Doctor Who_ Illegal Alien - Mike Tucker [45]
Feeling more confident now, she had set her mind to planning what she would do when she reached the surface.
Go to McBride's office, she supposed. Hope that the Doctor was still there.
Unknown to either of them, the Doctor was fifteen feet above her, waking Chief Inspector Mullen from his dream.
At the pumping station, alone in the room of the drains, Wall looked impassively into the hole that had swallowed the girl. No light glinted off his blacklensed glasses. He stepped back from the hole and let their gaze take in the entire vast space. The floor seethed before him.
There was no hurry. Let her run. The Cybermats had her scent. They were much more active now He took a small electronic pad from his pocket and began punching in numbers. His little pets began to wriggle and chitter frantically about his feet. One by one he picked them up by their tails and watched them wriggle in his hand for a moment. The feeling made him chuckle. One by one he dropped them, head first, into the hole.
Ace stopped suddenly. Something was wrong. The water, which had previously been lapping around her ankles, was now nearly up to her knees. The passage was subtly sloping downward. Carrying her deeper.
Closing her eyes, she had muttered a prayer. Pray to God the tunnel levels out. Pray to God the water doesn't rise to ceiling height. There was no doubt: the downward slope of the passage was becoming steeper. Soon she was wading thighdeep in water. Soon afterward it was above her waist.
Something brushed against her hand, and then swam away. Those Cyberthings! She put a hand against the wall to steady herself. Calm down, she told herself. Calm down. It's only a rat.
She was feeling the tug of the underground current now, trying to overbalance her, trying to tease her feet away from the clammy, slippery floor of the tunnel, dragging her forward and downward.
She peered into the beam of her torch. It was as she feared. Barely two yards ahead the tunnel roof disappeared under water. She would have to go back. Try to find some other way out. Barely holding at bay her terror at the prospect of being stuck down here, of dying underground, dying in a sewer, she would not even admit to herself the possibility of such a fate. She would find a way out. She had to.
She turned on her heel, resigned to the long journey back. She frowned. There was a wind, a rush of air, a sudden current tugging at her legs and then a wall of water was bearing down on her.
The brick world turned upside down. Her feet were swept from under her. Water engulfed her head, flooded her nose and eyes. She couldn't breathe. She was caught in the current, flailing, banging against the brick walls and ceiling, thundering downhill. No air. No light. Her mouth filled with water...
Ace skidded to a halt, dragging great gulps of air into her lungs.
For minutes she lay still, curled up, foetal, eyes tight shut. The first thing she saw when she opened them was water, plunging endlessly into the abyss. She was lying on an enormous metal grille a drain cover, deep underground, a gateway to a deeper, lonelier nether world. Her torch was still alight, although its beam was faint and flickering now She shone it across the floor and up the walls.
The massive disc of the grille sat at the bottom of a wide, shallow concrete bowl into which the deluges of twenty or more inlets constantly poured, before spilling away through the metal bars on which Ace lay curled. Stone buttresses crisscrossed high above her head, eaves and angles intersected around the classically shaped mouths of the inpouring tunnels. It was like some kind of cathedral. A cathedral underground.
Ace let her head slump to the floor. If she had to die down here, this seemed a good spot. No one gets a mausoleum like this any more on the surface.
She breathed deeply and slowly.
Something was flapping against her cheek. She opened her eyes. Some kind of wrapper, caught in the bars of the drain. Buzz Bar... She picked up the chocolate wrapper and stared at it in