Doctor Who_ Prime Time - Mike Tucker [60]
They entered a vast cathedral-like building and the door slammed shut behind them. Here the noise of screaming was louder, a constant background choir of pain and suffering. The Doctor shivered.
Two robed figures emerged from the shadows, limping painfully towards him, arm-thick pipes trailing from under their robes and sliding across the flagstone floor. The Zzinbriizi shuffled backwards. The Doctor could sense their fear. One of the figures stopped in front of him. The Doctor peered at it, trying to see the features under the cowl.
‘Good. Good, Barrock. You have done well,’ The voice was low and strained.
The Doctor held out his hand. ‘Good afternoon.’
Abruptly the figure pulled back its hood and the Doctor recoiled in horror. The F1eshsmith’s face was a mass of raw tissue, scarred and pitted. Surgical pins littered the scalp and thin tubes wound their way through the glistening skin. One eye was human, set deep into a black socket, the other was a compound eye, light glinting off its wet surface.
The other Fleshsmiths removed their hoods. All of them were uniquely different, all of them stitched together in different patterns. Beneath the robes the Doctor could see claws and pincers, scales and fur, flesh and machinery, all laced with the pulsing pipes that snaked off into the darkness.
The Zzinbriizi snarled in fear. The first Fleshsmith s misshapen mouth cracked into a malicious smile.
‘Impressed, Time lord? Impressed with our skills with the knife?’
The Doctor swallowed hard. ‘Well it makes you very...
distinctive.’
‘I am surgeon general of the Fleshsmiths. We have been waiting for you for a long time. Come.’
The creature caught the Doctor’s arm and began to shuffle back into the gloom.
‘What about us?’ Barrock snarled.
The surgeon general didn’t look back. ‘We will have need of you later, Barrock. Wait here.’
The Doctor glanced at the pack of snarling jackals. ‘Your handiwork, I assume?’
‘Yes, Doctor,’ rasped the surgeon general. ‘A fascinating project. To take the basest of creatures and give it a brain, an intelligence. To give its life meaning.’
‘To make it a more terrible creature than it already is. You have raised them to the point where all they will use that intelligence for will be to become more efficient killers.’
‘Quite.’ The Fleshsmith sounded pleased. ‘That was the intention.’
‘But why?’ The Doctor shook his head. ‘For what possible reason could you want to do it?’
‘All will become clear.’
The Fleshsmith pushed at a set of huge double doors. They swung open silently and coiling vapour swirled out. The Doctor nearly gagged.
‘The flesh banks, Doctor.’
Cramming his handkerchief over his nose, the Doctor followed the surgeon general into the swirling clouds of vapour.
He was used to the variety of nightmares the universe was capable of, but even he was unprepared for the horror that stretched before him. The chamber was vast, ranks of huge pillars stretching into the shadows, their tops hidden in the cavernous gloom. Chains and pipes hung from the distant vaulted ceiling like creepers, and amongst these chains hung the bodies.
There were hundreds, maybe thousands of them, hanging amongst the swirling vapour. Some were intact, some only partially intact with limbs missing and mechanical prostheses grafted in their place. Thick pulsing tubes wound from the bodies to elaborate junction boxes that hummed and whirred, and through the vapour crept the Fleshsmiths, checking connections, poking and prodding at the inert bodies, injecting them with huge vicious-looking syringes. Moans and screams echoed around the pillars and sometimes there was mad, maniacal laughter.
The Doctor stumbled forward, shocked and stunned.
Deeper in the shadows he could see more and more bodies hanging like meat in a butcher’s Window. The range of species seemed to be endless. He could see humans and Draconians, Ice Warriors and Ogrons; in one corner he caught a glimpse of the familiar studded shapes of Dalek casings. The