Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [76]
Anyone who survived tended to be uninjured. Hospitals were inundated with people looking for relatives, and many people needed treatment for shock.
Anyone who didn’t escape died.
In various bunkers, urgent messages determined a name for the monsters: the Vore. No one was quite sure who coined it first, but it quickly caught on.
Military planners started wondering whether anyone would be left alive by nightfall. It would be an hour before the question was asked out loud. By then, it was obvious: praying for a miracle wasn’t working.
The Vore swarm made another pass, rasping white gas over troops taking cover behind a wall and a dozen or so civvies who’d made a run for it, despite being told to stay down. Sergeant Cartwright, huddled close by in another position, behind a van in front of HMV, saw them die. Civilians – presumably –
were screaming all around him. He crouched down, out of sight, a small part of his brain hoping that if he couldn’t see the monsters they didn’t really exist.
He could hear shots – even after four years in the army he wasn’t used to how much louder real ones were than gunfire on TV – and glass smashing. Over every other sound was the buzzing of insect wings.
Modern military doctrine was to aim for ten-to-one superiority; that was the way the Americans wanted it. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of Vore for each soldier. British army training didn’t cover their tactics, and hadn’t since the First World War. Rows of enemies hurling themselves at armed positions. Conventional wisdom had it that you couldn’t win a battle if the enemy had control of the skies. There were so many Vore up there Cartwright couldn’t even see the sky any more.
The sergeant’s five minutes of fighting the Vore had proved that shooting brought them down in great numbers. Anything more substantial, like a tossed grenade or mortar, just arced up and fell back to earth again before exploding. At first, Cartwright thought it was like firing into a flock of birds.
He almost felt sorry for the insects as they rained down. Was there some in-sane leader, safe in the monster equivalent of a chateau fifty miles from the 158
front line, ordering them out regardless of the cost in lives?
Then the truth dawned: the swarm wasn’t getting any smaller. Now, shooting into it felt more like shooting at a hurricane or an avalanche. The insects kept coming, kept spraying the lethal white gas that affected everyone wearing a gas mask, let alone civilians whose idea of protective clothing was a raincoat. The air was black with them, like a storm cloud.
‘Covering fire!’ someone shouted.
A small group of soldiers obliged, and were targeted with the gas for their trouble.
Cartwright’s radio crackled. ‘Change of plan: covering fire, escort civilians to safety, then fall back.’
Where, exactly, was ‘safety’? He had a quick look round for it. The Vore were rampaging down the high street, tearing the roofs off cars, and flying into shop windows and smashing them (it wasn’t clear whether this was planned or whether they just didn’t see the glass).
Twenty feet behind him two Vore were emerging from HMV dragging a couple of screaming teenage girls out by their hair. They leant in, ready to gas them.
Cartwright stood up and fired three rounds. The first and third shots hit the Vore square in their mid sections – the ‘thorax’ if he remembered the quick briefing he’d been given. The second grazed the forehead of one of the girls, who swayed and dropped to the pavement alongside the insects.
He swore and ran over to the girls.
The one he’d shot was on the ground, blood pouring from her head. She was groaning – long, low moans that were trying to be words.
‘You shot her, you –’ the other girl started, the rest of her words melting into a mass of obscenities. She’d be a good-looker normally, he thought. Probably a bit older than she’d seemed at first too.
He did his best to ignore what she was saying. ‘Keep still,’ he told the wounded girl, whose eyes were rolling. There was no sign of a response.
‘Medic!’ he shouted.
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