Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [59]
‘Until someone else gets killed,’ she shot back. She was only small, but she managed to knock a few inches off Benton just by her attitude. He felt his cheeks burn.
‘Now look, your job is to obey orders, not voice opinions.’
‘Everything all right here, Benton?’
The familiar crisp tones of the Brigadier made the sergeant whip around guiltily. Although he hadn’t been the one questioning orders, it was still someone directly under his command, and he felt responsible. He crashed to attention, as did Corporal Robinson.
‘Everything’s in order, sir,’ he said smartly.
The Brigadier eyed him shrewdly, and then turned to the corporal. He nodded his head at her as if weighing up the insubordination he had so obviously heard while they had missed him in the gathering dusk, and Benton couldn’t resist rolling his eyes in frustration. He was always being caught on the slack. He really should tighten up on his men. And women. Captain Yates wouldn’t have stood for it for a moment. Benton was too soft, and he could tell the Brigadier was thinking the same.
Lethbridge-Stewart stared through the gate. Some of the travellers raised double digits at him from a nearby camp fire. He eyed them impassively, completely unfazed.
‘I’m glad everything’s under control, Benton.’ He shot a glance at the sergeant, one eye ominously narrowed. ‘Very glad indeed.’
The moon watched him drive, an old, fat moon keeping pace with the silver-haired Time Lord as he motored through the country lanes, watching out for him on his urgent errand or maybe gloating over his anxieties. Yet it was just the same old familiar moon when all was said and done, and this was just the planet Earth.
Just the planet Earth, yet once again the Doctor had managed to find himself involved in one big and very unearthly mess.
143
He knew exactly where the cattle truck was, and therefore the location of the original pulse, so there was no need to use the sensor any more. He had left midnight behind somewhere in the Wiltshire lanes, and now he was chasing towards dawn, the night wind combing his hair back from his brow. His face was grim, and his black gloves were tight on the wheel.
He curved round a bend, the moon flirting with him through the branches of some voluptuous oaks, and there was a figure in the centre of the lane.
The Doctor didn’t see him at first. As the oaks slipped away to his left, a barebacked range of hills had been revealed under the moonlight and, glowing bone-white on a hillside as if sketched there with luminous paint, was the huge figure of a chalk horse.
The Doctor took his eyes off the amazing sight and concentrated on the road ahead. And there was the man in the lane.
Except it was no man. It was a scarecrow thing of rags and stone-coloured flesh, head bald but for a Medusa writhing of blind, oversized worms. Eyes reflected the moonlight malefically and, throwing up one arm to protect his face, the Doctor swung down hard right on the steering wheel with the other.
The Edwardian roadster ploughed into the hedge on the side of the lane, hurling the Doctor forward across the top of the windscreen. The car lurched to a halt embedded in the thicket, and the Doctor slumped over the steering wheel, stunned.
The moon stared down at him as if in rebuke over his clumsiness, bathing the car, the hedge and the empty lane in its impassive light.
Dawn caught up with the Doctor as he finally succeeded in heaving the car out of the hedge and back on to the road. Pale first light, and birds shaken out of their slumbers and indignant for it, shattering the silence with their vociferous chorus. They reminded him of his lack of sleep, and that he would doubtless also lack the opportunity to get any in the future, but this was something he was becoming used to.
And to think he’d believed exile on Earth was the equivalent of 144
the Time Lords shoving him away in a retirement home!
He sat behind the wheel again, removing half a nettle from around the steering column, and looked ruefully at the car’s muddy bonnet.