Doctor Who: Rags (32 page)

All he needed to do was destroy whatever was producing these horrors of the mind.

It was no good running. He had to confront this head-on. The mummer was the answer. And if he didn’t respond to bullets, perhaps he’d respond to an honest to God grenade.

The trouble was the only one carrying grenades was Private Hooper, and he’d been the first to bite the thistles.

Yates took another look around the tree trunk. The shuffling highwayghosts were twenty yards away. If he ran fast and resumed his zigzag gait, he might be able to dodge them and their flintlocks and maybe reach Hooper’s body unmolested. Maybe.

A branch exploded above his head as another eighteenth-century weapon discharged itself angrily.

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And maybe it would have been a hell of a lot easier if he’d used his head earlier and ordered Hooper to use his grenades straight away. But then maybe that was why he had never made major.

Hell, maybe he was being too hard on himself. Maybe there were too many maybes.

He leapt out from the cover of the trees and started his suicidal flight back across the field. If his actions surprised the ghost-killers, they showed no signs of it. They simply loaded their pistols unhurriedly, cocked them, and fired.

The back doors of the truck were opening. Jo sucked in her breath with expectation. The band’s music filled her head, squeezing it with vice power. Her excitement was back. The thrill of the hate. And it was quite possible in that blasting storm of sound to hate everyone. And everything. She began to dance, wildly, crazily, still clutching Sin’s hand. All around her the crowd was succumbing to the same urge. The songs told her of artifice falling and brutal honesty rising. She welcomed the beasts of anarchy with open arms, and yes, she too could hear them howl.

Wasn’t it beautiful?

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Chap

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Yates had made it past the first highway robber. The killer swerved to track him and the captain felt a noose flick past the skin of his face. He threw himself to one side as the barrel of a flintlock loomed before his vision and the powder exploded. He was running, dodging, throwing himself into somersaults, leaping up again. Another ghoul barred his way, the barrel swinging up, and Yates had never seen a muzzle so huge. It became the centre of his universe. Instead of ducking aside he hurled himself directly towards that huge dark circle.

He crashed into the bony robber and together they bounced into the grass. Yates rolled frantically, twisted the flintlock from the skeletal paw and thrust the long, rusting barrel between the fleshless jaws of his assailant. He pulled the brittle trigger and the CRACK of gunpowder igniting was the most honest and exciting sound of weaponry he had ever heard.

He was crouching astride the cadaver, smoking flintlock in his hand, and he had never felt so vital, so much like a soldier in all his life. It was truly exhilarating.

Then he looked up from the shattered skull beneath him and saw the mummer standing before his stone, arms rising up into the air, and he remembered Jo and that he had a job to do.

The highwaything was still wriggling beneath him, although most of its bony head was scattered amongst the daisies. Yates leapt away from it and recommenced his dash towards Hooper’s body.

Five yards away, and he felt his left shoulder tugged violently while searing pain bit through him simultaneously. The roar of the flintlock that had inflicted the pain came an instant later, it seemed. He was slapped forward by the impact, rolling through a bed of nettles that stung his cheeks. He came to a rest lying right next to Hooper. The private’s face was turned towards him, eyes bulging, mouth open, as if to say: Get us out of this one, sir 235

Yates lay there for a moment clutching his shoulder and moaning. Sweat oozed down his face. It felt like a sharp pole had been rammed through his deltoid muscle. He wanted to just lie there and forget everything. All he could concentrate on was the pain.

Get up you wet bastard! You’ll never make major like this. GET

UP!

Yates gaped at Hooper. For a crazy second or two he was sure the private had spoken the words. Nope: just another delusion, Mikey-boy. It was his own voice, seeming so detached from him because of the pain. He struggled to sit up, and almost fainted as red agony ripped at his muscle like the claws of a panther. He screwed his eyes shut. When he opened them the highwaymen were closer.

I’ve got a job to do. I’ve got a job to do. If he kept repeating it like a mantra, he just might be able to get to his feet. Hooper’s body jerked while the captain searched through his knapsack. Yates choked: he was sure the dead private was getting up to join him; then he realised it was flintlock shot that was buffeting the corpse.

Now he was on his feet, and although the world was swaying and blurring he had a grenade in each hand. And boy, was he going to use them.

The back doors were open.

Jo looked to the horizon beyond the sparse elms marking the boundary of the field, and she could see the towers of London, situated surreally on the range of hills that normally displayed the white horse. She stopped dancing and pointed for Sin to share the view, to witness the capital’s tourist sites spiking up from the moonlit grass, as if she could not trust her own vision.

The GPO tower, Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament and, there, the grim Tower itself, all jumbled together and surrounded by rolling Wiltshire countryside. Jo could see that the white horse was still there, under the buildings. It was champing and tossing under the burden, and look! the towers were falling down...

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Falling down...

My fair...

The horse was no longer a chalk outline but a massive skeleton that reared up from the fabric of the hill and bucked with fury.

Big Ben took a dive. A giant equine skull threw the tall clock into a pile of rubble that slid down the hillside. The Houses of Parliament collapsed in a slow cascade of rubble. Immense hooves kicked backwards and the GPO tower teetered and was no more.

‘It’s all falling to pieces...’ Sin hissed in Jo’s ear, ... gloriously.’

And the band played a death knell at one hundred miles an hour, the singer chuckling and jigging on the spot.

The Tower of London was no more. The skeletal horse danced wildly across the spine of the hill, huge, empty eye sockets scanning the world for chaos, gaping bony mouth champing, champing, and then it was sinking back into the grass and soil and again becoming a chalk outline and nothing more.

The beasts of anarchy,’ sighed Jo.

‘Come to play, baby,’ Sin laughed. Jo joined in the laughter.

The mummer gestured at the rubble that littered the moonlit hills. Kane and Charmagne gazed at the spectacle, their eyes grey as stone, still holding hands.

The mummer was pointing in a different direction now, and suddenly the elm trees on the edge of the field were bearing strange fruit. Jo had to squint to make out the figures hanging from the branches in the darkness, but it was worth the effort.

Sin squealed with delight. ‘I will die happy knowing I saw this day. And so will many more.’

Jo was grinning from ear to ear.

The entire royal family was turning slowly in the night breeze, dangling from nooses. There the princess, so fond of dancing on the grave of the deprived; there the queen, gurning sourly with rigor mortis. There other feckless princes, born to squander, born to leech, purple-faced, greeting their subjects with lolling tongues rather than regal waves of the hand.

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‘Parasites!’ spat Sin. The band had turned to play to their new, albeit, dead audience. The power chords seemed to make the royal corpses twitch and spasm, as if they were jerking along to the rhythm of the damned.

Jo began to dance again, hand in hand with the lustrous-haired Sin. This was the final number of the night, they knew that instinctively. It was gone midnight and the Doctor had been right all along: the band was playing them all the way to hell.

And she’d never felt so good in all her life.

It was then the Doctor stepped down from the back of the cattle truck.

The first grenade tore one of the highwaymen messily in half. The top part of the torso rose eerily into the night sky before Humping down on top of one of the standing stones, where it lay, balanced precariously. The cocked hat rolled in the grass at Yates’ feet. The flintlock landed next to some sheep droppings. The lower torso remained standing, dust streaming from the midsection.

Yates frowned at the gruesome sight, clutching the other grenade indecisively. Should he use it on the other corpses, or save it for the mummer? He threw a look over the field towards the band and the wildly cavorting crowd. No contest. Time to ice the mummer. He lurched away from the highwaymen, wincing at the pain from his ruined left shoulder. Take out the leader and the mirages would go too. That was the plan. It seemed like a very sensible one too.

Jo and Sin turned as if somehow sensing that the Doctor was there, behind them. The band, too, whirled away from their royal performance to face this new arrival.

When the mummer swung around there was a devilish snarl on his face.

The band stopped playing, their chords of violence no longer required: the crowd were loaded with enough ley-hate power.

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Travellers and villagers alike stared as one at the frilly man who dared.

Who dared.

‘Ragman…’ the Doctor said.

It was hand-to-hand combat now.The filth and the fury. And which was which, and who was who? Throats were torn out, eyes gouged. Corporal Hannah Robinson snapped the neck of a hippie from behind, leapt over his body and on to the next. She could see Benton wrestling with a green-haired good-for-nothing, a savage grin plastered on his face. Behind her she could hear the roars of the Brigadier in full, demented battle cry.

‘Take them all down!! By the gods, terminate the bloody lot of

‘em!!’

She laughed like a berserker as she ran for a fat-bellied oaf in a straining Hawkwind T-shirt. Wanna Silver Machine, freak?’ she spat, pulling her broad-bladed army knife from its belt and slamming it home through the gap-toothed bastard’s neck:Take a ride on that beauty!’

This was sheer heaven. Or if it was hell, then her sunday school teacher had got it badly wrong all those years ago.

Hell was a good-time place. she only regretted it had taken her so long to get here.

‘What can you do, frilly man? The Beasts of Anarchy have already escaped’

The mummer gestured at the hills surrounding the village and the field of stones. Huge, vague shapes capered and frolicked darkly against the slightly paler night skies. Ferocious howls reached the field faintly, and, just audible over the chaos, an insane, echoing piping, picking up where the band had finished off.

‘More illusions and falsehoods?’ the Doctor asked, stepping through the crowd that parted willingly enough. He felt the fierce, primal energy pulsing from the ley lines beneath his feet 239

and concentrated in the lodestone behind the mummer; reeled from the resulting vibe of utter antipathy that sparked from the people.

‘It’s what they want to see; it’s what they expect. Anarchy must have a form, Time Lord, even if it exists only in their heads.’ The crowd was silent, still gazing blankly at the Doctor. He saw Jo as he passed, and put out a hand to touch her cheek. She flung it away from him and he moved on, approaching the gaily clothed mummer.

The band waited for further instruction, their instruments drooping. The Doctor paused before the singer, then abruptly plucked the wraparound sunglasses from the shaggy head.

Maggots frothed from empty sockets, ghostly pale in the moonlight. The Doctor replaced the shades and walked past Charmagne, past Kane.

He reached the mummer. The piping continued, becoming louder as the cavorting creatures thundered down from the hills, prancing and dancing over the ruins of London as they came.

‘Civilisation’s end.’ the mummer said.

‘Reality-wound, to be exact.’ the Doctor answered matter of factly. ‘Bleeding from the open doors of your little perceptual vortex over there.’

‘Vain one, I could pluck your spine through your velvet trappings and fling it to the crowd,’ the mummer said, relishing his own words.

‘You could.’ replied the Doctor bravely. ‘So why haven’t you done so?’

‘Perhaps I enjoy the theatricality of duelling with you, egotistical one. I trust your Time Lord friends called for you across the gulf of space, and rescued you from your mental wanderings? Be they frightened of what I shall bring to their homeworld in time? ‘Tis well they are afraid. But first, there is you. Why have I not squashed you as yet? Perhaps I like to play fair.You are alone: slaughtering you alone would not be fair. Someone will be along to help you soon.’