Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [84]
The receiver had been torn clear off the wire. A thick tube of electric skin hung down from the phone, trailing the ragged ends of copper wires. ‘No problem,’ said the Doctor, and went to work.
Benny and Ace stood in front of the phone booth, obscuring it. New York was big and dirty and packed wall to wall with people. There was a seemingly permanent traffic jam, bikes and motorbikes winding their way through the stalled mass of cars. Fumes hung in the cold air.
Benny was watching the people. In ten minutes, she had seen punks in silk shirts and slit sunglasses, a pair of tall blacks in African costumes, a troupe of street mimes, a tour group, a book‐laden scholar in a chador, a small crowd of prostitutes in coloured wigs, several blank‐faced police, and twelve cockroaches as big as her thumb.
A bag lady trundled along the pavement with a supermarket trolley of unidentifiable objects. Benny remembered Zamina calling them catfood monsters, remembered Ocelot’s tin with the cat on the label. Grief, said a little voice in her head, these people eat pet food to stay alive. People moved around the homeless woman in smooth twin streams. No one looked at her, she looked at no one. Benny realized she was just part of the garbage that littered the streets, part of the long chain that began with junk food and ended with junk people.
The Doctor had soldered the loose ends of the phone cord to a bundle of optical fibres and was trying to plug the improvised mess into the back of his palmtop computer. Figures started flashing across its liquid crystal screen. He typed used a ball‐point pen, leaving smudged black dots on the miniature keys.
Somewhere out there in the gathering evening was a lone assassin with a Charter Arms Undercover .38 revolver.
Much as she was fascinated by the twentieth century, it was difficult to keep a scientific perspective on it when you were hip‐deep in New Yorkers. Benny hugged her arms to herself, watching them pass by, eyes carefully averted from one another. It was the opposite of Mexico City; the chilangos were so curious about everyone else’s business that muggers didn’t have a chance. In the Big Apple, school‐children were taught how to hide under their desks from automatic gunfire.
All the homeless and all the victims. Five centuries on, and they were still practising human sacrifice.
‘Hail a taxi,’ said the Doctor.
Ace didn’t move. Bernice went to the roadside, where the traffic was beginning to trickle more quickly. She waved at a passing cab, a huge, rounded yellow contraption like a particularly large cockroach. The doorhandles were worn loops of rope. The driver wound down three‐quarters of an inch of window and said ‘Where to?’
The Doctor passed a strip of computer print‐out through the gap.
The taxi ride was brief and quiet. Ace sat on Benny’s left and stared out the window. The Doctor sat on Benny’s right and stared out the window. She was watching the feathers in his hair grow. At first she thought it was an illusion of the irregular light – the feathers couldn’t really be moving, be moving around in his hair, could they?
They were getting longer. And some of the white ones were becoming coloured, taking on pastel shades as they lengthened, lemon and rose and metallic green. It wasn’t quite the most horrible thing she had ever seen, but it made her stomach lurch as the taxi turned a corner. On the other hand, in New York, who was going to notice?
* * *
Cristián opened his door, yelled involuntarily and slammed it closed again.
Benny knocked again, slowly.
The door pulled reluctantly open again. Cris looked at her. He was grown up, not yet going grey.
‘How did you find me?’ he said dully.
‘The Doctor used the hotel reservations computer,’ she explained. ‘Do you think we can come in?’
Cris clung onto the door. After a moment, he let it swing open.
There were enough contemporary jokes about New York hotel rooms to compose a thesis on the subject. Benny was pleased to see that the room was not entirely awful. Yes, it had been painted a lurid shade of green; yes,