Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [7]
Jessica smiled at Fee and leant back, listening to the most familiar sound in the world. So familiar that it had faded to silence in her mind years ago.
The faint background roar of the four giant engines that carried these hundreds of fragile lives and these tons of metal safely through the night sky. Carrying her back to London, Roy and love.
‘At last,’ she whispered.
That was when the plane hit the turbulence.
They knew right away it was a bad one. They started getting ready.
As the turbulence grew more severe Fee and Jessica left their cubicle, moving quickly but without betraying haste.
They had to appear calm themselves as they calmed the passengers down.
It worked. The people in first class seemed reassured by their efforts and as the turbulence gradually eased things returned to normal.
But then the second surge hit the plane, like a storm wave smashing into a small boat.
And then the engines stopped.
Chapter 3
Creed squinted out through his windscreen at the bright Saturday afternoon traffic. The residue of chlorine on his face made his skin feel tight.
‘Why do they put chlorine in swimming pools, daddy?’
said Eve from the back seat. Creed explained about disinfectant and public health as he navigated through the traffic. Since they’d left the sports centre it had steadily thickened and Creed found himself devoting more and more of his time to double checking the car’s computerized decisions about speed, position and distance from other vehicles. The truth was, he couldn’t get used to half this automatic crap. He liked a hands-on approach to machinery.
He even preferred a manual transmission.
Eve fell quiet in the back seat, sensing her father’s concentration and not wanting to disturb it.
As they neared the school traffic thinned out again and Creed tried to concentrate on his son Ricky and the problem that lay ahead. For the thousandth time he felt that peculiar parental exasperation. Why did his children have to complicate his life? Couldn’t they just live with him in simplicity and peace until they grew up and found highly paid jobs to support him in his dotage?
No chance. It seemed that every time one domestic problem was solved, two more sprang up. And this one with Ricky was intractable and tenacious and profoundly baffling.
Creed remembered one summer when he and Ricky had gone on vacation, just the two of them. Justine had been pregnant with Eve. The weather was hot and she was feeling heavy and sensitive and moody. She suggested that Creed take off with Ricky for a few weeks while she stayed at home with Cynthia. Creed took his son on a short plane ride north across the Canadian border. They landed in a small town called Kenora and rented a ramshackle cabin by a lake.
The plan was to do some fishing. Standard father-and-son bonding holiday. But after a few days of going out on the water, Creed had to admit that he had as little enthusiasm for the sport as his son. So they reeled in their lines and emptied the small jar of salted minnows over the side of the boat.
The rest of their holiday they spent lazing around. Ricky met some other kids his age and started hanging out in town with them. Creed went swimming in the milky green lake and came out with glistening black leeches on his skin. You couldn’t just pull the leeches off because their mouth-parts remained attached to you and would become infected. But when the burning end of a cigarette was held near the leech the small parasite curled up and rolled off.
One day when Creed was sitting on the wooden dock drinking beer, and considering whether he wanted to go swimming in Leech Lake, Ricky got into some kind of trouble in town. He and the other boys were brought back in a police car. They dropped Ricky at the cabin before carrying on to deliver the rest of the disgraced children to their respective parents. The cops had paused to talk politely with Creed before getting on. They had seemed more amused by the incident than anything else.
From what Creed