Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [78]
‘You again!’ he spat, snarling at Ace. ‘You should be dead!’
‘Sorry to disappoint, Ace riposted, running to support the man with the hat who was slumping against the door frame. She glared at Michael. ‘Help me, Michael!’ she hissed again.
Michael looked up to see the goblinesque man looking back along the corridor, clearly wondering whether to fetch help. With a shake of his head, Michael leaned over and heaved the man up, slinging his arm over his shoulder. Mum and Gran would just have to wait. He didn’t know who this little man was, but he had a horrible suspicion.
Lying on her belly, watching Megan prowl around in the shingle twenty feet below her, Ace wished she hadn’t left her rucksack on the boat: one can of nitro-9 and Megan would have been history. Instead, she spent a few happy minutes toying with her, chucking pebbles ever further along the beach. She made sure she picked tiny ones, hoping that, with her bad vision, Megan wouldn’t be able to tell that they were coming from overhead.
Ace threw one final pebble, well down the beach, and watched as Megan took another couple of steps. Sliding backwards, Ace shuffled away from the little cliff’s edge, sprang to her feet and scuttled away. This was beginning to remind her of Sooal’s efforts to hunt her down on board the ship. The only difference was that here she didn’t have the option of the airlock for a quick escape. Of course, she could always just tackle Megan direct, go hand to hand with her armed only with a big stick and properly working eyes - although Megan’s pistol meant that she’d either have to be very stupid, very desperate or very both to consider it seriously. And at the moment, Ace knew exactly which category she fell into.
The sky blazed orange and copper, shrouded by vast palls of black smoke that crawled across it like ink on blotting paper.
Silhouetted against it were the ripped and torn spires of the city, once proud, he imagined, but now pitiful - charred fingers raised up in supplication, begging for mercy. The battledisc on which he flew hummed beneath his feet as he skimmed the top of the forest, spraying death into the treetops below. He glanced back, watching the spreading wake of flaming destruction behind him.
Above the roar of that unholy, cleansing fire, he could hear the shrieks and cries of animals, and saw flocks of black birds rise from the pyre, wheeling around in the heat, confused and scared.
The city ahead - the last city on the planet - crawled over the horizon, bloody light glinting from its towers and roofs. He could see half a dozen airships rising from it, a last attempt to escape before the attack fleet levelled their home. Smiling grimly, he thumbed the controls on the rail in front of him, speeding up.
And then the world tore down the middle with a thunderous roar, white lightning cracking it into fragments which fell and fell and fell.
Eddie opened his eyes; thin, greenish light filtered through his fingers. Slowly he lowered them and struggled to focus on the trees that surrounded him. And then he remembered the dream and felt sick. Not a sickness of the body, but of the soul -
a deep, shamed sickness that made him wonder, not for the first time, what kind of person he must be to have such dreams. At least this one didn’t involve children, begging to be spared, as he mowed them down with weapons that spat white fire; this one didn’t involve men and woman, strapped into... things... which made them scream and scream and scream; this one didn’t feature a mirror, into which he looked, and out of which stared his own face, ugly, brutish and cruel. That was the worst.
They’d done it. They’d put this filth in his head. Even with the silver foil that he wrapped around his head at night, they still managed to do it. They were turning him into something obscene, something evil. He looked up at the