Doctor Who_ Match of the Day - Chris Boucher [13]
Keefer crawled closer. ‘Run you scuffler!’ he hissed and fired another round, which kicked up a gout of earth by the man’s face.
Sobbing incoherently the man staggered to his feet and began to run towards the wood. Keefer rolled into the depression and snatched up a discarded gun. Closing his eyes against the light he fired a burst of tracers in the general direction of the fleeing figure.
Following the cue three other guns opened up, two to Keefer’s left and one to his right. As the deadly lines converged on the running man Keefer moved on the sound to his left. With a bubbling scream the runner went down but the marksmen continued to fire, pouring bullets into the twitching body, cutting and smashing it into bloody, smouldering pieces.
When the firing stopped Keefer was in position. In front of him two men stood up. They were excited by the kill, breathing hard and giggling.
‘Missed,’ said Keefer quietly and fired the handgun as they turned.
The heavy bullet punched into one of them. He was dead before he hit the ground. The second man spread his hands in supplication. ‘Don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.’
Keefer gestured with his gun. ‘That way,’ he said softly.
‘Walk in that direction. Walk slowly with your hands down and your mouth shut.’ Keefer stepped behind him and prodded him forward with the gun. ‘Move!’
Stumbling slightly the man did as he was told and when they had walked a short distance Keefer prodded him again.
‘Now run,’ he whispered.
‘Run?’
‘Run!’ Keefer hissed and shoved him hard in the back. The man stumbled forward and broke into a shambling run.
Keefer angled away from him then stood quite motionless, his gun half raised. He counted five slowly then he shouted at the top of his voice: ‘Look out, he’s coming your way!’
A burst of tracer fire chopped into the man. In the split second before his night-lenses blanked with the overload Keefer aimed and fired just above the muzzle-flash.
Chapter Three
Of all the cell blocks in all the worlds the Doctor had ever been thrown into, the Court of Attack lock-up was certainly among the more unusual, he thought. Apart from the one threatening detail it could almost be described as pleasant.
The communal areas were well appointed with comfortable furniture, reference books and computer workstations. There were very few prisoners, and those there were each had a small self-contained suite of rooms to which only they had unrestricted access. There were no locks on any of the doors and no guards anywhere in evidence. If it wasn’t for that one threatening detail, the wrist and ankle bands he and Leela had been fitted with when they arrived, he could almost have convinced himself that this was a voluntary programme of some sort. ‘This is getting to be a habit,’ he said, sitting down on one of the padded benches in the library area. ‘For a law-abiding Time Lord I seem to have ended up in jail rather a lot recently.’
Unexpectedly, and not a little unsettlingly, the Doctor thought, Leela’s knife had not been taken away from her. She was using it to pick at one of her ankle bands. ‘I thought you stole the TARDIS,’ she said. ‘Is that law-abiding where you came from?’
‘Don’t do that,’ the Doctor warned. He had a bad feeling about the narrow, seamless metallic strips that fitted so snugly and comfortably that you could easily forget they were there. At least you could if you were not Leela.
‘I will not accept marks of defeat from these cowards,’ she said, trying to push the point of the knife behind the band.
‘I’ve seen similar-looking devices before,’ the Doctor said.
He had given the bands some small consideration. They were obviously not for simple identification: why would they need four? And the same objection applied to simple locators. So why put one on each wrist and one on each ankle? The conclusion was fairly obvious. I think they might be the only thing keeping people under control here.’
Leela carried on working with the knife. ‘All the more reason to remove them,’ she said reasonably.