Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [10]
‘Scum,’ belched the singer. ‘The scum of the earth.Scum, scum, scum of the earth.’
Nick gaped. Sin stared. Rod and Jimmy began to feel like smiling, but couldn’t quite do it. There was something too unwholesome about the lurching stride of the anti-tunes, the latent viciousness of the musicians. This band dealt out attitude like an axe in the face. And yet, somehow, it felt right. Rod and Jimmy started to let themselves go, release tensions and resentments that had been folded away inside. Let go.
Nick felt the same liberation blast through him. It was simultaneously breathtaking and terrifying. The lyrics spoke to him, the music spoke to him, in a cacophony that spat on melody while also courting it; a murder of song that paradoxically threw out hooks of harmony at once irresistible and repulsive.
And the band played on.
The Doctor was watching the musicians play. He and Jo stood on the fringe of the crowd, beside the wall. Jo was staring, and she 27
was sweating. Something yawned in her, a gulf opening wide. She didn’t feel the Doctor’s hand as he touched her arm. She had forgotten he existed.
The Doctor withdrew his hand. Jo was trembling, and even though she was dressed as usual in a skimpy miniskirt and impractical trendy top, he knew it was nothing to do with the cold. He glanced round at the rest of the crowd. Tension, fear and excitement were jolting through them like electricity. He could taste the unease like bitter wine.
The band finished a song. A death rattle of evil guitar vibes, then silence. The green-haired singer sent a missile of phlegm into the crowd. Nobody offered a protest.
‘It’s time.’ the singer rasped, ‘for the scum... to inherit... ‘
The band blasted into another number.
Prison Officer Evans seized hold of Eddie Price’s shoulder. ‘Did you hear what I said? Move it!’
Eddie didn’t blink an eyelid. Pemo Grimes was rigid beside him.
The ten cons were watching the band: the music carried easily across the moor, a tremble of subversion in the sunshine.
Officer Evans had reached the limit of his patience. He whipped out his stick and brandished it before Eddie’s eyes. ‘You got a choice, Price. You move, or you do a month in the hole.’
‘Join the Unwashed,’ the singer called to them. ‘Join the Unforgiving Join the Ragged, for we are the way’
Price chose to move.
He stooped to pull something from the wheelbarrow in front of him, swung it upwards glinting in the sunlight, slammed one end of the pickaxe blade through Officer Evans’ chin. The PO went down squawking, dragging the implement with him.
The two remaining POs watched the bloody event with a surreal lack of understanding.
Pemo Grimes moved next. He threw one thick arm around PO
Jellard’s throat and held him fast, choking him. PO Samuels tried 28
to bolt for it. Three cons grabbed him, and hauled his arms behind his back.
‘Join us,’ the band called. Join the Unwashed, and the Unforgiving.’
The riot hit the prison at forty-three minutes after two in the Met-noon. All morning everything had been quiet within the complex.
Then...Bedlam.
Cons smashed everything they could get their hands on: chairs, crockery, windows, screws. The officers retreated before the onslaught, locking the doors to the main containment halls of the wings, effectively sealing off the cons’ exit from the blocks but leaving them in control of large sections of the complex. The governor called an emergency meeting in his office after alerting police task-forces from Exeter and Plymouth. He listened to the bloodthirsty chanting coming from the blocks, and seriously wished he had chosen to be a baker, like his old dad.
The two guards were dragged across the moor towards the band.
They tried to argue, to reason with their captors, but the cons remained eerily silent as they tramped over the heather.
The band continued to play as the prisoners approached, welcoming their new audience. Constable Jervis saw them too, as he pushed his way through the crowd, and all thoughts of simply pulling the plug on the raucous band left him immediately.