PART TWO
he
Doctor’s face was mirrored a million times in the great domed eyes of
the Zarbi as it bore down on the old man with its sweeping forelegs and
clacking mandibles…
Manuel de Valero
and Jamie Cameron didn’t have a lot in common. Well, that’s not
entirely true. They did have a lot in common, though they came from
different backgrounds. They were of course, both in their early
twenties, but they were also activists.
Manual had been
working as a cook on the Spanish fishing trawler ‘Catalina’, the first
of many ocean vessels to go missing in what the press were calling ‘The
Dulse Oblong’. In fact, he was an undercover agent for a Spanish
animal-rights group. His brand of activism was ‘hopeless causes’.
Jamie’s thing on
the other hand, was the paranormal. He was chairman of the ‘Roswell
Action Committee’. Actually, he was the only member of the RAC, but
through the internet he had networked with hundreds of other
impressionable types around the globe and had even acquired a video-tape
of a masked surgeon performing an autopsy on a space-alien.
Jamie’s parents
insisted that the alien was actually a plastic doll ( Ironically, both
parties were correct: the footage had been shot by UNIT and showed Dr.
Who, in another life, dissecting a Nestene Auton ). The RAC had been in
the phone book for a while, but the only call Jamie had received was
from an Australian lady reporting a flat tyre on the Barnet By-Pass.
Jamie had come
to the Isle of Angus as it was one of the best places to see the
Mopp-Topp comet, which - Jamie believed - was really a spaceship. He had
been captured by the Zarbi when he had wandered too close to one of
their caves late one night.
Now here he was
in the same work-group as Manuel, trapped in this hellish subterranean
cavern with hundreds of other slaves of the Queen Zarbi, feeding the
royal fungus beds with seaweed.
The two lads had
struck up a friendship after discovering a common language - Beano
Spakio, or BS for short. Hailed as ‘The
usie
had passed out as her grandfather was pinned to the floor and that
grotesque insect’s tongue snaked into one of his nostrils and…
