Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [103]
He was looking at someone, as though watching them on a television screen. Someone. Or two someones? They blurred together, as though they were a double image.
One of them looked vaguely familiar.
The man’s feet were an inch off the floor, one hand grasping desperately at the naked arm around his throat, the other held by the tall man standing behind him. The tall man’s – the tall – Huitzilin’s face was buried in his victim’s shoulder, gripping his neck firmly in his mouth. And how else, thought Cristián dully, would you eat, except through the mouth?
The Doctor.
Take away the cotton wool, and Cristián would be frightened again.
The Doctor was screaming.
It wasn’t a human voice. It wasn’t a human sound at all. It was a howl of anguish like metal being torn apart, high and alien. It was the sound of someone’s soul being ripped out.
The floor lurched, and the scream continued. An explosion sounded in the distance, and the scream continued. People were shouting and running and still the awful cry went on and on. Cristián wanted it to stop.
Cristián’s hand was resting against something on the floor.
The image in front of him was changing, melting. He could see through the Doctor. The Time Lord was becoming transparent as Huitzilin tore the reality out of him.
The scream was growing weaker as the Doctor faded, becoming a ghostly echo, going on and on, just an echo, a memory of pain. Cristián wanted it to stop. It had to stop, it had to stop, it had to STOP –
IT HAD TO STOP
Cristián snatched up Anna’s gun from the floor and shot the scream.
The Doctor was a ghost. The bullets went right through him.
Huitzilin was thrown backwards, stumbling. He dropped his victim, tripping over a chair, tumbling backwards until he struck the wall of the cabin. He roared in pain.
Cristián watched, his eyes round as saucers. Huitzilin put a hand to his chest, where blood was sizzling.
‘I always wondered,’ he said, and died.
* * *
12.25 am
Benny fought her way along the deck. Panic was rippling through the crowd now, in waves of sobbing and frantic conversations. She passed a woman shrieking that she was too terrified to get into the lifeboat. Perhaps she was frightened of drowning.
Where were they, where were they?
The boat was a quarter of a klick long. She was looking for the proverbial needle. Her questions had met with blank stares, with offers to assist her to the boats, with questions she couldn’t answer about the ship’s captain and the flares that had shot dazzlingly into the night.
A man in a uniform grabbed her arm, and she shook herself free, angrily. ‘You must get in the boat, miss,’ he said, trying to steer her towards it.
She briefly contemplated kicking him in the shin, but he was only trying to save her life.
Oh my God.
She could get in the lifeboat and go.
She could leave it all behind – the squabbles in the TARDIS, Ace’s guns, the Doctor’s games. She could just get in the boat and go. It wasn’t the late twentieth century, but it was the twentieth, she’d know enough about it to survive. If she stayed on board, continued her search, she might end up drowning, an anonymous body bobbing in the Atlantic. Even if she stayed with the Doctor, with Ace, how safe would she be?
She glanced around at the huddling crowd, some of them still refusing to get into the boats. Bodies. They were all just bodies, floating in the frozen sea.
Somewhere the Doctor was dying, and he needed her, he needed her to save his life.
She kicked the sailor in the shins and ran for it.
* * *
12.44 am
Captain Smith was in the wireless room, adding up the chances. The Carpathia was coming at top speed; the Titanic’s sister ship Olympic was en route, but she was five hundred miles away or more.
‘What call are you sending?’ he asked Phillips, who did not stop his rapid tapping.
‘CQD,’ said the radio operator.
‘I’ve an idea,’ said Bride. ‘Use that new call. It might be your last chance to send it.’
Phillips laughed dryly, and the pattern of his rapping changed