Doctor Who_ Wetworld - Mark Michalowski [6]
She checked her watch and the bloated orb of the sun as it sank towards the tops of the trees. The thickening clouds were painted orange and purple. Sunday’s sunsets were beautiful, but short-lived.
Dusk came quickly, and the settlement was a good half-hour away.
Candy didn’t mind being out after dark: there were few dangerous predators on this part of the planet. Out of the water, at least. Deep in the swamps were a host of unpleasant aquatic beasties, ranging from tiny worms that would bury themselves into your skin, right through to some nasty little fish that had the habit of sinking their razor-sharp teeth into you and refusing to let go, even if you chopped their heads off. And then there were the ’gators – five-metre-long things that were a cross between an alligator and turtle. You really didn’t want to be on the wrong end of one of those!
But she hadn’t seen many of them since the flood. Fish had been in short supply too, which was worrying some of the Sundayans. Anyway, she knew that if she kept away from the water, she’d be fairly safe. The only sizeable animals that travelled through the forest were the otters, and even they didn’t tend to move far from water and their nests. And according to Professor Benson they were veggies anyway.
Suddenly, she stopped. Ahead of her, somewhere away over to the right, she heard a noise: it sounded like branches snapping.
Curious – but with the blonde hairs on her arms pricking up into goose bumps – Candy crouched lower behind a fallen tree. Reaching into her backpack, she pulled out her monocular and raised it to her eye, thumbing the switch on the barrel that would bring up the light enhancement. The blood-lit gloom sprang alive in shades of yellow and ochre. She caught a glimmer of movement, a flexing lemon cres-cent that rose from the forest floor and swooped up into the canopy.
A water pigeon, perhaps. Maybe a curver – or a sea-wader. Candy let out the breath that she didn’t know she’d been holding in and stood up. Maybe it was Orlo, blundering around in the forest like he did.
A year or so younger than her, Orlo was a big, clumsy lad – quite the opposite of Candy. He was cheerful and good-natured and sometimes went out with her on night-time rambles. But, like Candy, he also enjoyed his own company, and many a time they’d come across each other in the dark, scaring each other in the process. Candy fished in her backpack and pulled out her torch. Aiming it towards the source of the noises, she flashed out a quick ‘Hi!’ in Morse code. If it was Orlo, he’d signal back: the two of them had learned Morse code together from an old manual in the One Small Step’s shipbrain on the trip to Sunday, just for fun.
Candy peered into the dark, waiting for the reply.
‘Hi,’ it came back a few seconds later, although the light was colder and more bluish than she remembered Orlo’s torch being.
‘What’s up?’ she sent back.
Orlo must have been practising. The reply came back quickly: ‘I’m lost.’
Lost? How could he be lost? He knew this bit of the forest as well as she did. Was he winding her up?
‘Yeah,’ she flashed back. ‘You’ll be out here all nite then.’
Quick as anything, Orlo sent back: ‘That’s not how you spell night.’
What was he on about?
‘What?’ she started to send back – but before she could finish the
‘t’, a pale, thin face leaped up out of the bushes just a few yards away, right in the beam of her torch.
‘Excuse me,’ said the man, his eyebrows raised, ‘I think you’ll find that correct spelling is the mark of an educated mind.’
Candy stumbled backwards and tripped, smashing her backpack against the trunk of the tree behind her. With a wet crunch, the eggs inside it shattered. She looked up frantically, waving her torch around until it connected with the man’s face.
‘Or is it the mark of someone with nothing better to do. . . ?’ He frowned, shrugged, and stepped out of the bushes into the full glare of her torch. He wore a strange two-piece brown suit, half fastened up the front. His hair was matted