Doctor Who: Drift (30 page)

‘Doctor! The evil snow! It is in her hair!’

Suddenly the Doctor was up on his knees, his eyes looming over her like twin dark moons. Ill omens for Joanna Hmieleski.

Makenzie Shaw was rapidly running out of detours. It was as if the goddamn drifts were manoeuvring around him, fencing off his routes out of town. Hell, maybe they were. Except he couldn’t figure why even alien ice would be wasting its time on him.

He put it down to the blizzard’s natural ability to frustrate and antagonise. And he thought of Amber lying back in her hotel bed, unaware of the threads of unnatural ice that had carved new lines in the palm of her hand and burrowed their way inside. Like a parasite.

Christ. The kid was ten. Had a father that was - hell, no, didn’t even have a father any more. Where was the justice in the world?

Swearing at another snowbank meeting his beams head-on, Makenzie threw the truck into reverse then hit the brakes recklessly hard. Luckily he didn’t pay for it - that time.

Except it made him think: don’t go killing yourself. Aren’t you supposed to be the justice round here, anyway? You owe it to Laurie, and you owe it to that girl, Kenzie Shaw, to do what you can. Which involves staying alive and finding the Doc.

Meanwhile, every delay biting great chunks out of his nerves, he had to know how Amber was doing. He reached for the mic clipped to the radio. Be there, little bro. Be there.’

In the midst of this poisonous winter, Melvin Village had come alive with action, civilians working with the troops to erect barriers and construct crude moats at key points.

Somewhere to the south, a pneumatic drill was busy chewing up the asphalt. Others were ferrying all the spare gas once intended for the evac to those defences, ready to fill the moats or soak the blankets that had been thrown over the barricades. Sergeant Kurzyk was distributing grenades to every soldier as they hurried past on some new errand for the defence, his grey Slavic features layered thick with satisfaction.

The only soul no happier for all this was the man who had set it all in motion: Captain Morgan Shaw. Possibly because he knew the town hadn’t come so much alive as undead.

Living past the point of no return.

Morgan wondered cynically what - apart from a morale boost - he hoped to achieve here.

O’Neill called from inside the Command Vehicle. Morgan gratefully hopped in and took the mic. The static was bad.

but Morgan was skilled at filling in the blanks:
‘It’s Kenzie. Can
you Just have one of your guys check in on Amber? It’s real
Important.’

Morgan rolled his eyes: was that it? He went to the door.

‘Hey, Kurzyk. Go check on the little girl will you? The manageress will tell you which room she’s in.’

‘Sir,’ the Sarge’s face paled, ‘the mother drove off with her a while back.’

Morgan chewed on a curse or two. Running away must run in that family. ‘Kenzie. did you get that? Your girlfriend drove out of town, took the kid with her. You want I should send someone after them? Repeat-’

‘Okay.’ Kenzie sounded mad. ‘No, I’ll turn back. Which way was she headed?’

Morgan looked expectantly at Kurzyk.

An age passed, locked in ice. Snowfall was the only movement for miles around.

Martha shoved Amber around behind her, mind racing everywhere and nowhere. The veins of ice seemed to float in indecision, waving in the wind like impossibly delicate branches on trees of ice. ‘It’s afraid. Mom. It’s afraid to cross the water.’

Martha shook herself awake. She spun her head round to stare at her daughter.

Amber backed up, scared. Martha realised her utter disbelief had emerged as plain anger.

Lips clamped tight, she dug at the back of her teeth with her tongue. Then nodded and braved a smile. ‘Is that right, honey? Well, let ‘s see if your Mom can’t scare it some more.’

Martha stood, glanced back at the shore, where the icicle tendrils had started to snake out again, forking here and there like slow lightning. A steady, predatory advance.

The Doctor’s brisk examination was a race against the ice tracing erratic lines through the dark strands of Lieutenant Hmieleski’s hair and extending roots down over her forehead to burrow into her face. Leela was a helpless spectator.

‘Mild concussion,’ the Doctor pronounced, pocketing the slender torch he had shone in the patient’s eyes. ‘Slowing down the rate of growth.’ Apparently this wasn’t cause for any great celebration, and Leela could only echo - and amplify - the Doctor’s anxious expression as she waited for him to
do
something.

She had followed in his wake, arms up to shield herself from the flames, and helped him shovel mounds of snow to force a parting in the curtain of fire. The Doctor had leaped through, opening the door with one hand wrapped in a length of scarf; and she had seen past him into the cab as he had hauled the Lieutenant clear of the truck. She had seen the monster that the driver had become - before the fireball had consumed the creature, the truck and the evil net of ice that had enveloped it all. The flames burned still, down the slope, setting the trees and hillside awash with the colour of sunset. Snowflakes fizzled and died, but the white night and Leela’s fear starved the scene of any beauty.

‘Neurological effects. Something to do with the transmission rate of neural pulses traversing the synapses, I expect.’

‘Doctor, you speak the language of the Tesh,’ Leela told him off. ‘What does it mean?’

‘Well, at the very least it means we have some time to slow it down even further.’

‘Before you do anything, Doctor,’ the Lieutenant suddenly insisted, her voice firmer and stronger than Leela would have expected, ‘I think you’d better take these.’ She tugged at the zipper on her coat and reached inside to pull out a sheaf of papers in a clear folder.

‘I’ll read them later if you don’t mind,’ the Doctor grinned, taking the folder and stuffing it into one of his implausibly deep pockets. ‘But you get full marks for handing in your homework on time.’ He tipped the woman’s head slightly to aim her eyes straight into his own. ‘Focus on my eyes, there’s a good Lieutenant.’

‘Doctor, what are you doing?’

‘Leela! Shh!’ The Doctor’s hiss was as angry as the fires below.

Leela retreated a few steps, cowed and reverent, as the Doctor practised his dark arts. And she saw the Lieutenant’s gaze empty of all light, as though he had bewitched her spirit from her body. Leela threw a hand up to cover her eyes, fearful her own spirit might succumb.

Then, unhappy with the protection that afforded, she turned away altogether and trudged back up the slope to where Kristal was-Leela powered herself into a sprint and dropped beside Kristal, panic taking hold of her as she craned to look into those eyes so full of wisdom. But the wisdom was gone. There was nothing beyond the dark hazel and their black centres were empty of life.

‘Kristal!’ Leela touched her friend’s face, only to snatch back her fingers at the feel of dead flesh. ‘Doctor! Come quickly!’

There was more she wanted to add to her cry, but she was stopped by the burn that locked around her throat like the lifeless metal hands of a Voc robot. Yet far, far colder.

Ordered around the far side of the truck by her Mom, Amber gaped around the front bumper to watch the great drift topple like a glass tree, reeling in hundreds of its branches only to extend new skeletal limbs ever closer over the lake.

Her Mom nearly slid into the listing rear of the truck and now she was steadying herself, popping the trunk and rooting around inside. Amber watched her Mom’s footing at the edge of the cracked ice. Panic rose in her throat but couldn’t find any sound.

Oblivious, relentless. Mom hoisted out a tyre iron and skidded hard onto one knee.

Amber flinched at the impact, but her Mom advanced a few feet from the truck and just set at the ice, driving the iron in like a spike or swinging it like a sledge hammer. She hacked and hacked, hurling raw shouts at the veins pumping white blood through the air towards them.

‘STAY AWAY FROM MY BABY, YOU BASTARDS! YOU COME

GET ME!’

Amber whimpered silently, her Mom’s rage turfing up a graveyard of memories.

Water was spilling up around her Mom’s knees. Her Mom shifted back and hacked again. Then the iron went in like a drill and something lurched.

Amber screeched a warning - too late. The truck continued its suspended roll, crashing down and sinking a great crater in the ice. The frozen lake cracked like thunder. Mom threw herself flat and tried to dig the tyre iron in, but she was spread unevenly on a treacherous island of ice and the whole thing tipped her sideways into the swelling waters.

Amber lunged forward on all fours, bawling and screaming, but even through her tears and the falling snow, she could see the icicle tracks retreating at last, like the scratches of ghostly blades in the air above a lonely skating rink.

The Doctor had made the Cherokee his makeshift ambulance. He was driving flat out through appalling conditions, willing the vehicle on and fighting every skid and swerve.

His two patients were strapped securely in the rear, Leela’s window-like gaze occasionally seeming to pass silent comment on his driving from the mirror. Her hypnosis hadn’t taken long, but a lace of frost had extended over her entire throat by the time she was under.

The sight put the Doctor in an ugly mood.

A mood that didn’t dissipate even as the sight of the cabin resolved itself out of the snow ahead. The Doctor brought the Cherokee to a controlled halt before the house.

He jumped out and was met by Ray Landers once more, and a couple of other troopers.

‘I need one of you to drive while I attend to my patients,’ he demanded. ‘Come on!’ he snapped at Landers because he was the closest. ‘Don’t stand there dithering, man!’

‘I got to go check with my Sarge,’ Landers was infuriatingly apologetic. He glanced into the truck behind the Doctor.

‘Where’s Lieutenant Wildcat?’

The Doctor reined himself in from ferocious to merely gloomy. ‘There was nothing anyone could do for her, I’m afraid.’ He’d had to leave her there, kneeling in the snow, unable even to close her lids. Ultimately, her physical form would disintegrate, consumed as he was sure her mind had been. ‘But we still have time to save my friend and your Lieutenant. Surely that’s enough to motivate your Sergeant?’

Landers nodded, apparently infected with the Doctor’s note of determination. ‘Okay, Doc, you got yourself a driver.’ He turned to the two female troopers standing close by.

‘Godzinski, go tell the Sarge. Maybe we should take the shooting victim down with us. And Zabala, you’re with me: you get to be navigator.’

While the woman ran for the cabin, the Doctor busied himself panning around with the graviton distortion sensor he had borrowed. He was intent on interpreting the readings as Landers explained about the woman and how, if it was okay with him, they ought to transport her down to the town with the rest of the patients.

‘The more the merrier,’ the Doctor said, from the opposite end of the galaxy to merry.

Amber lay flat and pulled herself towards the still churning waters. She cried every foot of the way, her convulsive sobs squeezing her young heart dry.

Close to her left she was conscious of the 4WD, which had lurched again but was now wedged at a severe angle, hanging on with its front wheels and dipping its rear bumper into the lake. The ice was straining under it and threatening to give at any moment.

Amber was busy being sorry as well as scared.

She had wished for this. Back in the truck - no, before that. When she was being dragged from the hotel, dragged out of town, dragged and tugged everywhere all her life. It made her hate herself, her life, the things and the people around her. Sometimes it was blind hate, black and shapeless inside. Sometimes it was hate in the shape of a wish.

The worst of all wishes.

Amber gave a start and screamed hoarsely as her Mom broke up through the surface, coughing and spluttering so hard Amber could feel the pain in her own chest.

‘Mommy!’ she screamed. ‘I never meant it! I never meant it!’

But Mommy couldn’t hear her. Nobody could hear her.

Amber threw herself forward and grabbed for her Mommy’s hand.

But the waters pulled harder and dragged her Mom under again.

* * *

It was weird as
weird
seeing them sitting up in back like a couple of zombies.

The Lowell woman wasn’t much better back there: shrinking into one end of the seat, resting her forehead against the window like she hoped it might freeze there.

Gluing his eyes to the road wasn’t easy when there wasn’t any road.

Lucky he had Michaela Zabala along for company. Even if she was a diminutive and aggravatingly quiet Spanish chick.