Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [85]
‘They’d sooner be destroyed than live in bondage to you or anyone else.’
‘If given such a choice,’ Eva said as she left the room, adding, ‘which they won’t be.’
The Doctor had come, unsurprisingly, to the same conclusion. ‘The Jex seem to have hit upon a novel solution to their need for higher resistance to heat,’
he told the Brigadier as they sped in a UNIT car through rush-hour traffic towards headquarters.
‘Outrageous,’ blustered Lethbridge-Stewart. ‘Alien Johnnies messing about with humanity’s genetic make-up? It’s unheard of.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ the Doctor said mirthlessly. ‘Spreading alien DNA such as Turlough’s via something like a gene-bomb would cause a genetic mutation in humans and give them a tolerance to higher temperatures. Not to mention other, rather nasty side effects such as birth defects in any offspring.’
Lethbridge-Stewart was appalled. ‘This is outrageous,’ he said, angrily. ‘We simply cannot let this happen.’
‘No Brigadier,’ agreed the Doctor. ‘We can’t.’
They say bad news travels fast and that was certainly true for the Sons of Nostradamus. Within twenty minutes of the bomb explosion a shocked Bill Quay and Sam Danvers were sitting in a virtually empty Denny’s Restaurant in North Hollywood being told the dreadful details by Nigel.
‘It was awful,’ said the young Englishman, numbed by the early stages of shock. ‘I wanted to go in there and see for myself, but I couldn’t, the place was overrun with cops. Some bastard ratted us out.’
Bill and Sam sat trying to digest this for an agonisingly long time.
Their leader was gone.
‘And you reckon Jon set off the bomb himself?’ asked Sam.
Nigel started to say something. Stopped. Looked at his coffee for a few seconds whilst his stomach performed extravagant gymnastic feats. Then he stood up and straighted his T-shirt. ‘Excuse me.’ he said as he turned and ran towards the bathroom, both hands clutched to his mouth.
Again, neither Sam nor Bill found themselves able to say anything until Nigel returned several moments later, dabbing the corner of his mouth with a wet paper towel. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said rather pathetically. ‘It’s just the thought of what it would have been like, you know to . . . ’ He stopped, and for the second time seemed ready to turn and run and vomit.
163
‘Try not to think about it,’ said Bill, though in reality he himself could think of little else, and was feeling more than a little sick. He had never previously thought for an instant about the consequences of their actions; of the victims of the bombs they planted being anything other than meat on a butcher’s slab.
They were the enemy and the enemy’s job was to die in bomb blasts. But now the bodies were known to him. And the taste in his mouth was different.
It was the taste of fear.
‘What are we going to do?’ he asked no one in particular.
‘I’m getting out of this city,’ said Nigel, standing up. ‘Prophecies or no prophecies, hanging around here has suddenly got much less attractive.’
‘But we have to work out what to do next,’ Sam said.
‘Next?’ Nigel asked incredulously. ‘Listen, man, Jon’s dead. Hayley’s dead.
The shit’s about to hit the fan, big-style. Every cop and soldier in southern California’s going to have us at the top of The List. You lot can go back to playing the Black Anoraks game if you want. I’m going. Bye.’
After he had gone Bill and Sam continued to stare into their coffee. Finally Sam looked up at his tired friend. ‘We’d better get the coven together,’ he said.
‘Hard times are coming. We should be ready for them.’
Alone in the penthouse suite of the Holiday Inn, Shaun Ryman moved to the mirror that dominated one wall and pulled at the skin beneath one of his eyes with two fingers. With the surface taut and stretched, he moved in with a pair of tweezers and removed the hard plastic of the lens that covered the eye.
With a hole established, the thing that had been Ryman carefully removed its human face and laid it on the table.
Beneath the latex was another mask, this time a Jex one. But it was impossible for Ryman