Doctor Who: Combat Rock (18 page)

‘I am Papul after all, missionary. I could never follow you in all things.’

‘It’s affected you, hasn’t it, Julius?’ Father Pieter’s voice grew more excited and anxious as he seized upon the only possible explanation for the madness that had consumed Agat.

‘You ate the fungus and it’s done something to your mind!’

The headhunter lifted the axe as if thoughtfully. The green quartz stone was firm in the hollow crook of the wooden head. ‘Maybe that’s why we succumbed to faith in your...
God
so easily.’ He dropped the fungus. Now he was rising from the armchair and advancing slowly on Father Pieter.

The missionary retreated against the living room wall. The door was not so far that he would not be able to make it if he sprinted, but the headhunter was easily the most agile of the two. There was more chance in appealing to the man’s reason and intelligence. And faith had always been the best tool.

‘Why are you afraid, missionary?’ the headhunter said, and now he was drawing a rope from beneath the body-mesh.

‘Don’t you have your God to call upon? After all your words of glory, do you then fear meeting him?’

In three rapid strides he was upon the missionary, seizing him by the back of the neck and steering him towards the armchair, flipping a loop of rope over him and pushing him firmly down into the seat.

It didn’t take him long to tie Pieter to the armchair, and although the missionary tried to resist, he was old and weak, and the headhunter was young and very strong. There was also the axe, and Father Pieter could see by the glint in Julius’s eyes that he would not hesitate to use it.

So he let himself be tied to the chair. But he wasn’t finished yet.

‘God loves you, Julius. He loves all of us, despite our sins.

If you stop what you are doing, I can help you. It’s not too late:

Julius finished his work and stood back. ‘
Does
he love you, Pieter? Does he
really
?’

The headhunter and the missionary faced each other in silence for a few moments. Agat was unnaturally quiet. No footsteps on the boards, no joyful shouts or angry curses. Not even any screams. The town had died.

‘Do you even
know
why you are doing this, Julius?’ Pieter said, when he could bear it no longer. ‘You’re an educated man...’

The headhunter nudged the fungus on the floor with his bare foot. ‘We’ll just have to find you something else to eat.’

He crossed to the wine cabinet behind the armchair, and opened it.

Father Pieter tried to crane his neck to see what his guest was doing. The cabinet doors closed again and the headhunter re-entered the missionary’s field of vision.

He wasn’t holding a bottle of wine.

The curator had already knocked a hole in the temple of Father Tomas’s severed head. He tilted the head to show his work to Pieter.

‘Can you appreciate the craft involved? Instincts, you see.

We are still savage, deep down. Alll my people have returned to the jungle. Skills once learned, no longer submerged. We remember...’

Father Pieter could not answer. A sickness akin to nothing he had ever felt before was crushing him.

The headhunter was working at the hole in Tomas’s head with his stone axe, drawing out the contents. He proffered them for the missionary, clumped on the axe head.

‘Eat the flesh, drink the blood. Isn’t that what you taught us, Father?’

He grabbed the back of Pieter’s head and forced his mouth towards the grey matter.

‘Swallow, or I will slit open your guts and make you eat those also.’ He continued to force-feed his sobbing captive, and the jungle was wild in his heart, in his blood.

‘Where’s your God now, missionary?’

Where’s your God now
?

Curfew in Wameen, and the market place was deserted as the dented cruiser dropped gently down in the parking bay next to the barracks.

There was no point coming out quietly. The rebels poured out of the port even before it had completely opened, and headed for the half-open barracks gateway at a mad run.

The guards had watched the cruiser with the Indoni markings descend, and despite being a little curious over the dents and green stains streaking the fuselage, hadn’t been overly interested. Now they jolted to shocked attention as the warriors streamed towards them, half-naked; bullet belts criss-crossing their chests; rifles, bows and arrows.

And a white man in a skirt.

They struggled to bring their Power Rifles to bear and managed to blast a couple of guerrillas into the dirt before they were overwhelmed, and the barracks breached.

The guerrillas were in.

It had to be a trap. There were so few soldiers in evidence.

Those that were proved not much of a threat. Jamie rushed around a lot in the dark courtyard screaming dramatically, but not actually doing anything. Soldiers were firing from a few glass-less windows, but there didn’t seem to be many of them.

The rebels swarmed up the spiral stairways, and soon most of the snipers were silenced.

Pulse fire from an archway across the courtyard. It kicked a cauterised hole through a guerrilla to Jamie’s right. He flinched as the body flumped steaming into the dirt at his feet, and then he was charging erratically towards the archway, emitting a hoarse war holler as he went, not sure what he was going to do, just trying to make it look and sound good. Three guerrillas followed him, rifles booming. The soldier jerked in the entranceway and fell inwards.

Another guerrilla whirled around in a mad dance, his head ablaze as a surviving sniper targeted him from one of the high windows. Jamie continued heading for the archway, carried along with the mad flow of battle, and actually realising it might be better not to skit around in the middle of the courtyard when snipers were about, even if it was dark.

It’s a trap. It’s a trap! It’s a –

He was repeating the words in his head now as he charged.

Why was it proving so easy otherwise? There had to be a large battalion waiting for them inside this archway, lurking in the darkness, and then they would all be for it.

Through the archway, into that darkness, his breath rasping in his excitement, highland blood pumping deliciously, and Jamie was almost beginning to
enjoy
this. It had been so long since he’d gone into battle.

The corridor was deserted. A single bulb set high on a wall at the end, and it showed them nothing but cells, and those empty. Around the corner at the end, Jamie clutching his machete and expecting his head to explode with blaster fire any moment.

More cells, the dim light from the bulb barely illuminating them. Some of them contained Papul men, in various stages of dying. The guerrillas took out the locks with the blaster from the dead guard, but there was little they could do for the wrecks of humanity inside. They could hear sporadic rifle and pulse fire from outside, but it seemed to be petering off. The cell at the end of the corridor contained just one man, hanging from the wall, his eyes gouged out. The Indoni hadn’t even bothered removing the corpse.

There had been a fury mounting in the guerrillas as they searched each successive cell and saw the extent of the torture committed against their countrymen. It reached a peak when they found the eyeless prisoner. Jamie leaned against a wall, catching his breath after the excitement of the battle, keeping out of the way of the guerrillas as they took the dead man down from his shackles and carried him outside the cell. From the look on their faces this was obviously the man they had come to find. Some high-ranking OPG rebel, he assumed.

They hadn’t told him too much on the journey here. Jamie had nothing to say. Judging from the guerrillas’ grief and rage, keeping quiet right now was by far and away the best thing to do.

More gunfire from outside. The guerrillas began heading back the way they had come, bearing their sad prize. Jamie followed, but his battle-adrenalin had pumped dry upon seeing the condition of the tortured man.

Maybe they had done the same thing to Victoria, if she was here?

In his despondence he almost missed the crack of light around the edge of a door in the wall to his left, and the rebels had clearly missed it too. He stopped. The door was ever so slightly ajar, allowing a faint green light to escape that made him feel sick and uneasy for no good reason – or might it have had something to do with the torture and death he had already witnessed in this dreadful place? He called to the two guerrillas ahead of him, and indicated the all but hidden doorway. They glanced at it, and then reverently lowered the body of their comrade to the floor in order to investigate further.

Jamie took it upon himself to go first.

He pushed the door inwards and it moved without grating.

More of the queasy green light welcomed him, and there was a stone stairway falling away beneath him, spiralling down into green. He turned uneasily to the guerrillas, but their faces were resolute. Clutching his machete more tightly, he proceeded down the steps, making as little noise as he could.

They were slimy, and more than once he nearly reached the bottom more quickly than he intended. Once, a guerrilla snatched the back of his shirt to prevent him plummeting, and he was sure they were not too happy with his lack of stealth.

Down and around, down and around, the green light becoming stronger, and at last he reached the bottom to be faced with another doorway, this one without a door, that opened into a large, low-ceilinged room.

The green light was from an array of dusty bulbs set haphazardly in the walls or dangling from string from the ceiling. There was a work bench in the centre of the room, one ratty armchair of gouged leather in a corner, a horrendously stained and filthy mattress next to it, a mug next to that. The workbench was piled with devices, some gleaming and new, some rusted – all quite horrible. They were gadgets of torture, Jamie could deduce that straightaway: sharp, vicious, cruel; some pronged, some jagged, some big – obviously to be hefted

– others small, like fitted attachments.

There was no-one in the room.

Scattered around the chamber were a number of short metal tanks, maybe five feet in length, most of them sealed.

Jamie heard a guerrilla groan in horror from behind him at what lay within the open ones.

The metal tanks were too small for the men and women squashed inside them, their legs broken and folded up unnaturally to fit the confined space. They hadn’t been dead for long by the condition of them. Some had bits of them missing, the wounds and stumps ominously cauterised. Some were white, obviously tourists, and in equally mutilated condition. This had been done for pleasure then, Jamie thought incredulously. Why else torture a holidaymaker?

While the guerrillas occupied themselves with forcing open the other containers, Jamie’s eyes scanned the walls looking for any other doors, and found a curtain. It had probably been white once, but was now daubed with dried orange stains that could have been old blood. It framed an alcove, and didn’t quite obscure the shadow behind it, the shadow that now burst through the curtain, coming at Jamie in a mad run.

Jamie saw the scythe first, but that was just one scary detail in a whole list of scary details. The scythe was wielded by a dark-skinned man in grubby overalls with a drooping red mohawk and a swivelling gadget where his left eye should be.

The scythe was gripped by the right hand only, because the left hand was gone, and a serrated device emerged from the grimy sleeve to replace it. The man’s huge metal boots clumped loudly as he charged at Jamie, and the scythe crackled as he lifted it; the Scot could see sparks of energy flickering along the edge of the blade.

The two guerrillas were behind him, too shocked for the moment to bring their weapons to bear. Jamie reacted faster, diving under the workbench as the scythe swept through the space he had just vacated. The blade hit the leg of the bench.

A sonic frizz of energy and the bench was three-legged. Some equipment clattered to the floor. Jamie squirmed out from under the table again in time to see the torturer go for one of the guerrillas. The scythe met the rebel’s abdomen, bisected it neatly, the torso and legs falling in different directions, cauterised by the charged blade.

The remaining guerrilla was stupid enough to gape too long in horror at his friend’s grisly fate. The power scythe arced, took away the rebel’s gun arm and part of his head with it. Then he was coming at Jamie again.

Jamie was on his feet now, and met the scythe’s attack with his machete. The machete became a jagged dagger in his hand – a haft and a shard of blade. He tried to ram it at the torturer anyway, and succeeded in embedding it in his assailant’s right wrist. The scythe dropped, and the torturer locked with the Scot, grappling hand to hand.

The torturer pressed his bleeding right wrist into Jamie’s face, momentarily blinding him. The jagged attachment on his left hand ripped at the highlander’s belly, gouging viciously.

Jamie felt his shirt rip and a flash of pain, and instinctively jerked his right knee into the torturer’s groin. His kneecap didn’t connect with what he’d expected – just a hollow of flesh – and his surprise robbed him of initiative. The torturer seized the opportunity and slammed the side of his arm implement against Jamie’s temple, at the same time throwing his right leg behind Jamie’s.

The highlander went down, the torturer on top of him, the serrated instrument forcing itself closer to the young Scot’s face. He was staring up into the face of the monster, and the eye probe was buzzing as servos kicked in along with his obvious excitement. The torturer was talking now in what could have been an Indoni tongue as he locked one arm against Jamie’s throat and pushed the instrument closer with the other, Jamie felt his strength sap away in his efforts to ward it off. The voice sealed it: Jamie gave way to the surreal horror of a woman’s deep-edged tones growling from what he had assumed was a man’s throat, and he would have given up the battle for good and all, had not a bark of energy sounded from behind him.

The head leering above him was reduced to molten slop.