Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [116]
These thoughts were so distracting that he found himself glancing over his shoulder, without even realising he was doing it. Looking back. Well, so much for his big decision.
He had only a second to register what was happening before the wave hit him. The monstrosity was still in the square, whirling in circles, but parts of its body were starting to leak into the rest of the town. One tendril had lashed out, and now it was following him down the side street. Rolling along the ground, picking up dust and matter as it went.
Accident, thought Father Kreiner. It hadn’t even seen him. It had reached out blindly, and he was right in its path.
And suddenly he was falling backward, knocked off his feet by the force of the wave. There was pain in his arm, although the repair systems in the armour were trying to distract him from it, pumping sedatives into his body before the shock could shut down his brain. But nothing else was happening. He hadn’t been carried away, or swallowed up by the wave. He could still feel his legs, and the sweat between the layers of his skin. He could still hear the echoes of a scream inside his mask.
He was on his back. Lying in the dust, with his head turned towards the square. He could still see the monstrosity from here, framed between the walls of the side street, but the tendril had been pulled back into the thing’s body. It had winged him, that was all.
It had touched his arm.
His arm… wasn’t there.
Something was there. Something that might have been a limb, but it was tiny and weak, and it made him think of the images of Tyrannosaurus rex he’d seen in picture books two thousand years earlier. A stunted little forepaw, stuck to a big powerful body. The limb was still surrounded by Remote armour, but the armour had shrivelled up around the flesh, so the arm looked as though it’d been shrink-wrapped. He couldn’t feel anything at all down his right side. The monster had sucked all the life from that section of his body, drawn the biodata out of one of his limbs, and left the remains just dangling.
Even if he got out of this alive, he’d be crippled for the rest of his life. For a hundred years, or a thousand years, or… or until he was crippled again, and again, and again, and eternity was made slightly less bearable for him. He remembered how the Remote had offered to make him more than human, back in the days of old Anathema. But he’d chosen the Faction, hadn’t he? Becoming less than human instead, just because he’d wanted to keep his own name and his own memories.
He was a one-armed man now. Which would have been a mark of distinction, if he’d still been with Faction Paradox.
Adding irony to injury. Hah.
He felt his head sink back into the dirt. Maybe it was the drugs, but he felt a lot more relaxed than he had done in a long, long time. Perhaps it was just the comfort of knowing that he didn’t really stand a chance of killing the Doctor after all, and that he didn’t have to go through all the stress of trying.
Not that his collection of Time Lord heads existed any more. He felt a bit sad about that. Still, at least he was feeling something.
* * *
Sarah had never seen the Doctor move so fast in her life. He’d hurtled along the streets like an Olympic sprinter, with his long legs suddenly changing gear from ‘gangly’ to ‘athletic’, and Sarah had poddled along behind him with tiny little atom bombs going off all around her diaphragm. He’d been in such a rush that he’d fumbled with the key twice before he’d finally managed to open the TARDIS.
Sarah had expected to feel safe once she was inside. It hadn’t worked out that way, though. The floor and the console had started to suck up the blood they’d leaked, but there were big pink stains wherever you looked, and Sarah still couldn’t quite come to terms with that. Now the Doctor was standing