Doctor Who: Drift (28 page)

Jeez! Talk about a ghost rider. Landers shouldered his M4.

Then lowered it again, even before Jen had raised her sights. The figure on the snowmobile was a strange shape, but not scary strange.

The scarf securing the floppy hat to the head like some hobo’s Easter bonnet was the ultimate giveaway. Landers slung his rifle and hurried up to welcome the Doc. ‘Yo, Scientist Guy, what the hell brings you to these parts?’

The Doc brought the snowmobile pretty smartly to a halt.

He grinned, but not entirety happily. ‘You haven’t happened to see a young lady with limited social graces go by?’

‘You’re talking about your girlfriend, right?’ Landers marvelled at the devotion this guy showed to his lady: driving up a mountain to find her in this crud-storm Maybe he should take notes. He gestured to where the path of the truck was being steadily erased. ‘The fugitive went thataway. Doc, and I think your lady went after them with Kristal. Nobody tells me nothing though, so you’ll have to take your chances.’

Thank you. Private Landers. It’s something I tend to do naturally.’

The Doc made as though to doff his hat, like a gent, but then appeared to remember the thing was lashed down like a tarp He opened the throttle and rode on into the storm.

It was the warm proximity of another human being, in consort with a blast of icy air, that woke Joanna up. But as hazy realisation dawned that the being was Emilie Jacks.

Joanna fought for consciousness the way a drowning man fights to reach the surface.

Jacks’ palm was like a rock pushing against her chest and the passenger door gaped open beside her. Groggy from a dozen hangovers. Joanna threw out her hands, one finding her opponent’s face and pushing back and the other latching onto Jacks’ arm. Barred from her full senses, Joanna had only desperation in her favour.

That and the way Jacks wasted energy in raw screams.

Whereas Joanna shoved with everything she had, pressing Jacks against the driver’s door.

Then it was as if that single shift had overbalanced the entire vehicle. A sudden slide and a tug on her stomach told Joanna they had left the ground behind. The truck nosedived and their wrestling match was suspended abruptly, the crash sending them into a deafening roll; they were trapped in a crippled dryer, blowing cold as it tumbled.

As she felt consciousness slipping, Joanna dug in her mental claws, riding it out until a religious stillness descended on the truck’s interior. She couldn’t focus, but she registered that Jacks was preoccupied, wiping a bloody river clear of her eyes.

That, she surmised, was the good news.

A blurred picture of the windshield told her it had been badly shattered. But when she looked a second time, the hairline cracks seemed a little too white. Gleaming like diamond twine.

It was dumb, impossible. She was hallucinating.

But Joanna stared at the intricate webs of ice extending inside the cab.

They would be travelling light this time. Time and the weather were against them. Makenzie would be too if he knew. And Martha’s need to act and never once - please Lord, don’t let me - stop and think was against them most of all.

She’d warned Mak not to take too long to reconsider, and almost in the same moment she’d given herself no time for that at all. Out into the night, she’d moved like the storm, furious and giddy with the headache of the century.

Somebody brushed past her, too busy to register her let alone apologise. She was fired up to shout at the guy, but saw only the broad retreating shoulders of the CIA agent.

Parked across the road was the agents’ 4WD. He must have been fetching something.

Head bowed, Martha raced through the wind and seized hold of the door release. The door swung open, and Martha grinned like she’d found an exit from hell.

Her skull was still fit to burst, but the ache had evolved into purpose, and she threw herself into it, riding it like a wave. Nudging the car door closed, she ducked back across the road in a half-run, thankful her small stature would help her go unnoticed in this friendless place.

She marched into the store, breathless, tearing her hood down and searching about. Probably Hal was out scouring the town for coyotes with the rest of the amateur hunters.

Didn’t matter. She grabbed a cardboard box. then set about collecting a few essentials from the shelves with a haste that bordered on random. When she was done she took a time-out, planting the box at her feet.

Next minute, she was scrawling out a note and her credit card details for Hal. Picking up her box, she carted it out into the storm, and part of her sank like plunging mercury.

Maybe she was the dumb Southerner everybody reckoned.

She’d spared herself a charge of looting only to commit Grand Theft Auto.

A twitch of satisfaction, heavily ironic, played at her mouth as she finished loading her goods into the back of the
4x4.

She sniffed and drew a gloved finger across her upper lip, looking about and waiting for the guilt and fear to overpower her and tip her back into indecision.

But no. Goddamn you, Melvin Village. And goddamn you too, Makenzie Shaw. She made a dam of her teeth against the threat of tears. She was back on her own now and there was no great wounding guilt, but there was plenty to fear to make up the difference

Not of prison. Why fear prison when you were breaking out of hell?

No, what she feared most was the storm and how much she was going to hate herself for what she was going to have to do to her baby. Again.

She had more than the wind to fight as she forced herself back across the street to the hotel.

Leela had used nets before, trapping the larger grazers that rooted through the jungles of her homeland, then pouncing from the branches to wedge a blade in behind the armour that rendered spears and crossbows impotent. Down the slope before her, a net of ice had been cast over the front of the renegade truck.

But the net was in constant motion, threads forming and reforming, barbed and forked in countless directions as though seeking entry through the metal hide of the vehicle.

The net’s frenzied attack was all the more fearful for its silence.

Leela sprang a pace down the slope, preparing to brace the pistol as she had been instructed. Kristal stopped her with a shout and ran instead for the rear of their truck.

‘Whatever we are going to do we should do it quickly!’ Leela warned.

From this angle it was impossible to tell if the crystal vines had found their way in yet, but Leela could see front portions of the truck being eaten away as the tendrils multiplied and struck out at the air like frozen whiplashes. Fissures of ice coursed all over the surface of the wrecked truck, cracks in an eggshell.

She backed up the hill to help Kristal.

And saw a figure coasting up on a snowmobile. She called out to Kristal. but the scout barely glanced around, and instead untied the two metal cans from the cargo frame.

‘Quick thinking. Lieutenant Wildcat!’ the Doctor commended her loudly, hopping off the snowmobile the moment it had halted. He strode up, ready to take charge, and Leela all but sagged with the sense of relief. She trotted up to join them as the Doctor came swooping in like a bird of prey, to snatch up the discarded rope that had secured the cans to the rack.

‘Old rope! Never underestimate its value, Leela!’

‘Doctor,’ Leela’s relief turned to frustration, ‘we haven’t much time! This snow is evil!’

‘Well,’ he squinted down into the teeming mesh of ice fibres, branching and dividing all over the stricken truck.

‘Ordinarily I wouldn’t say a spot of inclement weather would be anything to grumble about, but in this case you might be right! You just might be! Now, Lieutenant Wildcat, will you pour or shall I?!’

‘Doctor!’ Kristal was suddenly handing Leela both cans.

Now you’re here. I’ll try to commune with it!’

The Doctor’s expression was an instant prohibition, of the sort Leela had seen before. ‘I really wouldn’t do that, if I were you! No matter how much we might want to, I don’t think any of us can even begin to communicate with this creature!’

‘No, I know that. But I might distract it long enough for you to cut a path to the truck!’

‘All the same, I wouldn’t advise it, Lieutenant! I wouldn’t advise it at all!’

Leela caught something dark flashing between their respective gazes.

Whatever it was, it was apparently something with which the Doctor couldn’t argue. While Leela puzzled over its significance, she was adjusting to the weight of the liquid slopping around inside the cans. And she wrinkled her nose: they gave off a strong smell of ‘tailpipe’.

‘The Doctor will tell you what to do!’ Kristal squeezed Leela’s arm encouragingly, making the pressure felt through her gloves and the coat’s padding.

The simple gesture turned the hairs on Leela’s neck cold.

What are you going to do?’

‘Open my mind,’ said Kristal, and she knelt straight down in the snow, shutting her eyes just a shade too late to conceal the fear that possessed her.

The Doctor was advancing along the road with one eye on the crashed truck below.

Leela stared down at their enemy, with the feeling she was facing it alone.

Morgan Shaw narrowed his eyes and only just resisted closing them altogether, looking instead along the line of civilian vehicles queued up behind his small military convoy.

There were nearly a dozen now - some with chains looped around their tyres, others with roof-racks piled up like Native American funeral pyres. Appropriately enough.

There wasn’t going to be any evac. Not out of this place.

It had taken him years of effort, mule-headed determination and a conscious betrayal of paternal hopes to break out of this place before. No way was the town letting go that easily today. Not when she was as trapped as the rest of them.

Morgan heard Derm stamping up to present himself for orders. ‘Kind of the meteorological equivalent of a noose, wouldn’t you say?’ he asked his 2IC.

‘Sir?’

Morgan directed the man’s glance, past the vehicles, between the buildings and the trees, to where the street broke apart in hoary pixels. In all the blowing whiteness, it was difficult to make out with any solid certainty, but tangible enough to close around their throats with chill fingers. Down along the road by which they had entered the town, there lay a new-formed barrier. Like a shifting dune of white, angry spumes of snowflakes blowing over the uppermost ridge to fall at its base and pave the way for its slow - but definite - advance.

Not as dramatic, he imagined, as the swollen tidal wave of snow that Kristal had reported up on the mountain and by no means an avalanche. But in many ways, it augured more menace, like a B-movie zombie, perhaps, safe in the knowledge that no matter how slowly it progressed, no matter how fast its victims attempted to flee, it would ultimately have its prey. And above the advancing drifts, which Morgan now knew had to be actively encircling the town, the skies themselves were thickening and filling with a frozen swarm.

Snowflakes teeming like glass mosquitoes in a hurricane, any number of them carrying a deadly bite.

‘What do we do?’ asked Derm, and Morgan knew he’d recognised it too.

How in hell did anyone hope to defend this town?

And then it struck Morgan, hard, like a slap in the face from his old man, that he couldn’t hope to do anything of the kind. Not really. He’d set the townsfolk going through the motions, hadn’t he? Now he had to do the same to his men.

No,
for
them.

They were soldiers and they had to be doing something when they saw the enemy charging at them over the hill. And when the enemy was the winter? Well, it wasn’t a situation he’d ever encountered, but he was guessing you just dug yourselves in and prayed for spring.

Houston, we have ignition.
Parker shoved through the lab doors like a plough through a snowbank. He dumped the laptop and all the other gear and documents in a heap on the nearest table.

‘Pydych,’ he snapped his fingers loud enough to break the name in two. ‘Would you kindly step outside and fetch in some equipment from your electronic arsenal?’

Pydych hovered in a wanna-be helpful way just behind Melody at her microscope. ‘Uh, sure,’ he did a half-assed job of sounding alert. ‘Did you have anything specific in mind, or is this just a means to get rid of me to talk about secret stuff?’

‘Actually,’ smiled Parker tautly, ‘the latter. Find something to do for fifteen minutes. Who knows, maybe the Captain can use you in his defensive preparations.’

‘Unless it’s piling me up with the sandbags, I kind of doubt that.’

Parker thrust an arm out wide to point the man to the exit.

Pydych departed promptly.

‘You sound a little agitated, my love,’ commented Melody, turning from her microscope to Redeker’s corpse. ‘You think you could channel all that nervous energy into setting up the computer?’

‘In a minute,’ grouched Parker, and he rested his hands either side of the corpse’s feet. ‘Remind me again why we’re working away on all this research at the Doc’s beck and call?’