Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [79]
Then he felt a weary shifting of muscles under his hand. The stewardess’s head moved slightly, as if she wanted to lift it but was too exhausted. He reached under the tangle of long dark hair, gleaming in the moonlight, and cleared it from her face.
Up close the bruises and cuts looked much worse. Her eyes were squeezed shut as much by the damage to her face as by exhaustion. Her mouth was cut, the lips swollen.
Creed lifted her shoulders off the ground, rolling her at the same time, so her face lifted from the concrete. Her muscle tone was so slack it was like shifting a sack of potatoes. But as he turned her over she moved a little, settling into his arms like a sleepy child.
Creed held her with one arm. With his free hand he ripped open the velcro flap of the first-aid kit and shook its contents out. Fat wads of dressings. Rattling plastic containers full of pills. Glistening hypodermic ampoules.
Creed fumbled with the ampoules, trying to read over the stewardess’s shoulder in the moonlight. He managed to select one containing morphine.
He wondered what other medication he should give her immediately and what could wait until they were safely inside the armoured car. Definitely give her the morphine now. And some benzedrene. He was unwrapping the sterile seals from the ampoules when the stewardess opened one dark swollen eyelid to reveal a gleaming crescent of eye.
She looked at him for a moment, then opened her mouth.
‘Roy?’ she said. Her voice was thick, clotted with pain and fatigue.
‘No, honey, it’s me,’ said Creed gently.
She didn’t seem to hear his words. Or perhaps her mind was in some place where she couldn’t understand them.
‘Roy,’ she said again. Her voice was clearing and you could detect the tone of it now, pick up the emotion behind it.
The stewardess sounded sad.
‘All the blue glass is broken,’ she said.
Creed later thought it was as if her voice was a signal, because no sooner had she spoken than all hell broke loose.
Creed wasn’t paying much attention to anything except the injured woman in his arms. He was listening but he wasn’t watching his surroundings. He knew the defence system on the armoured car would spot anything that looked like a dog and scythe it down with machine-gun fire. So he let himself get careless; allowed all his attention to focus on the woman in his arms.
As he injected her, first with the morphine then with an ampoule of benzedrene, Creed was staring down into her face. The stewardess’s skin was pale in the moonlight. The first warning he had of the thing’s arrival was an inky patch of shadow falling across that pale skin.
Creed looked up and saw something that had come wobbling out of a nightmare. In fact, it was so preposterous it looked almost comical.
The flood of terror that hit Creed had nothing to do with the thing itself. It was the implication of the thing.
Creed let the stewardess slump out of his grasp as the thing reared towards him. The implication was intelligence, he thought. The stewardess’s head slumped against his knee as he rose to his feet. Intelligence on the part of the enemy.
Creed stood up slowly so the stewardess would hit the ground gently. The empty ampoules crunched under foot as he stood up to confront the approach of the enemy.
An enemy intelligent enough to know the armoured car would fire automatically on anything that looked like a dog.
Creed raised his gun. The thing was almost on top of him now. It certainly didn’t look like a dog. It looked like a Heironymous Bosch creation, an obscene insult to nature.
It moved shakily because it wasn’t one dog. It was two.
The bottom of the thing was a Great Dane, a specimen so large it was probably at the limit of the armoured car’s ability to recognize a dog. It moved slowly and painfully, blood flowing down its lean shoulders and flanks towards its paws.
A trail of blood followed it as it closed in on Creed, staggering silently towards him, shaking. It was shaking with effort, because of the load it carried on its