Doctor Who_ Illegal Alien - Mike Tucker [51]
Order will come to the game on his terms.'
As they had approached the ban, roaring past McBride's seedy, office, he had suddenly become alert. Out of the car now, he sprinted the last few yards to the bar, then, stopped dead. The place was silent. The door swung open in the wind. Whatever had happened here was over.
Getting out of the driver's seat Mullen looked at his watch. Nearly two bloody hours it had taken. The Doctor beckoned to Mullen. Slowly the two men sidled along the windowless wall of the brickandtin shack built into the railway arch. The place should be much more lively than this,'
whispered Mullen. 'Something's definitely... Christ!' He leapt backward as the silence was split by a pair of rapid gunshots from inside the bar. 'Quickly!' Crouching low, holding his hat on his head, the Time Lord sprinted for the door, and cautiously peered round it. 'Oh dear, oh dear,' he tutted.
'Dreadful, dreadful.'
The Doctor and Mullen listened to Mama explain as they stared round the place in silence. The last of the ambulance crews had gone, taking away the dead and the wounded.
The police had just left, promising to return when this insane night was over. They had helped dispose of the victims of the slaughter into the hands of the medics and the morticians, and taken a brief statement from Mama. It had had to be brief the whole thing had lasted less than five minutes. Less than five minutes from when those things those Cybermat things had burst up through the drain to when they flowed en masse out of the door after the fleeing girl. Less than five minutes to do all this, to trash his bar, to leave maybe twenty people dead. The floor was awash with blood, furniture was overturned and broken, the jukebox was smashed.
Mama had surveyed the carnage with disbelief. He had slumped against the bar.
'Time,' he had said, for the first time in his professional life, 'gentlemen, please.
A rattling at his feet had disturbed him. One of those metal rats was still here.
Under the bucket.
Carefully loading up the shotgun, rolling the beer barrel to one side, he had kicked out at the bucket with his foot. The thing had spun, and glared up at him.
Please, don't let me miss, he'd prayed, silently. He had pulled the two triggers in rapid succession. Caught the thing right in its tin back. Pointblank range. The mechanical spine had shattered. The innards had been all but pulverised.
Cyberdogmeat.
Ace's passage across London that night had been much smoother than the Doctor's. The bus had danced and dodged, driven ahead of the bombs as it raced north to distribute its cargo of volunteer gunners. How much of the journey Ace had spent unconscious, as opposed to pretending to be unconscious, she wasn't sure. She had caused a stir when she fell, the passengers fluttering around her like blackwinged moths. The women had been particularly flappy, refusing to hear any talk of putting her off the bus in the middle of all this. At their direction some of the men had lifted her on to one of the long benchseats.
Someone had pulled a blanket out of his bag, and this was now tucked around her.
Her sleep was short, but deep and black. The ATS
woman had difficulty in shaking her awake. Slowly, engine roaring, the bus was drawing up a steep hill. It stopped. They had arrived. Disorientated for a moment, Ace stumbled out of the back of the bus. Her fellow passengers all seemed to be disappearing into a huge, wide pit in front of her. She walked forward until she was looking into the manmade excavation.
At the centre of it sat the biggest piece of antiaircraft artillery Ace had ever seen. Her friends were suddenly a team, orders barked out and responded to instantly, swarming like ants over the gun, arming, loading, angling skyward. She covered her ears against the deafening cramp of ackack fire.
The sky was bright with fire, the ground lit up with it. Ace appeared to be standing on a huge hill. Behind