Doctor Who: The Zarbi by Bill Strutton Read Free Book Online Page B

wildly to the right and left as if expecting to see whatever was making the sound suddenly appear from the shadows and close in on her.
     
    She checked and darted up a small gorge leading off the pass. There she halted and turned to run in a new direction.
    But whichever way Barbara turned, the sound grew louder.
    And now she could run no more. She was utterly spent.
    She simply dropped there, holding her aching sides, her heart pounding like a steam-hammer, fighting to get her breath.
    As she straightened again, summoning the strength to go on, she saw clusters of light appear from behind the rocks in the gloom. Then to her right the hideous sleek shape of a Zarbi reared on its hind legs out of the gloom, glaring down, and with a slithering sound began to scramble towards her. The other lights converged and took shape too. The pass ahead of her and to her right was swarming with these loathsome creatures, and the chirruping sound they made, as they came crowding and slithering down towards her, bored echoingly through her head and vibrated on every nerve.
    Barbara stopped stock-still and moaned, ‘No... no...!’
    She backed away into a small gorge, turned to run, but saw her retreat was cut off by a solid wall of rock.
    She cowered back against it, eyes wide, mouth quivering, trembling all over with a cold sickness.
    Two of the Zarbi loomed now right in front of her.
    Barbara pressed herself desperately into a crack in the rock.
    The leading Zarbi reached out with its great shiny foreleg.
    Its pincer claws clamped like sharp steel on her arms.
    She screamed, and the sound echoed off every crag.
    There was chaos inside the control room of Tardis . It lurched and tilted in every direction, its hull scraping over rock and rough ground.
    Vicki, alone in the ship, clung to the control table for support and ventured another look at the screen.
    Through it, the landscape outside had lightened, and she saw what seemed to be ropes stretching far out ahead of the ship, ending in moving figures whose shapes she could not make out clearly.
    Then a scuttling, slithering noise echoed above her head and she opened her mouth dumbly in terror at the object which now suddenly appeared at the inspection window.
    Two giant, glaring eyes in a shiny, pointed head peered through the scanner window. The eyes, huge and distorted as through a great magnifying glass, stared inward, looking this way and that – then caught and held Vicki, and burned venomously right through her.
    Vicki screamed and plunged for the switches on the control table to blot out the sight.
    She thought she heard a strange high-pitched cry, then a slithering sound, as she fumbled haphazardly with the controls before finding the inspection off-switch.
    The screen blanked out, but the ship went lurching on.
    Outside the ship, a host of Zarbi swarmed around it. A great web had been spread over the exterior of its police-box shell, and from this a number of long, thin, rope-like strands, glittering like glass, radiated outward to a group of Zarbi, who toiled along, their shiny bodies reared upright, pulling steadily.
    They looked for all the world like giant ants, gripping the strands between pincer claws and lurching along with their ungainly, slithering gait.
    Their bodies were long and jointed in sections like an insect’s – first the great shiny head with huge eyes and cruel proboscis jaw that moved and clamped together like the tips of an enormous tweezer; then a short trunk, dark, shiny, smooth, shell-like too; and finally the glistening swollen posterior which ended in a point like the sting-end of a bee. They moved on the hind pair of six steely legs, and now it was clear that the shrill chirruping which Doctor Who and the others had heard came from these creatures.
    The Zarbi came lurching on now over rougher, rising ground till their leading Zarbi reached a ridge. Here they paused and turned to haul Tardis up with them, then rested.
    One of the Zarbi turned its