Doctor Who_ Wetworld - Mark Michalowski [30]
‘Grab my jacket!’ he said as they ran along the slope, parallel to the river-the quickest way back to the settlement. Ahead of them, down along the edge of the water, Ty could see the remains of the old city, poking through like a misshapen skeleton. The level had dropped even further in the last hour and a half hour.
She grabbed the jacket from where it was hooked over the crook of his arm.
‘Inside pocket,’ he said. ‘Other one – that’s it. No, not that!’ Ty had pulled out the black wallet with his mysteriously versatile business card. ‘Not unless you think I can persuade them that I’m Doctor Dolittle.’
‘Dolittle?’ puffed Ty. ‘Is that your name?’
The Doctor ignored her question. ‘The other pocket, Ty!’ He glanced back at the swarm of otters, galloping after them. ‘The other one!’
With the jacket flailing around in her hands as she ran, she managed to reach in and pull out the first thing she found: the torch that he’d used on the creature in the otter nest.
‘This?’
‘At last.’ He stopped dead and held out the now-snoring otter to Orlo. ‘Take it and go, both of you. Get back to the settlement. Tell them what we’ve seen.’
Ty just stared at him, at the brown and silver tide flowing along the ground towards them, and then at Orlo.
‘ Go! ’ he shouted.
Ty squeezed his arm and, with a single, helpless look back, she grabbed Orlo and the two of them ran.
‘Now,’ muttered the Doctor to himself, whirling to face the oncom-ing storm. ‘Let’s just hope your hearing is as sensitive as I hope it is.’
He remembered how the otter in the cage had flinched – and that was when he’d just been using the sonic screwdriver as a torch.
He raised it and held it out in front of him. ‘Otherwise it’s going to get a whole lot hotter for me.’ He paused and raised his eyebrows appreciatively. ‘Hotter. Otter. Oooh, that’s quite good. I might use that one later.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘When I’ve got a more appreciative audience. Sorry little fellers – this is going to hurt you a whole lot more than it does me.’
And with that, he pressed the button.
For a moment, nothing happened. The living carpet of scampering otters continued to race towards him at terrifying speed, the sunlight glittering in their obsidian eyes, their teeth bared. Even the Doctor winced at the wave of ultrasound emanating from the screwdriver, and he stuck one finger in his ear, uselessly.
And then the otters began to react.
The ones at the leading edge of the attack skidded to a messy, tumbling halt, some of them falling bum-over-head in their haste. The ones right behind them couldn’t stop in time and went crashing into them. It was like they’d hit a glass wall. But still the ones behind came. More and more of them began to pile up, writhing around, squeaking at the tops of their voices.
‘Sorry,’ whispered the Doctor, but he continued to hold the button down, and watched as the otters piled up in a huge arc a couple of hundred feet away from him.
He gave it another five seconds – until the stragglers had reached the front, climbing up onto the rapidly growing mound of writhing brown bodies, where they too felt the screwdriver’s ultrasonic waves enough to start screeching. Still gripping it firmly, he turned his head to see where the two of them were. Ty and Col were just tiny figures in the distance, rounding the gentle swell of headland where the first settlement had been built. Even as he watched, they paused, looked back at him one last time, and then vanished.
‘That should just about do it,’ he said to himself, and lowered the screwdriver.
The otters continued to shriek and chatter and roll around, clambering over each other like a litter of newborn kittens.
Slipping the sonic screwdriver into his trouser pocket, he set off at a sprint after Ty and Orlo.
The ship smelled horribly of rust and mildew and old fish. In fact, as Candy hoisted herself into the airlock, she saw a dead, half-rotted one on the floor and kicked it out of the door. The gridded metal beneath her feet was slippery