Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [100]
Because this storm had the shape and flavour and colour of his own rage. It was part of him, howling out of the blackest reaches of his mind. Blowing from the fetid choked swamps. He was letting it all out. All that poisoned stagnant air suddenly came alive, stirred into a tornado. It felt so good. Even as it tore him to pieces it felt great.
Raymond wanted to shout, ‘Who’s passive‐aggressive now, you bitch?’
But he was much too far gone to master the power of speech. His mind had collapsed like a star, falling into itself so that all that remained was a single thought, a final mental symbol which signified rage. And the power of this symbol was such that it burned the brain which held it, hot as a lethal fever, poaching the complex grey proteins like an egg.
Then the heat increased, pushing way beyond fever levels, smoking his brain into a cinder and spreading down his spinal column, across his skeleton, and fanned out along his ribcage like heat following the curved metal fins of a radiator. His heart sizzled and his lungs billowed flame as the rich pockets of oxygen in the alveoli fuelled the blaze.
The process was almost instantaneous, spreading and igniting, consuming his body in flame. Raymond’s mass was transforming into pure energy at a speed that shouldn’t have been possible. What had been a human being a second ago was now a ball of flame.
Raymond was dead but he’d got his rage out at last.
Christine was the second to die. She’d already begun to scream. She’d seen the fireball consume her husband and rise up off the cobbled street like a huge blazing balloon, floating away from the young man lying there in handcuffs. Perhaps Chrissie knew what was going to happen next. Perhaps she sensed it. Because she stopped screaming and made no move to flee as the fireball swept towards her, roasting pigeons as they tried to flap clear of its path, leaving a festive smell of roast fowl and a bitter tang of scorched feathers as it bounced off the cobblestones and swallowed her up in a ball of white flame hotter than any furnace.
The fireball grew as it consumed Chrissie’s body. It bounced across the small plaza, passing so near to a group of French tourists that it melted their brightly coloured synthetic clothes. They screamed as the molten fabrics seared their bodies and the fireball rolled on. The camera crews panned desperately to follow its path but the glare of the ball was so intense that it blew the camera chips and they recorded nothing but digitized smears of coloured distortion. One intrepid newsman wrapped a silk scarf around his lens to try and bring the glare down to a manageable level. It worked. The sensory hardware in the camera functioned perfectly. Instead of quitting on him, the device recorded every movement of the extraordinary fireball as it ran up the cathedral wall, spilled back onto the cobbled street and then tumbled right onto the newsman, scorching him out of existence like a moth in a match flame. His camera exploded as he flared, charred and crumbled into ash.
While the tourist crowds screamed and fled, the three surviving IDEA men were rushing towards the bench where the fireball had been born. Vincent was still lying on the ground, unconscious and unharmed, although the handcuffs on his wrists were uncomfortably hot to the touch.
Justine was kneeling over him, trying to unlock them. Artie pulled her off while Creed and Webster picked up the man and carried him away towards their van.
The fireball was spinning overhead now. It seemed almost playful, like a child’s balloon on a summer’s day, pushed here and there by random gusts of wind. Then suddenly it sagged and sank lower, descending back almost to pavement level. It headed purposefully up a side‐street, flowing and rolling like ball lightning. It bounced abruptly back into the small plaza, scattering the pigeons and tourists again, then veered sharply off along a different route.
Creed was halfway along Orange Street when he looked back