Doctor Who_ Winner Takes All - Jacqueline Rayner [50]
She tried to say something, to protest, let him know somehow that she was going to be torn apart, but nothing came out.
And then it stopped. The Doctor must have given up. Although, knowing him, probably not for long. Her legs started to move forward again. At the top of the corridor she had to turn a corner, which was scary – she couldn’t peek round it first to check for Mantodeans, she was just propelled that way, unable to exercise any caution. Her stomach was in her mouth – but there was nothing there waiting to snip off her head. The Quevvils had given her a little gun, but she wasn’t sure if the Doctor would use it – even as a last resort.
She came to another door, and her hands solved another puzzle in front of her eyes. The door opened, and her eyes went down again, checking for pits.
There was no pit, but there was something much worse. Fragments of a human corpse lay on the floor. She remembered seeing this sort of thing on the screen when Mickey had first shown them the game: they’d thought they were gruesomely realistic graphics. There was nothing left by which the dead person could be recognised, so by this stage it probably didn’t matter if other players tripped over the remains of a previous game. Even with the few remaining shreds of clothing – in this case denim, maybe black cotton, once‐white trainers – it would take a positive Sherlock Holmes to make any connection between some macabre image in a game and a person who’d gone off on holiday somewhere.
The metal forehead disc had gone, but then so had the head. Rose’s head moved until she finally located the fleshless skull over the other side of the room, five or six metres from the rest of the corpse. The box of the disruptor, however, was still on the body, its bloodied wires looped around vertebrae and ribcage.
Rose’s stomach heaved. She wondered, almost detachedly, if she threw up but couldn’t open her mouth, would she choke to death on her own vomit?
Thankfully she managed to hold it down. It was just a dead body. It was pretty disgusting, but it couldn’t hurt her.
But then, with a jerk, she found herself bending at the waist, her head getting closer to the grisly cadaver. What was the Doctor doing?! Had she been labouring under the misapprehension that they were friends, when he actually really hated her and wanted her to suffer? She could smell the blood from this distance, the faint whiff of a butcher’s shop. Was he intending to do the whole CSI bit and examine the horribly dead body for clues? She could save him the trouble if so: this person had obviously had their head chopped off by a Mantodean’s mandibles, and then it had been… eaten. Stripped bare. Oh, ugh. Butcher’s shop was right.
She was getting closer. After a few tries she managed to shut her eyes, but that was almost worse. It felt as if any second she was going to plunge into the corpse face first. She opened them again to find that she was staring right at the skeleton’s pelvis. And then her hand moved out…
Gross, Doctor, gross. He’d better have a bloomin’ good reason for this…
And it soon became clear that he did.
Her hand touched the pelvis, went underneath, inside the tattered remains of what must have once been blue jeans. The Doctor’s sharp eyes must have spotted what she only now took in, a tiny black plastic corner sticking out from underneath. Her hand grasped it and pulled it out.
It was a mobile phone.
It was her mobile phone.
It was still on, transmitting nothing across thousands of light years. On the screen it said ‘Home’.
These rags and bones had once been Johnny Deans, whom she’d known from school.
She had listened to this man’s death.
Her hand switched off the phone, pushed it into her own jeans, and she was walked away.
* * *
‘I want my mum!’ screamed Robert. ‘I want my mum. I want my mum, I want my mum!’ Tears were streaming down his cheeks as he tore at the bonds holding him to the chair. ‘Let me go! I want my mum!’
Frinel had left after helping tie them