Doctor Who: Rags (29 page)

He paused beside a black tarn and studied his reflection in the troubled waters. There was light of a kind in this dismal place; a diffused, bloody glow on the horizon that did not tempt him to seek out its cause. He realised that walking indefinitely was pointless. The doors, the walls of the truck were still there - of course they were. He was probably walking around in a circle within the back of the truck like a clockwork toy that refused to wind down. Well, perhaps it was time to stop his aimless wanderings and refuse to play the Ragman’s game. He was about to sit down beside the tarn when he saw the blue box.

The TARDIS.Waiting for him behind the black bone of a tree.And yet, of course, just another illusion. Should he waste his time checking? He would still be playing to the Ragman’s sadistic rules. Then again, the TARDIS might have responded to some summons

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- maybe the Time Lords were coming to his aid again. It wasn’t an impossibility. Surely even their short-sighted apathy could not ignore the universal peril the Ragman presented. In fact, what society offered more of a challenge to the levelling hunger of the Ragman than the officious, hierarchical sophistry of Gallifrey?

He walked around the darkly rippling tarn, heading for the TARDIS.

Perhaps there would even be something he could lash up in the control room to help him against the Ragman. Last-minute contraptions sometimes had their place, after all.

Yates saw the purple camper van hammering along the moonlit country lane towards them, and turned to the UNIT driver.

‘Pull over, that’s the vehicle Jo was travelling in!’

The soldier obediently swung the Land Rover into the verge. The camper came on, and it must have been doing at least sixty-five on the dangerously curving roads.

Yates could see the driver of the van, and recognised him as Jo’s companion Jimmy. He could see the grey Confederate cap pulled low over the crazy eyes. Jimmy had always had crazy eyes, but now they were more bugged-out manic than ever. At the same time that Yates realised there was nobody else in the camper van, Jimmy noticed them and swung the wheel down hard right, flinging his long vehicle into a direct collision course with the UNIT Land Rover.

Yates acted instinctively. The driver was already flooring the accelerator pedal in a knee-jerk shock reaction but his hands were not working in conjunction with his feet, so the captain seized control of the Land Rover himself, frantically leaning over to grab the steering wheel.

The UNIT vehicle bounded forward in first gear as the camper van rocketed through the space they’d occupied seconds before.

Yates saw it veer manically as it slammed over the grass verge, threatening to flip over sideways into the hedge that divided the road from Salisbury Plain on the other side. Then it righted itself 212

and, without pausing, continued its hurtling journey onwards.

Soon it was around a bend in the road and gone from their sight.

‘You want us to follow it, sir?’ the driver asked, white-faced.

Yates gazed anxiously in the direction from which the camper had come. ‘No. That’s just convinced me more than ever that we need to get to Cirbury now.’

The mummer stood next to Charmagne, in front of the stone from space. He was careful to leave a distance of at least a few yards between himself and the rock, but there was nobody around with sufficient presence of mind to notice his caution. In this comfortable position he could bathe in the escalating power-flow streaming from the rock, the rock that was the focus for all the ley lines beneath the stones. The flames of rage from near and far were being stoked to a crescendo. Near was Cirbury, and far, although it was not so distant as to lose its almost tangible volatility, was Stonehenge. The hatred, the violence was rising, rising...

And the band played fast, faster...

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The Doctor fitted his keys into the lock and the doors of the TARDIS swung open. He entered the craft, and shut them on the wilderness of psyche outside.

He stood within the blue box and for a moment he didn’t react.

It was barely larger than a cupboard, equipped with telephone and police-instruction notice. It was a box, and nothing more.

Perhaps it never had been anything more. Perhaps his past, Gallifrey, his travels - everything had been but a dream within a dream. Perhaps there had never been anything more than this box, and his delusions to fill it.

He slumped into a corner and put his head on his knees.

We’re gonna smash it up till there’s NOTHING left! roared Dave Vanian, as Captain sensible’s guitar wailed joyously, Algy Ward’s bass bounced and leapt and Rat Scabies’ drums galloped like a herd of rhinos determined to break free from the tinny speakers Jimmy had set up in the camper van.

Jimmy was grinning madly. Mad? He wasn’t mad. He was livin’

it: for the first time in his life he had a purpose and was pulling out all the stops to achieve it. This was his finest hour, this was Jimmy’s exclamation against the world that had always tried to hold him back, to throw him in the slammer, to tell him no.

Well, now he was shouting back. Yes, yes, YES!! You can’t stop me now! He sang along to The Damned’s tribal anthem, and it was everything he’d ever believed in. Of course it was. He’d never been a creator, had Jimmy. Destroying was much more fun.

Destroying pomposity, vanity, pretension. Bring it all down! Bring it all down!!! There was a devil in him, always had been.

Today it was having its day, that was all.

Mad dog, comin’ down the way.

The camper van tore along the road at more than seventy miles an hour. Jimmy could see the sacred circle of stonehenge on the 215

horizon, lit by moon and stars and surrounded by the green garbed protectors of the Establishment. Encroaching against that barrier, there were the rebels. The outcasts.The outsiders whonever belonged.

Time to change all that, Jimmy thought, and put his foot down even further.

‘It’s only rock ‘n’ roll,’ he sang crazily as the tape ended and the monument loomed larger in his windscreen.

But I like it.

Soldiers. Pigs in different uniforms, that’s all they were.

Withrifles ‘stead of truncheons. Oh well, no problem: here comes the

pig farmer. Run for your lives, boys, it’s porky-arse-kickin’ time.

The camper van took out a gate leading on to the plain without slowing. Splintered wood confettied around the windscreen and Jimmy hollered with glee. The van pounded over the grass, bouncing and lurching as the speedo flickered around fifty-five, sixty. Jimmy tore The Damned tape out of the player, tossed it over his shoulder, rammed The Ruts in. ‘H-Eyes’. Turned it up fullblast.

He was lurching past the parked convoy vehicles now; couldsee the crowd of hippies and punks and losers and outlaws all turning to stare as he howled, accelerator glued to the floor, and the music took him away...

AND THE BAND PLAYED FAST, PLAYED FASTER...

And now he was past the travellers and hurtling towards the ancient stone circle, towards the cordon of soldiers ringed around it, some of whom were unshouldering their rifles, taking tentative aim at Jimmy as he sat in the driver’s seat and screamed his reb yell and his soul took flight and this was the most glorious moment of his life and Malcolm Owen was screaming back a him:

‘You’re so young, you take smack for fun; it’s gonna screw, your head, you’re gonna wind up dead!’ and he aimed the purple camper van at a trilithon directly in front of him, the soldiers in his way forgetting about shooting and throwing themselves aside as Jimmy howled ‘How’s this for anarchy and

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chaos you bastards!’ and Jimmy...

Jimmy...

Jimmy drove the camper van at sixty miles an hour into a huge sarsen and the world went red, white and...

Black.

The camper van erupted into a mushroom of flame as it steamrollered into the ancient standing stone, slamming it over on to its back. The UNIT troopers hugged the grass and a great roar went up from the crowd of travellers as they saw what Jimmy had done, and that now there was a gap into the ancient stone circle. As one they surged forward, bottles, tyre irons, knives, anything they could get their hands on that would serve as weapons, clenched in fists that were ready to use them.

At Cirbury the gaily coloured mummer smiled a shark smile as a new wave of energy coruscated through him. He waved his hands to capture the attention of the surging crowd of villagers and travellers as the band threw themselves around in a whipped-up frenzy, the music a white noise of hatred and spite. The crowd parted before his gestures, leaving a clear passage leading to the edge of the field where the handful of local bobbies waited for precise instructions from their absent superiors... and waited in vain.

The mummer didn’t need to say anything. Travellers and villagers alike turned together and began running silently towards the edge of the field, their faces contorted with bloodlust, maniacal, horrible. The police realised belatedly what was going to happen and made a pathetic break for it, pelting towards the stile leading to the village.

Of course they never made it.

As the guitarist pumped high-voltage sonic fury into the night air, as the singer roared like a gutted grizzly and the rhythm section anchored the sound into a pummelling vibe, the mob caught up with the five policemen.

The mob didn’t need weapons. For the most part they used 217

their hands quite effectively. They used their teeth too. They used everything. The head of a pudgy sergeant was pounded repeatedly against a standing stone until the back of his skull was smattered all over the rock like pieces of bloody eggshell. The eyes of a screeching constable were gouged out by the Cirbury milkman, and his ribs were then kicked into his lungs by an enraged punk with UK SUBs emblazoned on his leather jacket. Brand New Age was painted in a wild scrawl beneath the group’s name. Another constable pulled his truncheon and actually tried to make a fight of it. His head was taken messily away from his shoulders and slung into the thick of the mob for his efforts. His torso was dragged through the grass by two screaming heavy-metal warriors, blood leaving a snail trail amongst the buttercups and daisies. Another bobby was down on his knees begging for mercy.

His helmet was almost reverently taken from his head, positioned under his chin, and filled with the blood from his own slashed throat by a hippie with a Charles Manson T-shirt and a rusty machete. The last survivor actually had his right leg on the stile and was just about to catapult himself over on to the path that led alongside the school when he was seized and dismembered like a human-sized fly, his legs and arms popped from their sockets and sent twirling away into the depths of the maddened crowd. Schoolchildren herded around the corpse, supervising the limb-pulling with relish as their deepest body-inpieces fantasies were enacted by the enraged crowd.

Green grass was saturated with red, and still the band wasn’t satisfied.

This was the sight that greeted Captain Yates’s eyes as the Land Rover roared into Cirbury’s car park. ‘My God!’ he croaked. The UNIT driver next to him gaped as he saw the torso of a policeman being held aloft by the insane crowd like a particularly gory Guy Fawkes dummy. After seeing that spectacle, there was no way he was going to be able to bring the speeding vehicle to a sedate halt.

Instead, the Landrover barrelled into a double-decker bus 218

with skulls and the names of punk bands painted all over it.

Yates was thrown forward by the collision, his outflung arms protecting him from the shattering windscreen glass. The driver was not so fortunate. The steering wheel was severed from its shaft on impact and the column driven deep into the gurgling trooper’s chest.

Yates fell back in his seat, cuts crisscrossing his face. The bonnet of the Land Rover was steaming.

‘Get out!’ he roared to the soldiers in the back of the vehicle as he yanked at the passenger door. He made five yards before the explosion, swatted him on to his face, skidding him through the grit.

Two troopers helped him up, their faces shocked and scared.

Yates gazed at them blankly while the world slowly settled into place once more. He wondered distractedly why UNIT was recruiting such pale-faced, callow boys into the task force, but then remembered he’d been one once himself. He was sure that, in the Brigadier’s eyes, he still was. Then shock and absurd ruminations drained away and he was the trained man of action again as he shook himself free of the well-intentioned soldiers and unholstered his revolver.

‘Right! Follow me!’

Action.At last.

He led the five troopers along the path that led from the car park, alongside the silent school and towards the field of stones.

Through the gaps in the cedars that fringed the path he could see the mob surging around the mummer band again, and the music was still pumping out into the night air.