Doctor Who_ Human Nature Part 16

Heartbreaker!' She laughed, trying to fit the ring over his finger, much to Smith's discomfort. He started to hop, holding his wounded hand to his head and looking away as if to ignore the pain.

'It was mine, I'm sure. Maybe I changed? Ow!'

They fell into a pile of limbs, Joan's legs tumbling round his very immodestly, and kissed excitedly in such a jumble. Finally, they unwrapped themselves, Joan blus.h.i.+ng thoroughly again. 'We're not married yet, John Smith. Do you like blackberry jam?'

'Jam? I don't know. I wonder if I've tried it?'

'Well, I make some every summer, so let us keep our hands to ourselves and see if we can find any early blackberries.' She hopped up and picked up her hat from where it had fallen. Instead of replacing it on her head, she upturned it and headed off for the hedgerow.

Smith followed, his hands in his pockets, whistling a jaunty tune. He bent to pick a poppy and fixed it to his b.u.t.tonhole.

'That's good!' she called, wandering along the hedge and plucking at the occasional early berry. 'What is it?'

'I'm not sure.' Smith tried to remember the lyrics. 'This old heart of mine... is weak for you... That's the t.i.tle, but I don't know who sings it.'

'A n-band, probably. We must go to London and see one, if we save up, and have a meal in some terribly precious cafe.'

'Yes.' Smith winced. His hand had contracted again for a moment then, as if something else had jarred. 'I'll just walk to the fence...' He set off up the field, wis.h.i.+ng that he could identify what it was that was curling him up inside. Perhaps it would get in the way of his marriage. Marriage! What a leap! How had he done that?

Ahead the field broadened out into a meadow with a few trees. At its end, up a light slope, was a wooden fence. And around the fence wheeled a flock of swallows. That was an odd sight at this time of day, there'd be no big concentration of insects for them to catch. And they were very low.

Something was s.h.i.+mmering in the air, a heat haze on a day too cool for one. It was actually getting closer, too, as he approached it, which was as impossible as walking through a rainbow.

He reached his wounded hand out to touch the phantom.

The shock rushed up his arm and thumped straight into his head.

A cat pinned down on a table, its skull open to show its brain. The folds of its head were pinned back and b.l.o.o.d.y white, like the skin on a roast chicken.

It was alive.

'Who's going to intervene?' a woman shouted. 'Who can save them now?'

He stepped back in fear and lost the vision. His hand plucked the poppy from his lapel and he sniffed it absently, his mind racing. There was a wall here. A real wall. Walls meant a prison. A prison meant guards. But what did the vision mean?

Joan wandered up to his shoulder, her hat full of blackberries, and he bounced the poppy off her nose, still frowning.

'Tell me,' he said. 'When you first met me, did I have an umbrella?'

Chapter Eight.

Everything Changes

Alexander slowly turned his head towards Bernice and coughed experimentally.

The noise echoed around the little dome. He opened his mouth and shouted something, but no sound was audible. Finally, he tried a whisper.

'I didn't understand a word of that. Are they Martians?'

'No. We could do with a few Martians right now. They'd sort those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds out.'

Benny closed her eyes, trying to stop the feeling of panic that was welling up in her stomach. If the fear overwhelmed her, she wouldn't be able to think. 'If I could reach to get the laser cutter out of my pocket, we'd also be better off. Alex, can you think of a really clever way to get out of this?'

'Not at all.'

'Because neither can I, and I really don't want to think about what's going to happen when they get back. So what do you want to think about? Women?'

'Women? If I'm about to be killed, loved one, that's the last thing I want to think about. Were you in love with your knight, Bernice?'

'Oh yes. No doubt about it. Full-scale romance. We nearly got there, too. Another few feet, and - oh, sod it!' She started to pull at the manacles, her wrists chafing white against the cuffs. 'I will not die like this! There's so much more to do!

There's my dad out there somewhere, Alex! And that b.a.s.t.a.r.d is not going to get his hands on me first! Do you hear me, Alex?'

'I hear you, loved one,' Alexander whispered.

Benny strained her hands against the manacles until her thumbs started to dislocate with the force of it. If your life depended on it, couldn't you just ignore the pain and wreck your hands?

She gritted her teeth.

Probably not.

Then the metal sheet thumped her in the back.

She waggled her hands to let the blood flow back into them, and the sheet fell backwards, nearly pulling her off her feet. She pulled forward and took the weight of it on her back. At the base of the sheet was a churned-up clump of soil. Two thin metal spikes that had fixed it into the ground had snapped in half.

'I pulled it out of the soil! I b.l.o.o.d.y pulled it out!' Benny shouted. 'Quickly, Alex, heave!' She hefted the sheet of metal on to her back, still manacled to it, and stamped around behind Alex to lean all of her weight on the back of his sheet.

Together, the weight and his efforts snapped the supports on that one too.

'My G.o.d, how do we get out?' Alex stumbled forward, tortoise like, carrying his sheet as Benny carried hers.

'Which b.u.t.ton was it? I think that's it...' Benny stamped up to a piece of machinery and angled the bottom corner of her sheet at it. She swung the metal deftly and the corner hit a b.u.t.ton dead centre.

A square opening appeared in the side of the dome. 'Come on!' Benny called.

'Run!'

The two awkward fugitives scrambled out into the forest and jogged away as fast as they could manage doubled up.

'At least we'll be safe if they start shooting at us,' murmured Alexander.

'Now these' - Rocastle held up a smooth, s.h.i.+ny-jacketed bullet pulled from the belt that fed the Vickers gun - 'are for enemy armies. Austrians, we might a.s.sume, Serbians or Germans. These will go right through the body and leave a clean, decent wound or kill instantly, as such n.o.ble enemies deserve.'

The boys were cl.u.s.tered around, listening intently as Rocastle sat on a sandbag behind the machine-gun, their imaginations racing across landscapes of cavalry charges and courageous squares of men in uniform. He held up another bullet, a square, sharp-edged one. 'This is for tribesmen, rebels and those whose creed is unchristian, thus disallowing them from the basic brotherhood of all professional soldiers.'

'Please, sir,' Merryweather raised his hand, 'did you use those in Pretoria?'

'Well, ah...' Rocastle stroked his moustache thoughtfully. 'What can I say, Captain Merryweather? Mixture of both. Brother Boer doesn't always behave like a serious soldier. Most of them were farmers with knives between their rotten teeth. Not our decision to make; anyhow, use of weapons is down to the C.O. Anyhow, enough stories. Shall we give it a go?'

'Yes, sir!' chorused the boys.

'All right then. Phipps, you've seen how to pa.s.s the ammo belt. Pay attention, boys, you'll all get a chance to fire her. Stand clear now. Don't get near the cartridge ejection.'

The boys hurried behind the machine-gun as Rocastle trained it on a row of straw figures in the middle distance. Phipps got down on one knee and grabbed the belt of ammunition that fed into the side of the gun.

'Is the line of fire clear?' asked Rocastle ritually.

'Yes, sir!' shouted Phipps.

'Stand by to fire.' Rocastle slipped the safety catch off. 'Fire!'

The noise of the bullets ripped up the air, hot cartridges spinning out of the gun.

The boys took a step back, gritting their teeth against the urge to put their hands over their ears or to cry. The targets spat straw everywhere, buffeted as they hung as if they were being tom apart by some invisible monster.

'Sir! Christ, sir!' Phipps shouted. 'Stop!'

'What did you say?' Rocastle bellowed, referring to the blasphemy rather than the sound. Then he saw it himself, and let go of the trigger.

Behind the targets, a dishevelled figure was pus.h.i.+ng through the hedge, its school uniform in tatters.

'Tim,' whispered Anand.

The figure wandered up to the targets and touched them gingerly, as if examining them. It turned to look at the group of boys around the machine-gun, and grinned at them.

It was wearing poppies in its hair.

Rocastle stood up, the sudden fear he'd felt when his finger was still on the trigger boiling into rage. 'Captain Hutchinson, I am going to my study. Bring that boy to me. The rest of you are dismissed.'

Hutchinson and Merryweather dragged the unresisting Timothy along the polished corridors to Rocastle's study. 'You're a disgrace to the school uniform,' Hutchinson told him, pulling the flowers from his hair. 'You look like a girl.'

'Really?' Timothy asked. 'A pretty one?'

Hutchinson punched him hard in the stomach and left Merryweather to straighten him up as he knocked on Rocastle's door. He waited for an answer, then stepped inside and saluted again. 'Prisoner and escort, sir.'

Rocastle looked up from his desk, resisting a sudden impulse to tell Hutchinson that this wasn't a playground game. No. The boy was following proper form. 'Let the, ah, prisoner, in, Captain. You needn't escort him. Then you're dismissed.'

Hutchinson nodded, led Timothy into the room and left, closing the door behind him.

The boy immediately limped over to Rocastle's bookshelves and started scanning them. He didn't even seem to notice the Head, who had begun writing again to give the boy some sense of scale. After a moment, he realised that he was being ignored back, and something snapped inside him. He leapt to his feet. 'Dean! How dare you ignore me!'

'Sorry,' Timothy raised his hands in a gesture of pacification. 'I thought you were busy, sir. That's an early edition of Darwin on your shelf. I thought you - '

'Never mind the b.l.o.o.d.y books.' Rocastle matched each hissed syllable with a stride round his desk and made the last one into a slap that sent the boy flying into the corner. 'You could have been killed this afternoon! What are are you playing at? What are you playing at?' you playing at? What are you playing at?'

'I'm not sure, sir,' Tim sighed, staying where he'd fallen. 'I see so many strange things. I think I've grown up.'

Rocastle laughed bitterly and dragged him to his feet. 'Like h.e.l.l you have! I've heard enough about your illnesses, your cissy ways, and now the flowers in your hair! A fine miss, you are, boy! Now, are you going to pull yourself together and join in with this outfit? Are you?' He shook Timothy harder and harder, until his head swung from side to side sickeningly.

'Don't-'

'That's sir!' Rocastle bellowed, his face red.

Timothy closed his eyes as he was shaken, drew in a breath and stuck out a finger.

The finger caught Rocastle in the centre of the forehead. He stared at it. Then he crumpled into a heap.

Timothy staggered back, staring down at the body. Then he started to laugh, wiping his mouth on the back of his unb.u.t.toned sleeve. 'You'll die in pain, in ten years, with a tumour on your bowel,' he told the unconscious figure. Then he turned and ran from the room.

Mr Hodges had been kneeling in the middle of the road, praying, when the army convoy rolled up. An officer had hopped out of the first of the dusty green vans, introduced himself as Major Wrightson and asked what the trouble was.

Hodges told him that he'd had a vision up ahead and been called upon to change his ways. He asked the major to leave him alone, and, with a nod and shrug to his comrades back in the van, the soldier did so.

They drove around him, with great care, and picked up speed as they returned to the centre of the road.

That was when the first van compacted, its front flattening like it had hit a wall.

The cap on the radiator blew upwards in a blast of steam. The other two vans braked before they ran into the back of the first.

Mr Hodges had stood up to watch the soldiers scramble out and stare at what was in their way: nothing. The front of the crashed van was rapidly rusting, a thin red layer rising to smudge the air around its bonnet. To Hodges, it made the soldiers look like they were just figures in a painting, staring at a puff of paint that had fallen across the canvas. A smell of pa.s.sing thunderstorms suddenly filled the air, but this was a clear spring morning.

Some of the men, those who lived through the next few months, claimed that they'd smelt something sulphurous in that suspended red cloud, but the recollections everybody had of the spring of 1914 were full of portents after the fact.

The major had clambered out of the cab and started shouting at his driver to back up. He probed the red cloud with his baton. With a sudden crash, the whole front end of the van gave way and the cloud grew heavier. It was following a gently upward slope, describing the perimeter of something invisible that the major measured by walking along it, slapping the air with the baton.

The air made a fearful series of echoes.

One soldier had opened his eyes full wide then, and ran to a bush to be sick. His fellows calmed him, and he told them later how the noises had reminded him of something big and terrible, like being buried under a pile of metal and hearing faint voices, the language of which you don't understand. They all felt lonely at the echoes, even Wrightson. He was an Eights enthusiast, and the clash of his stick on the air only made him wonder why he was here, why he wasn't scudding across some bright, flat lake in the suns.h.i.+ne. The echo was like being lost at sea, a little shape rolling in waves that reared like mountains alongside you.

'That's the voice of G.o.d, that chime,' Hodges had sighed, his gnarled old face beaming in the first real rays of the morning sun. 'He's coming back today.'

'You may well be right.' The major watched as what had been the bonnet of his van dissolved into an oxidizing cloud. He turned to the man in charge of the following truck. 'Gas masks!'

The soldiers ran back into the trucks, emerging a moment later wearing the grotesque masks with their dangling filters. The major spent a few moments trying to persuade Hodges to wear one too, to no avail. 'All right. Stanley, Torrence, with me. Let's see how far we can get through this thing.'

Two soldiers shouldered arms and ran to Wrightson's side. They walked up to the barrier, hands outstretched, and touched the smooth surface of the air. 'Wonderful,'

Wrightson breathed. He'd been chosen for this job because he'd been part of the only unit in Britain to have been training under gas conditions. If this was the war he could look forward to... well, it was different, anyway. 'Try and push through it,'

he ordered. The three men advanced, heaving against the barrier, their palms feeling the slight warmth of it.