Doctor Who_ Drift Part 18

' Back away now!' Back away now!'

Melody jumped back from the table, staring at the corpse as if she expected it to sit up and attack her. Parker rushed over from the doorway, in a hurry to play bodyguard.

'Whoa! Steady, Doc, you don't have to bite her head off.'

The Doctor met him face to face. 'Don't I? She might find it preferable to the alternative.'

Melody had taken advantage of the pause to recover her composure, and now she met the Doctor with carefully rationed patience. Her surgical gloves were dipped in blood, lending her something of a macabre appearance as she gesticulated with the scalpel. 'Doctor, you're clearly intelligent so I'm not about to dismiss your warnings - but you'll have to appreciate we need more to go on than a note of panic in your admittedly very commanding voice.'

The Doctor accepted the flattery sourly. 'I never panic.

What you heard was urgency. The kind of urgency that's needed when lives are at stake. Even yours. Agent Quartararo 'Well, I'm safely backed away now,' the agent answered tautly. 'so we can all rest easy.'

'Oh, I doubt that.' The Doctor regarded the agents darkly as he approached the table. The corpse lay stretched and open, no longer a life extinguished; rather, a death given substance. 'Your gun may have put paid to this man, but it's highly probable that whatever invaded his system is still very much alive. I could be wrong, but I'm generally at least half right.'

He bit off two words for added emphasis: 'At least.' 'At least.'

Charlene Lowell rolled onto her back and groaned She'd been in bed way too long, but it was G.o.ddarn cosy and she didn't appreciate being woken by crazy banging on the cabin door.

Crazy was right: the double glazing kept the sound of the storm out, but she remembered just how bad it had been last time she'd dared to look out.

Gary mumbled beside her. She reached over the covers and slapped his b.u.t.t. He just grinned, his head firmly embedded in the pillow.

'That's all right, sweets, you just lay there. Lucky for you, I'm in a good mood.' She'd managed to drag him away from that d.a.m.n CB for a few hours anyway: leaning over him, fresh from the shower, telling him if he wanted to get a response, he had to push the right b.u.t.tons. Warm with that and subsequent memories, she sat up and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. Someone's fist was still hammering on the door.

She pulled her robe up off the floor beside the bed and quickly wrapped herself.

'If it's one of the neighbours come to borrow some milk, they sure don't like their coffee black. They can have one carton and a piece of my mind, they keep this up.'

For the briefest second, she wondered if it was Gary's wife, and she laughed at the picture in her head: Lynette on a crusade up from Concord, battling through the blizzard to track them down. She'd have to be one crazy-a.s.s b.i.t.c.h.

Kind of like the woman waiting for her when she opened the door. Except this one was packing an automatic rifle and pushing another woman into the cabin.

Loss, like a mountain of hurt, cut Amber off from the world and cast her adrift in streets, recently familiar, now altogether foreign. The snowfall was like fog in a blender and she ran on, ghosts of buildings haunting her from all sides.

Sobs racked her lungs and reddened her face even as she vaulted someone's picket fence and landed shakily in the snow. She dragged herself up and hared blindly down the side the house. Some junk tripped her and she dropped on one knee, steadying herself against the end wall. She cried her heart out and smothered her face with a glove.

A dark grey cold filled her insides. Her hand slid from her cheek as she hurled her scream at the sky. The sky that wasn't there.

Her rage cracked, dry and scarcely audible. It caved into a single, shattered sound: 'Daddy.' 'Daddy.'

A slate cloud prowled at the edge of her vision.

Eyes like marbles: moon-bright colour locked in cold gla.s.s.

Amber's breathing was tight and rapid. She felt the blood draining from her cheeks.

The coyote pinned her with its glare. Saliva dribbled over its jaws and dropped in silver-wet strands to the snow. The animal looked mangy and shabby, a fur-clad skeleton. Evil, hungry. It sniffed and padded three or four paces toward her.

Beyond, towards the front yard, she could see more of them: patches of white and grey snuffling around the edge of the house.

It took her an infinity to stand and the coyote studied her all the way. It seemed to expect her to grow taller, none too impressed with her height. A few of its brothers and sisters shambled up behind, starting to show an interest. Amber had returned to the real world.

Low growls drove her back, her hand following the wall.

She nearly fell as she retreated around the corner, decided to turn it into a run.

She sprinted along the back of the house, her thoughts scrabbling around for some escape route. Where was Mom?

Where was Mak? She could manage without them, she could.

Down there! A dog-flap in the back door. Amber threw herself flat and didn't listen for the sounds behind her. She hauled herself through and turned to hunt for the catches. She found them and fastened the flap closed.

With a smile, she slumped down with her back to the door.

Trembles took over her small frame, but relief escaped as a cloud in front of her eyes. The floor felt cold through her gloves. Ice.

There was a thin coat of ice over the kitchen floor. Amber rose slowly, the ice cracking under her boots. Outside, the coyotes growled and sniffed at the back door; the whole pack of them, it sounded like.

Amber walked forward to where the kitchen door hung ajar.

She pulled it slowly open and peered through into a lounge where sheets of ice fanned out over the rug. Some of it was broken gla.s.s, but the TV and windows looked undamaged.

There was a noise. Like a lapping tongue.

A coyote lifted its head to peer over the arm of the sofa.

Amber's heart jumped. Her eyes dropped to where it had been licking. A colourful fish, fragile like a b.u.t.terfly, lay dead, locked under the Ice sheet.

The coyote snarled and curled back its lips to bare Its fangs. Its starved eyes fixed on her.

'You're supposed to be intelligence agents - think! think! What actually killed Mr Redeker there? Or is Central Intelligence another contradiction in terms?' What actually killed Mr Redeker there? Or is Central Intelligence another contradiction in terms?'

Melody's patience, Parker could tell, was thin ice over cold waters, and he hadn't had any to begin with: this Doctor guy needed to be told who did the sarcasm round here. But Melody played the guy's game and said, 'Trauma.'

The Doctor had drawn them into his forum, patronising them like promising students to his brilliant professor. He wielded criticism and encouragement like twin p.r.o.ngs on a pitchfork.

'Precisely!' Parker was prepared to punch him if he stooped so far as to pat Melody on the back. He didn't and his grin faded, like day into night. 'And what, in your professional opinion, did you see in there?'

Parker couldn't believe it as Melody allowed the Doctor to direct her gaze over to the fourth - silent - attendant of their conference. Since she'd fired the shots herself. Parker guessed she'd skipped the painstaking examination of the wound tracks through the 'victim'. Even so, he'd watched her take her time over the post mortem, exacting as ever, peeling back the skin from her Y-shaped (Y for yuck!) incision, sawing through the exposed ribs and removing the breastplate. She'd been making the preparatory incisions prior to lifting out the tree of internal organs when the Doc had interrupted and flipped everyone's lid.

'I don't think any kind of professional opinion enters into it,' she murmured, a shade humbled by what she'd seen.

Parker had leaned in casually, only to be rewarded by the sight of the central cavity infested with tangled roots of ice.

'But for what it's worth, it resembles the beginnings of a new nervous system, composed of ice. Except it can't be ice,' she added, 'because ice doesn't behave like that.'

'No, it doesn't, does it?' The Doctor, Parker was grateful to note, had shed his patronising tone. He stood expectantly, as though waiting for Melody to complete the puzzle.

'You think the trauma affected the invader as much as the host,' she deduced.

Parker followed the exchange intently, keen to stay in the loop. His face tightened as the Doctor laid a hand on Melody's shoulder. 'Not quite as much,' the Doctor qualified.

'Take a look through the microscope and I think you'll agree our invader was only stunned.'

Parker thought he'd missed something. 'Wait, what kind of invader invader are we talking about?' are we talking about?'

'Well,' surmised the Doctor, 'I don't imagine it arrived in a flying saucer. Or a full dinner set, come to that. Some micro-organisms travel well, all the same.'

'So, what is it, some sort of germ warfare agent?' Parker made a meal of the words - one that was difficult to digest.

'An aperitif before the traditional ray-guns-blazing invasion?

Well, gosh almighty, I can't wait for the after dinner mints!'

'Oh, I don't think we're expected to make it through to pudding. And I don't know about you, but I'm rather fond of pudding.' The Doctor hunched his shoulders and fell into an otherworldly frown. 'We could be witnessing the beginnings of something more conventional, I suppose.' With his lapels up he looked like an over-wise turtle, contemplating the world's troubles from just inside his sh.e.l.l. 'I'm not as sure as I was, and I wasn't very sure even then. But we might be in danger of forgetting Occam's Razor.'

Parker drew himself up. 'Don't sweat it. I cut myself on that all the time.'

'Parker,' Melody sighed, 'the Doctor's saying we should deal with the threat we know about before we go looking for complications.'

'Well done! I couldn't have put it better myself. Well, I could, but that would have been wasting even more time.'

The Doctor marched for the door. 'Come on!'

'Wait up, Doc!' Parker hurried to bar the Doctor's departure. 'We don't mind helping out, but let's refresh our memories here. White Shadow's priority, as well as ours, is to recover the Prism, okay? After which, we can call in the CDC, the Pentagon or whoever we need to clear up this germ warfare situation.'

'We could stand here and argue about priorities. Agent Theroux,' conceded the Doctor, after a pensive delay, 'but I imagine our top priority isn't wasting time arguing about us.

And if some of us don't adjust our priorities, we could all end up like Mr Redeker. Or worse.'

'Worse.' Parker twirled his finger rapidly around the side of his head and whistled. Melody just shook her head and rolled her eyes, before charging past after the Doc. Parker twirled his finger rapidly around the side of his head and whistled. Melody just shook her head and rolled her eyes, before charging past after the Doc.

Whose side was she on anyway?

Makenzie Shaw was tired, trudging up to the command vehicle. He hadn't been out that long, but long enough to start seeing coy-dogs everywhere, and no sign of Amber.

Five troopers were a.s.sembled close by. Morgan appeared on the steps of the Snowcat.

'Kenzie, this is Lieutenant Beard,' Morgan called him up.

introducing the tall black guy. 'He's my 2IC and I've instructed him to a.s.sist in the search.'

Makenzie stewed. He'd thanked the townsfolk for their offers of help, but felt the need to tell them to stay in one place, over at the station. He couldn't tell them why, but they trusted him. Only Phil Downey and a few of the other old die-hards had disobeyed orders and were out there right now, doing a house-to-house like they were some sort of militia. All the same, their devotion was to be admired. Whereas his own brother, of course, was too busy.

'Second in Command, huh? I rate that highly?'

'Chief, sir, we should find that little girl before nightfall,'

Beard said. 'If she stuck to the town, she'd be a whole lot safer where someone could keep an eye on her.'

The Doctor chose that moment to burst forth from the hotel, the two CIA agents in tow. 'I couldn't agree more! We all need to be somewhere safe and warm! Which reminds me.

Captain.' he pushed his way briskly to the front of Morgan's little audience, 'we need to gather all the townspeople under one roof. Safety in numbers, remember. And we have to do something to warn your people up on the mountain - not to mention my friend. They're all in a great deal more danger than they realise.'

Makenzie was almost grateful for the way this Doc took charge. For one, he hadn't cared to admit that the Lieutenant was right: he should have been thinking about Amber, not his feud with Morgan. Now he was anxious to kick-start this search.

Morgan wasn't happy. 'Thanks for the news, Doc, but I'm here right now trying to raise my teams on the radio.

Meanwhile I don't have the manpower to go herding the good folk of Melvin Village out of their homes!'

Makenzie smirked at how easily the Doc put his brother's back out of joint. He sobered himself in the same second, command the best medicine for his flagging morale.

'Listen up, Lieutenant,' he gestured up and down the street, each end of which was all but invisible, 'I've conducted a broad sweep of the main streets, but I may have hurried a little. Maybe a couple of your men can go over the old ground, while we check out some of the other areas. And as long as we're conducting a search, we might as well knock on some doors and ask the folks to relocate. It needn't take that long.'

Makenzie could hear the pessimism in his own voice. He antic.i.p.ated the townsfolk obliging willingly, but Amber was a difficult kid to track down in the best of situations.

The stairs were the other side of the room, on Amber's left.

The coyote was closer to them, and the animal seemed to know as much. It studied her at its leisure, disinterested now in the pathetic sc.r.a.p of fish locked in the pane of ice.

If it weren't for her tearless sobs, she might have forgotten to breathe altogether.

'Please don't hurt me, please', please', she whispered, afraid of making any louder sound. she whispered, afraid of making any louder sound.

Amber tensed. But there was no strength left in her legs to launch herself into a run. She was terrified if she moved she'd simply fall over and lie stranded like that fish. And all the others, strewn around the carpet, dead and somehow unreal. Like the rainbow-tinted pair, their swim suspended in a frozen pool around the base of the lampstand.

Scuffles and bangs from the kitchen doorway gave her a start: a fight had broken out in the pack. Amber could hear them all snapping and growling out there.

The coyote before her padded into the middle of the room, wary, but building up its snarls in ferocious layers. That was when Amber realised she was playing a game of chicken: she had to be braver than the coyote.

'You get away from me!' she screamed right at its eyes. 'Get 'Get away!' away!'

It recoiled, ever so slightly, but that was all Amber needed.

She grabbed for the lampstand, wrenched it free from the ice and hurled it at the beast with both hands. The coyote bolted back and Amber made a blind dash for the stairs.

Melody turned over the ignition and the low growl of the engine expressed her irritation admirably. Still, as Parker took his time settling in beside her, she felt the need to add something more. 'Just don't underestimate the Doctor. He'll pick up on every tiny slip.'

'What if he does?' Parker shrugged. 'Even the smartest cookie can be made to crumble.'

Melody coiled up inside. He could be so infuriatingly casual at times.

Still, they were meant to be a.s.sisting in the search. The Doctor question could wait.

The door was wide open and the wind was blasting in, driving the heat from every corner of the room. The cold only registered as a secondary symptom, ever-present but positively the least of Charlene Lowell's worries.

She hugged the robe around her and couldn't stop crying She shuffled fitfully on her bare feet. Gary sat up in bed, wide awake and struck dumb by what was going on.