnel was ankledeep in it. Just ahead of her it split into two. Ace had shone her torch down each of the tunnels. The one on the right ended almost immediately in more rubble, down which a constant sheet of water sluiced.
Water. It looked clean. It must be rainwater, which she hoped meant she was close to an exit to the surface. Eagerly she had begun tearing at the debris, throwing it behind her.
The ceiling was higher here. Another good sign. She had ascended the pile of rubble. Her hand had closed on something metallic, buried under the scree. She had tugged, and it had come free a metallic rod, four or five feet in length, and curiously grooved and notched. She tested its strength against her own. It was strong good. Wedging it under the largest of the clayandconcrete boulders which blocked her way, she had heaved downward with all her weight. The rod had held firm the huge block had stirred. Again she had heaved. Slowly, like a stone giant waking from sleep, the rock had pivoted over, half twisted, and thundered down the rubble slope.
Ace froze. A thin, constant trickle of dust was suddenly showering her from somewhere above. The trickle became a stream. Swearing to herself, she had skidded back down the slope, small clods of earth and pieces of broken brick tumbling around her legs. The metal pole had clanged down after her, catching her in the back of the legs and sending her sprawling.
Barely stopping to think, she had picked herself up and hurled herself down the other corridor as a huge, irregular slab of concrete encrusted around a twisted mass of torn pipes and cables crashed to the floor of the tunnel.
Miraculously, her torch, slung by its carrying strap around her wrist, still worked. Ankledeep in water, she had struck out down this last available path. At first the journey had seemed straightforward. Ace hadn't eaten since the previous day. The sleep she had managed in the pumping station had been sporadic and uneasy. Aware that she was drawing on her last reserves of energy, she had felt desperately grateful that the tunnel seemed intact, and that it ran straight and at a comfortable head height. She had stumbled onward, ignoring the spray of the minicascades of water which constantly sluiced out of much smaller tunnels and pipes, emptying into this larger tunnel at shoulder height. She was almost grateful for their sound, grateful as the remorseless pounding of the vast underground