Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [81]
‘Come on,’ she said with sudden determination. ‘This way!’
‘Where are we –’
‘That hut. Come on.’
Michael gave a disgruntled noise, but Ace didn’t care: whoever was following them was catching up, and at the rate that she and Michael were tiring, they could only get closer.
Short of leaving the Doctor out in the open, the plan that had just come to her was their only option.
Eddie hugged the trunk of the tree and slowed his breathing: he was fitter than he would have expected, scarcely out of breath.
There were two hunters – he couldn’t see their faces, couldn’t quite remember their names. But he knew they were from Graystairs. Maybe these were people who’d been taken over by stuff that had been put into their heads. A man and a woman.
He watched them pause, confer, and set off again. As quietly as he could, he circled round, trying to get a look at who they were hunting – and was surprised to see an ungainly clot of arms and legs and bodies, making good speed away from the two residents. Catching only glimpses of them through the trees it was hard to be sure, but it looked like a girl and a young man dragging the body of another man between them. There was something familiar about the middle figure – brown jacket, cream hat. Eddie screwed up his eyes, trying to remember where he’d seen him before – if he wasn’t just a fiction from the stuff they’d put in his head.
They were in a huddle, talking, although the brown jacket man’s head flopped onto his chest, and he didn’t seem to be taking part in the conversation. Eddie watched the girl look up and cast a long, slow look around the wood. He ducked back behind the tree and waited. A few moments later he peered out to see that the three of them had set off on a new course.
Keeping low, he scuttled through the undergrowth. He knew where – they were going – the hut he’d spent last night in. He shook his head: if they thought they’d be safe there, they were very much mistaken. In a few minutes, their pursuers would see it. It would be an obvious – if stupid – place to hide. What were they up to?
They stumbled into the clearing, the Doctor still mumbling. The hut resembled little more than an ancient, battered outdoor loo, the kind that Ace remembered Nan Dudman having at the bottom of her garden. Considering she was planning to dump the Doctor here for a while, she hoped that this wasn’t one –
although at least it would give him somewhere to sit.
‘We can’t hide in there,’ Michael said impatiently.
‘We’re not going to,’ she snapped back. ‘We’re going to leave the Doctor here and then draw them away.Without him, we can move as fast as them – but not too fast – and hopefully they’ll follow us. We’ll lose them, and then we can double back for the Doctor.’
Michael made a cautious noise, although Ace wasn’t sure whether it was approval or suspicion. Considering that he was the big military hero, he seemed a bit short on cunning-plans-for-dealing-with-the-enemy-out in-he-countryside.
As they approached the hut, Ace’s heart sank: it really did look like an outside toilet – although she couldn’t imagine why anyone would build one out here in the middle of nowhere.
Some of the slats were missing from the side, and the door hung at a drunken angle. As she pulled at the rusted handle, she half expected the whole thing to collapse. Inside were a few damp, yellowed newspapers, a small wooden crate and various lengths of twine and wire hung from nails hammered into the wall. They looked a bit like snares, and Ace wondered if it was a gamekeeper’s hut. They settled the Doctor down onto the crate and he looked up at her with pitiful eyes: she wondered whether he actually knew who she was. For one horrible moment, it suddenly occurred to her that maybe Graystairs and the people wired up in the spaceship were all part of some sickening plot to actually give people Alzheimer’s, rather than cure them. Could this be what had happened to the Doctor? Ace realised that her throat had gone tight and dry at the thought, and she swallowed painfully.