Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [29]
Nick frowned. He felt like maybe he was missing out on something here, because Sin was smiling in conspiratorial approval of Rod’s words.
‘Well I for one would like someone to tell me,’ Jo said, and Nick warmed to her, feeling a kinship for all of five seconds until Sin turned those beautiful, depthless eyes on him and froze it out of 72
him. He snatched the joint from her hands and her tight smile became a sneer.
‘Do you love me?’ she said and laughed. It was the cruellest laugh he had ever heard.
Rod went back to his Jack Daniels and Jo returned her gaze to the dark fog outside.
So there they all were: Nick, Sin, Rod, Jimmy and The Dead Boys.
Ain’t it fun...
And maybe Nick had a hint of what Rod had been driving at; but, if he did, it only made him feel colder than ever. Rod was implying the band had come to make a stand for people like them: rejects, misfits, dreamers who had forgotten how to dream; people from the dog-end of society. With the help of the band they were going to fight back. After all, that was what Nick himself had felt on the two nights the band had played to its ragamuffin audience. Yes, maybe he could see what had enthused Jimmy and Sin and all the rest of them, all the ragged heroes driving to nowhere in the foggy night. Maybe he could see that. Or maybe he just felt scared, and maybe he just felt cold.
And StivBators sang.
And Jimmy drove.
Ain’t it fun... When you know that you’re gonna die young.
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Chapter Eight
Two signals.
That complicated things, of course. But maybe it made a little sense too. One pulse emanating from the cattle truck, intensifying whenever the band played - whenever carnage was unleashed -
and otherwise practically dormant, only detectable under the amplification of the TARDIS’s booster circuits rigged up on the cluttered lab desk.
And the other signal? That was the mystery. And pointed the way to the answer too. All he need do was identify where that other signal - so much weaker than the first, like a faint heartbeat slowly waking - was coming from.
It was an aural shadow of the first pulse. It shouldn’t be such a huge task for the Doctor to isolate it.
Simple. Then why, despite all the technology his lab had to offer, was it taking such an interminably long time to do that one simple thing?
The Doctor straightened up from his desk. His thoughts kept straying from the task in hand, from the taunting elusiveness of the signal source, to the subject that worried him even more. He strolled to the window overlooking the canal, stroking the underside of his nose pensively.
Jo.
The fool on the hill.
Jimmy sat with his back against the Glastonbury tor and looked out on the world spread below him. Fool? He was a sodding king up here, surveying his kingdom. That kingdom was a flat green carpet cut by straight dikes and winding lanes. I can see for sodding miles and miles and... In a field at the foot of the hill the encampment was a disordered junkyard of almost certainly illegal vehicles. Jimmy marvelled at how large the convoy had become since the Oblong Box. Cars, buses, campers and motorcycles had
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just tagged on to the end of the metal snake as it slithered through England’s green and pleasant land as if it were growing a new but decidedly tatty tail.
To the south, Glastonbury was a sprawl of elegant masonry laden with windows reflecting a golden sky, dominated by the skeletal abbey, a haven for romantics. There’d be no one from the convoy visiting that relic, Jimmy thought. Hippies were dead, and their Meccas were crumbling. The travellers were on to something new and dangerous and exciting... He dabbed his tongue into the little plastic bag and rubbed the white powder across his teeth.
Jimmy was nobody’s fool. He knew it was down to him that they were here, on the tour to end all tours; the magical mystery tour to heaven, or maybe just to hell. Whichever, did he care?
Princetown was a hell, and he’d got out of there. At least he’d have a laugh looking for the next