Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [96]
She pushed past two troopers and let off a burst of staccato fire before bothering to pass on the command. Two punks who were lobbing rocks in their direction went down like mown wheat.
Sheer joy flashed across her face. ‘Fire at will!’ she bawled into the momentary silence that greeted the shooting. ‘Kill the bastards. Kill all the stinking, idle bastards!’ She was loosing off another round before she finished shouting. A tight knot of hippies and heavy-metal warriors danced a macabre jig of death as the FN round cut through them. Robinson let out a long tribal war scream as she kept the trigger depressed, hosing the scum with bullets:
‘DIMMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMIIMMIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!
The travellers surged forward, into the swathe of gunfire, not caring, tyre irons, knives, rocks all held aloft and ready to use.
The
227
distance between the two forces closed. The UNIT soldiers who were still forming a cordon on the other side of the monument advanced between the trilithons, forming a pincer movement with the travellers in the middle, firing as they came, blasting the hippies and punks from behind.
The travellers tore into the soldiers ahead of them and the mummer’s wishes reached fruition. Army and hippies, the law and the lawless, locked in combat: the ultimate clash.
Microcosm of a sliding society with the mummer as its gleeful patriarch.
Through a gap in the surging crowd Sin could see Nick, still sitting against a stone not far from the band. She laughed wildly.
Got what you deserved, you bastard! That’ll teach you to lose your heart to the heartless. Gonna wind up dead, son, that’s what your mother should have told you when you started seeing me.
Dead as coffin nails.
Don’t look so bloody disapproving now, do you? She laughed again, and her heart was black.
The band played a thousand-mile-an-hour hate ballad just for her, and she was sure the singer had announced it as ‘The Song of Sin and Her Fool’, before the guitarist fired his manic riffs into the audience and the drummer released his own special kind of thunder.
Yates and his three surviving troopers backed away from the advancing highwaymen. The captain was almost out of ammo, and his men were on the point of breaking. He could see it in Private Councell’s face. The soldier was shaking and not aiming his FN properly - and even when he did, the bullets had no effect on the ghosts from another age. The shots tore away patches of rotting cloth and sent chips of bone into the air but certainly didn’t deter the corpses in their implacable march.
‘Make for the trees!’ Yates barked, firing his last round into the nearest cadaver. The bullets slapped away the tricorn hat leaving 228
a grinning skull wrapped with white strands of hair bare to the elements, but did little else. The ghoul lurched closer and Yates could see a knot of worms twisting in one eye socket. The ancient flintlock lifted to point at him and he dodged wildly aside, pulling at Private Councell to follow him.
He was too late: the highwayman pulled the rotting noose from around its own neck and flipped it over Councell’s. It pulled tight and the private collapsed to his knees choking, his FN dropping into the buttercups.
Yates paused, then dived for the weapon, rolling and coming up firing, all in one agile, practised movement. The round tore through the bony face, unfastening the robber’s leather mask and drilling away its grinning teeth. The monster carried on choking Councell, ignoring the bullets even when the ferocity of the live round dug through its spine and lifted its head away entirely, blasting it into a thistle patch. The headless gallows thing simply tugged harder.
Yates’ gritted his teeth and continued firing. Councell’s face was purple, his hands digging at the rope biting into his neck. His tongue was flopping grotesquely. From the corner of one eye Yates saw Private Whitcombe go down, a hole in his chest smoking from a flintlock shot. When he saw