Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [91]
At Cirbury the gaily coloured mummer smiled a shark smile as a new wave of energy coruscated through him. He waved his hands to capture the attention of the surging crowd of villagers and travellers as the band threw themselves around in a whipped-up frenzy, the music a white noise of hatred and spite. The crowd parted before his gestures, leaving a clear passage leading to the edge of the field where the handful of local bobbies waited for precise instructions from their absent superiors... and waited in vain.
The mummer didn’t need to say anything. Travellers and villagers alike turned together and began running silently towards the edge of the field, their faces contorted with bloodlust, maniacal, horrible. The police realised belatedly what was going to happen and made a pathetic break for it, pelting towards the stile leading to the village.
Of course they never made it.
As the guitarist pumped high-voltage sonic fury into the night air, as the singer roared like a gutted grizzly and the rhythm section anchored the sound into a pummelling vibe, the mob caught up with the five policemen.
The mob didn’t need weapons. For the most part they used 217
their hands quite effectively. They used their teeth too. They used everything. The head of a pudgy sergeant was pounded repeatedly against a standing stone until the back of his skull was smattered all over the rock like pieces of bloody eggshell. The eyes of a screeching constable were gouged out by the Cirbury milkman, and his ribs were then kicked into his lungs by an enraged punk with UK SUBs emblazoned on his leather jacket. Brand New Age was painted in a wild scrawl beneath the group’s name. Another constable pulled his truncheon and actually tried to make a fight of it. His head was taken messily away from his shoulders and slung into the thick of the mob for his efforts. His torso was dragged through the grass by two screaming heavy-metal warriors, blood leaving a snail trail amongst the buttercups and daisies. Another bobby was down on his knees begging for mercy.
His helmet was almost reverently taken from his head, positioned under his chin, and filled with the blood from his own slashed throat by a hippie with a Charles Manson T-shirt and a rusty machete. The last survivor actually had his right leg on the stile and was just about to catapult himself over on to the path that led alongside the school when he was seized and dismembered like a human-sized fly, his legs and arms popped from their sockets and sent twirling away into the depths of the maddened crowd. Schoolchildren herded around the corpse, supervising the limb-pulling with relish as their deepest body-inpieces fantasies were enacted by the enraged crowd.
Green grass was saturated with red, and still the band wasn’t satisfied.
This was the sight that greeted Captain Yates’s eyes as the Land Rover roared into Cirbury’s car park. ‘My God!’ he croaked. The UNIT driver next to him gaped as he saw the torso of a policeman being held aloft by the insane crowd like a particularly gory Guy Fawkes dummy. After seeing that spectacle, there was no way he was going to be able to bring the speeding vehicle to a sedate halt.
Instead, the Landrover barrelled into a double-decker bus 218
with skulls and the names of punk bands painted all over it.
Yates was thrown forward by the collision, his outflung arms protecting him from the shattering windscreen glass. The driver was not so fortunate. The steering wheel was severed from its shaft on impact and the column driven deep into the gurgling trooper’s chest.
Yates fell back in his seat, cuts crisscrossing his face. The bonnet of the Land Rover was steaming.
‘Get out!’ he roared to the soldiers in the back of the vehicle as he yanked at the passenger door. He made five yards before the explosion, swatted him on to his face, skidding