Doctor Who: Atom Bomb Blues by Andrew Cartmel

Author:Andrew Cartmel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science-Fiction:Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780563486350
Publisher: BBC Books
Published: 2005-11-09T10:00:00+00:00

coming down the hill, past the jeep, towards them.

They were all carrying guns.

‘Which is not to say, of course, that these hills are uninhabited,’ said the Doctor.

Butcher drove down the Hill along the winding rocky road, past the shadowed pines of Los Alamos canyon and the Omega lab, where Fermi maintained his reactor and performed dangerous experiments with plutonium.

By now the sun was declining steeply in the sky and the desert night was approaching fast. Butcher drove swiftly and efficiently but he couldn’t outrace the setting sun. Soon the lengthening shadows of the broken landscape had swallowed him and the jeep whole.

Butcher kept driving, belting along in the desert darkness, with a growing sense of futility. He’d had a pretty good idea of the Doctor’s initial route because he’d spoken to the MPs at the checkpoint who’d watched them leave.

He’d even managed to find the spot where the Doctor’s jeep had left the road.

The tracks had been too fresh to belong to any other vehicle. Butcher had already followed them for about ten rough miles of broken terrain.

But now, caught in the darkness, the only way to make progress was to hazard a guess about the other jeep’s direction of travel, drive for a half mile or so, stop, get out of the jeep and use a flashlight to check the ground and see if he could discern any tracks in the dirt. At first he’d got lucky, following them for another two miles. But then he’d lost the track and had to double back on himself, doing a sweep.

Now he’d lost the track completely. He was on the verge of throwing in the towel and heading back for the Hill, taking off his shoes, collapsing on his bunk and drinking half a bottle of whiskey. Then he saw the light in the distance, in the crevice of a line of hills whose dark bulk cancelled the stars hanging low in the night sky.

He pointed the jeep in the direction of the light, put his foot down hard on the gas, and drove towards it.

The men who appeared from the pines were wearing coats of rough woven material that looked like blankets. The bold patterns on the coats, thick red and black lines, emphasised the resemblance. Two of the men wore hats; one a baseball cap and the other what Ace thought of as a regular cowboy hat –

the first she’d seen since her arrival here in what she still regarded as the Wild West. The third man had no hat, and his long, lank, black hair hung down to his shoulders. He was the oldest of the three, with a seamed, haggard face, and dark glittering eyes set deep in nests of wrinkles. The man in the cowboy hat looked like he was in his forties. His face was marked with a 94

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