Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [42]
He turned to Ryman. The bigger man had an amused look on his face.
‘What’s so funny?’ asked Sanger.
‘They’ve really got it in for us,’ replied Ryman.
‘Whom?’
80
‘The Sons of Nostradamus. You’ve got to admire their chicanery!’
Sanger didn’t say anything. At that moment, Chebb’s voice crackled through the headset on the desk.
Ryman quickly picked it up. ‘What can you see?’
‘Carnage.’
Newton was the first to pick himself up in the car park. Even at this distance, debris from the blast surrounded him and his companions. His blue velvet jacket was covered in specks of dust and charred fragments of concrete. He brushed himself down and then turned towards InterCom.
What he saw made him gasp.
There was a mushroom cloud, a plume of black dust, where the logo centrepiece had once stood. Around it was a plethora of tiny fires. There were bodies burning everywhere. The air stank of barbecued flesh. Newton put his hand on his knees, doubled up and vomited all over his suede shoes.
He felt a hand on his back. It was Nigel.
‘We done it man,’ said Nigel, his face black with soot. ‘We’ve only been and gone and done it!’
Hayley was in the car, revving the engine. She stuck her head out of the window and bellowed at the pair.
Newton staggered towards the car, laughing maniacally. ‘“The kingdom shall fall, with great sorrow!”’ he shouted. ‘It is written! ‘
‘Get in. We have to be somewhere else,’ cried Hayley.
‘It is written,’ repeated Newton as he stumbled into the passenger seat and the car sped off. ‘“Blood, fire, flood. A surprise to the Great One. Evil shall befall him, and he shall prove unworthy!”’
‘You all right?’ asked Barrington, standing over Paynter’s prone body.
‘Buggered if I know,’ replied Paynter, spitting out whatever foreign body it was that had managed to find its way into his mouth. ‘Gimme half an hour and my ears might have stopped ringing by then.’
‘We have to go,’ said Barrington.
Around him dazed, bewildered and
shocked people were beginning to rise from the ground.
Many though,
weren’t rising.
‘Innit marvellous?’ asked Paynter spinning on to his back and sitting up.
‘Bleeding outrageous, so it is. You come out for a nice quiet day sightseeing . . . ’
‘Come on Geoff,’ said Barrington, ignoring the pain in his shoulder and helping his captain to stand up.
Paynter glanced towards the place where the InterCom logo had once stood.
Now there was only an obscene parody of the original structure.
81
‘Well,’ he noted, ‘at least if one thing’s come out of this, it’s that they got rid of that bloody sculpture. I’ll bet it was art lovers!’
Turlough had lost all sense of time. In his white room it was never day or night.
It was simply white.
Occasionally, he would fall asleep and then find himself wakening, disorientated and confused. For a few seconds he would be completely at a loss as to where he was. He could be in the dormitory at Brendon, in his room in the TARDIS, even back on Trion. And then reality would kick in and he would let out a wail of despair.
Sometimes they did things to him. Probed him, or extracted fluids from his body. Or stabbed him, like a pig on a stick. Sometimes he could feel the cold metal of a table beneath him and the tight constriction of metal straps on his arms and thighs and around his neck.
He could feel the table now. His naked skin was glued to the clammy, slick surface. His flesh reacted and he shivered. He felt ashamed. Of his cowardice in standing up to this torture. Of his body and how small and insignificant he was. Most of all, he was ashamed of letting himself get into this situation in the first place.
His vision had become impaired. Some time previously a mechanical arm had been lowered above his head and some kind of liquid had been dripped into his eyes which were clamped open by metal devices. The liquid had stung badly and Turlough had felt a burning