Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [83]
‘I’ll be down in a moment,’ he said, a bad taste still in his mouth. ‘Let’s get the hell out of this city.’
The pain never came. Instead Tegan slowly opened her eyes to find Perico crumpled dead at her feet, on top of the body of his partner. Behind him stood Paynter, his gun still smoking, his leg still gushing blood. Neither said anything for what seemed like an eternity until Paynter dropped the gun, crouched and clamped both hands around his wound.
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ he said.
And he was.
Still Tegan said nothing. She was looking at her hands, bloodied and lac-erated from the force of the two blows she had brought crashing down on Perico’s big ugly head.
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‘I’ve hurt my hands,’ she said, feeling stupid and yet entirely vindicated by the sight of her own blood. ‘Look,’ she continued, holding out her hands for Paynter to inspect.
He raised his head, and wiped the sour spittle from his lips.
‘Tegan . . . ’ he began.
‘Look at my hands,’ wailed Tegan. ‘Look at them. They’re all cut and bruised . . . ’ Then she began to cry. Hysterically at first, until Paynter limped over to her and held her to his chest, then more quietly, sobs of shock and disgust.
‘Let it come,’ said Paynter, his own pain mostly forgotten. ‘It’s all over now.’
But it wasn’t. For Tegan Jovanka it would never be all over.
Control reached the car park without any of the incidents that he half-expected in the hotel elevator. He had imagined all manner of James-Bond-style means of dispatch including nerve gas coming through the vents and the bottom of the elevator simply disappearing from beneath his feet.
Neither happened.
Instead, he stepped out and found Greaves waiting for him with a bemused look on his face.
‘So what was all of that about?’ asked Greaves. ‘You look like hell.’
Control could barely speak as he sat in the car and shut his eyes against the harsh glare of the freeway while the car moved slowly out on to the 405.
‘That,’ he said evenly, ‘was a meeting with the aliens.’
‘Which ones?’ Greaves asked cautiously.
Control found himself unable to answer for a long time. Instead, he was rehearsing in his own mind a way of explaining the sheer bloodcurdling terror he had felt when he had seen Ryman and the Canavitchi for what they really were.
‘The most dangerous ones of all,’ he said at last.
Greaves digested this information. ‘So, what do we do now?’
‘We wait,’ replied Control. ‘Until UNIT work out all the plots and subplots and come looking for our help.’
‘And do we give it to them?’ Greaves asked.
For once, Control didn’t reply to one of Greaves’s more stupid questions with amusement. It was time to get serious.
‘Damn right we do,’ he said quickly. ‘We give them everything we’ve got.’
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Part three
O, King of Chaos!
‘ The London men numbering thirty shall secretly conspire against the King. They shall make their plots upon a bridge. Their satellites shall taste of death. ’
An extremely bad translation of ‘Century IV.89’ from The True Prophecies or Prognostications of Michael Nostradamus first translated by Theophilus de Garencieres (1672).
Chapter Seventeen
Submission
Turlough emerged from the long dark tunnel of sleep into the harsh and naked light of day and fell the final few feet to the bedroom floor with a muffled thud.
‘That was the worst day of my life,’ he muttered as his eyes flickered open and his senses were rudely assaulted.
The first thing his vision allowed him to focus upon was the carpet. Again.
Through a high window on the opposite wall, a disgruntled sun was giving off its light with all the enthusiasm of a turkey in the weeks leading tip to Christmas.
Turlough tried to move but something hard and strong was holding him in place. Turning his head, he found that his left hand and both of his feet were manacled to a short length of chain attached to a nearby radiator.
For a long time he simply lay where he was, waiting for something to happen. But nothing did, so he eventually pulled himself upright and sat, uncomfortably, with his back