by Mark Morris
‘Inferior?’ Mike exclaimed.
Tegan looked glassy-eyed, as if she’d been awake too long or was under the effect of a strong sedative. ‘What?’
‘You said inferior.’
‘Did I?’ She looked confused. ‘I meant...’ Then she seemed to snap out of it. ‘Oh God, it’s getting worse.’
‘Are you all right?’ Mike asked diffidently.
Her eyes flashed. ‘Of course I’m not bloody all right!’ Then, abruptly, her face crumbled, anger sliding into fear. ‘I’m so scared.’
Cautiously he reached for her, and this time she leaned into him, allowed him to hold her. She felt hot, as if she had a fever.
‘Hey,’ Mike said gently, ‘come on. Don’t give up hope yet.
Any minute now the Doctor’ll pop awake and come up with some brilliant solution. You’ll see.’
The smile he had hoped his words might raise from her failed to appear. Instead, her voice barely a whisper, she said,
‘A while ago, there was this... this creature called the Mara. It took over my mind, made me do evil things. It filled my head with rage and hate. It was awful. I don’t think I could ever go through anything like that again.’
‘You won’t have to,’ Mike replied.
She said nothing for a moment, then unfolded herself from his embrace and sat up. ‘This isn’t getting us anywhere, is it?’ she said, ‘I ought to tell you what else I know while I still can. It might come in useful later.’
He ignored the doubt in her voice and said lightly,
‘Forewarned is forearmed. Fire away.’
‘The Xaranti affect different people in different ways, like any normal disease. Some show the symptoms quickly, some hold out for a lot longer. Except that in the last few hours, the whole process has been speeded up. It’s as if... as if a switch has been thrown.’
‘What kind of switch?’ asked Mike.
Tegan thought for a moment. ‘A telepathic one.’
‘You mean... you mean someone is controlling this infection by thought?’
‘Not someone,’ said Tegan.
‘Something then ?’
Tegan’s face creased with the effort of trying to express in words the half-formed impressions that flashed sporadically into her mind. ‘The Xaranti creatures have no name for it. It controls them. It is the Xaranti. The creatures are its... its limbs. Its weapons.’
‘How long have we got?’ asked Mike. ‘How long before everyone in this country is either dead or has turned into one of those things?’
Almost casually Tegan said, ‘A week.’
‘And what about you? And the Brigadier? And the Doctor?’
Again, that glassy-eyed stare, that deadpan expression. ‘A few hours.’
Mike sighed. A few hours. Which meant that every minute that ticked by was another nail banged into the coffin of the planet. And what was he doing about it? Driving around aimlessly, hoping that the unconscious man in the back would suddenly spring to life and come up with something that would get them out of this unholy mess.
He had never felt so useless. For a while now he had been asking tough questions of himself and his life, had been wondering whether in fact he made any difference at all. His
whole existence had been centred around weapons and violence for so long that the real, fundamental issues had been lost somewhere along the way. He believed in peace, had believed - or at least had managed to convince himself - that UNIT was in essence a peace-keeping force. But how could you possibly maintain peace with guns and tanks and bombs? All right, so Daleks and Autons and the like wouldn’t give a hoot about petitions and marches and protest songs, but surely there must be some other way, some other option to consider?
‘We - they - want the Doctor,’ Tegan said suddenly.
‘What?’
Her eyes were wide as if she’d been struck by a sudden realisation. ‘It’s their overriding imperative. They know all about him from looking into the minds of his friends. They know everything he’s done from the Brigadier and Sergeant Benton and anyone else from UNIT who’s had contact with him.’ She looked momentarily afraid to go on. ‘Soon they’ll find him through me. I’ll lead them to him. I won’t be able to help it.’
‘We’d better move quickly then, hadn’t we?’ Mike replied decisively. ‘Get him into hiding.’
‘Maybe you should just leave me behind,’ Tegan said.
Mike shook his head. ‘No chance. You’re coming with us.
I’m not leaving you out here to fend for yourself.’
‘Promise me one thing then,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘If I get... uncontrollable... promise me you’ll shoot me.’
Mike said nothing for a moment, then he smiled stiffly and squeezed her hand. ‘I promise I’ll do whatever I have to.’ He put the truck into gear and rolled down into the car park.
There was an ambulance parked askew by the main doors.
It was only when they got closer that they saw the driver’s side window had been smashed and that the top half of a fat man in a paramedic’s uniform was hanging out of it, arms dangling and hands outstretched as if trying to reclaim the blood that had run down the side of the vehicle in rivulets and pooled on the tarmac below.
‘Cancer,’ Tegan said bluntly.
‘Pardon?’
‘He was killed because he was no use. He had cancer of the colon. We can sense it by -’ She stopped abruptly, suddenly aware of what she was saying. Looking at Mike fearfully she wailed, ‘I don’t want to know these things! I don’t want them in my head!’
Mike raised his hands to calm her. ‘Just keep fighting it, Tegan. It’s all you can do.’ He gave her a moment to calm down, then continued, ‘I’m going to have to go in there. Do you feel able to cope with sitting behind the wheel again?’
She scratched at a point just below her collarbone, then made herself stop. A small shudder passed through her before she nodded. ‘Yes, I’ll be fine.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Ok. I’ll only be a few minutes. I just want to see how the land lies before we take the Doctor in.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You know what to do -’
‘I’ll drive away if I see anything suspicious.’
‘Good. Oh, and honk your horn too if you can. At least it’ll let me know there’s something going on.’
He got out of the truck and Tegan moved across to take his place behind the wheel. He walked up to the hospital’s main double doors, gun poised. The sun was hurling reflections of itself back at him from the glass panels, masking what lay beyond them until he shoved them open and entered Reception. There was a semi-circular desk to his left, rows of chairs back-to-back, as if someone had set them up for a game of Musical Chairs, to his right. There were bodies on the floor - Mike counted seven of them - all of them lying in pools of blood. Despite the terrible violence that had taken place here, the building was silent now. Either the Xaranti had moved on, or they were lying in wait somewhere.
Going by what Tegan had said, could the hybrids really be that cunning, that restrained? Perhaps if they knew he had the Doctor with him they could be. Perhaps they were receiving orders from on high that were overriding their natural tendencies. He stood for a moment, undecided, though in truth his options were simple. Either he could get back in the truck and drive yet further afield, which meant the loss of more precious time and more ground to cover by returning if the Doctor woke up and could somehow set matters straight; or he could risk bringing the Doctor in here and try to find someone who could treat his wounds or have a go at doing so himself.
‘No contest,’ Mike murmured, and crossed to the body of an elderly man who had been bludgeoned to death with a desk lamp. The man had been sitting in a wheelchair, which had been tipped over as he had been knocked sideways. He was now lying on the floor, the lamp beside his shattered head caked with blood and hair.
Mike holstered his gun and lifted up the wheel
chair, grimacing at the schlupp sound it made as it disengaged itself from the pool of partly congealed blood in which it had been lying. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to wipe off as much of the blood as he could.
Tegan was peering out through the windscreen when he wheeled the chair outside. As he passed her window he noticed that she was gripping the steering wheel so tightly that her knuckles were white as bone. Her gaze followed his progress and she licked her lips, but her face was otherwise expressionless. Smiling to compensate for the fact that she wasn’t, Mike said, ‘Tegan, would you mind giving me a hand with the Doctor?’
She blinked and nodded. Her voice sounded strained as she said, ‘Of course.’
The Doctor didn’t stir as Tegan lifted up his legs and Mike sat him up then grabbed him beneath the armpits. Mike kept a look out as they transferred him into the chair, acutely aware that for the few minutes his hands were full the three of them were extremely vulnerable. Finally, the Doctor was installed, his head lolling, blond fringe flopping over his face.
Mike drew out his gun with relief as Tegan wheeled the Doctor towards the main doors.
‘It’s not very pretty in there,’ he warned her as he pushed the doors open. ‘There are bodies.’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve seen bodies before.’
He hesitated a moment longer. ‘Are you quite sure you want to go through with this?’
The indifference on her face worried him, but at least there was still a residue of bitterness in her voice. ‘Do we have a choice?’
Neither of them said anything as they wheeled the Doctor through the slaughterhouse that had been the hospital’s reception area. They proceeded slowly, cautiously, listening hard for the slightest indication of habitation. Everywhere was the same: bodies lay in the corridors in grotesquely twisted positions, most of them exhibiting appalling injuries.
There was blood on the floor and up the walls - but thankfully there was no sign of the perpetrators of this violence.
The wards were the worst. Many of the patients had been slaughtered in their beds, the juxtaposition of bright red blood and pristine white sheets like a blow to the system.
Mike had seen many people die in his time with UNIT, and to some extent had become inured to the physical shock of it, but the way in which the old and the frail and the sick had been systematically massacred here disgusted and enraged him.
He glanced at Tegan to see how she was taking it all, and was both relieved and disturbed to see the expression, or lack of it, on her face. It was as if a shutter had clanged down behind her eyes. Mike couldn’t be sure whether this was because the shock had been too much for her and her mind had decided to draw a veil over itself for a while, or whether the Xaranti infection galloping through her system was deadening her emotions.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked her, and for a moment thought she hadn’t heard him.
Then her eyes flickered in his direction and she said, ‘These subjects were unsuitable for Xaranti impregnation. Others have been taken, but these were... unsuitable.’
Her voice trailed off. Mike looked at her for a moment. ‘Yes, I gathered that.’ He allowed his gaze to roam once more around the ward. If all the beds had been occupied, around half of the patients were missing. He pictured those patients rising from their beds, Xaranti spines and legs erupting from their bodies even as they murdered their fellow patients. He thought of Charlotte up on the fifth floor, and of the foetus which had been clinging to life inside her. A sharp, unyielding block of ice seemed to have taken up residence in his stomach. Instinct made him want to rush out to the lift and jab the fifth floor button to find out the truth as quickly as possible, but he knew he had to do this thing properly, methodically, systematically.
The second and third floors were the same as the first, but the fourth floor delivered a surprise. The wards here were empty, and had been abandoned in a hurry, judging by the way books, meals and personal belongings had been discarded. Perhaps more tellingly, leads had been left dangling from various machines that had evidently been disconnected from patients’ bodies.
‘What’s happened here?’ he said, more to himself than to Tegan. But she answered, her voice a mumble, her eyes gazing into the middle distance.
‘We took them by surprise. There was so much anger in us.
We needed to kill. It was good. Made us feel so good. But we didn’t kill them all. We... we wouldn’t let ourselves kill them all. We took some. They became us. But the killing. It stopped us hurting. For a little while.’
The block of ice in his stomach extended tendrils along his limbs and up his back. His instinct was to shake Tegan out of her fugue, but his rationale urged him to use the situation to his advantage, to glean as much information as he could.
‘Who are we?’ he asked gently.
‘We are Xaranti,’ she replied.
‘What happened to the other people in the hospital? The ones who escaped. Where did they go?’
Her eyes widened a little. ‘They went up. They got away from us. We couldn’t catch them.’
‘Up?’ Mike said. ‘Up where?’
‘To the top.’
‘The top of the building?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s up there?’
Her face remained deadpan and he thought she’d switched off. Then she said, ‘We couldn’t get through. There were barriers.’
Mike pondered for a moment. It seemed his initial theory that half the patients had been killed by the others had been wrong. Perhaps part of the Xaranti plan had been to keep those infected out of hospital - and indeed away from other environments and situations where their affliction may have been discovered - until a stranglehold had been established on the town. Which meant that the missing patients had been infected during, not before, the Xaranti attack.
‘Tegan,’ he said now, his voice quiet but intense, ‘Tegan, can you hear me?’
She stared at him, a tiny frown appearing, her eyes swirling with confusion.
‘You are Tegan Jovanka,’ Mike said firmly. ‘You are Tegan Jovanka and an alien force is trying to take over your mind.
But you’re strong, Tegan. You can fight it. Fight it, Tegan.’
The frown became a wince of pain. Tegan snatched her hands from the wheelchair grips as if they had become hot and rubbed at her forehead as though trying to erase a stain from her skin - or from beneath it.
‘I am... we are... no, I am Tegan,’ she gasped. Her eyes crinkled into slits and her mouth stretched wide to reveal her clenched teeth. She gave a little scream and fell forward.
Mike caught her smartly. She opened her eyes and looked at him, her face etched with fear and dismay.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked softly.
Her face crumpled and she began to sob, clutching at him.
‘So scared,’ she whimpered. ‘I don’t want... this to... happen to me again.’
‘I know,’ Mike said, ‘I know.’ He held her until her sobs had subsided. At last he said, ‘Are you ready to go on?’
‘Where?’
‘To the top of the building. That’s where everyone is.’
‘How do you know?’
‘You told me. When you were... when you had your funny turn. It’s like you’d clicked in to their thinking again for a minute.’
She was silent, finding the information unpalatable. Finally she said, ‘I’m still useful for something then, at least.’
He wasn’t sure how to reply, so he gave her a squeeze instead. They wheeled the Doctor out of the ward and across to the lifts. The topmost button was 12, which Mike pressed.
As the lift approached their destination he raised his gun, pointing it at the opening doors.
The corridor ahead was as featureless as the rest they had seen. It was silent and deserted, too. Mike stepped out first, checking around, then motioned for Tegan to follow with the Doctor. To their left, at the end of the corridor, were the stairs that led down to each of the lower floors.
To their right, the corridor was foreshortened by a huge pair of vault-like doors. In large red stencilled letters on the doors were the words:
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT UNIT
STRICTLY LIMITED ACCESS
AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY
Beside the door was a touch-button panel, with numbers from 0 to 9.
‘Pretty snazzy for the seventies,’ Tegan said, back to her old self for the time being, although she sounded tired.
Mike moved forward and banged on the metal doors with the butt of his gun. ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Hey, is anyone in there?’
There was no reply. Mike continued to thump the door and shout for the next half-minute. Tegan watched him anxiously and scratched at her arms. The Doctor slept on despite the noise.
At last a voice on the other side, sounding no more than the thickness of the doors away, said, ‘Who are you?’
Mike raised his eyebrows at Tegan with an expression not quite of triumph and shouted, ‘My name is Captain Michael Yates. I’m an army officer who has been called in to deal with the current crisis. I’m accompanied by two civilians, one of whom is severely injured and in need of medical attention.’
There was a pause, then the voice said fearfully, ‘How did you know we were here?’
‘We worked it out,’ Mike replied slickly. ‘After seeing the carnage on the first three floors we realised that the only way you could have gone to escape was up. It didn’t need a genius to see that this was the only viable option.’
There was an even longer pause this time, then the voice said, ‘Stand back. I want to see you on the cameras.’
Mike glanced up and saw two cameras affixed to the ceiling above his head. He stepped back so he was looking directly into their lenses and smiled.
‘You don’t look like a soldier,’ the voice said suspiciously.
‘I was employed as an advance guard, to check out the terrain. That’s why I’m in civvies,’ Mike explained.
