Instead he turned to Max and Tegan and held up a finger.
"One moment. I"ve just seen a friend of mine."
He crossed to her and waited until the old man had finished drinking and Charlotte had lowered his head carefully back down to the floor. Then he said, "h.e.l.lo, Charlotte."
She looked up, startled, and her face broke into a grin.
"Mike!" she exclaimed. What are you doing here?"
He gestured across to the Doctor slumped in the wheelchair, behind which stood Tegan looking tense. "I"ve brought an injured friend here for treatment. The whole town is under attack."
The grin slipped from her face. "I know. What"s happening to everyone, Mike? What"s making them change like this?
Like my dad did?"
"It"s a long story," Mike said, and quickly changed the subject to avoid having to tell it. "How"s the baby?"
Charlotte touched her stomach and glanced quickly around, evidently not wishing her pregnancy to become public knowledge. "Fine, as far as I know."
"And your mum? How"s she?"
"Well, she"s alive at least. She"s over there."
Mike looked across to where she was pointing and saw a woman sitting against the wall with her face in her hands, so still that he was not sure whether she was awake or asleep.
"Is she -" he began, but was interrupted by a blurted word from Max: "Jesus!"
Mike turned and saw that whilst he had been talking to Charlotte a little group had gathered around the Doctor. As well as Tegan and Max, there was a doctor who looked young enough to be fresh out of med school and a nurse who looked old enough to be the young doctor"s mother. It was immediately evident what had caused Max to react so vehemently. The young doctor had begun to remove the makeshift dressing around the Doctor"s wound in order to take a look at the damage, when the Doctor had abruptly woken up. His eyelids had parted to reveal eyes that were completely black.
Mike caught only a glimpse of them before the Doctor closed them again in a slow blink. When he re-opened them a moment later they had returned to normal. The damage had been done, however. Stumbling back a few paces, Max pointed a fat, rigid finger at the Doctor. Fresh sweat bursting from his cheeks, making them shine like mahogany, he cried, "He"s one of them!" them!"
Before Max could say anything else, Mike strode forward and grabbed his arm, screening the Doctor from the others in the room.
"Keep your voice down. Do you want to upset everyone everyone?" he hissed.
Max turned on him, furiously. "You knew he was turning into one of them things! You knew it and you still brought him in here. You"ve put us all in danger."
"This is probably the only man in the entire world who can help us get out of this mess," Mike said calmly.
"But he"s not a man any more. He"s one of those freaks!"
"No, he isn"t."
"Don"t pull my cord, man!" Max said. "I saw his eyes. We all did." Max said. "I saw his eyes. We all did."
"Look at his eyes now," Mike replied reasonably. "They"re fine. He"s He"s fine. There"s nothing wrong with him." fine. There"s nothing wrong with him."
"Oh, I"m afraid there is," the Doctor muttered.
Max and Mike stopped and stared at the Doctor as if he was a chimpanzee who had just displayed an astounding apt.i.tude for human speech.
It was Mike who found his voice first. "Are you... all right, Doctor?" he asked.
"Not entirely," said the Doctor, and raised a hand in Max"s direction. "The gentleman here is right. I"m metamorphosing."
"See!" Max said, thrusting his chin aggressively at Mike.
"The guy admits it. We should never have let you in."
Before Mike could respond, the Doctor said almost heartily "Quite right. In fact, I suggest you let me out of here before I lose control and kill you all."
Tegan, who had not spoken a word since they had entered the R and D unit, suddenly said in an anguished voice, "You can"t go, Doctor. We need you. You re our last hope."
The Doctor flashed her a rea.s.suring smile. "Believe me, I"ll serve you better on the outside."
"They"ll find you," Mike said. "There"s too many of them.
They"ll use what"s in your head and turn you into one of them."
"That"ll happen anyway if I stay here," the Doctor said, and suddenly, to Mike"s astonishment, he was holding Mike"s gun in his hand, pointing it at his own head. "Now," he said almost cheerfully, "are you going to let me out or do I have to kill myself so that I don"t kill you all later?"
For every second of the three minutes it took Turlough to climb up on to the hotel roof, he was petrified. Petrified of being shot at; petrified of the hotel"s old but stout metal drainpipe giving way; petrified that one of the fully grown Xaranti patrolling the streets below would spot him and scuttle up the wall after him like a spider.
The ledge below his window, along which he had shuffled to the drainpipe, had been just about wide enough, but old and a little crumbly. He sidestepped along it with his back to the sun-baked wall of the hotel, trying not to look down, trying not to rush, trying not to panic, and in the event probably doing all three.
When he reached the drainpipe, he swivelled at the hips, taking care to keep his feet firmly planted on the ledge, and grasped it gratefully with both hands. He would have liked to have rested there for a few moments, but he was afraid that if he stopped he might never start again. He was grateful that the drainpipe was st.u.r.dy and not one of the flimsy plastic variety that humans seemed to favour on their buildings in this time period. It was attached to the wall by stolid, chunky brackets which would serve as precarious foot-and handholds.
Turlough manoeuvred himself carefully round, his heart pumping fast as his left leg swung out over empty s.p.a.ce before clanging against the pipe. He looked up to see how far he had to go, and immediately felt dizzy. The wisps of white cloud slipping beneath the horizon of the hotel roof gave him the impression that the building was toppling over. Turlough gripped the pipe even harder and squeezed his eyes tight shut for a moment, though he had seen enough to know that he had a distance of around twenty feet to climb.
It took him no more than half a minute, but it seemed like an eternity. When he finally reached the overhanging lip of the flat roof, his arms and legs were trembling and his body was drenched in sweat. This time he did did have to rest in order to summon up the energy to haul himself over the ledge. have to rest in order to summon up the energy to haul himself over the ledge.
Finally, first with one hand and then the other, he reached up, grasped the edge of the roof and pulled himself up.
There was an awful moment when he didn"t think he was going to have the strength to do it, when his feet pedalled at empty air and his arms began to tremble with the effort.
Somehow, though, simply through fear of what would happen if his strength did did give way, he managed to scramble up and over. give way, he managed to scramble up and over.
For long seconds he lay there like a beached fish, gasping for air, relief washing through him. Sooner than he would have liked he scrambled to his feet and staggered across to the ledge that ran along the top of the side wall of the hotel.
The building next door was a Chinese restaurant called King Prawn. The narrow alleyway ran between the two buildings, whose roofs were separated by a gap of no more than five feet. Ordinarily, this would have been a simple leap, but at this height, and given Turlough"s current state, the task seemed altogether more daunting. All kinds of possible scenarios ran through his mind as he backed up in preparation for his runup. He imagined himself slipping as he was about to leap and plunging head-first to the ground below; imagined himself falling short on the far side, scrabbling desperately for a handhold and clutching only empty air. Vertigo swept over him in a dizzying wave, and he had to squat down for a moment, squeeze his eyes shut and make himself take slow, deep breaths to calm his pounding heart. At length he opened his eyes again and slowly stood up. The day seemed piercingly bright and almost preternaturally quiet, with not even a gull"s cry to puncture it. By contrast, the gap between the buildings looked as black as the deepest abyss.
Turlough knew that the longer he thought about it the less likely he was to make the jump, so he did the only thing possible: he began to run. The air slid past him, warm and somehow slick; he moved so swiftly that his feet seemed to skim across the roofs surface like a stone over water. He gritted his teeth as he neared the edge, his stomach coiling in on itself. Every instinct screamed at him to slow down, to stop, but he simply made himself run faster, knowing that if he gave in to his fear he was lost.
As he launched himself through the air, the gap between the buildings yawned like a vast black mouth. For an instant he felt like a piece of plankton caught in the downdraft of a fish"s maw - then he was sprawling on the roof of the restaurant, having cleared the gap by a good three feet. His palms slid across the roof"s gritty surface, but Turlough"s relief far outweighed the sting of his skinned hands. He scrambled to his feet and ran towards what he had spotted from the roof of the Lombard - a raised skylight, the gla.s.s cloudy with grime.
The skylight had been locked with bolts from the inside, but the wooden frame was rotten with age. It took Turlough no more than fifteen seconds and three good kicks to break in. Lifting the skylight he saw a short drop on to a small, landing and a set of stairs leading down. A minute later he was at street level and hesitating about which way to go.
Straight ahead would take him through the main part of the restaurant and out the front door on to the main street.
The opposite way would take him through what he a.s.sumed must be the kitchen, where he would hope to find a back door into somewhere narrower and quieter.
It was no contest. He headed towards the back of the building, and opened the door into the kitchen he expected to find. It was large, its stainless steel surfaces gleaming, though no amount of scrubbing could have masked the smell of rice and fish and cooking oil. The back door was green, heavily bolted and padlocked. Beside it and above a large sink was a window covered inside and out with wire mesh.
Turlough selected a large two-p.r.o.nged implement normally used for skewering meat and set to work on the mesh.
Constantly expecting to hear the thump of booted feet on the floors above, he worked feverishly. Several minutes of hacking and twisting later he tugged the mesh away from the frame. That done, he picked up a three-legged stool and smashed the gla.s.s of the window, wincing at the noise it made as it rebounded from the outer mesh and shattered into the sink below.
Using the skewer on the outer mesh was tricky as he had to push rather than pull it away from the frame. In the end he climbed into the sink, gla.s.s crunching beneath his feet, and kicked the mesh into submission. When he had created a large enough gap, he squeezed through, wincing at the jagged shards of gla.s.s still jutting from the window frame that sc.r.a.ped against his skin. He all but fell into the narrow street that the building backed on to, almost landing on the two-p.r.o.nged skewer that he had decided to bring with him.
He climbed groggily to his feet, bleeding from a dozen stinging scratches, and looked around. There was no sign of either UNIT soldiers or Xaranti, which, only made him think that they were probably lying in wait somewhere. He had to find a place to hide until it was safe to emerge - if it ever would be.
Left would take him back down towards the promenade, so he decided to go right, despite the fact that it was the street in that direction, that bisected this one, that his hotel room overlooked. He only hoped that the two fully-grown Xaranti he had spotted prowling this street had moved on now; certainly they had been moving purposefully enough to have done so.
He moved forward cautiously, keeping close to the wall, shrinking back from the golden thread of sunlight that lay on the road and lapped over the edge of the pavement on his side. When he reached the intersection he poked his head round the corner and looked right and left, ready to turn tail and flee at the slightest movement. However the street, wider and more prominent than this one, was empty. As a right turn on this occasion would again have taken him down to the promenade, Turlough crossed the road, wincing as he stepped through the band of sunlight, and moved to the left.
He crept along from shop doorway to shop doorway, wondering whether he ought to duck into one of them and keep low or try to get as far away from Xaranti Central as he could. But how far away was that? How far did the aliens"
influence extend? Was the ship that arrived in Tayborough Sands an isolated one or part of an invasion fleet?
He was still trying to decide what to do when he heard a scuttle of movement from the end of the street ahead of him.
He glimpsed two fully-grown Xaranti turning the corner and heading in his direction a split-second before throwing himself out of sight behind a parked car. Praying that they hadn"t seen him and that the sc.r.a.ping, scuttling, clicking of their own bodies would mask his movements, Turlough dropped onto his stomach and crawled beneath the car.
Gripping the meat skewer like a talisman, he drew in his legs and lay there in the shade, willing the Xaranti to pa.s.s by. If he got out of this one, he told himself, he would take no more risks, would duck into the next shop he could find that contained food and remain there until it was safe to come out.
He could see the Xaranti"s spiny crablike legs rising and falling as they stalked closer to his hiding place. When they were almost parallel with the car, they separated, moving to flank the vehicle. Turlough prayed desperately that there was nothing sinister in the manoeuvre - and then the sweat on his body turned cold.
In unison, positioned one either side of the car, the Xaranti came to a halt.
At the entrance to the R and D unit the Doctor had exchanged the gun for the keys to the truck. He knew Mike could have tried to stop him them, or insisted on coming with him despite his protestations, but he didn"t. He simply looked the Doctor in the eye, wished him luck and shook his hand.
The Doctor was grateful for Mike"s intelligence, glad that it was not the Brigadier he was dealing with. Not that the Brigadier was stupid - on the contrary, he possessed a sharp mind and a quick, dry wit. However his old friend was ingrained with the gung-ho single-mindedness of many of the top military men the Doctor had encountered in his lives.
Often the subtle approach advocated by the Doctor baffled and infuriated him, seemed to him to undermine everything he stood for.
Mike was different. He was a good soldier - brave and loyal, dependable and efficient and cool under pressure - but also sensitive and sensible, far-thinking but impressionable too.
The Doctor focused on the matter in hand: he needed to find a way of halting the Xaranti infection before it laid waste to the entire population of the planet.
As he stood in the lift which carried him down through the hospital, the Doctor wondered whether he had done the right thing in leaving Tegan behind. She was infected too, of course - though it would be some time yet before she actually became a danger to those in the R and D unit. The Doctor was hoping to have solved the Xaranti problem long before that moment arrived, though if he failed in his mission he would at least be consoled by the thought that Mike had his gun with which to both safeguard the uninfected and provide Tegan with a merciful release. Despite his guilt, the Doctor knew that taking Tegan with him would have been a bad idea. She - or anyone else for that matter - would have been more of a hindrance than a help.
He took out the square, grey object which was his remote link with the diagnostic programmes he had left running in the TARDIS and flipped open the lid. He pressed a b.u.t.ton, then perused the columns of numbers and figures and formulaic symbols scrolling down the tiny screen.
He raised his eyebrows. "Interesting," he murmured, then snapped the lid shut and tucked it into his trouser pocket as the lift arrived at its destination.
He rocked backwards and forwards on his heels, hands clasped behind his back, as the doors opened. Despite appearances he was alert for the slightest sound or movement. However, the only sound was the buzzing of flies which had found their way into the hospital, attracted by the sprawled corpses in Reception. The Doctor set his face grimly as he strode through them to the main doors.
He could feel the infection inside him, tingling across his shoulders and chest and back, trying to gain a foothold in his mind. His shoulder wound ached intolerably, but at least it had been treated and properly dressed. That was one thing Mike Yates had had insisted upon, and quite a crowd had gathered to watch the man who was pointing a gun at his own head being patched up by a young and nervous doctor. insisted upon, and quite a crowd had gathered to watch the man who was pointing a gun at his own head being patched up by a young and nervous doctor.
After selecting a few items from his coat pockets and transferring them into his trousers, the Doctor had left his ruined coat and sweater behind in the R and D unit (remarking to Tegan that if he didn"t have spares in the TARDIS he would be writing a strongly-worded letter of complaint to the Xaranti government) and had strode to the exit, wearing his torn and bloodstained shirt, still holding Mike"s gun to his head.
Outside he climbed into the UNIT truck and drove away from the hospital. As he pa.s.sed through deserted streets he switched to automatic pilot, allowing the Xaranti part of him to lead him to where it wanted to go. Up until now his mind had withstood the siege that the infection had been conducting against it, but suddenly the Doctor lowered the drawbridge, withdrew his defences. The infection swept in, aggressive and triumphant, filling his mind with Xaranti thoughts.
The first phase of the Xaranti recruitment drive was complete, creating a wave of new Xaranti that had broken through and a.s.serted their dominance. Now the infection was speeding up and the second wave would not be long in coming. The Doctor knew that the first wave had taken the unaffected population by surprise, that the new Xaranti had swept through them, killing and infecting, slaking their bloodl.u.s.t whilst leaving no stone unturned in their search for new recruits. People had been taken in their homes, in their gardens, on the streets. High population centres - hospitals, supermarkets, factories - had been targeted and attacked en ma.s.se. en ma.s.se. In other areas of the country the attacks had been swift and invidious, creating ever-expanding cl.u.s.ters of new Xaranti. There was now a lull before the next storm, the streets (around here, at least) quiet because the newly infected, driven by their strange, new alien instincts, had retreated into darkness and solitude to gestate, metamorphosise. In other areas of the country the attacks had been swift and invidious, creating ever-expanding cl.u.s.ters of new Xaranti. There was now a lull before the next storm, the streets (around here, at least) quiet because the newly infected, driven by their strange, new alien instincts, had retreated into darkness and solitude to gestate, metamorphosise.
Half a mile from the promenade the Doctor stopped the truck and got out. The new Xaranti, their work done for the time being, had congregated in this area, having felt an instinctive urge to be close to the force controlling their minds. To their queen. To Xaranti Prime. To the brains of the operation. There was no Xaranti word for it, only inadequate human equivalents. Understanding their instinct, the Doctor slipped through the streets, keeping close to the walls, hugging whatever shadows he could. He ducked from one shop doorway to the next, crouching behind parked cars and litter bins, listening and watching not only with his eyes and ears, but also with his mind.
His internal radar - ironically a gift from the Xaranti themselves - allowed him to remain undetected for some considerable time, but at last his luck ran out. The problem was that he was able to detect the presence of other Xaranti only at close-quarters - half a street away at most - which gave him little time to find a hiding place. On this occasion he sensed several Xaranti in the street to his right, heading his way, and so turned to run back the way he had come. As he ran, he realised - too late - that there were more Xaranti approaching from the other end of the street. He skidded to a halt just as this second group came around the corner and saw him.
There were four of them, three males and a female, all relatively young. They were in the mid-stage of transformation, their eyes black, their faces changing shape and bristling with spines, their Xaranti legs and altering musculature causing them to hunch over. Despite this, they moved swiftly, their leader - a s.h.a.ggy-haired man in a now-ragged denim shirt - actually dropping on all fours to approach the Doctor. The Doctor took a step back, then thought better of it and drew himself up to his full height.
"Good afternoon," he said.
The denim-shirted hybrid hissed at him, which prompted the others to do the same. All four moved in threateningly.
The Doctor stood his ground, looked at them as imperiously as he could, and said, "Don"t you know who I am?"
As he asked the question, he mentally gathered up a sample of the Xaranti thought-patterns that were still roaming through his mind, mixed them with his own, and telepathically threw the whole bundle towards them. The leader flinched and blinked and the Doctor knew that the message had stuck.
The hybrid"s mouth opened and in a slurred, guttural voice it said, "Doctor."