Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [10]
They knew they were putting distance between themselves and the squad snake and they were beginning to come down from the fear-driven adrenaline rush when Rinandor tripped and fell heavily, twisting her leg under her.
‘Pe!’ she called out as she went down.
He turned and came back to her. ‘Come on. You can’t just lie there,’ he said and tried to lift her to her feet.
The pain was immediate and agonising. ‘Oh no. It hurts.’
‘So does a squad snake. Come on Ri.’
He tried again, and again the pain made her cry out. ‘You’ll have to leave me here,’ she said through gritted teeth.
‘I wish you hadn’t said that.’ Pertanor stripped off his pack and dumped it and then helped her out of hers and threw that away too. ‘You don’t mean it and I wouldn’t do it, so why should a beautiful and intelligent toody waste the time?’ He leaned down close to her and pulled her arm across his shoulders. ‘And you shouldn’t waste the time either.’ She tried to smile at his feeble joke. With a grunt of effort he heaved her upright. This time she did not cry out but her already pale complexion had turned white and her breathing was fast and shallow. Moving fast was not going to be an option.
Suddenly the keening of the telepathic strike became a nerve-searing howl.
The Doctor could see the hooks at the end of the creature’s legs. Evolved presumably to allow the parasite to dig in and cling on to its host, they did not seem to have slowed this monster over the ground and now they were certainly helping it to climb. As he had reasoned, though, the sheer bulk of the louse was slowing its progress up the tree. Slowing but not stopping it. With five of its feet firmly hooked into the trunk it had extended a hard-shelled soft-jointed foreleg and was probing for him. The Doctor stamped down hard at the nearest gap in the exoskeleton of the leg, aiming at the centre of the fringe of wiry hair which partially protected the exposed muscle tissue. Taking care not to snag himself in the claw he kicked a second time at the same spot. The leg withdrew. The creature needed to be closer to make sure it could safely draw the prey into its paralysing fangs. With the sound of splintering wood it began disengaging each of its feet from the rough bark in turn and placing them carefully in a slightly higher position. It tested the grip of each of these new places before releasing any more of its existing holds. It struck the Doctor that for an animal that had developed to hunt this terrain the procedure was peculiarly tentative. It was something he would have to think about when he had more time. His immediate problem was that unless he could get higher up the tree himself he’d have no more time. Ever.
Standing precariously balanced on the branch with his back pressed hard against the trunk, he finished tying a knot into the end of his scarf which contained some odd coins, his penknife and the gold nugget he had kept because it was shaped like a duck. He tested the weight and looked up at the next branch, unreachably high above him, trying to estimate how much of the long woollen rope he would have to use. Ideally he needed to swing it in a tight one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arc or, better still, a full circle, but that would put it within snatching distance of the creature. He was still not certain whether snatching was part of its repertoire.
He knew that it ran and turned quickly but that didn’t necessarily mean its general reflexes were fast. Of course, hooks and woven wool were not a combination that required lightning reactions.
He decided to go for broke and began to whirl the weighted end of the scarf round and round, building the speed and gradually extending the circle towards the upper branch. When he had almost got the length right the creature below him responded to the vibrations in the air and prodded out a leg. Luckily this was intended to be no more than a warning to the unidentified