Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [73]
There was a pile of ashes and glass on the floor under the shattered window, mixed with charred scraps of black cloth. MacB pressed a hand against the peeling paint on the wall. ‘It’s warm,’ he said.
The Doctor lay in a small pile in the corner of the basement. There was snow on him; flakes were still drifting in through the window. His face was hidden. There was a small puddle of blood around his head. Benny stood stockstill for a moment. Then she was walking towards him, fingers twitching, wondering what she was going to see.
She gently turned him over, supporting his head, listening hard for the sound of breathing. Nothing. His face was white, not the colour of death, thank God, but pale, so pale… blood had exploded from his ears and nose and mouth, drying in horrible black streaks across his face and hardening in his hair. A mangled pair of handcuffs clung to his left wrist.
‘Jesus,’ said Macbeth, standing behind her. He had taken the pillow from the bed. Benny carefully laid the Doctor’s head on it, straightened out the tangle of his limbs. She pushed her face close to his, listening, concentrating absolutely. Still nothing.
So suddenly that she almost screamed, he drew a ragged breath and grabbed the back of her shirt, fingers digging into her skin. His eyes did not open. It was like being clutched by a corpse.
She untangled herself from his grip. His hands were as white as his face, the skin frighteningly cold. His left wrist was badly lacerated. ‘I’ll get a medic down here,’ Macbeth was saying.
‘No,’ said Bernice. ‘Your medic’s no good, because –’ She bit down on the words.
‘Look, lady, he needs to get to a hospital.’
‘A twentieth‐century hospital,’ said Benny, a little hysterically, ‘on twentieth‐century Earth. I suppose you’re still sewing people up with thread.’
She could feel MacB’s gaze boring into her back as she pressed an ear to the Doctor’s chest, left side… right side. His hearts were beating sluggishly, but they were beating. He had survived. He was alive. And now this military idiot wanted to drag him off to the tender embrace of primitive medicine.
‘Wait outside, will you?’ she heard Macbeth telling the soldier. Sound of footsteps on stone. Silence for a moment or two. ‘Why can’t he go to hospital?’
‘Because he’s from outer crukking space,’ spat Bernice. ‘A crukking twentieth‐century hospital would probably do a crukking brilliant job of killing him!’
More silence. A small sound: MacB flicking ash from his cigarette.
‘No hospital, then,’ he sighed. ‘We’ll have to think of something else.’
Benny put her head in her hand and said, ‘What the cruk happened last night?’
* * *
He was suddenly alive again.
‘Unbind me,’ said Huitzilin.
Someone took the handcuff off his wrist. He sat up on the bed, stretching, stretching, filling his lungs. He hadn’t breathed for centuries, not for centuries.
It was cold. He felt the tiny hairs on his skin standing up. He held his hands out in front of him, examining his fingers.
There were two people kneeling before him. They took his hands, clutching them in adoration.
‘You’ll tell me, won’t you?’ said John. ‘You’ll tell me what I want to know?’
‘Oh yes,’ sobbed Lizzie. ‘You’ll make everything all right. You’ll wipe it all away.’
He devoured both of them. Then he stood up and stretched, passing through the tingling air where they had been, feeling that ecstatic tremor on his skin, all through him. Alive.
He couldn’t stay for long. Just long enough to remember the sensation of breathing, feel his stomach rise and fall and the cool air aching in his lungs.
It was better than nothing. And there’d be more later. So much more.
* * *
Interlude 1
Three weeks passed.
* * *
Chapter 12
You’ve Got Him Just Where He Wants You
Bernice slowed the rented Renault as she drove past the house, taking in the details. It looked no different to any of dozens of houses they’d passed; big garden and driveway, big walls to keep out the noise of the