Doctor Who_ The Taint - Michael Collier [96]
'It'll take me ages to get back from Bethnal Green!' moaned Fitz.
The Doctor ignored him. I'll work over there, check Maria's all right and keep an eye on things.'
Fitz thought. 'What if Taylor touches someone, spreads this bug to them?'
'Stun them. Try to isolate them.'
'Oh, no problem.'
'Stop talking and catch him, and he won't be able to touch anyone,' said the Doctor, carrying Sam through the police box's doors and slamming them shut behind him.
***
Maria backed away on all fours as Lucy held the syringe like a dart and aimed it at her.
Maria shut her eyes as the witch threw it.
No... Lucy was giggling. She'd only pretended to throw it. Now, as Maria watched, she took the syringe and made a great show of squirting the clear liquid into her mouth, swilling it around and then gulping it down with a triumphant laugh.
Maria stumbled away desperately, Lucy's laughter filling her ears, running, falling, scrambling back up again, painfully aware she had nowhere to go.
***
Fitz jogged along the tunnels, as softly as he could - he didn't want Taylor to hear him coming, and was straining to hear whether the man was up ahead. The stakes were high, the gun was warm in his hand. He if was James Bond.
Except he was Fitz Kreiner, and he was scared stupid.
The tunnel ended in a ladder. Fitz thought he could hear movement, and wondered what the range on his gun was.
***
The Doctor stood in the TARDIS, his face lined with worry. Understanding what the leech did was one thing; actually taking steps to reverse the process was quite another. And for any cure to stand a chance of working...
He thought about the last remedy he'd concocted for the improbable - the stuff he'd given Sam and Lunder back on Menda to cure their radiation sickness had taken weeks to perfect, while the TARDIS was parked nicely out of the way in a temporal orbit.
He'd known he was cheating. Twice now he'd pulled that trick - the last resort, the dismissal of destiny. But time could not be cheated too often, and he knew it. Why only now, in this lifetime, was it that things got so out of hand that he had to hide away in his ship to try to put them right? Had that transition from master planner to born-again novice of the universe so stripped him of his guile that he was left impotent to save those nearest to him?
He bunched up his fists. This wasn't helping Sam. Azoth had all the answers. If he connected Azoth to the TARDIS data banks, downloaded his memory wafers...
The TARDIS flung itself energetically round the vortex on its way back to Roley's as the Doctor busied himself getting his hands dirty.
***
None of the doors and windows in the house would budge. Maria paced around the east wing, fiddling with the ends of her cardigan. She was trapped, with no way out. She needed to hide, she needed some sort of weapon. If Lucy was awake, the others wouldn't be far behind her. They'd kill her when they found her, she didn't doubt it. She'd find a place to hide and pray for God to deliver her from evil and to look after Charles.
She wondered whether Charles would've woken up by now. How he would feel when he woke up on his own. Whether he could feel anything at all, any more. Then she thought about how the day had gone, and wondered if she seriously expected God to be listening to her in the first place.
She found herself by Charles's room, and pushed open the door.
Everything was as he'd left it that morning, quite neat, quite tidy. The room had been his father's. He hadn't changed it much since Roley Snr had died, hadn't imbued the place with his own personality at all. She smiled. He'd said he was going to pose for the dust-jacket photograph in here. Dreams.
She'd shared them. Stupid, childish dreams, and at her age, too.
She looked around for a weapon, then something caught her eye. She looked at it more closely, considered it, and found herself suppressing a nervous laugh.
'Oh Lord, you do move in mysterious ways, don't you?'
On the bedside table was