Ten Little Aliens: 50th Anniversary Edition (29 page)

To continue in Polly’s viewpoint, select section 12 on
here

8

Shade

We peer ahead into the darkness, our ears full of the crump, crump, crump of our feet on the stony ground, and straining to catch the first whispers of anything that might be lurking ahead of us, licking its lips at our approach.

When Haunt screams it nearly deafens us.

She’s lodged somewhere deep in our head, we feel a stab of pain behind our eyes, stony fingers clawing at – no,
inside
– our shoulder.

‘Do all you can,’ she yells. ‘Work together. Keep the neural network open. That’s an order.’

And every trace of her is gone.

‘Doctor!’ Polly yells. Even right in our ears, the scream feels muted in comparison. We stagger back a few paces, still reeling from the power, the
pain
of Haunt’s presence.

‘I’m still here, my child,’ says the Doctor. ‘Marshal Haunt ran on ahead, we saw someone…’

‘Denni?’ asks Polly.

‘What’s happened to her,’ we start to say, but Polly shakes her head, fiercely. Her long hair splays about over her face.

We hear another voice inside us. Our own voice:
jinx
.

Haunt made a fool of us in front of the whole academy, dressed us up in a combat suit so she could dress us down. Shoot us down. And didn’t we wish her dead? Didn’t we stare down at the vidphone and think about calling in friends and favours that would make Haunt disappear from our life forever? She must’ve known we could do that, but she didn’t care. She knew that when it came to it, we just wouldn’t have the guts.

We told Polly all this was our fault.

‘It seems highly likely, yes,’ says the Doctor. It takes us a few scared seconds to realise he’s saying Haunt must’ve chased after Denni. ‘I was too far away to see clearly.’

‘Is Haunt dead?’

A breathless pause. ‘I’m afraid I can no longer detect her in the neural network.’

‘Haunt’s dead.’ We can barely bring ourselves to say the words.

‘What about everyone else?’ Polly says.

It’s only a matter of time, we think. If Haunt’s dead, with all she’s lived through… how can the likes of us go on hoping for miracles?

The Doctor gives her a kindly answer, and says how he’ll be in touch. Will it be him next, shouting and screaming in our head as the angels close in on him, as the Schirr come stealthily for him out of the shadows?

Polly’s looking at us. She looks like she might burst into tears. She holds out her arms to me. We shamble over and clutch her close to us.

‘Who’s going to get us out of this now?’ we whisper. Our face is clear, unmarked, like the past never happened, like we’ve never fought our own battles before.

And Polly has nothing to say to us.

If you have not yet witnessed Marshal Haunt’s severance from the network, review section 11 on
here
.

Then return here and select another viewpoint

To continue in Shade’s viewpoint, select section 24 on
here
To witness these events again from Polly’s viewpoint, select section 7 on
here

To switch to Roba’s viewpoint, select section 22 on
here
– then return here

9

Haunt

We trudge about in the dark, playing out this stupid sick game. We can feel Schirr here. Out in the darkness.

The Doctor holds us up. He feels useless, we don’t need to try to spy on his head to get that signal. We have to keep stopping for him to rest.

We’re back thinking about Ashman. Listening to the Doctor’s old-man-breathing here in the chilly darkness brings us crashing back to Toronto. Nothing else to do while he catches breath but look back. Try to warm ourselves round that inner image. Maybe others are looking in. Let them.

After the Schirr blast, we came round in the shattered data office an hour or so later, woken by the sound of screaming. We couldn’t swallow. Our head felt like someone was slamming it in a blast door
.

It took us a few minutes to realise the screaming was Ashman’s. In combat his voice had always rung with calm authority. In pain, he sounded like a hysterical woman. The noise was coming from outside the room. Most of the ceiling had fallen inside it
.

We wanted to help him. We tried to push ourself up. That’s when we found our arm was broken, and we joined our CO in the shrieking
.

‘
Haunt,’ Ashman shouted, when he heard the noise. ‘Haunt, are you all right? Can you move?
’

The concern for us in his voice left us stunned. We even forgot the pain for a few seconds. ‘I’ll live
.’

‘
For God’s sake you’ve got to help me,’ Ashman moaned. ‘Get to me. For God’s sake get to me
.’

We crawled past the remnants of the data inputter, and the leering mask of the Schirr. Incredibly, the medikit was intact. And Ashman and us, we were both alive. Lucky
.

A slick of blood poured suddenly out of our mouth, over our chin and onto the floor
.

Bewildered, we checked our neck and found a jagged piece of metal sticking out there
.

Ashman was still screaming for help. But we knew that unless we helped ourself first we would both die
.

We ripped a length of charred material from the dead woman’s shattered leg. Gathered a handful of pills from the floor around the medical kit, tried to fathom them. Gave up and swallowed the lot
.

We didn’t dare pull out the piece of metal from our neck straight away. We didn’t know what else it might pull out. But we worked out the metal was probably from the back of the monitor housing, and just knowing that made us feel a bit better. Crazy. Ever since we were a child, we always felt we could handle anything as long as we understood it. Got it. Weren’t floundering about, out of our depth
.

‘
You’ll never fall in love, then,’ our mother used to tease us
.

There was a small hole in the ruined doorway. We wormed through. Ashman was lying in the corridor. His body was bent all wrongly. It looked like it was only his combat suit that was holding it together
.

His face was a sticky red-black where the blast had stripped his skin away. But he must still be able to see through the eye that hadn’t melted into the flesh, because he fell silent when he saw us. It was one of those stupid, slushy moments when you look at each other and you feel the electricity. Power there, between two people. Like in books. He started shaking, trembling for us as we crept towards him. He wanted us. Needed us. He would die without us. We could feel it, and we shivered
.

‘
Are…’ It was tough to talk with the metal in our neck. ‘Are you OK?
’

‘
You’re funny,’ he said. Like normal
.

We held out a handful of painkillers. He lunged for them like they were diamonds. But his hand was shaking too much to keep hold of them. They fell and scattered on the floor. We picked up each one and tucked it inside his mouth. He moaned, like we were feeding him strawberries dipped in chocolate. He coughed pathetically as he tried to swallow them down. His eyes stared blankly at the metal stuck in our throat, but he said nothing
.

Finally, his shaking hand gestured to his comms unit, just out of reach. ‘More Schirr, they said,’ he muttered. His voice was hoarse. ‘Unit came down outside. Took most of us out
.’

‘
Did we beat them?
’

‘
Don’t think so
.’

Neither of us said anything for a while. We listened to Ashman’s breathing grow gradually easier. Ours got worse. Throat felt like it was closing up. We coughed and felt something hot flood out the back of our nose. There was nothing to break the silence now. The shadows were thick and coal-black. One emergency light still flickered half-heartedly
.

We fixed up our neck as best we could. Lay down beside him, careful not to get too close. We wanted to but we knew somehow that would hurt us more
.

‘
They might come for us,’ we whispered
.

‘
Who?
’

‘
Help
.’

A pause. ‘I thought you meant the Schirr
.’

‘
No
.’

‘
If the Schirr won, they might want to get back down here,’ Ashman said slowly. ‘Finish off whatever they wanted to do
.’

We didn’t answer. We felt so tongue-tied this close to him, seeing him so vulnerable
.

What could we say? Someone who’d been so strong, weak like an old man, catching his breath
.

Like the Doctor now, who can’t even make a crummy mile in the dark
.

That feeling, the fear and resentment and the sorrow, never left us over
the
days that followed. We painfully built the rudiments of a nest about the two of us. The rest of the dead woman’s clothing made a cushion for Ashman’s head. A half-melted plastic covering draped over one of the ruined banks of equipment served as a blanket for us both. It was freezing now in the silent, shattered corridor
.

Somehow, under Ashman’s direction, we manhandled the ruined monitor into the corridor. There was no power supply, but Ashman told us that by crossing some of the wires inside, we could generate enough current to heat up the casing, and so warm us in the chill of those fitful days and nights. But Ashman was wrong. We crossed every wire in the machine, every possible combination methodically, but it remained cold. Dead. This was a ritual we had to go through every day, sometimes several times in a day. Our failures incensed Ashman. He insisted it was possible if only we could do it right. And when we didn’t, he laid into us, ordered us away in disgust. He’d only call us back when he couldn’t last a minute longer without the painkillers we would ease into the dry split of his mouth
.

He was getting worse. We felt like we were dying with him. Light-headed, we would glare for hours at a time at the broken bulk of the useless monitor
.

Then finally, days later, once life had dwindled to little more than a cold, painful sleep punctuated by rummages through the dregs of the medikit, the comms unit squawked into sudden life
.

The voice was heavily distorted, but it sounded like a woman. It said something about victory, and about help
.

Ashman stared at it dumbly, and we felt a stab of pain in our hungry stomach. They would come for us. They would help. They would help Ashman like we never could
.

He grunted at us. We turned. He was looking straight at us with his good eye
.

Holding out his hand to us. It wasn’t shaking so badly now
.

Can you feel it now? How our quiet shrivelled little heart quickened? We even dared to smile back at him. We reached out our fingers to his, touched them, entwined them. Everything seemed too hot. Our breath steamed out into the dank air like a warm kiss to him
.

He pulled free, smacked our hand away, threw out his palm again
.

‘
The pills, you stupid useless bitch. I need more of the pills
.’

We froze. Froze everywhere. Then we reached into our pocket for the painkillers and we hurled them away as far as we could. Like our senses, scattered to the shadows
.

Ashman bellowed like we’d stuck him with a knife
.

‘Forgive me.’ The Doctor’s voice in the dark. ‘I’m ready to go on, now.’

We jump like a current’s just been put through us.

The Doctor’s looking at us expectantly. Was he in our head watching the show or was he…

We slip back there for just another moment before we have to go on.

This was the moment. When everything changed.

Our good hand was groping around in the dust and the dark for the pills. We despaired of finding them before help came. We pictured the rescue party in the ruins outside doing much the same as us. Hunting round uselessly in the dark for tiny, meaningless things
.

It’s as dark here.

The Doctor’s set off again, breathless along the tunnel.

We feel our side. It’s sticky, pink and gleaming in the torchlight. We knew it was coming but still we’re shocked. Repulsed. And we know this is just a tiny taste of what the future holds.

The Doctor beckons to us. We have to pick up the search.

To switch to Frog’s viewpoint, select section 3 on
here

To switch to Creben’s viewpoint, select section 20 on
here

10

Ben

Tovel really puts us through our paces, fixing up the light-wires for the life support. We’re grabbing this, tracing that back…

‘Whoever done this knew what they were doing,’ we mutter to Creben.

He nods. ‘They did. They certainly did.’ Then he takes my latest bundle of laser spaghetti and buries them somewhere lower down in the grid. The red links flare brighter and then the lines merge.

‘This should be the last of the links,’ he says.

‘Good news, my friends.’ The Doctor’s whisper starts up from somewhere deep in our head. ‘Polly and Shade have the crystals. We can reset the coordinates and steer ourselves far from Morphiea’s noisome influence.’

We want to yell and cheer. But the Doctor’s shushing us, frantically.

‘We should not make this known to all in our network,’ he says, his voice low and urgent.

‘As we saw the Schirr through Roba’s eyes,’ Creben says, ‘you think they can see through his?’

‘And Tovel, and Frog, too, are no longer dependable,’ mutters the Doctor.

We want to protest. But we remember the change in them, their bloated, twisted bodies, and we just nod. One sensible thing our old man used to say: careless talk costs lives.

‘I think we were allowed to complete these repairs,’ Creben says. ‘Denni could have sent a hundred angels to take us here. She’s been waiting for something. … Just keeping us busy…’

‘Perhaps so. But Denni won’t have expected us to find those crystals. Hidden most ingeniously, most ingeniously, yes.’ He chuckles. ‘Those little gems may yet give us the advantage in this struggle. Once you’ve finished here, head for the control room. Be on your guard. I shall join you.’ With that, the Doctor breaks radio contact.