Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [90]
Eventually, Eva slipped off the bed and left the room. For several moments Turlough thought she had left him permanently, but eventually she returned with a key. Again she loomed over Turlough for an age, simply standing and staring the way a young boy would observe an insect trapped in a jam jar.
Turlough looked up at her, his eyes begging for release, however limited. ‘I really need to go,’ he said, pleadingly. ‘I’m desperate.’
Eva knelt beside him and unlocked the foot manacles. She moved to the handcuff and tugged Turlough’s arm out in front of him. Her nails sank deeply into his palm and he bit his lip until it bled. The key turned smoothly in the lock and he was free.
Turlough felt the blood rush back into his hand after hours of pins and needles. Eva stood, dragging him with her. His legs were like mounds of jelly as the circulation returned to them. The woman’s hand was on his neck, squeezing at his windpipe, threatening to cut off the air supply to his brain at the slightest wrong move.
‘You can use the bathroom,’ Eva said as the pressure was eased slightly. ‘But no tri–’
Turlough would never know quite where the strength came from for him to heave the chain up and wrap it around Eva’s neck. In life or death situations people can do strange and impossible things. His free hand groped around Eva’s back. He found the loose links of the chain and pulled as hard as he was able to, choking the woman.
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Her eyes bulged, huge like eggs, almost popping from their sockets. Her face turned red, then blue and her tongue snaked out of her mouth and hung limply to one side as unconsciousness loomed.
Eva’s eyes began to roll upwards, exposing white domes of vacant flesh.
And then one of them did burst from her face, crashed to the floor and rolled under the bed. Turlough found himself looking into a hollow, red, alien eve sunken beneath the ragged socket and the mask that was Eva’s face.
With whatever courage he had left, he screamed a last scream of defiance and hatred and head-butted the thing that had been Eva full on the bridge of the nose. Then he let the chain dangle and fall to the floor. The thing’s body followed, heavy and dead like a sack of potatoes. It lay still, a soft wheezing sound the only evidence that it was still alive.
Turlough picked up the chain and, without even thinking, brought it down with his full weight across the creature’s face. Then again. Within seconds there was blood everywhere: splattered over the walls, the bed, the radiator and his clothes and face.
A third hit. A fourth. A fifth.
Turlough’s teeth were fixed, as if glued together, in a snarl of rage. His heart pumped faster and faster. He screamed, wordlessly. A primal, bestial cry from the pit of his stomach.
Then he found the words.
‘Come on!’ he shouted. ‘What’s the matter. Get up and stick something in me, why don’t you?’
The chain came down again and again, shattering several bones in the alien’s face. After the next blow Turlough pulled up the chain to find that it had brought much of the facial mask of the creature that had once looked so human with it. He didn’t give the mask a second glance, but raised the chain again and smashed it down, churning the alien’s true face to a bloodied pulp.
‘What’s the matter?’ he screamed. ‘Nothing funny to say? Come on, say something funny now. Come on . . . ’
The attack continued until well after whatever life remained in the thing that had once been Eva’s body had evaporated. Turlough kicked at the prone figure when the chain grew too heavy for him to lift. His strength was beginning to ebb, the animal rush of adrenaline subsiding to be replaced by lethargy and shortness of breath. But still he had enough fight in him to collect a mouthful of saliva and spit at the dead creature.
‘Die, you bitch, die,’ he said, tears welling in his eyes.
And then, suddenly, it was over and Turlough stood dazed and horrified above the blood bath.
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For several moments he simply stared at the thing