Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [23]
Rain lay black and slick on the airport tarmac and flowed in clouds past the windscreen, as the big wheels of the vehicles mashed it into spray. Roz pushed a button and somewhere on the hull a jet of air from a concealed hose cleared the camera lens.
‘Being drafted is just as bad, if you’re being drafted to fight in a war you don’t believe in.’
‘Oh, you’ll believe in this war all right,’ said Redmond.
‘Turn left here.’
‘What if I don’t agree about the enemy? One man’s enemy is another man’s friend.’ Roz cleared her throat and assumed her most annoying nagging tone of voice. ‘And incidentally you still haven’t told me the identity of our enemy.’
‘Don’t worry, love,’ said Redmond grimly. ‘We won’t have any problem agreeing on who the enemy is. Sharp right here.’
Roz was happily steering the big vehicle at dangerously high speed through the curving maze of exit-roads which encircled the airport. Road signs popped out of nowhere, suddenly shining in the headlights of the big vehicle. There was almost no traffic, and no sign of other human life.
So, it was something of a shock for Roz when she saw the stewardess. She brought the big vehicle thundering down an incline and swept into the shadow under a bridge and there it was, a face looming out of the darkness. A woman’s face.
She was hitch-hiking. Standing under the bridge at the perimeter of the exit-road, sheltering from the rain. She had one small suitcase beside her. It was the stewardess from Roz’s flight all right. What the hell was she doing out here?
‘Sorry we can’t give you a lift, love,’ said Redmond, craning his head to catch a final glimpse of her in the rear screen. She had nice legs. ‘But we’ve got business.’
The stewardess disappeared on the rear cameras in a flash of rain-spray.
Lesbians, thought Jessica Morrell. Lesbians are on the airwaves tonight for some reason.
She had been getting thoroughly depressed with hitching. She’d been standing under that bridge for half an hour and it was so miserable that the great waves of emotion slopping around inside her began to settle down a little.
So what if she had got engaged and then jilted in less than 24 hours? If there’s one thing that’s worse than that, it’s standing on a grim motorway exit-road outside Heathrow Airport with water in your shoes, waiting for a lift.
Jessica began to feel silly. She’d only decided to hitch out of some bizarre sulky sense of rage. But who was she punishing? They were her feet standing in a growing puddle of oily water. Her toes that were cold and wet, not Roy’s.
The bastard. How could he do it? She felt a pain in her stomach when she thought of Roy. Had he been lying? Had he been planning this? To build her up by proposing and then to smash her down by abandoning her? No, that wasn’t like Roy.
He must have meant it. Meant it when he proposed and then changed his mind. She remembered the bouquet of roses he’d brought all the way out to the airport and presented to her on his knees. The same roses she’d jammed head-first into a waste receptacle when she finally realized that he’d stood her up.
My God, they talked about women changing their minds, being unstable, blown around helplessly by their emotions.
Look at Roy.
Jessica was growing increasingly miserable under the motorway bridge. Above her passenger jets rose into the sky, jewelled with red and green lights. Big, warm planes where friends and coworkers were pushing trolleys up and down nice dry aisles, with soft warm carpets under their feet.
Jessica sighed out loud but the sound was lost in the grumble of the ascending jet.
Then a big military vehicle came roaring down the exit-road behind her. The bridge echoed with the engine of the armoured car, and Jessica instinctively stood further back from the side of the road to let the big vehicle pass. But she didn’t move far enough because the vehicle slashed through a deep puddle and sprayed rain water all over her.
That would have been the last straw. Jessica was ready to break into tears. But it was just a minute